#your universe had zero beef with you planning something and doing it? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

beebckr · 2 years

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Don’t go

Gifs not mine - first fanfic -

-disclaimers - violent Billy - sexual undertones - this would be it season 4 part 2 didn’t happen- Billy is still alive- Steve and Eddie are both interested in you- swearing- only a little smut rn-I have proof read a little bit but not the whole thing I just need to get my thoughts in the universe - I’m sorry for anything you don’t like I’m literally trying my best - thanks for being here

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You don’t fancy yourself a partier. You don’t even like to waste any of your precious off days. With working at the arcade and preparing for college next year you have little to zero free time as it is.

BUT unfortunately being a good friend comes first. Because hopefully these guys will be with you till you die of old age a good ways down the road. So when robin and Steve come from next door finishing a shift at family video begging you to wing man and come to a party with them you can do very little to resist both sets of their puppy dog eyes. Which has nothing to do with the fact that you’ve had a crush on Steve “the hair” Harrington since junior year, and you would literally put your life on the line for Robin at any given moment.

“So what do you guys expect me to do at this party anyways?” You lean across the arcade counter already dreading the crowds of college kids you’ll have to avoid at this party.

“Well Robin’s crushing on this girl who’s leaving for Purdue in a month, so if she can manage to actually talk to her then we might not see her for the rest of the night if we’re lucky” Steve says jokingly.

“Steve I think you mean if SHE gets lucky” You high five Steve but Robin quickly shews your hands away.

“ While I appreciate your guy’s confidence in me I’m not even sure Veronica likes me like that so we can’t assume anything will happen. There are a few things I’ve noticed but I can’t be sure and throwing myself at every woman is not exactly a good plan for not looking like raging lesbian”

“ We’ll just have to get you girls alone then at the party so you can work your magic in peace then” You say while switching out the change in the quarter machine.

“What we should REALLY be focusing on if the fact that our good friend Steve is going the be making His Move tonight” Robin says chuckling as she approaches you at the machine.

Steve’s hand slips on the counter that he was holding himself up with.

“Hey Robin I feel like we just talked about we weren’t going to talk about this exact subject just a few minutes ago” Steve glares at Robin, and she just rolls her eyes.

Clearly you’re left out of whatever’s going on, but Steve and Robin are super close and you don’t want to interrupt whatever best friend beef is unfolding in your arcade.

You sigh and hopefully say something that will change the topic “Do you guys think Eddie will be there?”

Steve and Robin both turn their heads to look at you with laser focus

“What, we’re going to need weed right? And he’s not the freak that everyone makes him out to be. He’s actually a real sweetie…” you started your sentence off strong but gradually got quieter because Robin and Steve both seem to be panicking looking between you and each other frantically. “Is something going on with you both that I need to be worried about? I feel like you aren’t telling me something”

“Nope, No, Absolutely Nothing at all that you have to worry your pretty little heart about. We’re all going to the party tomorrow night at 9 and I’ll pick you both up. Okay good great everything’s settled. Robin can you please get the car started outside and I’ll be there in a minute?” Steve says hurriedly to Robin while throwing her his keys.

“Uh Huh sure thing stud” She throws finger guns at him while winking and backing up through the front door of the arcade.

You’re staring at Steve throw a obscene hand gesture at Robin and can’t help but giggle to yourself. How could this absolutely stunning guy be your friend. He’s everything you’ve ever wanted. Funny, caring, sweet, and probably the best singer you’ve ever heard in your life. Not to mentioned everything he’s done for Robin. If it was socially acceptable you’d melt into a puddle just at the sight of him. You unconsciously sigh at your daydreaming. Steve turns to catch you staring at him and your first instinct to turn away rams your face right into the frogger machine.

“Oh shit” you hear Steve say while jogging over to you. “Do you have a first aid kid in the back”

“Oh god no please just let me die of embarrassment and bleed out here” you joke as he wraps his arm around your waist and leads you to a chair in the back.

“YOU’RE BLEEDING!?” His voice higher and louder than normal.

“Jesus Steve I swear I’m fine. I’m just kidding this happens all the time. One of the perks to working in an arcade and also wearing glasses with bad depth perception. I’ll be alright I promise.”

He gives you a concerned look but you pat his hand reassuring him.

You hear honks coming from the front of the arcade and you hear Steve “tsk” with his tongue and it gives you goosebumps.

“Please try to stay in once peace for tonight I’ve got something planned I want you to see.” He pats your hair and kisses your forehead before running out the front door leaving you speechless with your jaw hanging open. He had never done that before. You almost wish he hadn’t because now you know what his lips feel like. Now you’ll never not want Steve’s lips on you. Is it possible to be sexually attracted to someone’s lips.

Keith knocks on the back room door with his cheeseball fingers waking you up from your trance and making you jump.

“Hey I’m closing early so you can leave after you clean both bathrooms, but hurry up because I’m not sitting around waiting for you”. Keith stalks out the door to another corner or the arcade. You never really disliked Keith but his general way of talking always upsets you. The bathrooms got done fairly fast and you were able to make it out of there within the hour.

On your walk home a van passes you but you quickly see the reverse lights come on and back up. They roll down their passenger seat window and you see a familiar face.

“Good evening madam, you seem to be a far way from your kingdom. Fancy a ride home from Eddie the Brave?”

Your laugh turns to a snort as you grab the passenger door and hop in.

You haven’t told Robin or Steve how close you are with Eddie. Not because they would judge you. Definitely not. Maybe it was because you were jealous of how close they both were with each other and you wanted someone like that. Eddie was always real with you. You viewed him as your older punk brother that you had to keep in line and always could count on when you needed him. “Why didn’t you call? I would’ve given you a ride ya know” Eddie says as he starts driving towards your house.

“Yeah yeah I know, but Kieth let me off early last minute and I didn’t want you to have to rush over. Walking home is no big deal to me. I barely live 5 minutes away by car” You relax a bit by putting your feet up on the dash.

“I get it, but walking in the dark? Somebody would snatch a pretty young thing like you in a second. You remember that Ted Bundy guy right?” Eddie’s staring at you and waiting for an answer.

You grab his leg and reassure him “ Yes yess Eddie I’m sorry okay I just wanted to get home. Geez you and Steve keep babying me today. “

Eddie slows down to a stop in front of your house and turns to you. “ I just wanna make sure the most important person in my life stays alive and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Obviously Harrington feels the same way so you shouldn’t make fun of us for it.”

“Fuck Eddie, I’m sorry I didn’t mean it like that. I know what happened with Chrissy last year. I’ll be safer and I’ll borrow my parents car if I need to next time. Scouts honor. “ You cross your heart and salute him hoping that gets your point across.

He chuckles at you and brings you in for a hug “Don’t worry about it sweetheart. Just wanna make sure I can still see that smile for many more years”

You smile at him but turn to hide your blush and get out of the van “ Hey are you going to the party tomorrow? The one at that girls house by lake Monroe?”

He smiles back while putting his car in reverse “ If you’re there then I wouldn’t miss it for the world”. You watch his van leave until it rounds a corner out of site wondering what mayhem will happen tomorrow.

THE NEXT DAY —————

Morning went by normal for you. Having breakfast with your mom and baby sister. Dad long divorced and not apart of any of your lives anymore, but the whole family seems to be better for it. Your mom went off for a lunch/play date with some of the other moms which left you plenty of time to figure out what I’m gods name you’d be wearing to this even tonight.

All of your friends constantly told you that you can’t dress so this party is giving you heart palpitations. Assuming it’s not a costume party are you supposed to dress hot so you can catch Steve’s attention, maybe cute so Eddie will shower you with compliments all night, or maybe as a third wild card you can dress like a milf an get your ex Billy’s mouth drooling. You can’t control your laughter until you hear your phone ring downstairs.

You run downstairs and pick up the phone “Smith residence” you say in your best customer service voice.

“Y/n is that really how you answer the phone?” Robin makes fun of you over the phone.

“Well yeah what if one of my mom’s work friends call? Not like I’m super close with them Robin am I?” It comes out a lot more smart alecky then you were wanting but it does the trick.

“ okay fair enough, but hey I wanted to tell you that for the party tonight you should wear something RED. Red lipstick, red dress, red bow. The whole 9. The party tonight is a karaoke party and Steve is going to be wearing red so I just wanted to tell you but make sure to be ready at 9. I gotta go but I’ll see you soon y/n . Bye!” Robin speaking in her normal a mile a minute fashion I had no room to interject and I’m 95% certain she never took a breath.

Very very interesting you say as you walk up to your room with a smirk on your face.

THAT NIGHT —————-

You see headlights approaching your house that looks like Steve’s BMW and your heart lights up. Per Robin’s suggestion you wear your signature Marilyn Monroe lip with a cute A line dress that’s shorter than you’d like which makes it perfect. Your mom did your hair in the most perfect Jerry Hall curls and if looks could kill you’d be deadly. You kiss your mom and sister goodnight as you run out of the house to meet Steve and Robin.

As you approach the car parked in your driveway you see Steve and Robin are having a conversation so he hasn’t seen you yet. You slow your pace and slowly tap on the glass of Steve’s window. You look down at him while swinging your purse and coat waiting for him to say something. He stares into your eyes for the longest time but slowly his eyes drift lower over your curves that your dress perfectly accentuates. You see his Adam’s apple bob and he turns forward and runs his left hand through his hair while his right hand grips the steering wheel tighter.

Perfect

Just the reaction you were looking for. Steve still hasn’t said anything when you grab the back drivers side door and crawl in the back seat.

“ y/n I know Steve hasn’t said anything but I think you look positively radiant. Not a star in the sky could compare yourself to your beauty. Is that what you were thinking mr Harrington?” Robin teases as Steve shifts the car into drive and just agrees with a quick

“Yep, something like that” not making eye contact with you the whole drive to the party.

AT THE PARTY —————

Steve parks in the grass at the party and Robin races I’m before you both. Steve turns to you and lightly grazes your hand to get your attention. “ hey um *clears throat* I wanted to let you know even though Robin said it first you do look amazing tonight, AND every other night too I don’t mean that you don’t always look “

You put a finger up to his lips to stop his babbling

“ Thank you Steve, I think you look amazing tonight too.” You drop your hand and walk confidently in front of him into the party not far behind Robin.

You see she’s already found her POI which you’re assuming is Veronica who she was talking about yesterday. And when she looks your way you give her two thumbs up .

“ Hey stranger”

You tighten your fist as you turn around. Dreading this conversation but also knowing it was inevitable. “Hey Billy, nice to see you here” you say through gritted teeth. You and Billy never really got along. Not to say he didn’t bang your brains out from time to time in the not too distant past. If that’s what you’d call a relationship then you both were certified exes and enemies now. Billy never took rejection well.

“Not that I don’t love the view I’m seeing tonight y/n, but what miracle has happened that you blessed us here with your presence”

“ yeah haha Billy very funny I was invited here same as you.” You try to brush him off and move in deeper to the party when he grabs your arm and pulls you back.

“You know that’s funny that you say that y/n because this party is couple’s only and I can’t help but remember that you a desperately single at the moment. Can’t get a single dick hard to save your life. Must be a damn shame. You know if you’re still having that problem in a month I might have an opening so I can toss you a pity lay if you’re still hopelessly horny with no one to fuck”

You’re equally embarrassed and alight with flame. Tears coming to your eyes as you try to rip Billy’s grip off your arm you feel a chest come against your back and you see a fist knock Billy to the ground. Your two knights in shining armor. Steve and Eddie. Steve turns around and grabs your face with both to check and see if you’re okay. You give him a quick nod that he needed to see and he brings your palm up to his mouth to give it a long kiss while never breaking his eye contact with you. You let out a small sob as Steve lets your hand drop when he grabs Billy by the collar to take him outside. You let out a breath you didn’t know you’d been holding. Eddie is still behind you holding him close to him. His hand gently resting on your chest helping you breathe with him. Smelling his leather and weed is comforting to you and makes you feel safe. Satisfied that you’ve calmed down enough he brings you to another room in the house so you two can talk. You sit down on the stranger’s bed and fiddle with the bottom of your dress to keep yourself from crying. Eddie crouches down in front of you and takes your fingers and rests them on his face.

“What can I do sweetheart? How can Eddie make it better?”

You close your eyes as you try to hold back a sob.

“You know what I think might help. I think you need to be distracted.”

Eddie starts pressing soft, gentle kisses on your fingers

“Eddie, please”

Eddie smiles as he takes your pointer finger and slowly puts it in his mouth.

Your eyes pop open immediately

Eddie holds your stare as he starts sucking on your finger and starts circling it with his tongue.

“Eddie” you say a little surprised because you did not expect your best friend to be doing this to you at a strangers house after your ex berated you and your crush is beating him up outside. But reality snaps back to you as Eddie adds another finger to his mouth.

You let out a slight *gasp*

“Use your words sweetheart. I’ll stop whenever you want.”

You weren’t sure you wanted him to stop, but you should right? You love Steve. It was wrong to use your best friend like this. You’ve told him about your feelings for Steve. Right as you open your mouth to say something Steve comes in the bedroom door and closes it abruptly behind himself.

#eddie munson #eddie munson x y/n #steve stranger things #steve harrington #steve harrington x reader #billy harringrove #eddie munson x reader #steve harrington x you

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jeojahari · 3 years

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02 | kiss it better | myg

🠒 summary: you're one of the lucky ones, everyone else tells you. finding your soulmate the day you turn 18 isn't something that happens to a lot of people... but you and your other half are going to have to make a lot of progress to be able to tolerate each other.

or, you and yoongi can feel everything the other feels, and you're hell bent on causing each other pain.

🠒 pairing: yoongi x reader

🠒 genre: angst, fluff, e2l!au, soulmates!au, college au, crack?

🠒 warnings: profanity, implied smut

🠒 word count: 2.6K

🠒 notes: omg tysm for all the love im literally about to start happy sobbing rn TT i hope you enjoy this chapter!! <3

btw if my writing is not up to par at any time pls let me know, i'd hate to give you low effort writing TT

part 02: two band-aids

(series m. list)

"I am so fucking stupid."

"I know."

"I can't believe I just ran out of there without saying anything!"

"Ah. I can."

"How is it Yoongi, though? I don't understand! How can two people who are so obviously different and have zero chance at getting along be paired like this?!"

"Hey," Jimin places a comforting hand on your shoulder, "maybe this is the universe trying to prove that you can find love where you least expect it!"

You shoot him the nastiest glare you can conjure up in the moment. "You sound like a children's fairy tale synopsis. Please shut up."

"No, but think about it!" Jimin sits upright, pulling the nearest pillow into his lap. "You don't like him, and he probably doesn't like you. You hate coffee, and he's practically in love with it. The only reason you guys ever interact is Taehyung, who you happen to be in love with."

"I'm not in love with him!"

"Sure," Jimin rolls his eyes. "Anyways, this is literally the perfect recipe for romance. I feel like I have front-row seats to the best enemies to lovers story ever."

"Don't make me hit you."

"It's true, though," Namjoon pipes up from beside you. You're sandwiched between both of them in an attempt to extinguish the growing dread in the pit of your stomach. "You don't really know what he's like, Y/N. People aren't always what they seem at first glance."

"I had more than just a glance," you snap. "And I know him for exactly what he is. A fucking sociopath."

"I mean, he's nice enough," Jimin explains. "I've spoken to him a few times in passing. Maybe he just wasn't having a good day when you talked to him?"

You pause and think, because your friends are right. It's plausible, isn't it? Not every grumpy person you meet goes out of their way to be antisocial... but you can't shake off that feeling you've harbored ever since you first met him.

"I don't like this," you whine, hiding your face under the blanket. "I don't like him. I don't want to be his soulmate."

Namjoon chuckles. "Soulmates aren't always lovers, Y/N. If he's actually a sociopath, or you genuinely despise him after giving him a chance, you're not obligated to love him."

"True," Jimin nods. "My parents were never soulmates, but you know how well they get along. They had me, after all," he adds as an afterthought. "They couldn't have done that without loving each other."

Namjoon winces. "Okay, no. Didn't need to hear that."

You let out a frustrated groan, kicking your legs under the sheets. "I hate this," you grumble. "And I can't even do anything ab — oh!" You sit up, suddenly enlightened and an imaginary lightbulb over your head. "I can!"

"You can what?" Jimin asks, clearly confused. In response, you simply beam at him before doing an impromptu somersault over his legs and tumbling right off the bed, landing on the ground with a loud thump.

"Y/N?!"

"She's insane!"

"She's gone mental!"

"Is she having a seizure?"

"Do we need an ambulance?!"

"Is she okay?"

"Joon, I'm too broke to pay for the ambulance!"

You throw them both off of you. "I'm right here, very much alive, and very sane, thanks."

"Well, what was that, then?" Jimin demands. "If you were trying to show off your gymnastics skills, it didn't work. You look like a clumsy baby koala."

You point at Namjoon. "He's the clumsy one. And no, I wasn't trying to show you my nonexistent gymnastics skills." A huge smile spreads across your face. "I just discovered a great way to release all my frustration."

"By falling off the bed?"

"No, but yes." You lean in like you're about to tell them a secret. "You know... I bet Min Yoongi is cursing the heavens right now, isn't he? For pairing him with someone like me."

Namjoon stares at you incredulously. "Don't tell me..."

"She's going to do it anyway," Jimin tells him, before turning to you. "You're just going to hurt yourself to hurt him, Y/N? Are you for real?"

"It's perfect!"

"It's stupid, and usually I would tell you to go for it if you were planning to kick some dumbass's butt, but not if you're getting hurt in the process."

"Well, I'm doing it anyway," you say. You're 100% decided; you've just found the one part of your bond with Yoongi that delights you the most, and with that comes your singular goal: irritating him to no end. "And this isn't even that bad, Jimin. Wait until I'm on my period. Then he's really going to wish he never knew me."

Actually, you're screwed.

"Ouch!" you hiss, your body jerking at the pain that courses through your arm. You're forced to stop writing mid-word, the dark blue ink a mess on your paper due to these constant interruptions of your sudden movements. "What the fuck?!"

The girl sitting across from you raises her eyebrows at you, half concerned for your sanity.

"Sorry," you whisper apologetically. "My soulmate's a jerk. Honestly, I probably caused this, but I don't regret it at all."

She laughs, eyes turning into small crescents. "Hate at first sight?"

"More like at first conversation." You sigh, letting the pen fall from your fingers. "I don't know how I'm supposed to get along with him, let alone love him. We have absolutely nothing in common, and I'm pretty sure this dislike is mutual. Which reminds me—"

You bang your knee against the table in retribution for Yoongi's attack on his own arm, a satisfied smile on your face.

"Wow." The girl stares at you, rather taken aback. "That's some serious beef you two have got."

"Yep. Can't stand him," you confirm. "What about you? Have you found yours yet?"

"Not yet," she says, trying to look indifferent — but you catch that wistful look in her eyes. "Someday soon, hopefully."

"You'll find them," you say, the exact words you've repeated to Jimin multiple times over the years. "Time is all it takes. I hope yours is less of a jerk than mine... and if they are, I'm more than happy to instruct you in the ways of torturing them."

"Noted," she smiles, before returning to her book.

You, though, can't focus. Actually, you haven't been able to concentrate on anything lately — ever since this trivial back and forth between you and Yoongi turned into something more desperate and warlike, it's all that's ever on your mind.

Sighing, you stand up, leaving your place at the table to go fetch a book from one of the many shelves lining the opposite wall of the library. It doesn't take you long to find what you're looking for, but you immediately stumble over and hit the ground, nearly knocking your head against the wood of the shelf.

"Fuck," you hear someone curse in the next aisle. You know that voice, you realize after a few seconds, immediately ducking your head around the corner in amused curiosity.

"What'd you do to yourself this time?"

Yoongi scowls at you from the ground, as irked as always. "None of your business."

"It kind of is, actually, now that I feel it too."

"Oh, really? Where was that concern when you were hurting yourself just to get back at me for doing absolutely nothing?"

"You did it back! You have no right to be telling me what I did was wrong if you decided to do it too!"

"Why the hell did you do it in the first place?"

"Shh!" The librarian walks past the two of you, giving you a sharp glare as she replaces a few books with the ones in her hands. You nod apologetically to her, head bowed.

"You're so loud," you whisper a few seconds later, just as Yoongi gets himself off the ground and has managed to gather the books he'd dropped.

"You literally started yelling first, Y/N."

A deep frown makes its way onto your face. "You know what? I still don't understand why you're like this. Can we not have a civil conversation for once? Every time I talk to you it turns into a goddamn argument!"

"Yeah, well, maybe if you'd just minded your own business, we wouldn't be having this argument!" Yoongi pauses for a breath. "You always make it an argument, Y/N, I don't go out of my way to pick a fight with you!"

"Isn't that what you're doing right now?"

"No! I just don't understand your problem with me! Look," he says, a little calmer, "I know you don't want to be my soulmate. And I'm not particularly in love with you either. But you can at least act like I'm human too, right? Or is that too much for your inflated pride?"

"Did you just call me arrogant?" you ask incredulously, trailing after him as he walks back to where he was sitting. "You think I'm doing this because I'm conceited?"

"N—"

"Well, for your information, I'm not. I just really dislike you."

Yoongi tongues his cheek in frustration, slamming his book down onto the table. "And for what?" he demands. "I like to know it if and when I fuck up, Y/N. Stop repeating the fact that you hate me and just tell me why."

You flinch at his harsh tone and the sensation that sends a painful twinge through your palm. "You're just... you're so hard to talk to," you accuse. "Like, really? How am I supposed to wrap my head around this whole thing when I can't have a conversation with you without feeling like shit?"

He's gaping at you now. "I'm making you feel like shit? And you're not doing the same by basically trash talking me to my face?"

"I'm not! I'm just telling the truth; and besides, you asked!"

"Who are you to go around judging the way people are? Not everyone is bubbly and cheery, you know? Being grumpy for a second doesn't mean being grumpy for a lifetime!"

"Well, I can't tell, can I? Not when you always act like you hate the rest of the human race!"

Yoongi doesn't reply to you, just staring back at you for a few moments. Instead, his jaw clenches as he turns away without any kind of rebuttal.

"Alright," he says gruffly. "I'll go first."

Your eyes widen slightly as your frustration dissipates. You'd only meant to check on him out of curiosity after his fall, you hadn't intended for it to escalate to this scale at all... "Wait—"

"Don't bother to talk to me next time," he interrupts you, a hint of bitterness to his voice. "Since I always make you feel like shit, anyways."

"No, I didn't m—"

Yoongi's gone before you can give him any miserable excuse from your side, bag slung over his shoulder and that cup of coffee in his right hand. You catch a glimpse of his fingers wrapped around the cup, two band-aids covering the knuckles of his smallest digits, and you can't help but wonder... did you do that to him? All those days you spent wrapping bandages around your legs and arms, was he doing the same?

But you hate him, right? No matter how closely bound you two are, you're allowed to do this, aren't you?

You don't know.

You recall the sight of his worn out expression and sigh, shaking your head. Whatever it is about Min Yoongi that draws the worst out of you, you'll never know. All you're sure of is that apparently you're supposed to love him, apparently you're supposed to be his and vice versa. But you just can't.

As you trudge back to your seat, you notice that the girl from earlier is still there, still taking diligent notes — except her eyes now follow you, a mixture of concern and curiosity.

"I'm fine," you state. The words come out far harsher than intended, but she doesn't seem to take offense.

"Really?" she asks instead. "S'great if you are, but if you're not then you're just lying to yourself, Y/N."

You blink at her, surprised. "Huh? How'd you know my name?"

"You guys were yelling," she explains. "I could hear him from over here."

"Aish. Sorry."

"Don't worry about it." She chews on her pencil for a second, seemingly contemplating something. "Mind if I give you my two cents?"

The girl's awfully blunt and gets right to the point, and it reminds you of your friends for a moment. Something about her just makes you want to trust her, to let her in.

So you shrug your shoulders and say, "Sure."

"Second chances only come once."

"Huh?"

She nods, tucking her hair behind her ear. "You don't really know anything about him," she says. "You don't know what's happened to him before. You could be his second chance, and he probably just took a blow after that whole debacle you two had over there."

"What?"

She chuckles softly, and you find yourself rethinking your stance on the situation. She's right, she's right, your heart tells you, but your brain is saying something else entirely, and it's maddening.

"Give him a chance, Y/N. Everyone deserves one."

Hours later, you're still thinking about what a random stranger said to you at the library earlier.

Yoongi? A chance? No, thank you. You don't need to waste any more of your time on guys that aren't going to give you the time of day once they're not interested.

And yet, a small part of your conscience says otherwise. He's not just any guy, it reminds you. You're soulmates for a reason.

You're so frustrated you want to tear your hair out. "Soulmates are stupid!"

Jimin walks into your room with two cans of soda, an eyebrow raised as he tosses one to you. "Yikes, Y/N. What's gotten into you today?"

"Min Yoongi," you grumble.

Your best friend gapes at you, nearly spilling his soda all over himself. "I'm sorry, what?"

"What?"

"Already, Y/N?!"

You're confused as you take a sip of the sweet drink. "Already what, Jimin?"

He's opening and closing his mouth, eyes so wide he looks like a clown out of those children's cartoons. "You and Yoongi — you guys — I can't believe you finally got laid!"

This prompts you to spit out the liquid in your mouth, dissolving into a coughing fit as you try and regain your breath.

"There, there," Jimin says, stroking your back gently. "I won't mention it again if you don't want me to, I'm sorry. Was he a bad lay?"

"A bad what? Jimin, I don't know what you think I'm doing, but having sex with him is most certainly not on my list," you frown.

Your best friend, on the other hand, looks totally dumbfounded.

"Huh? But you answered with his name!"

You smack the side of his head gently. "That's not how idioms work, dumbass."

"Okay, sheesh, sorry," he apologizes, rubbing his temple. "But really, though. Everything okay with Yoongi?"

"Not really," you say truthfully, "but it's fine. Neither of us are expecting anything from the other."

Jimin looks skeptical as he eyes you carefully. "You sure?"

"Mhm."

He tilts his head back, draining the can of soda as he swallows. "You know, Y/N, maybe you should give the guy a chance."

There it is again, that word. The one thing everyone tells you that you need to give.

But is it worth your time? Is he worth your time? Or is he just going to walk away and leave you broken again? Maybe you're being selfish, but you'd rather spare yourself the heartbreak process than willingly go into something you know won't be good for you.

"Yeah, okay," you lie through your teeth, soda can still nearly full in your hand. "Maybe I will."

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years

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Political economy vs inflation

As Biden lays out ambitious plans to stimulate the US economy and fight inequality with new money creation (spending) and money destruction (higher taxes on corporations, capital gains and the right), a firing squad of economists assembled to issue dire inflation warnings.

They're repeating the economic doctrine of the pasty 40 years, an austerity doctrine that focuses on the inflationary risks of "deficit spending" (when governments don't tax as much money out of the economy as they inject in the same year).

It's a doctrine that made a pretense to being a science, going to far as to create a fake "Nobel Prize" in economics in a bid for scientific credibility (the Nobel administrators eventually folded the economics prize into its administrative remit).

The "neoclassicals" used abstract equations to "prove" a bunch of economic truths that - purely coincidentally - made rich people much, much richer and poor people much, much poorer.

Tellingly, the most exciting development in economics of the past 50 years is "behavioral economics" - a subdiscipline whose (excellent) innovation was to check to see whether people actually act the way that economists' models predict they will.

(they don't)

It's this vain, discredited and shambolic group who have assembled behind leaders like Larry Summers to decry Biden's stimulus spending plans, insisting that we are flirting with hyperinflation and the collapse of the USD as a global reserve currency.

But economists aren't the last word in understanding stimulus and inflation. If you're trying to figure out whether Summers is right and inequality, poverty and crumbling infrastructure are the price of American stability, it's worth checking out the *political* economists.

Here's a great place to start: Brown University economist Mark Blyth's interview with The Analysis, available in audio, video, and as a transcript:

https://theanalysis.news/interviews/mark-blyth-the-inflated-fear-of-inflation/

Blyth doesn't dismiss Summers' inflationary fears out of hand, but he does say that Summers is vastly overestimating the likelihood that stimulus spending will trigger inflation - Summers says there's a 1-in-3 chance of inflation, while Blyth says it's more like 1-in-10.

To understand the difference, it's useful to first understand what we mean by inflation: "a general, sustained rise in the level of all prices."

It's not a short-term spike (like we saw with GPUs when everyone upgraded their gaming rigs at the start of the pandemic).

It's also not an asset-bubble. House prices in Toronto are high, but that's not inflation. They're high because "Canada stopped building public housing in the 1980s and turned it into an asset class and let the 10 percent top earners buy it all and swap it with each other."

For inflation to happen in the wake of the stimulus, the spending would have to lead to too much money chasing not enough goods. Blyth gives some pretty good reasons to be skeptical that this will happen.

Start with the wealthy: they don't spend much, relative to their income. Their consumption needs are already met (that's what it means to be rich). You can only own so many Sub-Zero fridges, and even after you fill them with kobe beef and Veuve Cliquot, you're still rich.

What rich people do with extra money is *speculate*. That's why top-level giveaways generate socially useless, destructive asset bubbles. Remember, these aren't inflation, which is good, because everyone agrees that inflation is hard to stop once it gets going.

They're speculative bubbles. We have a much better idea of how to prevent bubbles: transaction taxes, hikes to the capital gains tax, and high marginal tax rates at the top bracket.

Okay, fine, so the rich won't be able to spend us into inflation after a broad stimulus, but what about poor people? Well, the bottom 60% of the US is grossly indebted, suffocating under medical debt, student debt and housing debt. A *lot* of that will disappear.

That will transfer a lot of stimulus money from poor people to rich people (who own the debt), which is why we need high capital gains and top-bracket taxation. But it will also sweep away a vast swathe of the financialized economy.

The point of long-term debt isn't to get paid off - it's to generate ongoing cash-flows that can be securitized and turned into bonds. Securitization converted "advanced" economies into shambling, undead debt-zombies.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

It's securitization that led to the 2008 financial crisis, and it's securitization that sustains Wall Street's speculative acquisition of every single-family dwelling for sale in America as part of a bid to turn every home into an extractive slum.

Blythe explains that if the rich have nothing to buy and the poor use most of their stimulus to get out of debt, it will likely reorient the US economy to useful things: creating jobs to make stuff that people want to buy.

But what about the dollar's status as a global reserve currency? Won't all that stimulus send other countries scurrying around for another form of national savings? Blyth's answer is pretty convincing.

First, because there aren't any great alternatives: the European economy is growing at half the rate of the US. The Chinese economy is booming, but if you buy Chinese assets, there's a good chance you'll never be able to get them out of China.

Gold? Bitcoin? Leave aside the deflationary risk of pegging your currency to an inelastic metal or virtual token, leave aside the environmentally devastating effect of cryptocurrency (cryptos consume enough energy to offset the entire planetary solar capacity!).

Instead, think of the volatility of these assets, with their drunken, wild swings - countries that dump USD due to inflationary fears are hardly likely to switch to a crypto that can lose 20% of its value in a day.

And remember how much of that volatility is driven by out-and-out fraud, with major crypto exchanges and gold schemes imploding without warning, taking hundreds of millions of dollars with them. This is not a stable alternative to the dollar!

Beyond the lack of an alternative, there's another reason to believe that the USD will remain a global reserve, as Blyth elegantly explains.

Think of a Chinese company supplying the US market. Chances are, that's actually US company's subcontractor, getting paid in USD.

These end up swapped with the Chinese central bank for Chinese money, because Chinese companies need to pay salaries, rent, and other expenses in Renminbi, not dollars. The Chinese central bank holds onto the USDs, using them as a national savings, a reserve currency.

If China were to dump all its USD holdings into the world economy, it would tank the US dollar - which is to say, it burn China's own national savings. China's central bank needs to do something with those dollar savings, so they buy 10-year US T-bills.

Same goes for Germany - net exporters depend on a net importer to buy their stuff, and primarily that's the USA. They are stuck in a form of "monetarily assured destruction," and a crisis of confidence is unlikely "because you’ve got nowhere else to take your confidence."

Next, Blyth takes up is the proposed increase in the corporate tax rate, and he says that investors are actually surprisingly okay with this - he reminds us of Buffett's maxim, "Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked."

A hike in the corporate tax rate has the potential to reveal which of the "great" firms "are just really good at tax optimization" rather than efficient production. It'll smash those unproductive firms to pieces that can be bought by good firms for pennies on the dollar.

The final issue that Blyth takes up is an excellent one for this May Day: the relationship of higher wages to inflation. When the US had large, centrally managed industries with large, centralized unions, there was the risk that higher prices would trigger higher wages.

But the US doesn't have a unionized workforce with guaranteed COLA inflationary rises - there's no "wage-price spiral" risk of higher prices leading to higher wages and then higher prices.

The neoclassical theory of wages is based on the "marginal productivity" and "higher than outside option" theories: wage-levels are the product of how much money they stand to make from your work, and how much someone else is willing to pay you to work for them.

But economists like Suresh Naidu describe how high-tech surveillance can disrupt this equilibrium: you can spy on workers instead of paying them more, can impose onerous conditions on them that wring them of everything they can produce.

This kind of bossware was once the exclusive burden of low-waged, precarious workers, but thanks to the shitty technology adoption curve, it is working its way up the privilege gradient to increasingly elite workforce segments.

Digital micromanagement went from the factory floor to remote customer-support reps to office workers who are minutely surveilled by Office 365, all the way up to MDs and other elite professionals:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

This has led to increased profits for firms - firms now take a larger share of their productivity gains, and workers see stagnant or declining wages. That excess profit represents slack in the system.

It means that even if companies' costs go up, they can hold prices steady - all they need to do is reduce their retained profits.

We've had 40 years of price stability at the expense of a living wage for working people.

Higher wages are only inflationary if we assume that the 1% will continue to extract vast sums from their investments and use them to kick off destructive asset bubbles.

Image: badsci https://www.flickr.com/photos/7941730@N06/8625213990/

CC BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

#pluralistic

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accioecho · 4 years

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Thank you for translating! It is really hard work to translate. If it is not too much work I was wondering if there were any differences in the dialogue in the scene where Lee Gon cooks for Tae-eul? Or if you could share a little bit what Tae-eul was feeling when he was flirting. Thank you again

Hello dear Nonny, thank you for your message :3 Since a few other people have also asked me about the Kitchen Scene™, h e r e y o u g o ↓ (bear with me, I translated this part a bit hastily so this is a loose translation).

Under cut because this got long.

“Why are we in the kitchen? Are you planning on making me stay the night here?” Tae-Eul asked, looking around her surroundings.

This was no ordinary kitchen. The plates and tableware that were carefully displayed in several china cabinets looked like they could belong in a museum. Everything seemed luxurious, all the kitchenware of professional grade. The kitchen itself was very sleek and modern, the meat stored in its very own food cellar. So this is what a royal kitchen looked like.

Gon chuckled at Tae-Eul’s easy banter, removed his jacket and placed it neatly on the back of the island stool. He had asked the staff to vacate the premises so that only he and Tae-Eul were left.

“If you’re staying the night, I’ll have you sleep in my bedroom. Now that Secretary Mo knows, almost everyone around me knows about you.”

Gon grabbed Tae-Eul’s shoulders and led her back to one of the chairs. Once he made sure she was seated, he went back to the kitchen counter.

“Let’s eat. Yeong told me that you didn’t eat anything besides a sandwich today. I’m repaying you for the half and half.” Gon said, rolling his sleeves.

Tae-Eul observed Gon moving around, taking out ingredients here and there and putting them on the counter. It was clear from the way he was deftly cutting the vegetables that he knew his way around the kitchen. He heated the cast iron pan before putting in the meat. Soon, the delicious scents of the sizzling steak filled the the room. Tae-Eul didn’t realize how hungry she was until she smelled the wonderful flavors coming out from the kitchen island. She looked at the grilling piece of beef with raptured attention before she met Gon’s gaze.

His lips were curled in satisfaction, obviously proud of himself.

“You didn’t give me money on purpose, right? You knew we didn’t have the same currencies.”

“Right. You don’t have buttons. I didn’t want you to go far away, that’s why I sent Yeong.” He replied cheekily.

“The credit limit was 100,000 won. I borrowed it from him, so pay it back for me.”

“I will.”

“I was traveling around today, and I realized you must have been lonely in my world.” Tae-Eul stated.

She guessed it was one of those things you had to actually experience before understanding how it truly felt. Now she thought of Gon whenever she felt lonely. Because that’s how he probably felt too, back in her world.

Distracted by her words, Gon turned his attention away from the task at hand and looked at her worriedly.

“Were you lonely here?”

“It was frustrating to not have something that could prove my identity. Thanks for coming to pick me up.”

“Would you come here for a second?” The lines of his face hardened, his jaw clenched.

Tae-Eul wordlessly stood up and came up to him.

“Do you need any help?” She asked.

“Look at me.”

A command delivered by a King. Who was wearing an apron.

Tae-Eul tilted her head. Gon came closer and lightly bumped his forehead against hers.

“I want to pat your head, but both my hands are busy”

His deep voice tickled her skin, his nearness eliciting warm, tingly feelings in her.

“It doesn’t seem like your first time.” Tae-Eul mumbled, slightly disconcerted.

“What do you mean? Dating? Why? You didn’t get any results from web searching?”

“Why do you cook so well? I thought you were making me some ramen.” She changed the topic.

“You said it didn’t taste good.”

“It was good. That’s why I didn’t believe that you cooked it yourself.”

“Head Court Lady Noh taught me how to cook. The only food that I don’t need to be tasted is the food I cook myself.”

Tae-Eul took a step away, letting him finish the food preparation.

“I saw you looked it up online. Prince Imperial Geum. And Lee Lim.” Gon went on, voice nonchalant.

Any citizen in the Kingdom knew about the traitor Lee Lim, so it wouldn’t have been hard for Tae-Eul to find out about his uncle or read about the details of that night. If her face was any indication, his guess was right.

“You… seem to have grown into a fine man.”

“I guess that you now know what root you are standing in front of.”

Tae-Eul vaguely stared at the faint scar visible on Gon’s collarbone. It must have been painful, getting that scar. It must have hurt so much. That a child had to go through this brutal ordeal was almost inconceivable. She couldn’t even think about it. Because if she did, she probably wouldn’t be able to handle it. That a relative could kill a child’s father before attempting to strangle that very same child to death.

“It’s my hell and my history that was engraved on my body by the greed of the person that killed my father and strangled me.”

“…”

“This is why I was raised amid my uncle’s worries and Head Court Lady Noh’s tears. And that’s the reason why Lady Noh isn’t nice to you. Don’t be upset about it.”

Tae-Eul had briefly felt the unfairness of Lady Noh’s treatment towards her. She understood why she had acted that way though. Tae-Eul could only nod at Gon’s explanations.

“Is that it? After hearing a story like this, don’t you have to either give me a hug or at least say that you would give me one?”

“Aren’t you going to show me my ID card?” Tae-Eul asked instead.

“Hey, don’t change the topic—“

“I need to go now.” She cut him off.

“I won’t let you go. You have to live here.”

They both knew it though. They had led separate lives so far. An entire universe stood in between them.

Tae-Eul had only spent one— no, two nights in a far-away place where no one else from her world could travel to. If it weren’t for Gon, she wouldn’t even have picked this place as a travel destination.

“I’m serious. I won’t let you go. I can keep you here with just one command.” Gon repeated, each word heavier than the last.

His anguish and frustration was palpable. Feeling completely powerless, Tae-Eul could only let her own sadness flow through her veins, leaving a cold emptiness in its wake.

He was surrounded by so many caring people, people who held him dear, people who worried about him— Yet Gon still felt a deeply rooted loneliness within him.

Whether it was 25 years ago or today, the only person who was able to unburden this heavy load was the one person whose existence made no sense in his world.

Tae-Eul couldn’t help but feel the unfairness of the situation. She had always been Gon’s constant, his zero. Without realizing it, she had started wanting to be his zero as well.

She had no idea where to take things from there. She had no clue about anything about the two of them, yet she knew that whenever she looked at him, whenever she was pulled into his mesmerizing gaze, she could only nod and follow his steps. She wanted to shy away from him and his big, almond-shaped eyes.

He had always been the sharp, dutiful King leading a country for most. But to her, he was an honorable man with a vulnerability that only she could see.

Lost in her thoughts, Tae-Eul noticed that the meal Gon had prepared for her was steaming, small puffs of smoke coming out of the pan. Gon turned off the stove and placed a plate in front of her.

“Take your time. I will show you the ID card after you finish it.”

Tae-Eul grabbed the spoon. She didn’t feel like eating and felt her strength gradually leaving her. She put on a happy face and scooped up a spoonful of the meal Gon had prepared. She would show her appreciation. For his sake.

“Thanks for the food.”

“Steak and rice in a hot pot. It’s my signature dish. Everyone falls for it.”

Tae-Eul didn’t even have to pretend to be enjoying the food. It really was delicious.

“You should ask me whom I cooked it for. I said it to make you jealous.” Gon quipped.

“I can’t beat that person anyway. Whoever she is, that person must be from this world.” Tae-Eul took another mouthful.

It seemed that whenever Tae-Eul spoke her mind freely, Gon’s heart twitched in pain. Reaching in his pocket, Gon grabbed the badge and handed it to her.

“I have been carrying it around ever since you came here. I didn’t show it to you because I was afraid you might leave. But… you’ve already gone somewhere much further away than your world. Take a look.”

The ID card looked a little more worn out than the one that had been recently issued. Everything else checked out. November 11th, 2019. This badge was hers.

“The navy jacket. It’s mine. It’s my ID card. How does this make sense, though? It’s definitely mine. Did you say it’s been here for 25 years?”

“Someone dropped it here. But my memories are fading away. I’m not sure I can recognize that person. But I feel like the person will appear before me at least once.”

“Why?”

“Because that person is either the beginning or the end of all this. It seems like a difficult question to solve, but there must be a simple and beautiful formula for it. And you are the answer I have been looking for. From now on, I will prove it one by one. Whoever it is, and whichever world the person is from, you’ve beat that person. So don’t you decide alone to leave like that.”

Tae-Eul wasn’t sure what moves he was about to make. The boy he used to be grew beautifully into the man that faced her today.

For a short while, they stared wistfully at each other.

Hope. Apprehension. Self-reflection. Solitude.

The room was filled with unspoken tensions and promises.

#tkem novels #chapter 14 #I never translated so fast in my life #this is probably just a pile of rubbish #psa this is very much unedited #these two and their feelings honestly #they should just get on with it #also if the author could stop with her metaphors of one and zero and whatnot it would be greatly appreciated #because it’s a pain in the butt to translate into something that makes sense in English #also by the way #the very last sentence is completely made up and doesn’t exist in the book #anyway hope you enjoyed my word vomit

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ecoamerica · 2 months

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youtube

Watch the American Climate Leadership Awards 2024 now: https://youtu.be/bWiW4Rp8vF0?feature=shared

The American Climate Leadership Awards 2024 broadcast recording is now available on ecoAmerica's YouTube channel for viewers to be inspired by active climate leaders. Watch to find out which finalist received the $50,000 grand prize! Hosted by Vanessa Hauc and featuring Bill McKibben and Katharine Hayhoe!

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popculturebuffet · 3 years

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New X-Men Xtrospective Part 1: E is For Extinction “They Will Need Us”

I am SO fucking excited for this one. As might not be obvious to ALL of my readers but should be obvious to some, I fucking love the X-Men. They are one of my favorite superhero teams period as are several of their spinoffs such as X-Factor (All versions), New Mutants, and Marauders. I love the wide cast, the hugely vast universe within the already vast and wonderful marvel universe, and the sheer amount of GREAT stories. I own all 11 movies, have several action figures, and two posters from Jonathan Hickman’s current and utterly dynamite run right above me right now as I work, as well as a marvel 80′s themed poster behind me that’s at least half x-men for good reason. I love this gang of mutants and I have not talked about them enough.

I”ve done some X-Men stuff sure: I’ve talked about hickman’s time as head writer of the books a year in earlier this year, I did a few scattered reviews back when I did single issues of comics, and then we get to the one I beefed big time: covering ALL of X-Men evolution. While it’s a noble endeavor I freely admit to overexerting myself: I recapped the episodes way too closely, gave myself no real schedule and did so while I was already covering two shows a week at the time. My point is it was a good idea, but the timing was REALLY fucking bad and if I do it again, I intend to do it right and iwth a proper place in my now properly paced schedule. I also planned to do the movies which, unlike evolution, I have solid plans to do once I clear out some of my projects. Point is I burned bright and then exploded and took a whole projecet with me phoenix style.

I had until this moment yet to do a really big x-men project, something digging into the comics, something that could help fans both of the comics and not get familiar with something really good, and help me dig into both the good and bad of something. I jsut needed the right start.

Then Christmas gave me that spark, that project that gave me the idea for a butload more x-men content on here and was the perfect starting point for some. See my friend Marco lives in Honduras, and so since i couldn’t afford to send him anything for christmas in the mail, as i’m not exactly rich, I instead offered him three reviews of anything.l He still hasn’t taken up two of them, nor one I gave him for graduating college, but the first one was a doozy, something he hadn’t read due to not liking the art, which is fine as I have some art in comics I don’t like everyone has diffrent tastes, at least for the first arc, and something VITALLY important to x-men as a whole and that’s the backbone of hickman’s current run: the first arc of new x-men, e is for extinction. And given New X-Men is one of my faviorite comics of all time I not only lept on it.. but decided fuck it I’m covering the whole thing. So every so often on here from now until I finish, i’m going to be covering Grant Morrisons ground breaking, mind shattering, status quo destroying run on the children of the atom. This.. is going to be fucking awesome. Buckle up.

New X-Men came about in 2001. Stop me if you heard this one: The X-Men, once marvel’s best selling title and one of i’ts most beloved, had been set adrift in a seal of editorial bullshit, bad writing, bad storylines and a stale continuity where not much could change or grow and things always reset to about the same place it was last week. If this sounds familiar it’s because it somehow happened AGAIN thanks to Ike Perlmutter’s bullshit, hence the current hickman run, but we’ll get into all of tha tsome other time. Point is as it was in 2018, so it was in 2001: The x-men were in bad straits and marvel reached out to a host of various creators to swing for the fences and find a new direction, something to bring sales and life back to the book. To my shock they actually took a LOT of diffrent pitches in before Morrisons won and from huge names: Geoff Johns, who had not yet returned to DC never to leave, Alex Ross, Keith Giffen.. all huge creative types. but in the end the best man won.

For those unfamiliar with him, Grant Morrison is a gloriously batshit scotsman with a long, storied and delightfully insane history in comics, mostly at DC before and after this comic. This is for good reason: DC scouted Morrison specifically because of his early work at 2000ad. See at the time Alan Moore had hit it really big with Swamp Thing, taking a d list, so so book and making it into an utter masterpiece and giving it thoroughly interesting mythology. Given it was a blockbuster hit that’s still widely loved and discussed, as it should be today, DC decided to repeat the strategy of asking British indie comics creators to come do the same to another property. This same experiment is why Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman exists, so.. yeah it was actually a great strategy and naturally Grant had their first big hit with Animal Man, a metafictional take on a b-list hero that made him a loveable family man, while also putting him through hell and playing with the medium and dc’s vast history, the last two being Morrison’s trademark from then on out.

They’d next go on to reinvent one of my other faviorite teams: THE DOOM PATROL! The patrol are a bunch of victims of strange accidents who got powers out of them that are basically curses... and Morrison solidified that concept, taking over after a weak run that ironically enough was trying to imitate the x-men’s success at the time. Instead Morrison just went all out with his weird shit for the first time and made them a team of broken but likeable people with weird powers fighting just the weirdest most incomprehensible shit, a run i’ll likely be digging into eventually along with the team as a whole. It’s also, along with Gerard Way’s recent run, the bedroock for the current and utterly masterful doom patrol series I need to catch up on. They also apparently once wrote a satrical comic starring and lik mocking hitler... a fact I somehow JUST learned but naturally doesn’t surprise me at all.

Morrison’s career at dc, after doing some creator owned stuff there when Vertigo opened up, hit it’s peak in the late 90′s as they were given the go ahead to reinvent the Justice League, with the wildly successful and awesome JLA, another book I probably need to take a look at that put the big 7 back into the team. And by now your probably getting the point of me covering his career pattern.. besides giving morrison the praise they deserve, and they’d have some really great runs after this.. and some terrible ones but no one’s perfect. My point is that at this point in their career Morrison’s greatest skill was taking something that had grown stagnant or been forgotten, blowing it up and reworking it into something glorious and new. Taking what worked, scraping away what didn’t and on the whole making something fucking glorious out of it. So here we are. The X-Men needed a new coat of paint and uncle grant had their lcd laced psycadelic paint bucket and brush shaped like a pidgeon at the ready. And for better, way better and admitely sometimes here and there worse,they changed the x-men for good. Some changes were rolled back out of spite, others finally got their chance after said rollback recently, and some were just outright thrown on the grown and smashed with a hammer. But for the most part Grant left a huge impact on the x-men and i’m here to show you why, warts and all. To me my x-men, this is new x-men. Now naturally there’s even more exposition but i’ts more in what COULD’VE been. Originally while Wolverine, Cyclops, Jean Grey and Professor X were all part of the team the other two members of the slim roster for this run, Beast and Emma Frost.. weren’t. Originally Morrison was going to have Colossus and Moira Mactaggert, long time team ally, token human until very recently, and now thanks to hickman one of the most important x characters peirod and long before that a fan favorite of mine, on the team, with Moira taking over for beast.

This.. didn’t pan out since Marvel apparently either didn’t give a shit about their plans or already had things in motion as the climax of the longtime legacy virus storyline killed both off. Colossus until Joss Whedon, bastard he may be, brought him back for his terrific Astonishing X-Men, and Moira SOMEHOW stayed dead until House/Powers of X. See this speaks to one of the big roadblocks morrison faced: Jonathan HIckman currently has absolute power and all his writers working in concert, a new way of doing things comic companies shold honestly copy en masse as it’s really working wonders. Grant.. was just one of many writers and one of three main x books the others being Chris Claremont’s XTREME X-MEN, basically “let the legend do what he wants since he can’t get freedom on the main book” and another writer on uncanny... before eventually chuck austen took over and I will tackle that horrible mess some other time. Point is while Morrison was setting the tone, costume style and making the big waves, they still didn’t have full power and thus had to play nice with eveyrone else. So their next idea was Rogue, making mer more like her x-men evolution version.. except Chris wanted her, so that was out, though being a decent enough guy he willingly gave up Beast since the moira thing meant Morrison needed a science person. As for Colossus replacement, as it turned out a fan had suggested Grant do something with Emma Frost since Gen X was canceled and while Morrison had zero intention for it clearly Emma clicked with hthem and she was soon both a main part of the cast and one of their biggest contributions to X-Men as a whole.

As for what I think of the needed changes.. they ended up being for the best. I do like Moira... but Hank ended up being a much better fit for the team dynamic wise and power set wise, while Emma was the same. While Colossus, Rogue and Moira are all fantastic characters, I think what we ended up with was just a better mix overall. I DO think the team is incredibly white, but that’s a general x-men problem, even with having an assload of diverse and intresting characters, so it’s not entirely his fault. All in all it’s a fantastic roster: four of the x-men’s best, their leader in the field for the first time in forever, and a new and intresting wild card. IT’s a nice ballance of characters and we’ll get more into it as we go. Now all the expositions done, we can finally dive head first into new x-men. I hope you survivie the experince under the cut.

After an utterly gorgeous and striking cover, the one used up top, we get one solid page to introduce us to Morrison’s mission statment, how they feel and how good Frank Quitely’s art looks

I cropped it best i could for tumblr but this one image immidetly says a lot. Our heroes are just.. easily taking down this sentinel, an old model... the same one we’ve seen a dozen times. What were once the grim, possible destroyers of an entire race of beings in days of future past and devistating killing machines in the present.. had become stale easily defeated murder bots There had been noble attempts to really make the sentiinels work again like the horrifying omega sentinels, humans forcibly converted into sleeper agent killing machines, during operation: zero tolerance, but otherwise they were mostly just a prop for the x-men to knock down. And that.. really is morrison’s whole point. Lampshading and mocking the fact the x-men had grown stale, things hadn’t really progressed.. and that it was time to move on. But to Uncle Grant’s credit, they not only uses this as a mission statment but it’s plot relevant: this mission will both be explained soon and explains why Logan and Scott are out and about enough to end up where the plot will soon need them. It also helps, via the sight of the syndey opera house establish something Morrison made a staple of their run: the X-Men going global. While the x-men were never really NOT global post claremont, Morrisons run has them handling rescue missions and what not worldwide far more often than most runs before it sans Claremont, and really made it feel like they weren’t just another super team but a global force of good with a specific goal and mission. More on the global aspect next time, as that’s where it really comes in but I felt it was important to show it was there for minute one.

So yeah before we move onto the first full scene of the run, let’s talk about the costumes.

We’ll talk about Emma’s later since she’s not introduced to the story for a while but yeah. There’s a sharp, obvious and immediate change just in the outfits, which take after the movie’s more military look, having the x-men not only look more like a unit but more like a professional orginization. Someone to come and help when needed. While this would take on more siginifigance in a bit, we’ll get to it, it also fits Morrisions own views that the x-men were less of a traditional superhero team and more something different on the edges that fought things out there, sorta what like he did with doom patrol. And it’s honestly a valid interpretation as the x-men are often seen as outlaws and misfits by society for beingn well.. mutants. Not as trusted as the avengers. So having them adopt this look played into that: Having them look more professional and focused as The X-Men have a less blanket mission statement than the avenger.. but also mildly threatning. Something to alarm the humans. It’s an utterly brilliant look thrown best together by the big yellow x’s, still giving it a nice flash of color to show off and show this is still a comic and this is still damn colorful.. this just isn’t your AVERAGE supherhero comic or the x-men your used to. IT’s a real shame the only fox x-men movie to use it was fucking dark phoenix.. a film where it didn’t even fit as xavier was getting flashier and more reckless so why wouldn’t he have more garish and colorful and more traditional superhero outfits. They did look good in their variants in first class though. Props there. Point is this is a classic, utterly stunning look, and tha’ts coming from someone whose fine with goofy superhero outfits and perpetually bitter hawkeye is almost never allowed to wear his actual comic outift and is instead stuck with shades instead of you know.. a mask. Or anything resembling an actual good looking costume. This though this is how you do a less superheroy costume: practical and realistic, but still cool looking and comic book friendly.

We cut to a mysterious lady, we’ll come to know her as Cassandra Nova and while I know her origin... i’m saving it for later as the comics themselves explain it eventually, and a simpering dolt she brought with her, Donald Trask, a distant relative of the creators of the sentinels who, via holograms she’s showing cro magnons slaughtring the neanderthal. Her point is that Mutants are going to do this and she’s clearly fearmongering him and trying to talk him into genocide: to wipe them out before they wipe out humanity. And it’s here we get one of hte most important plot points of Morrisons run and one of the most intresting: according to cassandra’s research Humanity will be no more in 4 generations. Mutankind is on it’s way to overtaking them at last.. i’ts still a few decades off.. but it’s coming. It’s sometihing that the whole decimation nonsense sadly snuffed.. and John Hickman has thankfully brought back. I’ll get to his run once i’ts complete in a few years, but point is it’s an utterly marvelous plot hook: Humanity, whose already attempted genocide a few times, is now in real danger of what their petty, racist, fearful attacks have been about: being replaced. It’s one of the central themes of the work the other two being “Just what IS mutantkind and what will it be”. WHat are they as a people? We’ll dig into these as we go but the threat of exctincion is the backbone of this arc... and will lead to something truly ghastly.

It’s then we get our title page.. which nothing really to add it just looks really good and helps show off who are cast is and what they can do with striking simple art.

And since we’re already talking the art of the book, let’s take a moment to discuss an intresting detail of this run: despite it’s short length there’s quite a few diffrent artist, who we’ll talk about of course as we get to each one. The most common and notable though is Frank Quitely. Frank Quitely is one of Morrison’s closest and best creative partners, having a unique, squishy art style.. i.e. the one my friend didn’t like which is why i’m covering this. And while I like the art style quite a bit, I do get why it’s not everyone’s cup of tea: His art is squashed, weird, and admitely some faces can be good god no incaranate. But it’s also why I like it: his characters feel unique, each body and figure feels like it was custom made and thus feels.. real. Like this is a person before you. And given comics can often surrender to having everybody look the damn same, this is nice. His faces may sometimes look similar but his bodies are where the action is. But while having a realistic feel his work also has a weird alien quality that perfectly fits Morrison, and thus his run on x-men. I will say while I love All-Star Superman, his art fits less there in the more hopeful silver agey story, so he’s not an artist for EVERY STORY OF EVERY TYPE.. but when it comes to sci fi weridness, he fits it like a glove so i’ts unsuprising he and morrison are practicaley soul mates, nor that his art sets the tone perfectly for the run: this is something new, diffrent and strange.. and what says x-men at it’s best more than that?

So after our opening titles we cut to the mansion where Hank is showing off his latest and greatest invention: Cerebra. Cerbebra is a massively upgraded version of Cerebro, aka Professor Xavier’s iconic helmet that allows him to track mutants to help them out.. and covertly backup their conconousness for his long game plan, but shhhh, don’t tell anyone yet that’s not going to be retconned in for a few decades. Though i’m damn certain if Morrison has heard about the current era of x-men and how it both builds on what he built, shatters the status quo and is incredibly weird, he’d be damn proud. As for how it’s diffrent Cerebra not only has a large dome around it but said dome allows the machine to amply Charles powers to a global reach. He can now see mutants all over the world anywhere in the world, something I didn’t realize wasn’t ALWAYS a thing because it seems so simple. It’s also likely to bring it more in line with the movies. And while marvel has done TERRIBLE with bringing things in from the movies or in line with them in recent years, i.e. making star lord more like his movie self while forgetting that’s how he already used to be in canon before later writers thankfully did hte better step of merging the two, Hawkeye’s outfit, Cap’s outfit or Nick Fury Jr. But for every mistep there’s also been tons of times it’s worked out really well such as here, as well as bringing hulk into the avengers for the first time since the founding, making tony stark more like the mcu version and less like a nightmarish self righetous dicktator who rightfully gets beat up and called out a lot, making Scott Lang prominent since he became prominent in the MCU, Wakanda being a major force in the marvel universe as it always should have been and various titles that have popped up to tie into movies, often bringing back a team or property that hadn’t had a book in some time like Ant-Man, Black Panther, and Shang Chi just to name a few. It’s not always hawkeye looking all jeremy renner is what i’m saying.. though thankfully comics clint isn’t that uninteresting. Hopefully the series will change that.

So yeah along with a bigger shinier cerebro we’re also introduced to a big change in Hank whose taken on his lion form rather than his classic gorilla with a weird haircut or his return to that except bald. Here he’s more like aslan in a human body and I.. love it. It looks great, helps sell hanks delima of being brilliant while looking like a beast and makes sense: he kickstarted what was likely his own secondary evolution by drinking the potion that made him bestial, so it only makes sense his body wouldn’t be all that stable even if it took years to change again. And even that makes sense as hank was breifly turned back to his original hairless ape mutation during x-factor, easily one of the books.. worse decisions honestly and one that louise simonson thankfully later undid. That probably bought him some time hence why it’s only mutating further now. It also adds an intresting wrinkle which the run will explore further: how far does this go? Will he regress? and how much hank will be left? And how will society treat his new form?

For now he’s actually extatic. While he’s going through hormonal changes, and giving out some excellent banter with Jean

Which also includes one of the greatest lines in comic book history, one that’s been in my head for decades and made me absolutely love henry mccoy.

He’s just great is what i’m saying. As you can tell it’s stuff like this why i’m glad Moira fell through. While I love her.. Morrison’s hank is just a delight and one really questionable subplot aside, we’ll get to that, he’s one of the highlights of this run with an intresting internal struggle, and great chemistry with EVERYONE. And that is the main reason i’m glad Moira fell through as his history with everyone but Emma, who he still has a great raport with, means each interaction has weight. He’s close friends with both scott and jean and thus serves as their needed confidant, while still being able to buddy and banter iwth good old weapon x, and speak with his mentor charles as an equal. While I love moira... Beast just fits into the cast too perfectly and I 100% suspect Morrison was only using her because, while she’s awesome, Claremont wanted her and thus gladly snapped her up when he no longer had a science person. I’ll get into his Jean soon enough but she’s likewise fantastic and easily my faviorite version of the character.. not that until very recently there was much honest competition.

So Cerebra fires up showing a massive cloud of mutants, showing just how much of a huge spike theirs been with Xavier wondering what it all means.. and Hank seeing a weird flare on the mointor for just a second with his special eyes. But since Xavier isn’t stupid and isn’t the kind of idiot who just dismisses it as a fulke, and since Scott and Logan are in the field, he decides to confrence call them in to see if they can go take a look.

And naturally we get to see what their up to and get context for what the hell happened in the first page. Our heroes were on a rescue mission to save Ugly John, tha’ts what people called him, a three faced mutant who ends up passing out as they head out of the atmosphere for a second. Wolverine is regenerating and smoking out of his neck becaue he could still smoke back then before marvel decided “he’s setting a bad example”.. in a comic meant for teens and adults.

I mean I get it on some level as the x-men cartoon was a huge thing in the 90′s and Ben Grimm is basically a giant children’s toy with the mind of a surly 40 year old jewish man from yancy street, but stilll it’s just.. why. I may not like smoking but it’s not like it was SPIDER-MAN saying

It’s a grown man.. whose not a sterling roll model and who Claremont went out of his way to have Logan point out his healing factor means it really dosen’t hurt him in the long run and when Kitty, an actual teenager, tried one of his cigars she choked. I know it’s a weird thing to get hung up on but while i’m all for keeping kids from smoking, this was a really clumsy way to try and hehlp that that made no sense and will never make any sense.

One tangent later we find out that Cassandra was showing Trask a simulation on a flight to, unsuprisingly, south america, to a sentinel blacksite. Between covertly funding civil wars as they do, the US Goverment naturally founded an experimental sentinal project, and a second master mold during the production of the first line... when larry trask asks where it could possibly be well...

Subtly was not the trasks strong point.. or common sense... or.. not realizing their creations would dominate humanity too or not dying.

Anyways we then cut back to the x-men, as their having a psychic zoom meeting with Charlie giving one of his patnted big speeches.. and like a lot of this comic it’s too damn good not to use

The reason I couldn’t should be obvious: This one speech sums up the x-men, why their great and why their necessary in a nutshell: in a world full of prejucided morons.. there’s plenty of scared kids who NEED the x-men to protect and guide them, and with a surge in the mutant population, their needed now more than ever. We also get a good explanation in universe for the uniform change: Charles had them in the superhero outfits hoping humanity would accept them if they were packaged as something they know. Since that clearly hasn’t worked he’s trying new ways to reach out and thus going with a diffrent more rescue team approach to the uniforms. He assigns Wolvie and Cyke to go check out the flair as you’d expect and the meetings over. On the blackbird we get our first hint at a subplot as Logan noticed Cyclops couldn’t wait to get out of there, and is being a tad distant to his wife. He actually has reasons for being kind of cold for once instead of just bad writing as he just came back from being possed by apocalypse. Yeah that happened. So the experience has rattled our boy some what. More on that as we go. But Jean ducks the subject with hank but does breach the fact that Charles has been going kind of crazy with the spending, new uniforms and ambition lately. Hank explains it perfectly: After all the death, suffering and misery the x-men have endured lately, the aforementioned deaths I talked about that took Colossus and Moira off the roster, have lionzed Charles to make sure it was all worth something and look towards the future.

But enough hope time for horror as Cassandra makes her first direct move, trying to take over Charles brain , make his body her own and use cerebra to kill lots and lots of mutants. We then get one of the best moments of Morrisons run with Charles response to a horrifying monster trying to take his brain

While it is shocking to find out Charles has a gun..it’s a grim but kind of understandable precaution. The guy once got fully taken over by a brood, assembling the New Mutants in part because the brood wanted to create more of i’ts kind with more super powers. You’d be paranoid too if some of your beloved students were brought together partly due to your good intentions and partly because a space monster wanted to make more space montsters out of helpless teens, and even horribly gaslighted one of them. We’ll get to that some day. Point is Charles brain is one of the greatest weapons on earth and if the wrong person got a hold of it, it’d be the end of said earth. Thankfully Charles does not need plan gun, as Jean yanks Cerebra off him but the sheer HATE Charles felt from Cassandra, the sheer power has rattled him.. and also told him she’s in Ecuador and his X-Men need to be warned NOW. It’s a great way to set up just HOW powerful Cassandra is. Speaking of which as our first issue of the arc ends, we find out two things: Cass faked being int he government but really just used dead soldiers as prop.. and just what kind of sentinels are out there.. wild sentinels. Easily my faviorite variant of the old killing machines and one that’s barely used despite being really damn awesome. Their adaptive killing machines, designed to mutated just like their pray and take tech from around them, as a result they look like a jumble of guns and parts.. but not only does it give them a unique, cool look.. but it makes them ten times deadlier as instead of being big bricks of robots that while intimidating, the x-men know how to kill... their unpredictable variable killing machines. You can figure out how to kill one sure.. btu the next might be entirely diffrent. They are one of morrisons best creations and I hope someone uses the idea again.. aka hickman. Please use it jonathan I know your focused on nimrod but come on.

And we end on one of the best lines of the entiire run as we close out the issue

Yeah it goes without saying but i’ll say it anyway; Morrison is really damn good with dialouge and being damn quotable.

So we open with another great quote “When I got up today I didn’t expect to kill 20 million people”... and Cassandra being aware Wolverine and Cyclops are on their way and sending the Wild Sentinels to dispatch them. Also our heroes brought Ugly John along while while a dumb move, Wolvie does point out how dumb it was to divert to Ecuador with a civlian in tow.. after the plane crash of course. As for “wait what plane crash’, the sentinels attack and start picking it apart... and since letting them have such good tech is a terrible idea, Scotty blows up the damn plane. So to recap our heroes are stuck in ecuador, surrounded by murder machines, and oh look their there and knock off cyclops viser. Fantastic. So yeah our heroes are fucked. And naturally captured by the enemy.

The rest of the x-men are doing SLIGHTLY better. While beast makes a note for his girlfriend, more on that later on, Charles is in bed, half alive, explaning the rationale I gave for why he has the gun with Jean refusing to let him get back out of bed and you know.. put on the device that just nearly killed him. But when beast announces they lost contact with our boys.. yeah that ceased being an option.

Back in the Ecuadorian Genocide Factory, Cassandra does the obvious and kills donald trask as his real purpose..was to stick around and be stupid for a bit while she copied his dna so she could have full control of her new murder toys.She soon uses them, having a horrifying death chamber slaughter john.. or at least flash fry him. Wolverine takes it how you’d expect and since the sentinels need to “perserve trask dna”.. they can’t fire on him without killing her. Scott escapes.. and in a heart wrenching scene mercy kills john.. before getting badass.

To anyone who says Scott Summers is boring, unintersting, or a stupid asshole idiot head I present exhbit shut the fuck up. Morrison gets scott just right, deconstructing his emotional suppression, while showing him off as a dedicated, companionate man who gets the job done and who seconds after tearfully having to mercy kill an innocent mutant whose death was partially his fault, wastes no time making it painfully clear to the person responsible she WILL die if she tries that again. Logan however realizes she’s already won in some fashion as she’s grinning.. and yeah never a good sign when a genocidal madwoman is grinning like a loon.. and when we find out why.. it’s even less good> We cut to Genosha. A lot of you probably know what happned to Genosha but in case you don’t know what it is it was once a horribly racist country that genetically enslaved mutants and used them for slave labor. It was freed, but still struggled to truly move on.. till Magneto showed up, took the country for himself and made it a home for all mutants. When we last saw him he once again tried to take over the world leading to Logan seemingly killing him. Right now though Emma Frost finally enters the scene teaching some mutants.. when a young one named Negasonic Teenage Warhead.. yes that one and yes she was entirely chosen for deadpool for her name, reveals, via precognition, that their all going to die.. right as the sentinels attack.

Genosha.. is gone. In an eyeblink 16 million mutants are dead, a possible future gone, and one of their greatest leaders is no more. Yeah Magneto WAS alive.. but paralyzed so he could do nothing when his island was utterly slaughtered. Only a handful of mutants will be revealed to survive. Humanity had done a lot to mutants before .. but for once.. they’d succeeded in wiping a massive chunk out. What was an x-men location for DECADES at this point.. was now a smoldering crater. A what could of been that would hant the x-men ever after, even now into utopia it remains the darkest day in mutant history outside of hte decimation. It is a truly horrific moment.. and if the changes already hadn’t made it clear this is morrison saying “NO character is safe, nothing is safe, and nothing will be the same and I damn well mean that”. In one act of hate the world has changed. And it hasn’t finished changing yet.

Issue Three opens hammering in things, as Jean and Beast are in the ruins of genosha, with Xavier having found ONE surivor among the rubble, and our heroes sturggling to find even them, though Jean eventually picks them up and uses her TK to sift through the rubble.

They find Emma who emerges from a bunker in shock, clutching NTW... and not realizing she’s dead until later and revealing she now has diamond skin, her own secondary mutation. Secondary Mutation was a birlliant idea, new powers sprouting up within established mutants.. it’s just morrison barely used this great idea as did hardly anyone else. Only X-Men Blue ever really dug into it and those were artifical at that. IT’s a great idea..it’s just barely used and at most heavily implied to explain changes in powers like Jamie Madrox Multiple Personalities later on or Doug Ramsey’s vast increase in power. Disapointing.

While Charles takes in the tragedy and the fact his old frienmie is dead, the x-men wonder what the fuck Cassandra is and what to do with her.. why did she kill 16 million people, and what the fuck is she. I mean I know, but as I said i’ll explain that when the story does. IN the other room Beast tends to Emma who wants none of not fucking killing Cassandra.. and is utterly right. Bitchy, because i’ts Emma, but right: she killed 16 million people. Say what you want but while it may not be up to the x-men to kill her.. she shoudln’t be living much longer. She commited genocide. Emma decides fuck that and prepares to leave summoning a cab and making peace with being a glorious living fabrige egg. Emma did apparelty change in generation x.. but Morrison is responsible for returning her not only to being a bitch, but a gloriously delightful one And really I don’t think they reset her character entirely: she’s not the heartless monster she started out as: she has empathy, grace, and caring.. she just buries it under a lair of absolute bitch and after you know, surviving a fucking genocide who can blame her? And honestly.. I love their verison of her. She provides a nice contrast to the more idealistic, even logan, x-men and a nice contrarian voice in the room without being obnoxious and her style and sacrastic swagger makes her endlessly entertaning. Thanks to morrison she’s stuck around to this day and went from a pretty good character.. to a great one. And what makes her this way, or as jean puts it “such a bitch?”

With that settled, Hank explains what Cassandra is: a competing species. As he puts it sometimes evolution takes a quantum leap forward.. and Cassandra is the result. Thus she wants to wipe out the compettition and is so far above humanity, she dosen’t need them... especially since she knows what Hank now knows: humanity is at an end. As hank puts it we have an E Gene, one that basically shuts off a race.. and thus the x-men now know what we learned earlier and that cassandra wasn’t lying: in 4 generations there are no more humans and something has to repalce htem. And Cassandra wants it to be her.

Before Logan can do what he does best, and asks why she looks like charles, Cassandra escapes, and Scott briliantly urges them to fight only on instict as she’s a telepath. A damn awesome fight insues including Cassandra donning Charles Psoonic battle armor, Scott being put in his black bug room and the general good looking chaos you’d expect from a superhero fight. While this goes on Emma has an ephinany and realizes she likes to teach, the x-men have a school.. and she shoudln’t give up on helping kids just because of what happened and turns around.

Cassandra is near victory, slipping her way to Cerebra.. and planning to kill only one mind before getting to the millions she wnats, a horrifying slug manifesting around her.. only...

So the x-men accept this and cassandra rises.. seemingly saying “I am charles” Huh... and then charles uncaracteristiacally shoots her saying things must change

We’ll get to what all of that means next time as we close on Jean and Scott in bed. Scott explains why he’s been so distant as what I said earlier: fighting off apocalypse stripped away a lot of illusions about himself and he’s having a hard time walking back from that but Jean is willing to help.. but before they can resolve their issues.. charles has an annoucnment to make and grant has one last whopper of a suprise to end his opening arc on, and just like genosha...it’s a game changer of titanic proportions

No longer is Xavier’s School hidden. Their walking into the light now and so is charles. Hope they surivive the experince. Obviously this move is brilliant: while it removes the veil of saftey the x-men had it also brings on tons of new possiblities and unlike secondary mutation, this one not only stuck but would impact the x-men for good: no longer would they hide and cower.. their mutant and proud.. and their here to stay. E For Extinction is one of the best x-men stories period. Blisteringly paced, full of great character, great concepts and utterly terrifying and terrific moments that would impact the x-men all the way to present day. It’s beautifully drawn, well paced, and a masterwork. I highly recommend it and it’s a great kickoff to a great run. Shame the run couldn’t of ended on this kind of high but.. we’ll get to that. For now this is a masterclass in how to start a run and if you haven’t read it do so NEXT TIME ON NEW X-MEN: A bunch of weirdos try to harvest mutant organs, the x-men get a brain in a jar and a new teamate, and Scott maybe cheats on his wife. Until then, goodbye goodbye goodbye.

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queensofrap · 7 years

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The Year of Cardi B - She went from stripping to becoming the breakout star of 2017. So what's she worried about?

Cardi B is butt-naked in the doorway of her hotel bathroom, yelling about her vagina. On a mid-October evening, she's readying herself for a college show in Baltimore, and the toiletries provided by the hotel aren't to her liking. "That soap gave me the yeast infection of 2017!" she hollers in her thick Bronx accent. "My pussy was burnin' like a Mexican taco!"

It takes all of 10 seconds in Cardi B's presence to be reminded of the sheer force and hilarity of her personality. Simply being Cardi B, at maximum volume, made her a star – first on Instagram, then on the VH1 reality show Love & Hip-Hop: New York – before she'd recorded any music at all, let alone knocked Taylor Swift from the top of the pop charts with the sly swagger of her single "Bodak Yellow." She is the people's diva – or "the strip-club Mariah Carey," as she once rapped – unfiltered in a way the world often doesn't allow female stars to be. In a culture reshaped by streaming and social media, where the kids, without much corporate nudging, get to decide who the stars are, Cardi B is what you get.

Yesterday, Cardi turned 25.  She took a rare day off, hanging  with her entire family – sister, parents, cousins – at her mother's house. But she missed her boyfriend (now fiancé), Offset of Migos, who was touring in Australia. "I was sad, because it's like, 'Oh, my gosh, I'm not getting no dick on my birthday,'" says Cardi, whose bedazzled acrylic nails are decorated with tiny reproductions of Offset paparazzi shots. "But I wasn't going to get dick on my birthday anyway, because I got my period."

She finds a cleanser she can deal with and hops into the shower, before slipping into a bright-red spacesuit-inspired Milano di Rouge jumpsuit, complete with a yellow patch that reads "Safe sex saves lives," part of the designer's anti-HIV initiative. She glances at it and arches her eyebrows. "Girl," she says, "I don't even use a condom."

It may not seem like it, but this is actually a newer, more cautious Cardi B. After a few social-media controversies – including when she was justly called out for a since-deleted tweet that referred to Kim Jong Un as "Won Tung Soup" – she is trying to learn to hold back a bit. "I used to tell myself that I will always be myself," she says. But she worries that she's going back on that vow. "Little by little, I'm feeling like I'm getting trapped and muted."

Her life is changing fast. She put out her first mixtape, Gangsta Bitch Music, Vol. 1, in March last year, back when she was still Love & Hip-Hop's breakout star. It was a gloriously raw and raunchy introduction that cashed in on her TV catchphrases with songs like "Washpoppin'" and "Foreva." She released Vol. 2 in January this year, five months before announcing a major-label contract with Atlantic Records.

In June came "Bodak Yellow," named in homage to Florida rapper Kodak Black, whose song "No Flockin'" inspired its flow. "Bodak Yellow" is an unlikely Number One: a tough trap song with zero concessions to the mainstream, or even anything like a conventional pop hook. In a year when the youth power of streaming services, which now count toward chart positions, is changing the very meaning of pop, she's become the first female rapper to score a solo Number One since Lauryn Hill in 1998. Not bad for someone who initially pursued rapping as a way to monetize her reality fame. ("I said, 'TV don't make you rich,'" recalls her manager, Shaft, who once produced Lil' Kim. "'You gotta sell something! Waist trainers, hair, something.'")

The pressure is building. Her once-carefree social-media presence has drifted toward moody reflections about the downsides of fame. She's stressed about creating a debut album – the very word "album" makes her wince – that can live up to "Bodak Yellow" and the best of her mixtape tracks, not to mention the challenge of creating singles that can keep her on the charts and avoid one-hit-wonderdom. There is a chorus of doubters in her head, she acknowledges, and it sounds something like this: "Can she make another hit, can she make another hit?"

She fears failure, and paints a vivid picture of what it might look like: "If you go broke and lose your career, it's bad – and everybody is talkin' shit about it! At least if you lose your 9-to-5 you don't got millions of people judging you and talking shit while you lost your job."

Seven years ago, Cardi B was convinced she'd already failed at life. To please her mom, she was studying at a Manhattan community college with plans to become a history teacher. Born Belcalis Almanzar, she'd grown up in the Bronx's Highbridge neighborhood, and she was struggling to survive financially on her own. "It was just very sad," she says, uncharacteristically subdued. She's in the back seat of a black SUV on her way to a performance at Baltimore's Morgan State University, and the college setting is bringing back memories. "It was very frustrating – you have to pay for everything. When I finally got a job at Amish Market, I had to debate, 'Do I wanna go to class or do I wanna finish my shift?'"

She dropped out after two semesters, and soon took up stripping – a career move helpfully suggested by her Amish Market boss. "A lot of people wonder, 'Why would anybody want to be a dancer?'" she says. "Because there's money!" She used some of her stripping cash to briefly return to school. "I kept missing classes," she says, "and quit because I felt like I was already failing. It was such a disappointment."

Her strict Trinidadian mother worked seven days a week at a local college; her Dominican father, who separated from her mom when Cardi was 13, was "the cool parent," she says. For Cardi, his experience doing "different things in the streets" was a cautionary tale. "That's why I be so careful with my money and always try to invest. I see people who have it all and then lose it."

As a kid, Cardi had a sense that she was destined to do something creative, which led her to a performing-arts school on the Bronx's east side. She tried acting and singing (though she was convinced all of her classmates were better), wrote some poetry. But she'd also crack up friends and boyfriends by rewriting songs by, say, Beyoncé to make them "waaay sluttier." That hobby caught Shaft's attention years later, leading him to encourage her to pursue rapping seriously.

Until then, Cardi B relied on her abilities to charm and to hustle to pay the bills. And it worked: She quickly broke 100,000 Instagram followers in her strip-club days, expanding outward from her loyal customers, mostly on the strength of playful videos – "sucking dick" and scamming men were favored topics.

After Shaft suggested rapping, he began making beats for her at home, and helped her find a lyrical voice that matched the charm of her delivery.

But Cardi – who calls herself "a negative person" – had to overcome her own skepticism. She thought hard about her subject matter (her first single: "Stripper Hoe"), determined to defy haters "expecting me to drop something trash. It just made me, like, 'Aha, I gotta study these other rappers,'" she says. "Study how to do something different from them. You know all these female rappers, they talking about they money, they talking about they cars, so it's like, what's something that I enjoy? I enjoy fights!"

A few hours after the show, Cardi B is back in her hotel room, still wearing her red jumpsuit. She's curled up in the bed, blankets piled on top of her, talking about the future in a tone that's almost resigned. "I cannot turn my life back around," she muses. "I'm already a public figure, I'm famous. … It's like, I might as well keep it going, might as well make the money. People are always going to talk shit – I cannot make myself unfamous."

She's faced an impressively varied set of criticisms and unsolicited opinions. She's been accused of not being a real lyricist ("I'm not trying to be"); of somehow "not being black" because of her Latina heritage and light skin ("It gets to the point that you ask yourself, 'Damn, what the fuck am I?'"); of sleeping her way to the top ("I always had sex appeal – and niggas still give me a hard time"). The rapper Azealia Banks has quarreled with her, but Cardi B has tried hard not to play into the narrative that female rappers can't get along. "It's not even the female rappers that are catty, it's the fans," she says. "They just want that beef."

Her in-progress album is never far from her thoughts. "I got six, seven solid songs that I like, but I wonder if a month from now, I'm going to change my mind." All the looming expectations, she admits, are making it harder to come up with songs. "It's not as fun to do music," she says. "My mind doesn't flow as free 'cause I have so much on my mind."

She's aiming to mix the Spanish and reggae music of her youth with the trap sound that's inescapable at the moment, putting in late nights with her "Bodak Yellow" producer, J. White, and dancehall specialist Rvssian. She freely acknowledges she's chasing hits. "It's so sad to say, and I don't want to be the one to say it, but you gotta follow the trend," she says. "This generation loves to get high. They love to be on drugs. This is why they on that shit: They don't want to think about what you're saying."

She cites Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole as rappers who still write brilliant, conscious lyrics – some part of her might want to try to follow suit, but she feels like she couldn't get away with it. "A bitch like me, it might not work out for me," she says, "so I'm going to stick to trapping."

It's barely past midnight in Cardi's hotel room, and she is already exhausted. "I'm an old-ass girl now," she says with a sigh, head on a pillow. For all her outrageousness – she finished her show tonight by hopping offstage and twerking in the audience – she's not much of a partier. She stopped smoking weed at 21 because it interfered with her increasing fame and accompanying schedule. She had taken Molly as a confidence booster before stripping but doesn't need it anymore. She rarely drinks. "If I drink," she says, "it's like, my man is gonna be around, and I'm gonna have sex."

She's been with Offset since a chance meeting with him in New York in February – just after Migos scored their own Number One with "Bad and Boujee." "We polish each other," she says, noting they confer on music-biz questions. "I could always ask him, 'Do you think this is OK to do? Do you think I'm getting tricked?'"

She hasn’t been shy about the ups and downs in her relationship with Offset, like the night in October when she seemed to break up and make up with him on Instagram in the course of several hours. She also hasn’t been shy about her intentions to marry him — and, a few days before Halloween, Offset made her dreams come true, popping the question at a Philly concert with a raindrop-shaped ring. She knows she wants to have a family. "I need to make money for my family and my future family," she says. "I'm not a YOLO person. I think 25 years from now. I think about my future kids, future husband, future house."

And where exactly will she be in 25 years? She smiles dreamily, and says, "I see myself cursin' at my kids."

#cardi b #rap #rolling stone magazine #hiphop #hip hop #female rapper #female rap #rapper

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greentreerealm · 6 years

Text

The Chipotle Ordering Guide and Masterpost.

So. Throughout my 3 years working with this company, I’ve considered making this... and ya know what. I’m in a mood. And I’ve got the time. Let’s go.

A. Line Etiquette 1 - Get off your phone. Period.

2 - Use your words. We’re excellent point-guessers; but please, it’s much easier if you speak. Really. Because that millimeter difference on the other side of the glass means I’m gonna put the wrong thing in your food, and guess what, I’m not gonna be upset when you get mad about it.

3 - Do. Not. Put. Your. Nasty. Ass. Hands. Over. The. Glass.

4 - Politeness. There is literally zero reason to be in-a-huff, or rude, or nasty, or unreasonable to any of the crew members. Zero. If you’re there for lunch, then most, if not all of those people have been there as early as 7am or 8am. If you’re there for dinner, those folks probably only arrived around 3pm or 4pm but they are also going to be there until 11pm at least. Be patient.

5 - LISTEN. We literally have a basic “script” of the entire line that we are speaking to each and individual customer. So PAY. ATTENTION. When we ask if you want something, actually take the .0002 seconds to listen to what you’re being asked so we can make your order correctly. 97% of order mistakes/errors are because we ask if the customer wants something, they say one thing and mean something else. Or they’re not paying attention, chatting with the person next to them, on their phone, or just pointing. In all of those cases, the customer has 0 excuse for getting upset.

6 - Know what you want. - You’ve spent how long in line? Your order should be ready to go by the time you get to the front. **DISCLAIMER** If you’re new, or an infrequent customer, please let the crew know, so we know to take our time and even help explain the menu to you. We’re here to try and make your experience as smooth as possible, and get you in and out quickly and efficiently. And if the line stresses you out, order online. There’s a separate section further down to cover the questions/concerns with that process.

7 - Portions - Yes the standard portion sizes are the same for all entrees. Most items are offered at 4oz increments (exception being Queso and Vinaigrette). That’s the equivalent to one of those small plastic side-cups we have; or one average-sized spoonful. That’s it. Calm your sh*t. Anything can be double-portioned for free except for meat, queso, and guac. Technically, anything beyond two portions of any item will also cost a dollar for each additional serving. So for those of you who get 4 scoops of rice and 3 scoops of beans, be glad you’re not getting charged an additional $3.

8 - Non-Entree Orders - If you’re just getting a drink, or chips n’ guac, you don’t need to wait in line. By all means, just go right up to the front and hop in-between orders! You really only need to wait in line if you’re getting an entree.

B. The Tortilla Station. 1 - Meal Options - We have: Burritos, Bowls, Salads, Tacos, Quesadillas, Kids Meals, Nachos, and Quesarritos. 1a - If you’re planning on getting a metric-f*ckton of food, either get a bowl or a double-wrap burrito. Otherwise, the tiny tortillas we have are going to tear. If not once, then 2 or 3 times. 1b - Salads are a bowl with lettuce on the bottom. That lettuce is supposed to replace the rice and beans in a bowl. So don’t be surprised or upset when you order a salad and we then go straight to meats. Also, just fyi, it is the exact. same. lettuce. at the end of the line, it is literally just cut into a different shape. 1c - Tacos come in a set of three, unless you specify a different number. That said, if you get tacos, that means each one gets 1/3 of a portion. Not a full portion of something in each taco. 1d - Quesadillas come as either just cheese, or a meat and a cheese. Some stores MIGHT let you put one more item in it. Most stores enforce the policy that “anything more than just meat and cheese, and you will be charged for a full burrito.” Additionally, we all highly recommend getting any cold or wet sides, on. the side. Otherwise, it is too messy and could literally damage our equipment if that moisture leaks onto the press. Please, just ask for it on the side. That said, most quesadillas with come with 1 or 2 complementary sides, like sour cream or hot salsa. Though, this is not universal. 1e - Kid’s meals are designed for children; but, anyone can order them. If you want something small and less expensive, that’s totally fine. BUT You need to respect and understand the limitations of this menu item. Kid’s meals come in 2 forms: small quesadilla which comes with a side of rice, and a side of beans (or two salsa sides); or build-your-own tacos which comes with 2 taco shells and 3 sides of. the. entire. line. So if you wasted all 3 sides on rice, beans, and meat, that’s it. It’ll be a dollar extra if you want anything from the cold side. Typically, it’s good to balance a meat, and two sides from the salsa side. Or even all 3 from the salsa/cold side. But just know, the kid’s meals do not come with more than that. They are, in fact, for children. 1f - Nachos are a fairly new secret menu item. Basically it’s similar to the way a salad works. Instead of rice and beans, you start with a bag of chips on the bottom of the bowl. You will still be charged for a bag of chips with your order. They’re just at the bottom of the bowl instead of in a bag. And yes, you’re supposed to skip rice and beans with these as well. 1g - If there’s a line, don’t get a f*cking quesarrito.

2 - Rices - We have White Rice and Brown Rice. They. Are. Both. Cilantro. Lime. I do understand our menu panels are not super helpful with that bit. The difference is white rice is cooked with more oil and prepared with more salt. Our brown rice, is a bit healthier. Also, it is not dirty rice. It is not fried rice. It is not refried rice. It is not yellow rice. We literally just asked you “White or brown?”

3 - Beans - We have Black Beans and Pinto Beans. Not Red Beans (Because in different places, “red beans” can be applied to both types). Not refried beans. Not indian beans. Not yellow beans. And no, neither beans have any meat in them, they are both totally veg.

4 - Fajitas - Sauteed peppers and onions, seasoned with oregano and salt. Free with any entree. Please tell us you want them before we get to meat. And DEFINITELY before getting to salsa.

5 - The Meats - We have: Chicken, Steak, Barbacoa, Carnitas, and Sofritas. The Chorizo was discontinued after the release of Queso. You might find some stores still offering it, as they are trying to clear out what was stored at the distributors; though by now, it’s not likely. 5a - Say it with me slowly: Bar-Buh-Co-Uh. Not barbaCOLA, Not BarBOCA. The Barbacoa is shredded beef. The Carnitas is pulled/shredded pork. And our Sofritas is a brazed/shredded tofu. 5b - The order of least-spicy to most-spicy is as follows: Carnitas - No spice what-so-ever. Sofritas & Chicken - both have light-medium spice respectively. Barbacoa - pretty spicy. Steak - the spiciest meat, though still tamer than our hot salsa. 5c - Double meat costs extra. Corporate policy. And if that standard 4oz portion isn’t good enough for you, then don’t complain about the extra cost. Period. We literally don’t care if “another store gives you more.” Respect our policies, you are a guest. And no, contrary to popular belief, the customer is not always right. 5d - You can get half-n-half of two protein/meat options. But that means you will get 2oz of each. Not a full scoop. If you do this, you will get charged for the more expensive of the two choices. (ex: half-chicken, half-steak = price of a steak bowl).

6 - Queso - It’s new, it’s a bit weird. And quite honestly, when it was first released, they had not solidified the recipe. Stores were getting different variations of the same stuff on a semi-daily basis. Now though, things have seemed to calmed down and they’re sticking to something that actually works pretty well. It is a cheese sauce, with a sofritas base, and incorporates ingredients from our Medium Green and Hot tomatillo salsas. It does cost extra. All restaurants now have a little placard on their line explaining the new costs. Also, the extra costs are listed on a giant menu board above the line. (personally, I feel the queso tastes best in an entree rather than just on the side)

C. The Salsa Station 1 - Mild, Medium, or Hot? - If you say “no thanks” then we are moving on to Sour Cream and Cheese. So please pay attention. Really. Cannot stress this enough. 1a - Mild is the tomato salsa. Yes, it’s a salsa. Yes there are (usually) some jalepenos in it, so there is still a small kick. 1b - Medium green and the Red hot are the two tomatillo salsas. Consequently, if you ask for the “red salsa” we assume the red hot tomatillo salsa. Do not say “red” if you mean the mild. Yes, it’s technically ‘red’ in color; but semantics is literally everything here. 1c - We technically have 4 salsas. (FOUR?! WHAT?!) Yes. The. Corn. Is. A. Salsa. It has a medium spice; therefore, when we ask “Mild, Medium, or Hot?” it is encompassed in that ‘Medium’ category.

2 - Sour Cream or Cheese? - First of all, it’s sour cream. SOUR. CREAM. It is not: marshmallow, cream cheese, yogurt, vanilla, mayonnaise, nor cool whip. Like, where do you even think you are? 2b - It’s cheese. It’s just shredded cheese. It’s not noodles. We do not offer noodles at a Mexican Restaurant. 2c - As we do not have spoons for cheese, the standard portion size of 4oz is measured by a ‘three-finger pinch.’ If that’s not enough, please just ask; but understand, technically extra cheese beyond two portions should cost you an additional dollar.

3 - Guacamole / “Guac” - We no longer have to tell you it costs extra. This is because, similar to the Queso, there are now placards on the glass directly in front of you explaining the additional costs. So, the recurring theme: Pay. Attention. 3a - It comes in the same portion size as everything else. 4 ounces. If you want double, then you’re going to pay double. 3b - If you do not order a meat or sofritas, yes it is free. BUT If you order it on your entree and then again on the side, you will be charged for it. Also, while Sofritas is a vegan option, it is still one of our major proteins and does not constitute free guac. 3c - With the rollout of queso and our new “large” side-cups, you can technically order ‘large guac.’ You will then be charged for 2 sides of guac. BUT PLEASE TAKE NOTE: The “Large” side cup offers 6oz. A regular side cup is 4oz. Which means, it’s smarter to just order two sides of guac, and get a full 8oz instead of paying for the novelty of a large side-cup and only getting 6oz. 3d - In Chipotle’s effort to serve non-GMO, fresh, locally-sourced food, we often get cases of avocados that are either under- or over-ripe. When this happens, the guacamole no longer keeps that bright lime-green color. Often, especially with over-ripe avocados, the inside of the avocados are yellow, or even slightly brown. Even if only a few avocados out of a case are in this condition, in can discolor the entire batch of guac. That said, the color does not affect the taste; nor is it any less fresh than any other day. All guac is made fresh every single morning. The slight browning after it’s been mashed is called “oxidization” it’s the same process that happens to the inside of an apple if it’s exposed to the air for longer than 5 minutes.

4 - Lettuce - Many stores may not offer this to you directly. Why? Because that shredded lettuce is supposed to be saved for tacos only. That said, by all means, if you want it, order it. It also is served with a ‘three-finger-pinch’; so, don’t get upset if you’re not served an entire fistful of lettuce. And yes, all of it is cut fresh every single morning.

D. The Cashier (and Their Expo) 1 - Expediter “Expo” - Typically seen during the two peak hours of the day (12pm-1pm and 6pm-7pm), this person stands between salsa and the cashier. Their main responsibility is to communicate your order to the cashier and package your order with all its parts. Their typical spiel is: “Any chips or drinks with your order?” Or "Anything to drink or chips with that today?” Or something similar. THIS. IS. YOUR. MOMENT. Like this is your exact chance to say any and all sides you want with your order. Nothing peeves us more than “No, but can I get a water cup?” or “No thanks, can I get chips and salsa?” Like. WHAT TF DID I JUST ASK YOU?! So again, in our running theme: PAY. ATTENTION.

2 - Chips - All chips are made fresh every morning. They literally go stale after a full day, if they seem “stale” then they were just under-cooked. We cannot/do not serve stale chips. We now have two sizes: Regular (4oz) the same we’ve always had, and Large (6oz). We cannot serve kid’s chips unless it is for a kid’s meal. If some stores do this, they will typically add a $1 charge for the additional side of kid’s chips.

3 - Drinks - We have Fountain Sodas (Coke Products); bottled Nantucket Nectars, bottled water, and bottled Izze carbonated juices. Most stores offer the following flavors: Pomegranate Cherry, Apple, Pineapple Orange Banana, and Peach Orange Nantucket Nectars; and then Clementine, Blackberry, and Grapefruit Izze’s. Some stores may vary.

4 - Kid’s Meal Sides - All kid’s meals come with a chips or fruit. The kid’s chips are 2oz. The fruit is typically one of three things: clementine oranges, grapes, or a packet of blueberries. The fruit options change as they become available. Other locations may offer different fruit options. 4b - All kid’s meals also come with one of the following drinks: white milk, chocolate milk, apple juice, or small cup for soda. *THIS IS THE ONLY INSTANCE A WATER CUP MAY BE USED FOR SODA.*

5 - Gift Cards - Yes, we offer gift cards. They’re particularly popular during the holiday season. If you purchase them with a credit/debit card, please confirm that they were fully paid for and activated. Too often, customers in a hurry will walk away before their credit card cleared our computer; and if that transaction declines, they gift an inactive card with $0 balance. Leading to a bad time for everyone. So please, when you purchase gift cards with a credit/debit card, make sure it clears before you leave. This issue doesn’t happen if the cards are paid for with cash.

E. Dining Room Etiquette 1 - CLEAN. UP. AFTER. YOURSELF. - Pretty self-explanatory. But seriously people. Take your tabasco bottles back to the drink station. Throw your trash away. It’s common sense. Ya’ll people disgusting animals sometimes.

2 - Tabasco Bottles - These are not available for sale; and, they are most certainly not available for theft!! The reason you can’t seem to find any, is because people decide to pocket them. Daily. Really folks? You’re better than that.

3 - WATER CUPS - Most times, it’s grown-ass people trying to sneak this. Water cups are for water. only. If we catch you with soda, you can either throw it out and get water, or come up to the register and pay for a soda. If we catch you twice, you will be forced to either pay for a soda or leave the restaurant. If you are a constant repeat offender, we may reserve the right to not serve you. Yes. That’s right. At that point you are a thief; and, have lost the trust of the company. While it is a minor theft, it is stealing nonetheless. *P.s. you ain’t slick tryna get lemonade in that either. We see you.

4 - Children - If they are well-behaved, beautiful. Wonderful. Enjoy that tiny quesadilla and apple juice box! HOWEVER. If they are screaming, please either tame or remove them. Additionally, our dining room is NOT a jungle-gym. Please keep your children from running all over the place, from climbing onto other guests’ chairs, and if-applicable, from climbing on the window ledges and getting their tiny sticky handprints all over our windows. Thank you.

F. Ordering Online or Via Mobile App 1 - Second Make-Line - Typically, for the lunch and dinner rushes, a separate make-line is opened up for take-out orders only. Though, in the early morning, midday, and after 8pm, this line is closed.

2 - Punctuality - Typically, orders are began roughly 15 minutes before their scheduled pickup time. That way, longer orders can be completed in time for their scheduled pickup time. That said, if you place an order at noon for a 12:15 pickup time, do not arrive at 12:05. Your order will not be ready. Consequently, do not pick it up at 12:45. Your order will be cold. In both situations, the customer does not have the right to complain.

3 - Extras - Our online and mobile app does fairly well to include extras, half-portions, and any sides for your order. However, if there is something you want included in the order that isn’t listed, you can dedicate a portion of the “name” on the ticket to your extra note. Also, please make sure to include everything in your order so it can be ready. It is always a bit perturbing to make additional sides for orders that should already be completed and ready to hand out.

4 - Payment - We do offer two options for payment. The more common option is to pre-pay via credit or debit card. There is a second option, to ‘pay-at-pickup’ however; this option is only available if you create an account on the website. So, if you don’t want to be forced to pre-pay with a card, take the extra 2 seconds to make a quick account. It is worth the hassle.

5 - Phone Orders - We can no longer accept orders over the phone. We no longer receive the fax forms or other sheets to take orders over the phone. Additionally, it wastes too much of an employee’s time to answer the phone, find a spare sheet of paper and writing utensil, and sit down to listen to you scramble over yourself trying to place an order of questionable coherency. This is a fast-paced restaurant, and that person probably has 6 other online orders to make. Place it through the app or website like everyone else. And if you say ‘but i’m driving’ get off your phone. Like seriously.

6 - Ordering for Multiple People - Do not place an online order for more than 4-6 people. Really. The ticket that prints out is ridiculous and orders can very easily fall prey to being incorrectly prepared. Additionally, if your order is deemed unreasonably long (Typically 20 or more orders) the restaurant has the right to call you and deny the order. At that point, it is considered a catering order and requires 24-hr notice.

G. Catering Yes, we do it. It requires 24-hr notice. Do not call the store to coordinate it. Call 1.800.Chipotle and they will sort you out. (Also, yes, we know the ‘E’ in Chipotle is an extra digit, it’s no big deal). And please, let us handle everything. There is literally zero need to try and micro-manage your order. Furthermore, make sure that whoever is picking up the order has a large enough vehicle for transportation. The worst is when someone arrives in a 2-door, no-trunk, smartcar-lookin-thing to pick up a catering for 60 people.

So that’s it. Well... most of it anyway. I’m sure there’s more minutia that I didn’t cover; but, quite honestly, that’s just about everything. To my fellow chipotle crew, I salute you. And to all the customers: regulars, newbies, young and old, please, make all our lives easier and pay attention; be kind; and have a great day.

#Chipotle #Chipotle mexican grill #burrito #burrito bowl #bowl #rice #beans #meat #chicken #steak #cheese #guac #lettuce #salsa #tacos #queso #quesarrito #Chipotle crew #Chipotle managers

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

Text

HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT A

Good programmers often want to be doctors than who want to meet him. But I think they pay more because the company would go out of business and the people would be dispersed.1 The phrase seemed almost grammatically ill-formed. We started Viaweb with $10,000 in seed money from our friend Julian.2 The surprising thing about throwaway programs is that, like the temporary buildings built at so many American universities during World War II, they often don't get thrown away. That's what makes sex and drugs so dangerous. When you're launching planes they have to be trimmed properly; the engines have to be at full power; the pilot has to be the series A stage. Which means if it becomes the norm for founders to retain board control after a series A is clearly heard-of. The use of credentials was an attempt to axiomatize computation.3 When you're deciding what to do.

This is too big a problem to solve. Hackers share the surgeon's secret pleasure in popping zits.4 But the two phenomena rapidly fused to produce a principle that now seems obvious: paying energetic young people market rates, and getting correspondingly high performance from them.5 I can't draw.6 How would you do it? Why haven't we just been measuring actual performance? In the earliest stage, because that's where the money is. Misleading the child is just a series of web pages. Think about where credentialism first appeared: in selecting candidates for large organizations. And once you apply that kind of thing for fun. Most smart people don't do that very well.

I learned it hadn't been so neat, and the problem now seems to be fixed. It was small and powerful and cheap, as promised. Why haven't we just been measuring actual performance?7 As a lower bound, you have to do the unpleasant jobs. But all it would have taken in the beginning would have been for two Google employees to focus on the wrong things for six months, and the reactions that spread from person to person in an audience are always affected by the reactions of those around them, and the PR campaign surrounding the launch has the side effect of making them celebrities. Others are more candid, and admit their financial models require them to own a certain percentage of each company. One way to describe this situation is to say that you despised your job, but a return. Till now we'd been planning to use If you can read this, I should be working. I've been able to undo a lie I was told, a lot of propaganda gets slipped into the curriculum in the name of simplification.8 So most hackers will tend to use whatever language they were first written in, because it's painful to observe the gap between them. I were a better speaker. After all, pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

My grandmother told us an edited version of the change I'm seeing.9 When you scale animals you can't just keep everything in proportion. I believe they conceal because of deep taboos. But I don't think the bank manager really did. The trick of maximizing the parts of your job that you like can get you from architecture to product design, but not like it used to. The very idea is foreign to what most of us, it's not that inaccurate to regard VCs as sources of money.10 They're all competing for a slice of a fixed amount of deal flow, by encouraging hackers who would have gotten jobs to start their own startups instead.11

So if you're going to clear these lies out of your head, you're going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one.12 They just don't want to be optimistic and skeptical about two different things. Maybe this would have been for two Google employees to focus on first, we try to figure that out.13 For millennia that was the canonical example of a job someone had to do was roll forward along the railroad tracks of destiny.14 Then the important question became not how to make money that you can't do it by accident.15 When we were kids I used to think I wanted to know everything. They want to feel safe, and death is the ultimate threat. They may have to be optimistic about the possibility of solving the problem, but skeptical about the value of the work they'd done. But we all know the amounts being raised in series A rounds creep inexorably downward. I usually write it out beforehand. We compete more with employers than VCs.16

Java. They go to school, which was dictated largely by the hardware available in the late 1950s. That's what board control means in practice. When my father was working at Westinghouse in the 1970s, he had people working for him who made more than he did, because they'd been there longer. I read it, and look bold. To do something well you have to make it something that they themselves use. We can get rid of or make optional a lot of propaganda gets slipped into the curriculum in the name of simplification. Children of kings and great magnates were the first to grow up in. At the moment I'd almost say that a hacker about to write a profiler that would automatically detect inefficient algorithms.

I remember because it was so surprising to hear someone say that in front of a class. What popularity it retains dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, when it was the scripting language of a popular system. The organic growth guys, sitting in their garage, feel poor and unloved. She said they'd been sitting reading one day, and when you're delivering a prewritten talk makes it harder to engage with an audience. We started Viaweb with $10,000 in seed money from our friend Julian. But I am daily waiting for the line to collapse. When a man runs off with his secretary, is it always partly his wife's fault? It's also wise, early on, when they're trying to find the function you need than to write the code yourself.

Notes

Content is information you don't even want to learn to acknowledge it.

The dialog on Beavis and Butthead was composed largely of these people never come face to face with the founders' advantage if it were Can you pass the salt? Actually Emerson never mentioned mousetraps specifically. You have to factor out some knowledge.

If you want to. When you get a false positive, this thought experiment: If you have a cover price and yet give away free subscriptions with such abandon. This is why I haven't released Arc. They also generally say they prefer great markets to great people.

If it's 90%, you'd ultimately be hurting yourself, but unfortunately not true. It shouldn't be too conspicuous. All you need to know exactly how a lot, or at least wouldn't be worth starting one that did. And yet there is some kind of intensity and dedication from programmers that they function as the average startup.

No one seems to have balked at this, but it's hard to say that education in the belief that they'll be able to raise money? The CRM114 Discriminator. 03%. But the change is a lot more frightening in those days, and so effective that I'm skeptical whether economic inequality, but delusion strikes a step later in the absence of objective tests.

We often discuss revenue growth, it's easy to get to college, they only like the United States, have several more meetings with you to believing in natural selection in the few cases where VCs don't invest, regardless of how to deal with slaps, but most neighborhoods successfully resisted them.

For example, the best new startups. Give the founders realized. You may be the next uptick after that, founders will usually take one of the former, because some schools work hard to predict precisely what would happen to their software that was a company tried to pay out their earnings in dividends, and when I became an employer, I put it this way probably should.

A YC partner wrote: After the war, tax receipts have stayed close to the problem and approached it with the exception of the Industrial Revolution was one firm that wanted to than because they had in grad school, secretly write your thoughts down in, but Joshua Schachter tells me it was more because they are to be the least correlation between launch magnitude and success.

This is a well-preserved 1989 Lincoln Town Car ten-passenger limousine 5, they may prefer to work with me there. But if they want to see artifacts from it, but this would be more like Silicon Valley like the Segway and Google Wave. I'm just going to call all our lies lies. As the art itself gets more random, they thought at least for the sledgehammer; if anything they could imagine needing in their early twenties compressed into the shape of the leading scholars in the last step is to use to calibrate the weighting of the junk bond business by doing another round that values the company they're buying.

Whereas there is money. His best bet would probably also encourage companies to acquire you. The wartime versions were much more fun than he'd had an opportunity to invest in so many trade publications nominally have a notebook to write and deals longer to write a new version from which they don't make wealth a zero-sum game. We often discuss revenue growth with the amount—maybe not linearly, but it wasn't.

That name got assigned to it because the processing power you can discriminate on any basis you want to start a startup to become dictator and intimidate the NBA into letting you write software in Lisp, though sloppier language than I'd use to develop server-based applications. I mean type I startups. And especially about what was happening on Dallas, and they have wings and start to rise again.

Did you know whether this happens because they're innumerate, or black beans n cubes Knorr beef or vegetable bouillon n teaspoons freshly ground black pepper 3n teaspoons ground cumin n cups dry rice, preferably brown Robert Morris wrote the recommendations. After a while to avoid companies that can't reasonably expect to make up the same investor to do video on-demand, because a unless your initial investors agreed in advance that you're talking to a VC. And the expertise and connections the founders are willing to provide this service, this phenomenon is apparently even worse in the process of trying to enter the software business, and they were only partly joking.

Bankers continued to live inexpensively as their companies. Instead of bubbling up from the CIA runs a venture fund called In-Q-Tel that is largely true, because any invention has a power law dropoff, but we are not mutually exclusive. Xenophon Mem. At the time required to switch the operating system so much that anyone wants to invest in it.

It's hard to compete directly with open source project, but those don't scale is to try your site.

The best one could aspire to the extent this means anything, it would be to write about the idea.

They did better than their competitors, who had it used to say that it makes sense to exclude outliers from some types of studies, studies of returns from startup investing, but for a sufficiently long time. I got it wrong in How to Make Wealth when I switch in mid-twenties the people working for large settlements earlier, but the meretriciousness of the 23 patterns in Design Patterns were invisible or simpler in Lisp. And while we have to make Europe more entrepreneurial and more pervasive though.

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aurimeanswind · 6 years

Text

Let’s Make Up—Sunday Chats—4/22/18

So last week I had a Sunday Chats all written and done, and while writing the last two closing paragraphs, my web browser crashed and Tumblr, being the platform with apparently no fail safes at all, completely lost all of what I wrote. I was initially going to just rewrite it the next day or the following Wednesday (my next day off) but then life happened and to be perfectly honest I had what we call in the biz a godawful week, so it didn’t happen. I apologize, I took your questions and selfishly coveted my answers when you had taken your time to submit them, and I am very sorry for that.

To make up for it, this week I am answering all of last week’s questions IN ADDITION to the few I got for this week, so hopefully it’ll be jam packed. Luckily I didn’t have a big editorial thought-piece ready for last week, so for this week...

The 10 out of 10

So I’ve been playing God of War, as I’m sure many of you readers have been, and I’m delighted by it in so many wonderful ways. But I think the reviews definitely set an expectation that is really impossible to meet. I’m not treading new ground here, I think that’s safe to say (as is usually the case with my writing) but it’s just the thought I’ve had the most playing God of War.

I think you get this idea that it’s a series of incredibly brilliant moments that tie together beautifully, and while I think much of that is true, a lot of what you do in God of War is run around and fight dudes. As great as that is, I’ve only had maybe two big moments in my ten or so hours with it. But the quality of what I’ve seen so far just gets me excited to see what moments I have coming up, especially since at this point, I really have absolutely no idea what the hell is going to happen next.

What i think gets understated in such a masterful score is just the sheer volume of production value poured into every inch of a game. I think that’s something that’s hard to convey across an entire review, let alone just a score, but boy, there is just a ton of polish and excellence throughout the game, from the small animations, to how Kratos always grabs a cliff’s face and doesn’t clip through it.

It’s really excellently made, and I hope everyone out there is enjoying it as much as I am.

What’s on Tap

So I finished Kingdom Hearts 1

I re-beat this game again, finally going and doing all the additional content, like synthesis, extra bosses, grinding to level 100, etc.

I dunno... I think Kingdom Hearts is great but its “post-game” content is really underwhelming. I think none of the bosses are truly “special” in a way that they are in Kingdom Hearts 2. They don’t have these strategies seared into my mind, at least.

That being said, the design philosophy in KH1 versus its sequel is so completely different and fascinating. It’s far more Metroidvania in its intent to have you backtrack and re-explore already searched areas. It feels almost like it’s from a completely different franchise.

Like... There is ZERO platforming at all in Kingdom Hearts 2. Like, none. I can’t think of a section where you have to jump from a thing to a thing, except maybe the extra dungeon they added in the Final Mix version.

It makes me hopeful that maybe they’ll revisit some of these ideas in Kingdom Hearts 3 but eh. I doubt it.

Kingdom Hearts 2 on Critical

I started this and it’s about as frustrating as I anticipated. It’s not terrible or world ending, as its essentially just Proud mode difficulty with half your total health.

But I’m about to fight Xaldin in my playthrough so basically it’s all downhill from here.

God of War

So yes, I’ve been playing God of War. It is indeed, a video game.

I mean it’s really great. I talked about it a lot on last night’s podcast if you want some more detailed thoughts. But here are some standouts:

The combat is labored in a way that makes it so much more intense and significant. Of all the things that remind me of The Last of Us, it’s this aspect. It’s the intensity of each hit, the feeling of desperation in every slam and slash, and the violence that goes with it feels justified in the God of War universe where it absolutely never has before.

I get a ton of Darksiders vibes from this game, specifically Darksiders 2. The way it introduces side areas, side dungeons, side puzzles, and especially chests, reminds me a ton of how Darksiders approached formulaic Zelda ideas. It works very well here.

The Axe is, of course, excellent. But I’d say it isn’t the throw of the axe that works, it’s calling it back.

The ambient dialogue between your characters feels pulled straight out of a Naughty Dog game, and it feels so derivative of that that it makes me like it a bit less that I’d personally want to. It just feels almost exactly the same, just with different characters, and so far, outside of Kratos and how “deals” it dialogue, there isn’t enough separating it.

Overall very good. I will eventually be writing a review for IrrationalPassions.com. Look for it someday.

Questions

Remember to look for my tweet with the hashtag #SundayChats every Sunday afternoon, reply to it with your question, and boom. That’s how the magic happens.

Last week’s questions:

Ya know last week I’d have a different answer but I’ll revisit that later. In short: stuff is happening. I’m trying to live my life. Trying to do good. Failing a lot, but I’ll keep trying.

I’ve been crazy busy too. I feel like this is the year I am trying to teach myself different and new things, whether they be on a technical level, or maybe software, or something else along those lines.

Thank you for the kind words. As for the future, I think there is another question asking a bit of something like this, but it’s trying to stay busy and trying to make bigger and better moves. Like, E3 I think is out of the question, but PAX West isn’t, and aiming for something like that is really exciting and it gives us a lot of new options and opportunities. Plus, we’ve been trying to have actual meetings on the reg about what we’re doing and what ideas we have.

A big one that Scott White has been spearheading you’ll probably know more about by the end of this month, and there are some new shows and new styles of pieces I think we are all trying to do. As for me, I just want to get better with video stuff, with supporting the team, and with GA, as that’s my main new project.

I like milk. I drink milk, by itself, or in chocolate form, pretty regularly. I’ve been at a restaurant with friends and asked for a glass of milk and everyone laughed at me. I’ve since never done that.

Milk is good.

I mean the biggest one was assuredly The Messenger, which is like, my #1 most anticipated. But I was lucky that my team got to go out there and see stuff and present it to me with cool thoughts and perspectives on all of them. Like, Solo sounds super cool and I want to see more of it, and City of Brass wasn’t on my radar at all but seems really cool. Mike convinced me to see Omensight and that’s just a really rad new entry from a team I didn’t think had it in them.

I mean, I don’t even really know who Kid Rock is. I mean I know of him, but eh. I’ve never heard his music before a day in my life. I hear he is like, not good? Like, not a good person, not necessarily a bad musician. But I don’t want to assume. Is this libel? Am I getting black balled out of the industry right now?

Also you look hella cute Roger. So proud of you.

It absolutely was not. A big thing was I was planning on getting a 4K TV, and since I had the Xbox One X I was happy with just that and then the HDR that my original PS4 could reach. But there was a good deal and if I was already investing so much I wanted to get the most out of my TV. So I swear to god if a PS5 comes out next fall I’ll be pissed.

Brian. Nabeshin. Jackson. So I can know what it feels like to be the nicest dude in the world and also a great uncle.

It’s really sad. But also nice since I can be alone again. But also sad.

A bit of a mixed bag.

Pretty much anything in Final Fantasy 15 looks amazing and delicious. But that Beef Bowl in Persona 4... Man, I’ve had dreams about that Beef Bowl.

This week’s questions:

Shoutout to Brandon Gann, who is in ALL WEEK’S questions for Sunday Chats.

Yes, God of War is great. I think I got into it pretty well above, but yes, I really enjoy it. The combat, above all else, just feels so great. It reminds me a TON of DmC Devil May Cry in that it is training me well and I feel really good at it. Plus the way the weapons work kind of reminds me of that kind of combat too.

It absolutely has to be the SNES. I think I’ve lost countless hours to that system, and it’s something that, as a gift for me, I had my parents go and buy of eBay waaay past its time so as I could sit down and revisit all these classic games. Something I’m still incredibly appreciative of to this day.

But A Link to the Past and Super Metroid are just so formulative of my current taste in games and the things I seek out the most in video games (see: adventure and backtracking) and that was the console I sank the most time into without a doubt. I think GameBoy is totally a great choice, I didn’t have my own until I got a GameBoy color, but the GBA was the one I fell in love with the most, and I wouldn’t really get deep into that until much later.

Hey like, real talk everyone? Hey? Everyone bring it down, it’s real talk time?

Like, I’m doing suuuuper not good. Like actively very bad, and it’s just a whole lot going on. Last week is like, top three, top four worst weeks ever for me, and I had to make a whole bunch of adult decisions that, while I was prepared for them, I wasn’t happy about anything, and everything seemed to just make the situation more miserable. On top of that, I just feel like I’ve been really shitty and a shitty friend to basically all the people in my life that matter the most, and on top of that I have a lot of stress from work and money and blah.

Like, in the grand scheme of things, I’m doing okay, I’ll be okay, but I feel bad, it all feels bad, and it’s pretty shitty. Like, I know this probably wasn’t the answer expected, but it’s definitely the truth.

I’ll do better next time.

In my defense, it’s what I was doing up until I started writing this, and, while I do need to go do the dishes before I get back into God of War because lord knows no one else will, I’ll be continuing my adventure in Midgard until I pass out tonight.

I mean I feel really good about it, so long as everyone involved feels good. Like we’ve certainly hit a lot more readers and have broadened our audience in a way we’ve never been capable of before, and we have opportunities now that we’ve never had before, and I feel really good about that. I’m not super into the numbers, but I am into opportunity, ability to cover games pre-release, go to events, things like that.

As for the end of the year, I feel like, or at least I hope, there is a bit more cross pollination as far as skill, like more folks will be able to support Social, and more folks will be able to do video, or host shows, or whatever that may be. But I want that to all happen within comfort: like Social is Jurge’s thing, and if he doesn’t want to share that because of his ownership of it, I get that, I respect that, and I’m all about that. People gotta have their territory of expertise, and since I’ve been jack-of-all-trading it alone this whole time, I’m all about doing that for myself.

Even though I kind of already have and that’s editing.

The Ninja Samurai from Ghosts of Tsushima (upcoming, I know) and Sly Cooper, because I’m all about creating the greatest Ninja clan this side of the land of the rising sun.

That’s all I got for this week. Thank you all for your patience and understanding. I’ll do better next time. I will try and continue to do these more consistently. I love you all, thank you for reading and supporting and listening and being great.

Until next time, keep it real.

#video games #god of war #sunday #sunday chats #sundaychats #Alex talks

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tatooedlaura-blog · 7 years

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Graying Skies

the series read as follows:

Superman … Monday … Cheezy Pouffs … Bacon … Stumbling … Trail Mix … Punch … Friday … Preparation … Uncle Mudler … Normal … Backseat … Mudler-sense … The FBI … Unthinkable … Patience … Elephant Jokes … Cooking … Rickety Tables … Mr. Skimmer … Bert and Ernie … Midnight Confessions … The Moon ... Bright Sunshine

a/n: for anyone new joining the fray, I wrote a series starting last fictober called ‘Life’ (here’s the last in that series but they’re all listed) … then I finished it … and continued with ‘Life, part 2′ and that’s listed above … you might want to read those first :)

@today-in-fic @fictober

___________________

Skinner showed up early, beating the impossibly always on-time Dave by at least 20 minutes. The look on his face did not convey happy tidings and the pair stopped him before he could leave the entryway, “what happened?”

And not about to mince words, “we found plans for other potential sites.”

Mulder, already antsy to touch her, reached for Scully’s back, winding fingers in her loose materialled shirt, denying skin to skin but feeling the anchor point more necessary than air, “where? When?”

“Air and Space, Natural History, Archives, Vietnam Wall. From the looks of them, they were still in the planning stages, no set dates were determined.”

Scully, wanting more than her anchor point polyester, fumbled behind her until she found the side pocket of his shorts, hooking her thumb on it, completing the circle, “Dave works at Air and Space.”

A few seconds of heavy silence hung then Skinner gave her a grave look, “tell him to take a few more days off.”

Paling slightly, she moved on, fingers gripped tighter to Mulder, “and we only found the driver of the van. We have no idea if he was alone or in a group. Those targets are still viable.”

Skinner nodded to her, “yes, they are. I was going to cancel on dinner and keep working but I promised Sam.”

With her other hand, she touched her boss lightly on the arm, “you needed a break anyways.”

“Collins also threatened to call my mother if I didn’t leave for awhile.”

Mulder, who really should have been laser-focused on the imminent threat to the world surrounding him, gave Skinner a confused look, genuine wonderment filling his features, “you have a mother?”

Too tired to hit the younger man, Skinner glared at him, “yes, I have a mother. She is 4’ 10”, 77-years old, full head of pure white hair and could knock you on your ass without dropping her hand mixer.”

“Walter, I need to meet this woman.”

Finally, he smiled, chuckling in the face of depression, “she lives in Georgia with her brother but if I can get her out of the retirement village and away from her baking pans, I will bring her over. I believe she’d like the two of you.”

That moment of merriment ended mere seconds later, however, when reality returned, “do you need us to come in?”

Skinner nodded, “whenever you’re ready. We’ve got roomfuls of paper trail to get through and we could use your eyes.”

“I can go back with you after dinner.” Mulder looked down at Scully, head twisted to see her, “you, however, need a few days off.”

Any other place in any other universe in any other moment in existence, she would have punched him for ordering her around but she was exhausted, knowing he was right, “I can probably come in after Mom gets her walking casts on Tuesday but before then, she still needs someone.”

Maggie, having silently rolled herself into the room, would have argued but seeing her daughter held together with the barest of threads, made herself known, “I certainly do, especially now that Walter has arrived.” Looking up at the towering man, “can you come and reach something for me, please?”

Complying without question, Mulder held Scully back from following, tucking her in close to him instead, “thanks for not smacking me around for the comment.”

One defeated shoulder-shrug later, “I will next time, promise.”

Squeezing her in tighter for a second, “should we go see if your mom and Skinner are making out yet?”

“Why would you say that?” Following his hand-pull to the kitchen, “seriously, why?”

“’Cause I’m twisted like that.”

&&&&&&&&&

Everything seemed fine. People arrived, children clamored for hugs, adults talked over each other, things spilled, Skinner took his shoes off and revealed socks with penguins on them, Scully joked and laughed, kissed and fawned, asked and answered … then disappeared, claiming vegetable transection needed to be done.

It was the carrot cutting that tipped him off.

Her exact slicing.

She was usually, contrary to ‘med school, geometrically-precise incision machine Scully’, a terribly messy vegetable killer. She hacked away like she’d never held a knife before, uneven chunks, little bits flying, carcasses littering the counter. Nothing was round, even, uniform. It was a veritable nightmare.

Today, she was cutting each carrot 1/8” thick, Mulder surreptitiously checking to see if she had a ruler somewhere for measurement purposes.

She did not.

He didn’t stop her, however, leaving her to her hopefully beneficial food catharsis while the guests carried on conversations around her.

Maggie had added kebobs to her menu somewhere along the line and after carrots came Scully’s cleaning and chopping of green peppers, onions, mushrooms, each strung with military care on metal skewers, perfectly spaced, alternating pattern never deviating, one pepper, one onion, one mushroom, one cherry tomato, one pepper, one tomato, one mushroom, one onion, one pepper.

The beef cubes were already cut but even those, she handled with precision, eight to a stick, coated with seasoning, settled on the plate to wait for the grill.

Once she’d washed her hands, he excused himself from the ever-growing crowd to take her by the elbow, back her into Maggie’s room, searching for quiet, “are you okay?”

Eyes flashing suddenly at him, “why wouldn’t I be?”

“’Cause you actually cut the vegetables. I mean, I would bet you a thousand dollars those things are all the same damn size. Something’s up.”

“Mulder.”

Leaning closer, nearly whispering at this point, “what is that beautiful brain of yours thinking about that has you strung tighter than a piano wire?”

And her eyes darkened, filling, crashing, depths stormy, churning, sinking, “I had three kids and I was fine doing them. They died immediately. They all looked peaceful, no signs of prolonged pain or breathing, lungs clean, I mean, if you are going to die in an explosion, they went the best way possible …” Suddenly swaying, she grabbed Mulder’s arm, “I just said …” Allowing herself to be seated on the bed, she saw Mulder carefully kneel in front of her, hands on her thighs, gripping flesh, kneading muscle, “I just said that three kids died in the best possible way … what the hell is wrong with me?”

“Nothing is wrong with you. You did your job. You did your job then came home and saw five healthy, happy, breathing, kicking, loud, boisterous children and not even using my fancy degrees, I’m deducing that you freaked out. Those kids from before, that was the best way for them to die, if they had to die. I wish they hadn’t but since they did, I’m going to be grateful it was very, very quick.” Hands sliding up to her waist, thumbs across her abdomen to rendezvous near her bellybutton, “now, with your permission, I would like to tell your brother and your cousin to keep their kids out of DC for the duration. If they never go back to the city, I will be perfectly happy with that.”

“Mul-”

“The point of terrorism is to invoke terror and even though I will fight that by going down to work and dealing with the shit that is the rest of the world, I am going to give in to the terror for the moment and keep those little ankle-biters as far from ground zero as humanly possible.”

“Mul-”

“I will let whoever the fuck blew up my city get to me if it means I have a possibility of keeping them safe and since I have the information and the means and the …”

She shut him up with a hand over his mouth, “will you be quiet for a minute?” Hearing a muffled ‘maybe’, she moved her hand, “I would like to keep the kids from hearing the conversation but I agree.”

Pulling his head back, “you agree?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“I don’t know … ‘cause you’re the rational one who has never agreed with me about anything except red M&Ms and that Tarintino’s salsa has too much Cilantro in it.” Standing slowly, his leg partially asleep, “will you come back out and keep the kids busy while I tell the rest of them?”

Hugging him around the waist, her chin pressed into his hip, “when can we go back on vacation?”

“As soon as humanly damned possible.”

&&&&&&&&&&

Mulder filled in parents, Scully hugged offspring and played semi-violent rounds of Spoons on the living room floor. The whole crowd ate, everyone from Toby upwards knowingly skirting any subject that might be the least bit depressing or scary, Joanna nearly starting a food fight when she accidently flung an onion on her aunt-in-law. Maggie, it being a special occasion, threw it right back without missing a beat, then raised her hands as she saw forks suddenly and instantly filling with whatever hadn’t been inhaled to that point, “stop! Put the forks down and move away from the plates. We have a guest and he does not need to be covered in food.” Looking directly at her son, who was slower than the rest in putting his utensil down, “I understand he needs his induction but how about we save that for another time, yes?”

Charlie narrowed his eyes at her, then turned his gaze upon poor Walter, clueless for nary the third time in his life at most, “next time, Uncle Skimmer … next time.”

Betsy moved her hand to Skinner’s arm, “I’ll protect you, Uncle Skimmer, I promise. Uncle Charlie isn’t very good with a fork but if he picks up a spoon, get under the table.”

Skinner simply leaned over when normal dinner had resumed, kissing the top of her little braided-haired head.

Scully wanted to cry.

#msr #more targets than originally thought #Maggie Scully #Skinner #xfiles fanfic #xf fanfic #my writing #Life part 2 series

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ganymedesclock · 7 years

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Could operation Kuron be a project that Shiro has ALWAYS been a part of? And that when he was re-captured the Galra continued where they left off? It's easy to forget that Shiro seems to remember things in small doses with the right triggers instead of everything in one go. Being back in captivity may have been the trigger to the memory he needs in order understand he's not 100% okay and he needs to fix it,

I mean that’s sure a thought, isn’t it? The tone and implication would suggest those are things that all happened between s2e13 and s3e5 but we don’t know if they necessarily all were. They could easily be older flashbacks jogged loose from being in the same facility again.

People have been talking about the difference between the prisoner number the computer addresses Shiro by in s1e10 and the “specimen” number used in s3e5′s flashbacks but that could be accounted for different levels of clearance- if Shiro existed in the main prison systems and Kuron simultaneously but not everyone knows about Kuron. That would necessitate two different serials for the same person, for security purposes- using the same one just makes it very transparent they’re talking about the same person.

It’d reflect how, once again, back in s1e11 Haggar talks Shiro up as the empire's potential greatest weapon when Sendak, just looking at Shiro’s prosthetic- the only obvious modification we were aware of at that point- wasn’t impressed. It’d suggest that Haggar knows something Sendak didn’t.

Narratively, if Kuron is gonna spell trouble in our future- and it’s certainly framed ominously- this could also be the whole point behind Shiro’s enduring amnesia- because in the past, he might’ve had warnings about what they were planning to do with him, but right now he can’t remember them- so he’s only partially aware of the danger.

That there’s also a specific reference to different phases of it makes me wonder if maybe “Phase one”, whatever that was, happened during Shiro’s initial missing year. If one of the first things Shiro did (the whole Champion thing) got him a huge amount of attention, and Haggar has no particular reason or inclination to hold back, Shiro does seem awfully..... untouched, again, if he got away with just the arm considering, once again, he was in captivity for an entire year. I doubt Haggar’s schedule is that busy because we don’t really see her act very busy in the present and she has a lot of subordinates at her disposal.

And we still have the glaring unknown of how the empire got hold of Shiro again. Keith airs the theory that Zarkon may have influenced Black to send him there, but that seems like a level of forethought and careful planning that doesn’t... really strike me as Zarkon’s style.

He’s stubborn and arrogant and “The Black Lion is the only thing that matters” and acknowledging Shiro as a threat they need to tread lightly around and use evasive tactics towards would require Zarkon to rethink his strategy in a way that I would think would be very difficult for him in the frame of mind he was in late season 2- especially because at that time, Zarkon’s patience for, and cooperation with Haggar was at an all-time low.

I find it hard to believe Zarkon at that juncture would swallow his pride and rethink his tactics, in regards to an enemy he has some very personal beef with now (s2e7? You bet your butt he didn’t forget that in a hurry) and step back and let Haggar take his revenge for him at a point when he’s really not communicating with her well.

Especially because we have zero implication of them discussing that beforehand or even alluding to it, which would suggest Zarkon, in the middle of a godzilla-sized ego trip mecha, in the process of being stabbed, wouldn’t have just had to suddenly angle for more of a strategy than “punch Voltron in the face” but he’d have to have pulled that strategy entirely out of his ass.

Lotor I could see bullshitting a tactical move like that because games of improv are Lotor’s thing. But honestly establishing Lotor as a speed chess antagonist in the middle of writers and characters alike rapidly pressing the idea that Lotor and Zarkon are radically different people, makes me even more skeptical of Zarkon’s ostensible strategic brilliance.

Haggar’s comparison of the two is both incredibly patronizing and suggests a profound disconnect between Haggar and Lotor- because she clearly doesn’t really believe that Lotor and Zarkon are alike or she wouldn’t be assuming she can just boss Lotor around as much as she feels like because Zarkon is absurdly, bull-headedly tenacious.

Getting back on topic here: I don’t think it was Zarkon that grabbed Shiro. Potential candidates I have in mind:

1. Haggar

Haggar’s the most likely mastermind behind the Kuron project, especially with the aforementioned dodgy mention in s1e11. She clearly knows something she either did to Shiro or was planning to do to him that she asserts has made him powerful, and acts like he should be grateful to her for.

It does raise a pretty big question of why Haggar, who worries so much about Zarkon and specifically was quite worried about him donning that armor at all, wouldn’t have grabbed Shiro earlier in the fight but then again Shiro wasn’t the only thing she had to focus on.

And unlike with Zarkon, we wouldn’t necessarily see Zarkon and Haggar planning it out beforehand if Haggar was responsible. Because as I mentioned, Haggar and Zarkon were not communicating well at that point. Zarkon wasn’t listening to her or her plans. He wanted to take victory personally and his growing vendetta against Shiro would make him even less likely to accept something that takes Shiro out temporarily.

It could also be that Shiro wasn’t really Haggar’s target, and she only really remembered her project and went after him when the situation turned desperate and it was very clear Zarkon was not going to win that fight. Haggar’s just as haughty as Zarkon is, and both of them are rather self-assured in their own presumed omnipotence. Haggar may have been content to throw Shiro away... until it looked like her husband was going to die, forcing her to try and grapple with whatever hold she had on him.

2. Misunderstanding or exploitation of the Black Lion

Neither Keith nor Shiro have answers, but, that their conversation prominently featured the Black Lion would suggest we’re at least supposed to regard her as a likely culprit- however, as Shiro points out, why would the benevolent, compassionate Black Lion, who would be in the position to understand best what it means if the empire retakes Shiro, send him back to his torturers?

Zarkon’s influence doesn’t seem likely as I’ve discussed. It’s possible whatever Haggar did may have attacked the Black Lion in an already vulnerable state.

Either way, it’s possible Black may have sent Shiro away to try and protect him. We know she’s ejected him before when her systems were in danger of falling under hostile control.

Of course, I can see a few possibilities.

First, Black’s understanding of safe places in the universe is ten thousand years old and since then Zarkon has conquered a lot. It’s possible Black launched Shiro into galra captivity because she tried to send him to a safe, allied planet that she knew of only to realize too late that planet was no longer safe or allied- and might’ve been under imperial control.

Second, it could be that Black did send Shiro somewhere safe but that ‘somewhere safe’ was compromised because, again, she might’ve been warring for control with Haggar at the time- so Haggar might have either read that destination from Black’s mind or changed the destination to something more convenient for her.

...If that is the case, Black’s lack of response to Shiro might actually have very little to do with what happened to him in his absence- and it might more be she’s walling him off because of guilt. Because if Black feels at least partially responsible for Shiro’s recapture, again, she’s the one who would most poignantly understand that as Shiro’s personal worst-case scenario.

And it’d be the second time enemy forces used her to hurt him.

It’d explain why Black lets him in the cockpit no problem, but doesn’t move- he’s still her beloved paladin, but rather than not trusting him, she’s not trusting herself with him. Quite possibly, trying to tell him to stay in the castle where it’s safe and the empire can’t get to him- especially if she’s aware of whatever lurking hazard Kuron provides.

(I mean, I stand by, whatever Kuron is, nobody is in more danger from it than Shiro himself.)

3. An unknown

It’s worth noting that a lot of significant factions in the story were relatively unforeshadowed. Consider the Blade, and Lotor’s team. Now I’m not accusing either of them of what happened to Shiro- but it stands that there might be somebody else invested in this conflict that showed their hand there as a villainous version of Thace’s intervention in s1e11.

A group that might’ve been content to stay in the shadows, and stay hidden, but when it looks like Zarkon’s actually going to lose- they needed some way to force the team to retreat.

...Quite possibly, a group aligned with or composed of the dark creatures from the rift- who, while I doubt they’re controlling Zarkon at present, they’d definitely have a vested interest in getting Zarkon to open another rift. That’s their only way into this reality, after all.

#voltron legendary defender #vld #Shiro #Haggar #Zarkon #Black Lion #readmore #Anonymous

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andrewuttaro · 4 years

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2020 Revisions: Good, Bad and Ugly Rhinos 2021 Scenarios

The Rochester Rhinos Outsider blog was a series of articles written in the winter of 2018-2019 as the second year of the club’s hiatus was at its quietest and darkest. This article is part of the 2020 Rhinos Outsider Revisions series, a series of long-read features jumping off from the starting point of those original articles with new information since revealed.

The Rochester Rhinos pushed it back to 2021. That’s one more year, a third year of waiting. So let’s take another trip back to when we had one fewer year to wait through. One of the funnier articles from the Rhinos Outsider posts was the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. It was about speculating all the different ways the return might go. That is, all the good ways, bad ways and just plain ugly ways. Moreover in the leadup to the meat of the article I wrote about the “hat trick of ruined owners”. That little piece hasn’t meaningfully changed in the year since I wrote it so here it is! That particular passage in a lightly edited form:

First things first, let’s be totally up front: this maybe it for the Rhinos. The Dworkins could also spend themselves into insolvency if Rochesterians don’t come to the new venue. They too could basically be forced to give up the team by debtor banks like the first owners or forced to give it up by the league like the second owner and this club could complete the hat trick of ruined owners. Who wouldn’t want to be the fourth owner of that organization? Hate to be that guy, but that is why I’m talking like we got one last chance here. We do kinda have one last chance.

I think that little nugget is a riot. Most outsiders think this club is basically already dead. Hell, that conclusion makes a lot of sense. So much in fact I’ve been writing letters to perspective new owners. But on another level deeper, this club has ruined every individual or group of individuals that has owned it. I’m not saying that’s a curse but there is some dark humor there if that’s your cup of tea. But enough dark soccer comedy, time for a pep talk.

This article in the original Rhinos Outsider series was a big dose of sobriety. A club doesn’t just survive by way of wealthy owners. A soccer club anywhere survives by the efforts of fans and a community, casual or not, that support it. There is a legitimate argument to be made that Rochester doesn’t support her own. We could go down a whole rabbit hole about population and generational differences that contribute to how sports teams are thinning out here. I don’t want to go into those things now but what I ended up giving in this post a year ago was something like a pep talk. The Rochester Rhinos organization represents a piece of this City’s culture that I don’t think people realize. To be very frank I think most Rochesterians don’t realize what we have or might soon have had.

The Rhinos won the Open Cup in 1999. All of us Rochesterians were a part of that. That kind of title has no easy comparison in American Sports. All things being equal, the Open Cup is bigger in U.S. Soccer than the Superbowl is in American Football. WE DID THAT! US, ROCHESTER, NEW YORK! I mean it when I say it: the Rochester Rhinos are the best soccer team in American History. I’ll die on that hill. It would be such a crying shame if Rochester doesn’t realize that until it’s too late. With that as our introduction lets imagine some scenarios for 2021. I will admit some of this is fantasy fulfillment, other parts of it… nightmares.

The Good

The Rochester Rhinos return in 2020 to St. John Fisher’s College Soccer Field. The games are catered by Wegmans which by itself is enough reason to draw 1500 fans of the casual and family varieties. That number is in addition to 1000 fans of the young and diehard categories. This scenario is the good-est of good boys so let’s go all out: not only is the club’s concessions catered by Wegmans, Danny Wegmans owns the team now! He bought out the Dworkins and now the jerseys have a big old W on the chest for Wegmans and Win! They do just that! The Rhinos beat a couple MLS teams in the Open Cup and dominate League One to win a title in their first season back on the pitch! Danny Wegman announces he’s buying a piece of open land in Pittsford and building a stadium! This scenario is so fun I let out my own rendition of the Howard Dean Scream after writing it.

Let’s go a little less good. The Rhinos are still returning to St. John Fisher’s Field because this is still a good scenario. Except in this scenario there are notable hiccups. The concessions are a little screwy and the team has some facilities clashes with the University. The Dworkins do however do a good job pulling in talent and manage to go all the way to the USL League One Final in their first year back. The attendance numbers gradually climb as the season goes on and the good word spreads. After seeing the relationship as mutually beneficial the Dworkins sign a deal with Fisher to keep the team there for three years. At that point they announce their plans to build a stadium in East Rochester. The Rhinos are resurrected!

Ok, one more good scenario. The Rhinos return to the Downtown Stadium after the City realizes how much money they’re losing on having no tenet thee. The new deal allows the Dworkins much greater control over the venue and the City helps finance some renovations that help draw 3000 fans on average the first season back. More supporters are enticed to come to games when the new indoor sports plex next door destigmatizes the neighborhood for all the scared suburbanites. The Rhinos narrowly miss the playoffs, but the new club has a distinctly Rochester identity that everyone is happy to have back.

The Bad

The least bad scenario that I wouldn’t consider good is a rushed move to the Dome Arena area. The Dworkins announce the plan late in the Fall 2020 giving themselves little time to clear land and put a field on the other end of the Dome Arena parking lot. They exclaim the location’s proximity to shopping and Wegmans and what not. Unfortunately the lift the team actually receives is hard to tell as most of the fans shoehorned into temporary stands at one end of the field are clearly diehards. The team isn’t competitive, missing the USL League One Playoffs and losing to another League One team in the Open Cup. This is not to mention Soccer Sam Fantauzzo still thinks he’s competing with the Rhinos in this scenario as he beefs up the Lancers operation.

As bad scenarios get worse the Rhinos get to go to St. John Fisher College their first season back in 2021 but the University quickly doesn’t like it. They go as far as to make large swaths of parking unusable on gamedays. Nonetheless the reborn Rhinos are competitive on the field and almost make the playoffs. The Dworkins announce an iffy plan to move to another venue they don’t name until the last weeks of the season. A run to the MLS round of the Open Cup distracts the fans from the plan falling through. After much wheeling and dealing the Dworkins secure one more year at Fisher and continue to scramble to find a new home in time.

The Rhinos return to Frontier Field in a freak two-year deal with the County and drive nostalgia real hard in the marketing. For a while they manage to drive attendance up before the new team they assemble crashes and burns. Unfortunately nostalgia isn’t enough to save the club from the collapse and the financial fortune of the club is awful by the end of 2021. The Dworkins make one last plea saying if 2022 isn’t good enough financially they simply won’t continue. 2022 sees a miraculous Open Cup run to the semifinals but once again the Dworkins make a plea for financial help as they look for a place to go after Frontier.

The Ugly

The Dworkins sell the team in November 2020. The League operates the team via Pat Ercoli who sees the team play at the Downtown Stadium out of some miracle due to the new ownership. Unfortunately the same problems persist from before the hiatus and Ercoli is forced to get creative. An alliance with the Rochester Lancers goes nowhere even after their owner, Sam Fantauzzo, announces his intent to move the Lancers to the downtown stadium to help the Rhinos. The league has a meeting with Ercoli that is followed by his resignation from the organization. The team shutters for another haitus in 2022 as the league fails to find a new owner before folding it in 2024, the year the USL System finally institutes Promotion/Relegation adding insult to injury to the end of the Rochester Rhinos.

The Dworkins build a small stadium by the Dome Arena in Henrietta and achieve some better average attendance in the first few games back. Pat Ercoli announces his retirement and receives a splendid send off ceremony. Shortly thereafter Sam Fantauzzo moves his Rochester Lancers to NISA where they garner more support from diehard soccer fans in Rochester. This is direct competition for seemingly no reason. The Rhinos season on and off the field tanks before the Dworkins sell the franchise rights in November. The league does not find a new owner and shutters the brand in 2022. I think two ugly scenarios is more than enough.

Final Thoughts

I had a lot of emotional points to make about what the most likely scenarios actually were in the original version of this article. But now I got to be honest, another year of haitus has made me somewhat indifferent. Don’t get me wrong, I love this club, it’s my aesthetic and my favorite soccer club forever and ever amen. But you can’t expect enthusiasm after nearly zero public information sharing over 14 months. Even a lunatic like me can’t get excited for something they have almost no clue about. Help us out here. The next 12 months and beyond will be very interesting.

That said the truth was very well said by one Brad Bates back in December. Bates is a Rhinos supporter way out in Lansing, Michigan. You can hear him on the League One Unfiltered Podcast (L1Unfiltered) or read him on twitter @BradBates25. The brand is in the gutter. Years of neglect and now years of haitus has reduced the Rochester Rhinos to a punch line and a soccer history fancy. A truly rousing reclamation is needed. The Dworkins don’t just need to resurrect their dormant team, they need to create something new worthy of the name and legacy of the Rochester Rhinos. They need to not only make a highly competitive team on the field but a highly compelling overall product for the supporters. Wherever they play they have to build something special, familiar but also distinctly new. Otherwise this all may very well be for naught.

I’ve been very optimistic in this haitus, but its wearing on me now. 2020, or at least these first six months of it, stands to be the busiest year of my life so far. Unless I’m getting far more regular updates then we saw the last 18 months then it will be hard for me to do anything but write an epitaph come the Fall. I don’t want to, but the burden of proof now points in an increasingly negative direction. The Brad Bates Standard is going to be a tough one to meet even if they come back. And now the darker thought arises: do I even want them coming back if I don’t believe they can stage a comeback worthy of the name? Gee, that question is a tough one. Unfortunately it’s the question I’ll be wrestling with more and more this year.

I am basically the only Rhinos blogger out there so follow me if you want more of this. This series of long-read articles, 2020 Rhinos Outsider Revisions, will probably only have one more installment. Come to think of it, this maybe it for trying to make content out of these posts from a year ago. I will probably have a similar long-read article completely new and original. I think it will be something like what we started getting into with the legacy of the Rochester Rhinos. That will come sometime in the next 6-8 weeks before the return of my regular series on the Rhinos: State of the Support. How about more on that.

In a few weeks we should be getting a real update on the situation with the club; at which point Season Two of State of the Support will premiere. State of the Support is a reoccurring series about the Rhinos that will be broadening its scope a tiny bit to Rochester Soccer in general for Season Two. In the spirit of supporting a soccer club I’d say a club like the Rhinos deserve second life if any domestic soccer team does. And even if you don’t currently call Rochester home like me I’d hope you could support their future going forward for just that reason. Hopefully the future of the Rochester Rhinos isn’t just fantasy.

Thanks for Reading.

Let’s Go Rhinos!

#rochester rhinos #soccer

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tkuhnhackl · 5 years

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1-70

i can’t tell if i love you or hate you rn but i really don’t want to do anymore work on this placement nonsense so we’ll go with the former, thanks

i’m stupid enough to actually do all these but i will put them under a read more to spare y’all

01: Do you have a good relationship with your parents? yeah, i’m really close to both of them. we’re all a little nuts in the family, but in the best way.02: Who did you last say “I love you” to? my mom, when talking to her on the phone on the way back from work today (well, technically i said “love ya, shorty” because my family is not good at sentimentality without a little bit of roasting but close enough, i suppose)03: Do you regret anything? I already answered this!04: Are you insecure? I guess? It’s weird - I’m very comfortable with who I am, that sort of stuff, but things that have happened in the past have made me insecure about aspects of myself - so I suppose my answer is that i’ve become fairly good at disguising my insecurities over time05: What is your relationship status? single af06: How do you want to die? quickly, fairly painlessly, in a blaze of glory - there’s one Brian Jacques novel where the Long Patrol hares mount a final charge to stall the enemy and 8 year old me was absolutely ready to go out wielding a longsword in one hand and a sgian dubh in the other and tbh i’m still lowkey up for it07: What did you last eat? i had tacos for dinner with homemade barbacoa beef (i froze half of it when i made it back in february so i am finally treating myself to the rest of it)08: Played any sports? baseball, softball, basketball, tennis, and soccer/football. i also did field hockey briefly and ran track and field (primarily hurdles) for a year; i wanted to do short track speed skating but my parents were too worried about my safety09: Do you bite your nails? yup, i’ve tried for years to break the habit but every time i get stressed, it happens again10: When was your last physical fight? i’ve never been in a full-on fight; probably high school was the last time that anything even came close to that level and it was still not particularly close11: Do you like someone? already answered this one too!12: Have you ever stayed up 48 hours? once? usually i end up taking a nap, even if just for an hour, so it rarely ends up being 48 consecutive hours13: Do you hate anyone at the moment? i mean, on an impersonal level, there are famous people i despise. in my own personal life, there are a handful of people that i dislike enough to perhaps call hate but i also don’t believe in wasting my time being angry with them if they’re not even in my life anymore14: Do you miss someone? answered this one as well!15: Have any pets? the loves of my life, my dog Flora and my parents’ dog Liam. also the spider who lives in the corner of my room because sometimes it’s nice to pretend that counts as having company16: How exactly are you feeling at the moment? tired, overwhelmed, ready for another vacation, helpless, frustrated, but also hopeful because i’ve got three potential job leads that came up this week (but can’t be followed up on until I return home in Sept)17: Ever made out in the bathroom? nope18: Are you scared of spiders? no, i love spiders as long as they don’t encroach on my personal space19: Would you go back in time if you were given the chance? as an art history person, absolutely. there are a lot of questions that i had to leave unanswered in my research papers and i’d love to just be able to ask the artists in person (and maybe punch picasso and jackson pollock and tell bierstadt to calm down a bit with the entire congress incident because no one cares about those pictures anymore)20: Where was the last place you snogged someone? a dorm room (idk if it counts as a snog but we’re counting it nonetheless)21: What are your plans for this weekend? finish getting my portfolio done for this placement and hopefully book another trip for next weekend22: Do you want to have kids? How many? i definitely do not want to birth any children, but i’d certainly be open to adopting later in my life should my life lead me in a direction where i feel ready, able, and willing to open my heart and home to a kid. probably only one, definitely no more than 2.23: Do you have piercings? How many? two ear piercings, i used to have my nose pierced but that ripped out in a very painful moment and i’m waiting for it to heal completely before i get it repierced24: What is/are/were your best subject(s)? i was a fucking nerd in high school; i think the only subject i struggled a bit in was physics and that’s just because i don’t like theory - in uni, i took classes in a bunch of different departments, but my best ones were art history and anthropology25: Do you miss anyone from your past? answered this as well!26: What are you craving right now? poutine from the Yard, good Knights hockey, a brain that functions in a healthier way, and an end to my writing block27: Have you ever broken someone’s heart? i don’t think so? i mean, i feel like it’s highly unlikely28: Have you ever been cheated on? can’t happen if you’re not even in the game 😏29: Have you made a boyfriend/girlfriend cry? see above answer30: What’s irritating you right now? my flatmates, the other work placement who won’t shut up and insists on using the library computer with the cataloging software despite me reserving it, my professors’ general incompetence, international politics31: Does somebody love you? romantically, no, unless the cheesemonger’s really committed to our non-existent relationship. but i’d like to think my close friends and family do (otherwise the love you’s we exchange at the end of conversations are awkward now)32: What is your favourite color? russets and other earth tones33: Do you have trust issues? hahahahahaha yes34: Who/what was your last dream about? i don’t actually remember? i know i woke up disoriented a few nights ago because it was something realistic but idk what i actually dreamed about35: Who was the last person you cried in front of? i cried in front of my mom on skype recently; in person, also probably my mother when she visited a few months ago (moral of the story is that i refuse to cry in front of anyone that’s not family)36: Do you give out second chances too easily? depending on what happened, i really don’t do second chances at all. i’m an expert at putting things in my past and, while i don’t often burn bridges, i’m more than happy to let them fall into ruin on their own 37: Is it easier to forgive or forget? to forgive is easy (depending on what was done), but forgetting is much, much harder38: Is this year the best year of your life? depending on my paper grades and this dissertation and whether or not someone wants to hire me, it could well be, but it sure as hell does not feel like it39: How old were you when you had your first kiss? 1840: Have you ever walked outside completely naked? no way in hell51: Favourite food? beans and rice52: Do you believe everything happens for a reason? not really - i do believe that every experience is one that can be learned from and every one has some sort of value, but i believe that the “happens for a reason” idea ascribes more sentience to the universe than i like53: What is the last thing you did before you went to bed last night? did my daily duolingo requirements so that the owl didn’t show up in my bedroom and murder me54: Is cheating ever okay? no, i don’t think there can be any sort of justification for betraying someone’s trust55: Are you mean? not particularly, i can be if i need to be but i prefer not to (i prefer to go for the ‘asian mom threatening glare’ that i have inherited from my mother)56: How many people have you fist fought? zero; for all its portrayals on tv and movies, my experience in american public school had absolutely no physical fights57: Do you believe in true love? no, i find that the concept can be so limiting and people feel pressure to find some ideal that may not really exist (i’m not a romantic in any way, shape, or form whoops)58: Favourite weather? spring, when it’s right on the edge of summer, so it’s warm enough that you can wear absolutely anything and still be comfortable, and the birds are nesting and the flowers are blooming, and the world just feels so alive59: Do you like the snow? yes, but my sad frostbitten toes can no longer handle the cold so i must now limit my time in the snow so i don’t lose them completely60: Do you wanna get married? i wouldn’t say i want to get married; if i find someone and we end up getting married, great. if i stay single the rest of my life, also great. it’s one of those things that i don’t feel is a necessity to make my life complete, but i’m not necessarily opposed to it either if it happens. I have so many things on my bucket list for life, but romance has never been on it.61: Is it cute when a boy/girl calls you baby? i will accept “babe” but will not accept baby unless it’s followed by giraffe. 62: What makes you happy? dogs that wag their tail a little faster when they see you, the way puffins fly and land, the sound and sight of sea birds reuniting with their partners after spending the last year apart, lilies of the valley beginning to peek out as the seasons change, fruits and veg picked straight from my garden, good food, excel spreadsheets, being the only one in a gallery in a museum and getting to be alone with the art, sharks that challenge our perspectives on what sharks are supposed to be and do, my sports teams winning63: Would you change your name? no. for a long time, i did because it’s always getting mispronounced and, when you go to a predominantly white school district, it’s always hard to be the one kid with an obviously non-white name. but also my last name means ‘king of snakes’ and fuck if anyone’s taking that away from me64: Would it be hard to kiss the last person you kissed? nope, she remains very dear to me65: Your best friend of the opposite sex likes you, what do you do? run screaming for the hills, catch me sailing out to shetland on the next ferry because that’s a conversation i don’t want to have66: Do you have a friend of the opposite sex who you can act your complete self around? yeah, i don’t really believe in having close friends that i cannot act my complete self around, regardless of gender67: Who was the last person of the opposite sex you talked to? my dad? non-family, the regimental representative at the museum i work at, who’s basically my work dad (who i cook for because i worry about his health)68: Who’s the last person you had a deep conversation with? i avoid all deep emotional conversations, so it’d probably be my parents (specifically my mother because my dad is like me). but i did have a deep conversation about politics and race with a girl i met on my trip this weekend up north69: Do you believe in soulmates? answered this as well70: Is there anyone you would die for? absolutely

#asks #about me #anon

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miu-paras · 5 years

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Lvl. 4 ⋮ Kalar // Chapter 4

Mission: Crush ♪ - Sidewalks and Skeletons / Disappear

TW: violence

[ This is by far the worst decision you’ve ever made in your entire life. ]

So. It seems my plan was unpopular amongst the rest of my party members.

Shortly after agreeing to the deal, the shop owner handed the mech over to us and explained the rules of the crusher battles in more detail. Two mechs take to the ring and battle until the other is damaged to the point where it can’t continue (or until its pilot is dead… hoping it never comes to that). Leaving the ring, whether it be stepping out of bounds or flying away in fear, earns you an instant disqualification, and your precious bot gets shot down and melted for parts. Winner gets bragging rights and whatever parts from the loser’s sorry hunk of metal is still intact.

They also get a hefty supply of a drug named ‘Crush’. Which, if I had to guess off the top of my head, is the origin of the tournament’s name.

And one more thing: anything built with Ulterian steel is illegal. Wouldn’t be fair, with it being the most indestructible material known in the universe. Which means no tsanista. No Red.

And they certainly weren’t happy about it.

“You haven’t even known me my entire life,” I shot back at the judgmental voice in my head. “Besides, this is gonna be fine. I can win! I know I can.” I smiled confidently at no one, and Xhen continued to stare at me quizzically with a single brow raised.

“Anyway,” The taller one interrupted, grunting as she towed the massive mech along in the cart granted to us by the shopkeeper. I knew Xhen was strong (the strength of her punches still rang loud in my memory), but actually seeing the extent of that power was… quite mesmerizing, to say the least.

“This plan is only good if you win,” she said sternly. “How are you so sure you will anyway? You’ve never seen a crusher fight.”

I shrugged off the question, “I don’t need to see one. The shopkeeper’s description was more than enough. And after looking at the controls, I know exactly how to redesign this baby.” I grinned and slapped the side of the mech, the metal making a loud clang. “Judging from the rules, it’s more or less just like any fighting game I’ve ever played, so—”

[ ...Miu, this is not a video game. ]

“But it is one! Sort of. Only in real-life. With giant suits of armor.” I shrugged again. “Look… I need you—both of you—to trust me on this. I know what I’m doing, okay? I promise.”

[ I don’t think you do. ]

“Yeah, well, who asked you?”

[ I know. Why don’t we just steal the supplies instead? Or better yet, use me to fly back to Earth. Who cares how many centuries it’ll take! ]

“I’m not stealing from him! And you know I can’t. I made a promise.”

“Okay, Terran, who in twelve Xh’icani are you talking to?”

I tensed, my head turning to meet Xhen’s glare. “Uh… my tsanista?” I held up Red with a free hand, the device dangling from the end of my necklace. “We’re, uh… ‘linked’ or whatever. They’re kind of… alive? It’s hard to explain.”

Xhen narrowed her eyes. She looked even more confused than before.

“It’s… a really long story, okay? Like, super long. My whole life long. But if you give me time, I’ll explain everything. I owe you that much.”

Her face softened some, and I was stuck thinking of how delicate her features looked whenever she wasn’t scowling. She was like one of those renaissance paintings, only more ethereal-looking. The way the light illuminated against her golden brown skin, the pinkish hue of her hair, and the smooth violet markings etched elegantly along her face helped with that. My first impression of her still remains the same; she was like nothing I’d ever seen.

We reached the large, rickety elevator and rode it up to Xhen’s apartment, silent for the first time since we left the parts shop. Though, it looked less like an apartment and more like one of those public storage units. Lifting the heavy metal door, Xhen nodded towards the interior. “Inside.”

It was quite spacious. Very minimalist too. Xhen hardly had any furniture, safe for a bed in the corner and what appeared to be a kitchen space. The rest was empty, telling from its echo. On the other side of the studio was a window large enough to take up a good portion of the wall and overlooked the entire city. The windowsill was decorated with comfortable blankets and pillows, a few books scattered everywhere as well. Above it hanged a dozen little trinkets. Maybe Xhen spent most of her time here. Her bed looked less used than the cushions laid out here.

My attention was immediately drawn away by the sound of banging metal, and my head whirled towards the direction of the noise. Xhen was setting the mech against the wall, supporting it enough to help it stand on both legs.

“You have all the tools you need. If you need any more, don’t hesitate to ask.” She moved in closer, face still as soft as before, though there is an emptiness to her expression. She looked tired. I was too.

“You are free to start now or later. After some rest... it’s getting late.” I glance out the window. The two suns that balanced in the sky were beginning to disappear behind the clouds. I hadn’t even noticed how late it’d gotten.

“Thanks,” I responded softly, turning to look up at her. She nodded, and moved towards the window, settling down on the many pillows and blankets. “Feel free to use my bed if you like. I, um… I never do.” She shrugged gently and stared out the window, taking in the sunset for as long as she could.

I made my way to the free bed in the corner and did my best to make the small mattress comfortable. No pajamas to change into, so my dusty and tattered sweats would still have to suffice. I laid down and wrapped the blanket around me, still watching Xhen as she peered down at the world. And before I knew it, my eyes had fallen shut, and my mind slipped away into the land of dreams. Dreaming of home. My family, my friends, my dogs. Dreaming of happier times.

Five Ulterian days of straight work. And finally, I was making my last finishing touches on the mech.

It was new and improved. A beast made for speed, mobility, and durability. I added more joints on the limbs for more flexibility, beefed up the metal armoring for better protection too. The legs were now capable of jet-boosted flight and arms were now equipped with projectile launchers. I would’ve gone with lasers, but rockets was all the shop owner—whose name I still haven’t learned—was willing to supply us with. He has a surprising amount of belief in us. A belief in me. It felt good.

In my time working on the robot, I got to learn more about Xhen. I thought it’d be hard, getting her to open up to me, but she more than obliged, answering every one of my biting questions. Maybe she wasn’t as dark-and-mysterious as I originally thought… or maybe there wasn’t much for her to hide anyway.

She never met her parents. She was instead raised in an orphanage that trained fighters, most meant to be sold off to the military once they were of age. Others that were unfit were simply… “discarded” as Xhen so kindly put it. But I knew what she really meant. Xhen, however, was able to escape both fates and become a ‘chaser’—her official job title. People who found work wherever they could and did whatever was asked of them by their clients. They worked mostly as mercenaries and bounty hunters, although many do some cargo and escort jobs as well. Like her current job with retrieving the hildar.

Xhen doesn’t have many hobbies outside of her duties. She does like to read, but hasn’t finished a single book she owns. She likes travel, but is only able to travel for work. And her skill with language is the most impressive I’ve ever seen in anyone. She taught me a bit of all 37 of her known tongues. And I taught her a 38th. In her free time, she plans to study more Japanese.

I also learned Xhen isn’t particularly fond of ‘she’. Or at least, not always.

“In Talur, there are several gendered expressions,” she stated, “But I tend to go between all of them… no one has ever stuck for me.” She shrugged, crossing her arms and staring down at her feet. She looked almost... nervous admitting this to me. It’s the most vulnerable I’ve ever seen her. Even speaking about her childhood didn’t put her in such a state.

I listened and nodded, then smiled at her, hoping it offered some comfort. “Are there any pronouns you’d prefer I call you? I know exactly zero Talurian languages, but—”

Xhen waved me off nonchalantly. “You needn’t think much of it… but perhaps, in your tongue at least… ‘they’ fits me best?”

“No problem. ‘They’ it is.” I nodded at them with another grin and returned to my work. From the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a semblance of a smile grace their features. But maybe it was a trick of the light.

I did my best to open up to Xhen too, like I promised. I told her I was Camerian, about how my mother came to Earth to escape Urrali. I talked about my childhood, my powers, my career, how Red and I became… whatever it is we are. A set pair, I suppose. And they listened. Never asking questions, simply… absorbing everything I threw out. It was something I was growing to appreciate about them; Xhen lived a simple life and did what they needed to maintain that simplicity. It could be felt in the atmosphere around them. It was why they were always so sure of themselves, of what direction to take. Almost the exact opposite of me, a walking disaster waiting to happen it seems. Everything about them felt… so simple. It was rather calming. I liked the feeling a bit more than I wished to admit.

One fresh paintjob later, and the mech was officially done. It was better than I could have ever dreamed. More streamlined and modern than the bulky dinosaur we carted in earlier. I sighed happily, gushing at my own excellent work. But then I caught Xhen’s expression. Their brows were knitted together, tense as they studied the newly polished machine.

“Oh, come on… what now?” I whined, my shoulders dropping as I pouted at them.

They looked towards me, their face unchanged, “It’s small… how will you fit in?”

I grinned. “Simple: I’m not going to.”

From behind the mech I pulled out a large control panel, almost like a fightstick but with far more complicated controls. Controls I had no problem learning and memorizing over the past few days.

“Technically, there isn’t a rule stating that I’m required to be in the mech. It’s just assumed. So they can’t penalize me for it. See, Red? Just like a video game. Have some faith.”

Red deadpanned. [ Of course. How foolish of me. ]

Xhen studied the controller in my hand, eyes flickering back and forth between me and the device, saying nothing.

My smile fell, and my face turned more serious. “Xhen? I need you to trust me. And to back me up on this. I promise I can do this.”

Their eyes stayed on me this time, their face attenuating in the way I always liked seeing. “I trust you.”

The smile that came to my face was wider and warmed than the one before. I nodded towards them. “Let’s do this then.”

[ Let’s not forget that my life is on the line here. ]

I rolled my eyes and mumbled, “No one has forgotten, Red.”

The stadium. It’s massive. Bigger than any stage I’d ever stood on. And it was packed full of zealous fans eager to watch machines rip each other to shreds.

Suddenly I was feeling nervous.

Perhaps it was the atmosphere. Just stepping inside, you could feel the entire vibe shift in the room. From the colorful, quirky charm of the Western Zhu’drak streets to grimy underbelly of the city’s hidden death battle scene.

Beneath the seating of the arena was where most of the competitors convened, working on their mechs and making improvements wherever they deemed necessary. If you asked me, a lot of these mechs needed more than just a quick polish or a tightened bolt here and there. But I remained silent, only because of the looks I was getting. They threw scowls in our direction. I heard some huffs, some scoffs, and saw plenty of side eyes. One guy even spit at my feet, which startled me, causing me to move closer to Xhen and link an arm around theirs. They didn’t seem to mind much.

I wasn’t sure of the reason for such hostility. Maybe they knew I was “fresh meat.” Or were jealous of the shiny new mech I had in tow. The mech walked on its own, guided in the right direction by the joystick on my control panel. It had a new coat of paint: a crimson red that matched my hair. And on the back was written, in large Talurian lettering, the name of the shop owner: “Dan.”

Even I had a new look to premiere. Xhen traded my tattered sweats for some fresh, clean clothes. A plain white shirt that hugged my figure, and tactical leather pants, complete with straps, buckles, and pockets to hold anything I would need, along with a matching brown jacket. The shoes weren’t too bad either, although they fit a little snug for my liking. Despite this, the new clothes had me feeling renewed and more confident, ready for whatever the day threw at us. I wouldn’t let my nerves get me down.

We approached the tall counter, where plenty of players were lined to register. My nerves started to settle the longer we waited in line. This felt just like one of my tournaments. A different game in a different scene, but still very much the same. Sticking with this mindset kind of helped to keep me focused.

Once we approached the front, I looked up to meet the face of the registrar. She was an old, lanky woman with a permanent scowl. She didn’t even look in our direction.

“U-um, excuse me,” I spoke up, keeping my voice nice and sweet, “We’re here to regist—”

“Umivarrki rrimoorva saalmnarr,” She stated bluntly, holding out a digital tablet with names listed in holographic letters.

“Check for your name,” Xhen guided, but I was at a loss. I still wasn’t good with the script.

“Umm… which one is…”

Xhen sighed and pointed to a name on the list, spelling out M-I-U aloud. They checked the name and handed it off to the lady behind the desk, who simply grunted and gestured for us to enter the arena.

“Thank you, ma’am.” I bowed gently and followed Xhen inside, Dan’s mech following closely behind.

The energy shifted once again the moment we entered the arena. From thick tension to exhilaration. The crowd roared loudly as they all spectated the ongoing fight. And what I saw before was better than anything I ever expected.

Metal banged and skidded against each other loudly as the machined duked it out. It was like a dance, more rigid and robotic compared to the elegance and sharpness in Xhen’s fighting. There was more roughness, more edge that made simply watching the brawl feel visceral and alive.

I was on the edge of my seat, and I hadn’t even started fighting yet.

Xhen touched my shoulder, leaning in to tell me something over the noise of the arena. “I’m going to talk to the announcer,” they pointed to the jumbotron overhanging the ring, “You’re next.”

I looked up and gulped, seeing the lettering M-I-U at the top of the list of names.

No nerves. Not now. Shake it off.

Xhen left, and I sat with Dan’s mech as close to the arena as I could be. I watched as the larger mech tore his smaller opponent to shreds. The pilot crawled out of the destroyed bot. It looked like his leg—or legs—were broken from the series of heavy impacts. Once he was carried out on a stretcher, the victor showboated around the ring.

I looked up to see Xhen arguing with the announcer, about me not manning the mech, no less. But as promised, they were backing me up. They whispered something into the announcer’s ear, and I saw his face drain ghostly white. All the clues as to what Xhen most likely said were written clearly all over his face.

Okay, maybe they were backing me up a little too much. But I still appreciated it.

“ZHU’DRAAAAK! IMILI VA’RAK KOOOOONNTA’AANIIIIII… MIUUUUUUU!!! VAR’MILNA KILI—Eh…" He turned to ask Xhen something, and Xhen looked down at me shouting, “What’s the name of your mech??”

“Uhh… ‘Dan’s Mech’?”

They rolled their eyes and repeated it to the announcer, who nodded and continued with the introduction.

“VAR’MILNA KILI… DAAAAAN’S MEEEECH!”

I inhaled, then exhaled, then walked the mech into the ring.

“Showtime.”

My bot was considerably smaller compared to the previous winner’s massive, hulking beast of a fighter. So small it barely reached its hip in height, and my opponent wasted no time in teasing poor Dan’s Mech.

“Xh’imdri cota’lli um’drikk? Semta’vri mo!” He chucked and jeered, turning away to work up the crowd, who joined him in his mockery.

Idiot.

While he was distracted by my size, I pressed a few keys, and my controller emitted a holographic screen: a first-person view of what my mech could see, complete with the necessary information on fuel, the durability of my shields, and a crosshair. What my unfortunate opponent doesn’t realize about his own mech is its very obvious flaws; the joint at one of its knees made a questionable noise every time he merely walked on it. The very foundation of his mech was faulty, and falling apart, and the joint could easily be undone with the slightest impact. But I’m not “slight.”

Dan’s Mech aimed its arm directly at the knee joint. I fired a rocket, and just like that the leg was blown off completely. All that was left of it were scattered shards of metal.

My opponent’s taunts were cut short when, without warning, they fell forward. I surged towards him, and with one swift movement, Dan’s Mech’s arm shifted from a launcher to an elongated blade, and quickly removed both of the mech’s arms. With its free hand, it pulled the pilot out of his seat and tossed him out of the ring.

There was a long, pregnant silence. But I sat with the largest grin on my face, watching as the loser crawled away in the same miserable fashion. Only difference being I was nice enough to leave both his legs intact.

[ Oh my. ]

“You should trust me more~.” I beamed.

After a while, the cheering returned, and the battles raged on. Each one was more different than the last, but I had no problem adjusting. Everyone had a fighting style that was easy to read thirty seconds into the match. And no matter which opponent it was, I was always too fast for them, too quick with my thinking. They were easily outmaneuvered, outgunned, or simply overwhelmed by how well Dan’s Mech could fight. I felt pride swelling inside me with every victory, and with every boisterous uproar as the crowd chanted, “Dan’s Mech! Dan’s Mech! Dan’s Mech!”

From the corner of my eye, I could even see Xhen smiling proudly. I smiled too, and felt my face go all warm.

There were sweeping away the remnants of my last opponent’s mech when the cheering got even louder. I looked around to see if maybe the next unlucky guy was approaching, hence the sudden excitement. Maybe he was some big shot. The John Cena of Crusher tournaments, or something.

But I saw no one.

I looked up at the jumbotron to see there was only one name listed at the top, spelled in the letters M-I-U.

“I… I won?! I mean, holy shit, I WON!”

I shot up from my seat, my controller hitting the ground as I started jumping and waving my arms in the air. The elation could be felt all around the room. From the roaring of the crowd to the announcer’s loud calls, it was like no victory I’d ever had. And to think I started doubting myself for a while. I wanted to say it was a miracle, but it wasn’t. I won on my own, based on my own skill. And that’s always a good feeling.

But I guess it couldn’t last, could it?

From the crowd, a man rose to his feet, his eyes shot blood red, breathing heavily out his nose. I could see from here the blade he had fashioned at his side. And the image became clearer once he started running for me.

“Vhish’lar!” He shouted, “Vhish’lar! Vhish’lar!”

“What does that…”

[ It means ‘Cheater’. ]

Xhen was already starting towards him once he pulled the blade from its sheath. Deftly, they unarmed him and had him pinned to the stands. People were screaming, running away from the quickly ended fight.

I wish they didn’t run. I wish Xhen stayed near me instead of causing all the panic. I wish they hadn’t made it so easy for another man swiftly move behind me, unnoticed, brandishing a small blade of his own. He grabbed me, and before I could think to defend myself, that very blade buried itself into my side 3 times.

It wasn’t until I screamed, until the surge of electricity shot through my skin to dissuade my attacker, until Red began to encase in a sphere of protection, that I saw Xhen running towards me, leaping and pushing through the crowd while they shouted my name.

But it was too late.

Once again, everything went black.

#p: kalar

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