#Andrew learned asl in a week

[a-lilguy]

Neil with bruises - but only from Andrew’s mouth and exy racquets ❤️

[bisexualchaosdemon]

So, I was thinking about how Andrew was in the car with Tilda when he wrecked it and how he could have gotten hurt and I just– Can you imagine if Andrew went deaf in one ear or something?

Like, he for sure wouldn't say anything about it. Aaron hates his guts, and he barely knows Nicky. Why would he bother telling either of them? He probably figures it could be temporary at first, but when he starts to think it might be permanent, he still says nothing about it. It's not like they would care, right?

So he would say nothing. People just think he's this asshole that ignores people (and, sure, sometimes he is ignoring them because people be fucking annoying) but half the time he just legitimately doesn't hear them. None of the Foxes notice. The staff don't either, since Andrew always keeps his hearing ear towards them. It causes issues, sure, but it's not like anyone would be able to fix it, so Andrew still stays quiet. But Neil figures it out.

It takes him a while, but he eventually notices that Andrew always sits on a certain side or has to turn to face Neil when he hasn't quite managed to pick up what he said. He starts watching and realises that he does it with the others too, and he's much more likely to completely ignore someone speaking to his left.

One day, when the monsters are hanging out, Neil finally decides to ask:

Neil decided to speak up during a lull in a conversation that Andrew was totally zoned out of. "Drew?"

"Hmm?" It's subtle, but Andrew definitely turned his right side slightly more towards Neil.

"Can you not hear out of your left ear?" Neil asked, and Andrew just blinked at him for a moment.

"Neil, what are you talking about?" Kevin shot him a confused look.

"I'm deaf in my left ear." Andrew said to answer them both.

"What??" Nicky looked startled. "Since when?"

Andrew considered that for a moment. "Since about a week before we met."

"Hold up," Aaron held up a hand. "Are you telling us you have been deaf in one ear since the crash?"

"Yes."

"And you didn't think to maybe say something about it?!"

Andrew shrugged. "I didn't think you would care." It wasn't a jab, it was just the truth.

"Andrew–" Nicky spluttered a little. "Of course we care!"

"Telling you doesn't really make a difference." Andrew said, glossing over his own surprise at how much his family seemed to genuinely care about him. "The hearing loss doesn't just go away because you know about it."

"No," Neil agreed. "But there are things we can do to help."

And they do. They all make small adjustments, simple things that make Andrew's life easier. He and Neil even learn ASL together. It increases the amount Andrew calls them all annoying ten-fold, but he secretly appreciates it.

[jcmarchi]

Google at NeurIPS 2023

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/google-at-neurips-2023/

Google at NeurIPS 2023

This week the 37th annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023), the biggest machine learning conference of the year, kicks off in New Orleans, LA. Google is proud to be a Diamond Level sponsor of NeurIPS this year and will have a strong presence with >170 accepted papers, two keynote talks, and additional contributions to the broader research community through organizational support and involvement in >20 workshops and tutorials. Google is also proud to be a Platinum Sponsor for both the Women in Machine Learning and LatinX in AI workshops. We look forward to sharing some of our extensive ML research and expanding our partnership with the broader ML research community.

Attending for NeurIPS 2023 in person? Come visit the Google Research booth to learn more about the exciting work we’re doing to solve some of the field’s most interesting challenges. Visit the @GoogleAI X (Twitter) account to find out about Google booth activities (e.g., demos and Q&A sessions).

You can learn more about our latest cutting edge work being presented at the conference in the list below (Google affiliations highlighted in bold). And see Google DeepMind’s blog to learn more about their participation at NeurIPS 2023.

Anonymous Learning via Look-Alike Clustering: A Precise Analysis of Model Generalization Adel Javanmard, Vahab Mirrokni

Better Private Linear Regression Through Better Private Feature Selection Travis Dick, Jennifer Gillenwater*, Matthew Joseph

Binarized Neural Machine Translation Yichi Zhang, Ankush Garg, Yuan Cao, Łukasz Lew, Behrooz Ghorbani*, Zhiru Zhang, Orhan Firat

BoardgameQA: A Dataset for Natural Language Reasoning with Contradictory Information Mehran Kazemi, Quan Yuan, Deepti Bhatia, Najoung Kim, Xin Xu, Vaiva Imbrasaite, Deepak Ramachandran

Boosting with Tempered Exponential Measures Richard Nock, Ehsan Amid, Manfred Warmuth

Concept Algebra for (Score-Based) Text-Controlled Generative Models Zihao Wang, Lin Gui, Jeffrey Negrea, Victor Veitch

Deep Contract Design via Discontinuous Networks Tonghan Wang, Paul Dütting, Dmitry Ivanov, Inbal Talgam-Cohen, David C. Parkes

Diffusion-SS3D: Diffusion Model for Semi-supervised 3D Object Detection Cheng-Ju Ho, Chen-Hsuan Tai, Yen-Yu Lin, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Yi-Hsuan Tsai

Eliciting User Preferences for Personalized Multi-Objective Decision Making through Comparative Feedback Han Shao, Lee Cohen, Avrim Blum, Yishay Mansour, Aadirupa Saha, Matthew Walter

Gradient Descent with Linearly Correlated Noise: Theory and Applications to Differential Privacy Anastasia Koloskova*, Ryan McKenna, Zachary Charles, J Keith Rush, Hugh Brendan McMahan

Hardness of Low Rank Approximation of Entrywise Transformed Matrix Products Tamas Sarlos, Xingyou Song, David P. Woodruff, Qiuyi (Richard) Zhang

Module-wise Adaptive Distillation for Multimodality Foundation Models

Chen Liang, Jiahui Yu, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Matthew Brown, Yin Cui, Tuo Zhao, Boqing Gong, Tianyi Zhou

Multi-Swap k-Means++ Lorenzo Beretta, Vincent Cohen-Addad, Silvio Lattanzi, Nikos Parotsidis

OpenMask3D: Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation Ayça Takmaz, Elisabetta Fedele, Robert Sumner, Marc Pollefeys, Federico Tombari, Francis Engelmann

Order Matters in the Presence of Dataset Imbalance for Multilingual Learning Dami Choi*, Derrick Xin, Hamid Dadkhahi, Justin Gilmer, Ankush Garg, Orhan Firat, Chih-Kuan Yeh, Andrew M. Dai, Behrooz Ghorbani

PopSign ASL v1.0: An Isolated American Sign Language Dataset Collected via Smartphones Thad Starner, Sean Forbes, Matthew So, David Martin, Rohit Sridhar, Gururaj Deshpande, Sam Sepah, Sahir Shahryar, Khushi Bhardwaj, Tyler Kwok, Daksh Sehgal, Saad Hassan, Bill Neubauer, Sofia Vempala, Alec Tan, Jocelyn Heath, Unnathi Kumar, Priyanka Mosur, Tavenner Hall, Rajandeep Singh, Christopher Cui, Glenn Cameron, Sohier Dane, Garrett Tanzer

Semi-Implicit Denoising Diffusion Models (SIDDMs) Yanwu Xu*, Mingming Gong, Shaoan Xie, Wei Wei, Matthias Grundmann, Kayhan Batmanghelich, Tingbo Hou

State2Explanation: Concept-Based Explanations to Benefit Agent Learning and User Understanding Devleena Das, Sonia Chernova, Been Kim

StoryBench: A Multifaceted Benchmark for Continuous Story Visualization Emanuele Bugliarello*, Hernan Moraldo, Ruben Villegas, Mohammad Babaeizadeh, Mohammad Taghi Saffar, Han Zhang, Dumitru Erhan, Vittorio Ferrari, Pieter-Jan Kindermans, Paul Voigtlaender

Subject-driven Text-to-Image Generation via Apprenticeship Learning Wenhu Chen, Hexiang Hu, Yandong Li, Nataniel Ruiz, Xuhui Jia, Ming-Wei Chang, William W. Cohen

TpuGraphs: A Performance Prediction Dataset on Large Tensor Computational Graphs Phitchaya Mangpo Phothilimthana, Sami Abu-El-Haija, Kaidi Cao*, Bahare Fatemi, Mike Burrows, Charith Mendis*, Bryan Perozzi

Training Chain-of-Thought via Latent-Variable Inference Du Phan, Matthew D. Hoffman, David Dohan*, Sholto Douglas, Tuan Anh Le, Aaron Parisi, Pavel Sountsov, Charles Sutton, Sharad Vikram, Rif A. Saurous

Unified Lower Bounds for Interactive High-dimensional Estimation under Information Constraints Jayadev Acharya, Clement L. Canonne, Ziteng Sun, Himanshu Tyagi

What You See is What You Read? Improving Text-Image Alignment Evaluation Michal Yarom, Yonatan Bitton, Soravit Changpinyo, Roee Aharoni, Jonathan Herzig, Oran Lang, Eran Ofek, Idan Szpektor

When Does Confidence-Based Cascade Deferral Suffice? Wittawat Jitkrittum, Neha Gupta, Aditya Krishna Menon, Harikrishna Narasimhan, Ankit Singh Rawat, Sanjiv Kumar

Accelerating Molecular Graph Neural Networks via Knowledge Distillation Filip Ekström Kelvinius, Dimitar Georgiev, Artur Petrov Toshev, Johannes Gasteiger

AVIS: Autonomous Visual Information Seeking with Large Language Model Agent Ziniu Hu*, Ahmet Iscen, Chen Sun, Kai-Wei Chang, Yizhou Sun, David Ross, Cordelia Schmid, Alireza Fathi

Beyond Invariance: Test-Time Label-Shift Adaptation for Addressing “Spurious” Correlations Qingyao Sun, Kevin Patrick Murphy, Sayna Ebrahimi, Alexander D’Amour

Collaborative Score Distillation for Consistent Visual Editing Subin Kim, Kyungmin Lee, June Suk Choi, Jongheon Jeong, Kihyuk Sohn, Jinwoo Shin

CommonScenes: Generating Commonsense 3D Indoor Scenes with Scene Graphs Guangyao Zhai, Evin Pınar Örnek, Shun-Cheng Wu, Yan Di, Federico Tombari, Nassir Navab, Benjamin Busam

Computational Complexity of Learning Neural Networks: Smoothness and Degeneracy Amit Daniely, Nathan Srebro, Gal Vardi

A Computationally Efficient Sparsified Online Newton Method Fnu Devvrit*, Sai Surya Duvvuri, Rohan Anil, Vineet Gupta, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Inderjit S Dhillon

DDF-HO: Hand-Held Object Reconstruction via Conditional Directed Distance Field Chenyangguang Zhang, Yan Di, Ruida Zhang, Guangyao Zhai, Fabian Manhardt, Federico Tombari, Xiangyang Ji

Double Auctions with Two-sided Bandit Feedback Soumya Basu, Abishek Sankararaman

Grammar Prompting for Domain-Specific Language Generation with Large Language Models Bailin Wang, Zi Wang, Xuezhi Wang, Yuan Cao, Rif A. Saurous, Yoon Kim

Inconsistency, Instability, and Generalization Gap of Deep Neural Network Training Rie Johnson, Tong Zhang*

Large Graph Property Prediction via Graph Segment Training Kaidi Cao*, Phitchaya Mangpo Phothilimthana, Sami Abu-El-Haija, Dustin Zelle, Yanqi Zhou, Charith Mendis*, Jure Leskovec, Bryan Perozzi

On Computing Pairwise Statistics with Local Differential Privacy Badih Ghazi, Pritish Kamath, Ravi Kumar, Pasin Manurangsi, Adam Sealfon

On Student-teacher Deviations in Distillation: Does it Pay to Disobey? Vaishnavh Nagarajan, Aditya Krishna Menon, Srinadh Bhojanapalli, Hossein Mobahi, Sanjiv Kumar

Optimal Cross-learning for Contextual Bandits with Unknown Context Distributions Jon Schneider, Julian Zimmert

Near-Optimal k-Clustering in the Sliding Window Model David Woodruff, Peilin Zhong, Samson Zhou

Post Hoc Explanations of Language Models Can Improve Language Models Satyapriya Krishna, Jiaqi Ma, Dylan Z Slack, Asma Ghandeharioun, Sameer Singh, Himabindu Lakkaraju

Recommender Systems with Generative Retrieval Shashank Rajput*, Nikhil Mehta, Anima Singh, Raghunandan Hulikal Keshavan, Trung Vu, Lukasz Heldt, Lichan Hong, Yi Tay, Vinh Q. Tran, Jonah Samost, Maciej Kula, Ed H. Chi, Maheswaran Sathiamoorthy

Reinforcement Learning for Fine-tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models Ying Fan, Olivia Watkins, Yuqing Du, Hao Liu, Moonkyung Ryu, Craig Boutilier, Pieter Abbeel, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh*, Kangwook Lee, Kimin Lee*

Replicable Clustering Hossein Esfandiari, Amin Karbasi, Vahab Mirrokni, Grigoris Velegkas, Felix Zhou

Replicability in Reinforcement Learning Amin Karbasi, Grigoris Velegkas, Lin Yang, Felix Zhou

Riemannian Projection-free Online Learning Zihao Hu, Guanghui Wang, Jacob Abernethy

Sharpness-Aware Minimization Leads to Low-Rank Features Maksym Andriushchenko, Dara Bahri, Hossein Mobahi, Nicolas Flammarion

What is the Inductive Bias of Flatness Regularization? A Study of Deep Matrix Factorization Models Khashayar Gatmiry, Zhiyuan Li, Ching-Yao Chuang, Sashank Reddi, Tengyu Ma, Stefanie Jegelka

Block Low-Rank Preconditioner with Shared Basis for Stochastic Optimization Jui-Nan Yen, Sai Surya Duvvuri, Inderjit S Dhillon, Cho-Jui Hsieh

Blocked Collaborative Bandits: Online Collaborative Filtering with Per-Item Budget Constraints Soumyabrata Pal, Arun Sai Suggala, Karthikeyan Shanmugam, Prateek Jain

Boundary Guided Learning-Free Semantic Control with Diffusion Models Ye Zhu, Yu Wu, Zhiwei Deng, Olga Russakovsky, Yan Yan

Conditional Adapters: Parameter-efficient Transfer Learning with Fast Inference Tao Lei, Junwen Bai, Siddhartha Brahma, Joshua Ainslie, Kenton Lee, Yanqi Zhou, Nan Du*, Vincent Y. Zhao, Yuexin Wu, Bo Li, Yu Zhang, Ming-Wei Chang

Conformal Prediction for Time Series with Modern Hopfield Networks Andreas Auer, Martin Gauch, Daniel Klotz, Sepp Hochreiter

Does Visual Pretraining Help End-to-End Reasoning? Chen Sun, Calvin Luo, Xingyi Zhou, Anurag Arnab, Cordelia Schmid

Effective Robustness Against Natural Distribution Shifts for Models with Different Training Data Zhouxing Shi*, Nicholas Carlini, Ananth Balashankar, Ludwig Schmidt, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Alex Beutel*, Yao Qin

Improving Neural Network Representations Using Human Similarity Judgments Lukas Muttenthaler*, Lorenz Linhardt, Jonas Dippel, Robert A. Vandermeulen, Katherine Hermann, Andrew K. Lampinen, Simon Kornblith

Label Robust and Differentially Private Linear Regression: Computational and Statistical Efficiency Xiyang Liu, Prateek Jain, Weihao Kong, Sewoong Oh, Arun Sai Suggala

Mnemosyne: Learning to Train Transformers with Transformers Deepali Jain, Krzysztof Choromanski, Avinava Dubey, Sumeet Singh, Vikas Sindhwani, Tingnan Zhang, Jie Tan

Nash Regret Guarantees for Linear Bandits Ayush Sawarni, Soumyabrata Pal, Siddharth Barman

A Near-Linear Time Algorithm for the Chamfer Distance Ainesh Bakshi, Piotr Indyk, Rajesh Jayaram, Sandeep Silwal, Erik Waingarten.

On Differentially Private Sampling from Gaussian and Product Distributions Badih Ghazi, Xiao Hu*, Ravi Kumar, Pasin Manurangsi

On Dynamic Programming Decompositions of Static Risk Measures in Markov Decision Processes Jia Lin Hau, Erick Delage, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh*, Marek Petrik

ResMem: Learn What You Can and Memorize the Rest Zitong Yang, Michal Lukasik, Vaishnavh Nagarajan, Zonglin Li, Ankit Singh Rawat, Manzil Zaheer, Aditya Krishna Menon, Sanjiv Kumar

Responsible AI (RAI) Games and Ensembles Yash Gupta, Runtian Zhai, Arun Suggala, Pradeep Ravikumar

RoboCLIP: One Demonstration Is Enough to Learn Robot Policies Sumedh A Sontakke, Jesse Zhang, Sébastien M. R. Arnold, Karl Pertsch, Erdem Biyik, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn, Laurent Itti

Robust Concept Erasure via Kernelized Rate-Distortion Maximization Somnath Basu Roy Chowdhury, Nicholas Monath, Kumar Avinava Dubey, Amr Ahmed, Snigdha Chaturvedi

Robust Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Adversarial Regularization: Theoretical Foundation and Stable Algorithms Alexander Bukharin, Yan Li, Yue Yu, Qingru Zhang, Zhehui Chen, Simiao Zuo, Chao Zhang, Songan Zhang, Tuo Zhao

Simplicity Bias in 1-Hidden Layer Neural Networks Depen Morwani*, Jatin Batra, Prateek Jain, Praneeth Netrapalli

SLaM: Student-Label Mixing for Distillation with Unlabeled Examples Vasilis Kontonis, Fotis Iliopoulos, Khoa Trinh, Cenk Baykal, Gaurav Menghani, Erik Vee

SNAP: Self-Supervised Neural Maps for Visual Positioning and Semantic Understanding Paul-Edouard Sarlin*, Eduard Trulls, Marc Pollefeys, Jan Hosang, Simon Lynen

SOAR: Improved Indexing for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search Philip Sun, David Simcha, Dave Dopson, Ruiqi Guo, Sanjiv Kumar

StyleDrop: Text-to-Image Synthesis of Any Style Kihyuk Sohn, Lu Jiang, Jarred Barber, Kimin Lee*, Nataniel Ruiz, Dilip Krishnan, Huiwen Chang*, Yuanzhen Li, Irfan Essa, Michael Rubinstein, Yuan Hao, Glenn Entis, Irina Blok, Daniel Castro Chin

Three Towers: Flexible Contrastive Learning with Pretrained Image Models Jannik Kossen*, Mark Collier, Basil Mustafa, Xiao Wang, Xiaohua Zhai, Lucas Beyer, Andreas Steiner, Jesse Berent, Rodolphe Jenatton, Efi Kokiopoulou

Two-Stage Learning to Defer with Multiple Experts Anqi Mao, Christopher Mohri, Mehryar Mohri, Yutao Zhong

AdANNS: A Framework for Adaptive Semantic Search Aniket Rege, Aditya Kusupati, Sharan Ranjit S, Alan Fan, Qingqing Cao, Sham Kakade, Prateek Jain, Ali Farhadi

Cappy: Outperforming and Boosting Large Multi-Task LMs with a Small Scorer Bowen Tan*, Yun Zhu, Lijuan Liu, Eric Xing, Zhiting Hu, Jindong Chen

Causal-structure Driven Augmentations for Text OOD Generalization Amir Feder, Yoav Wald, Claudia Shi, Suchi Saria, David Blei

Dense-Exponential Random Features: Sharp Positive Estimators of the Gaussian Kernel Valerii Likhosherstov, Krzysztof Choromanski, Avinava Dubey, Frederick Liu, Tamas Sarlos, Adrian Weller

Diffusion Hyperfeatures: Searching Through Time and Space for Semantic Correspondence Grace Luo, Lisa Dunlap, Dong Huk Park, Aleksander Holynski, Trevor Darrell

Diffusion Self-Guidance for Controllable Image Generation Dave Epstein, Allan Jabri, Ben Poole, Alexei A Efros, Aleksander Holynski

Fully Dynamic k-Clustering in Õ(k) Update Time Sayan Bhattacharya, Martin Nicolas Costa, Silvio Lattanzi, Nikos Parotsidis

Improving CLIP Training with Language Rewrites Lijie Fan, Dilip Krishnan, Phillip Isola, Dina Katabi, Yonglong Tian

<!–k-Means Clustering with Distance-Based Privacy Alessandro Epasto, Vahab Mirrokni, Shyam Narayanan, Peilin Zhong

–>

LayoutGPT: Compositional Visual Planning and Generation with Large Language Models Weixi Feng, Wanrong Zhu, Tsu-Jui Fu, Varun Jampani, Arjun Reddy Akula, Xuehai He, Sugato Basu, Xin Eric Wang, William Yang Wang

Offline Reinforcement Learning for Mixture-of-Expert Dialogue Management Dhawal Gupta*, Yinlam Chow, Azamat Tulepbergenov, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh*, Craig Boutilier

Optimal Unbiased Randomizers for Regression with Label Differential Privacy Ashwinkumar Badanidiyuru, Badih Ghazi, Pritish Kamath, Ravi Kumar, Ethan Jacob Leeman, Pasin Manurangsi, Avinash V Varadarajan, Chiyuan Zhang

Paraphrasing Evades Detectors of AI-generated Text, but Retrieval Is an Effective Defense Kalpesh Krishna, Yixiao Song, Marzena Karpinska, John Wieting, Mohit Iyyer

ReMaX: Relaxing for Better Training on Efficient Panoptic Segmentation Shuyang Sun*, Weijun Wang, Qihang Yu*, Andrew Howard, Philip Torr, Liang-Chieh Chen*

Robust and Actively Secure Serverless Collaborative Learning Nicholas Franzese, Adam Dziedzic, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Mark R. Thomas, Muhammad Ahmad Kaleem, Stephan Rabanser, Congyu Fang, Somesh Jha, Nicolas Papernot, Xiao Wang

SpecTr: Fast Speculative Decoding via Optimal Transport Ziteng Sun, Ananda Theertha Suresh, Jae Hun Ro, Ahmad Beirami, Himanshu Jain, Felix Yu

Structured Prediction with Stronger Consistency Guarantees Anqi Mao, Mehryar Mohri, Yutao Zhong

Affinity-Aware Graph Networks Ameya Velingker, Ali Kemal Sinop, Ira Ktena, Petar Veličković, Sreenivas Gollapudi

ARTIC3D: Learning Robust Articulated 3D Shapes from Noisy Web Image Collections Chun-Han Yao*, Amit Raj, Wei-Chih Hung, Yuanzhen Li, Michael Rubinstein, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Varun Jampani

Black-Box Differential Privacy for Interactive ML Haim Kaplan, Yishay Mansour, Shay Moran, Kobbi Nissim, Uri Stemmer

Bypassing the Simulator: Near-Optimal Adversarial Linear Contextual Bandits Haolin Liu, Chen-Yu Wei, Julian Zimmert

DaTaSeg: Taming a Universal Multi-Dataset Multi-Task Segmentation Model

Xiuye Gu, Yin Cui*, Jonathan Huang, Abdullah Rashwan, Xuan Yang, Xingyi Zhou, Golnaz Ghiasi, Weicheng Kuo, Huizhong Chen, Liang-Chieh Chen*, David Ross

Easy Learning from Label Proportions Robert Busa-Fekete, Heejin Choi*, Travis Dick, Claudio Gentile, Andres Munoz Medina

Efficient Data Subset Selection to Generalize Training Across Models: Transductive and Inductive Networks Eeshaan Jain, Tushar Nandy, Gaurav Aggarwal, Ashish Tendulkar, Rishabh Iyer, Abir De

Faster Differentially Private Convex Optimization via Second-Order Methods Arun Ganesh, Mahdi Haghifam*, Thomas Steinke, Abhradeep Guha Thakurta

Finding Safe Zones of Markov Decision Processes Policies Lee Cohen, Yishay Mansour, Michal Moshkovitz

Focused Transformer: Contrastive Training for Context Scaling Szymon Tworkowski, Konrad Staniszewski, Mikołaj Pacek, Yuhuai Wu*, Henryk Michalewski, Piotr Miłoś

Front-door Adjustment Beyond Markov Equivalence with Limited Graph Knowledge Abhin Shah, Karthikeyan Shanmugam, Murat Kocaoglu

H-Consistency Bounds: Characterization and Extensions Anqi Mao, Mehryar Mohri, Yutao Zhong

Inverse Dynamics Pretraining Learns Good Representations for Multitask Imitation David Brandfonbrener, Ofir Nachum, Joan Bruna

Most Neural Networks Are Almost Learnable Amit Daniely, Nathan Srebro, Gal Vardi

Multiclass Boosting: Simple and Intuitive Weak Learning Criteria Nataly Brukhim, Amit Daniely, Yishay Mansour, Shay Moran

NeRF Revisited: Fixing Quadrature Instability in Volume Rendering Mikaela Angelina Uy, Kiyohiro Nakayama, Guandao Yang, Rahul Krishna Thomas, Leonidas Guibas, Ke Li

Privacy Amplification via Compression: Achieving the Optimal Privacy-Accuracy-Communication Trade-off in Distributed Mean Estimation Wei-Ning Chen, Dan Song, Ayfer Ozgur, Peter Kairouz

Private Federated Frequency Estimation: Adapting to the Hardness of the Instance Jingfeng Wu*, Wennan Zhu, Peter Kairouz, Vladimir Braverman

RETVec: Resilient and Efficient Text Vectorizer Elie Bursztein, Marina Zhang, Owen Skipper Vallis, Xinyu Jia, Alexey Kurakin

Symbolic Discovery of Optimization Algorithms Xiangning Chen*, Chen Liang, Da Huang, Esteban Real, Kaiyuan Wang, Hieu Pham, Xuanyi Dong, Thang Luong, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Yifeng Lu, Quoc V. Le

A Tale of Two Features: Stable Diffusion Complements DINO for Zero-Shot Semantic Correspondence Junyi Zhang, Charles Herrmann, Junhwa Hur, Luisa F. Polania, Varun Jampani, Deqing Sun, Ming-Hsuan Yang

A Trichotomy for Transductive Online Learning Steve Hanneke, Shay Moran, Jonathan Shafer

A Unified Fast Gradient Clipping Framework for DP-SGD William Kong, Andres Munoz Medina

Unleashing the Power of Randomization in Auditing Differentially Private ML Krishna Pillutla, Galen Andrew, Peter Kairouz, H. Brendan McMahan, Alina Oprea, Sewoong Oh

(Amplified) Banded Matrix Factorization: A unified approach to private training Christopher A Choquette-Choo, Arun Ganesh, Ryan McKenna, H Brendan McMahan, Keith Rush, Abhradeep Guha Thakurta, Zheng Xu

Adversarial Resilience in Sequential Prediction via Abstention Surbhi Goel, Steve Hanneke, Shay Moran, Abhishek Shetty

Alternating Gradient Descent and Mixture-of-Experts for Integrated Multimodal Perception Hassan Akbari, Dan Kondratyuk, Yin Cui, Rachel Hornung, Huisheng Wang, Hartwig Adam

Android in the Wild: A Large-Scale Dataset for Android Device Control Christopher Rawles, Alice Li, Daniel Rodriguez, Oriana Riva, Timothy Lillicrap

Benchmarking Robustness to Adversarial Image Obfuscations Florian Stimberg, Ayan Chakrabarti, Chun-Ta Lu, Hussein Hazimeh, Otilia Stretcu, Wei Qiao, Yintao Liu, Merve Kaya, Cyrus Rashtchian, Ariel Fuxman, Mehmet Tek, Sven Gowal

Building Socio-culturally Inclusive Stereotype Resources with Community Engagement Sunipa Dev, Jaya Goyal, Dinesh Tewari, Shachi Dave, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran

Consensus and Subjectivity of Skin Tone Annotation for ML Fairness Candice Schumann, Gbolahan O Olanubi, Auriel Wright, Ellis Monk Jr*, Courtney Heldreth, Susanna Ricco

Counting Distinct Elements Under Person-Level Differential Privacy Alexander Knop, Thomas Steinke

DICES Dataset: Diversity in Conversational AI Evaluation for Safety Lora Aroyo, Alex S. Taylor, Mark Diaz, Christopher M. Homan, Alicia Parrish, Greg Serapio-García, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Ding Wang

Does Progress on ImageNet Transfer to Real-world Datasets? Alex Fang, Simon Kornblith, Ludwig Schmidt

Estimating Generic 3D Room Structures from 2D Annotations Denys Rozumnyi*, Stefan Popov, Kevis-kokitsi Maninis, Matthias Nießner, Vittorio Ferrari

Large Language Model as Attributed Training Data Generator: A Tale of Diversity and Bias Yue Yu, Yuchen Zhuang, Jieyu Zhang, Yu Meng, Alexander Ratner, Ranjay Krishna, Jiaming Shen, Chao Zhang

MADLAD-400: A Multilingual And Document-Level Large Audited Dataset Sneha Kudugunta, Isaac Caswell, Biao Zhang, Xavier Garcia, Derrick Xin, Aditya Kusupati, Romi Stella, Ankur Bapna, Orhan Firat

Mechanic: A Learning Rate Tuner Ashok Cutkosky, Aaron Defazio, Harsh Mehta

NAVI: Category-Agnostic Image Collections with High-Quality 3D Shape and Pose Annotations Varun Jampani, Kevis-kokitsi Maninis, Andreas Engelhardt, Arjun Karpur, Karen Truong, Kyle Sargent, Stefan Popov, Andre Araujo, Ricardo Martin Brualla, Kaushal Patel, Daniel Vlasic, Vittorio Ferrari, Ameesh Makadia, Ce Liu*, Yuanzhen Li, Howard Zhou

Neural Ideal Large Eddy Simulation: Modeling Turbulence with Neural Stochastic Differential Equations Anudhyan Boral, Zhong Yi Wan, Leonardo Zepeda-Nunez, James Lottes, Qing Wang, Yi-Fan Chen, John Roberts Anderson, Fei Sha

Restart Sampling for Improving Generative Processes Yilun Xu, Mingyang Deng, Xiang Cheng, Yonglong Tian, Ziming Liu, Tommi Jaakkola

Rethinking Incentives in Recommender Systems: Are Monotone Rewards Always Beneficial? Fan Yao, Chuanhao Li, Karthik Abinav Sankararaman, Yiming Liao, Yan Zhu, Qifan Wang, Hongning Wang, Haifeng Xu

Revisiting Evaluation Metrics for Semantic Segmentation: Optimization and Evaluation of Fine-grained Intersection over Union Zifu Wang, Maxim Berman, Amal Rannen-Triki, Philip Torr, Devis Tuia, Tinne Tuytelaars, Luc Van Gool, Jiaqian Yu, Matthew B. Blaschko

RoboHive: A Unified Framework for Robot Learning Vikash Kumar, Rutav Shah, Gaoyue Zhou, Vincent Moens, Vittorio Caggiano, Abhishek Gupta, Aravind Rajeswaran

SatBird: Bird Species Distribution Modeling with Remote Sensing and Citizen Science Data Mélisande Teng, Amna Elmustafa, Benjamin Akera, Yoshua Bengio, Hager Radi, Hugo Larochelle, David Rolnick

Sparsity-Preserving Differentially Private Training of Large Embedding Models Badih Ghazi, Yangsibo Huang*, Pritish Kamath, Ravi Kumar, Pasin Manurangsi, Amer Sinha, Chiyuan Zhang

StableRep: Synthetic Images from Text-to-Image Models Make Strong Visual Representation Learners Yonglong Tian, Lijie Fan, Phillip Isola, Huiwen Chang, Dilip Krishnan

Towards Federated Foundation Models: Scalable Dataset Pipelines for Group-Structured Learning Zachary Charles, Nicole Mitchell, Krishna Pillutla, Michael Reneer, Zachary Garrett

Universality and Limitations of Prompt Tuning Yihan Wang, Jatin Chauhan, Wei Wang, Cho-Jui Hsieh

Unsupervised Semantic Correspondence Using Stable Diffusion Eric Hedlin, Gopal Sharma, Shweta Mahajan, Hossam Isack, Abhishek Kar, Andrea Tagliasacchi, Kwang Moo Yi

YouTube-ASL: A Large-Scale, Open-Domain American Sign Language-English Parallel Corpus Dave Uthus, Garrett Tanzer, Manfred Georg

The Noise Level in Linear Regression with Dependent Data Ingvar Ziemann, Stephen Tu, George J. Pappas, Nikolai Matni

[sweeterthanyou-blog]

Reblog because I am apparently not done

Renee and Ronan going to church together on Sundays

Adam struggles a little on court since losing half his hearing and Neil has been learning ASL for the last year so he teaches Adam and Kevin and later the team some basic signs to use on court when Adam plays.

Aaron: “oh god not another one” when he first sees Adam and Ronan being affectionate to each other. So he is incredibly happy to see Gansey and Blue tip the scales in more in the “straight” favour (jokes on you Aaron the Gangsey are all a bit in love with each other)

Adam becomes the unofficial fox mechanic. He’s working on the pig one day when Matt comes out and asks him to check something in his truck. From then on he’s always called of the foxes’ cars start making weird sounds. It takes a while before he’s finally allowed to look at the Maserati though.

The first time Gansey, Ronan or Adam speak Latin Andrew is immediately annoyed and makes a mental note to add it to his list of languages

Just picture Neil absolutely LOVING the Squash song. Him and Ronan pull pranks on the others with it all the time.

Awkward scenario where Neil’s past is brought up in front of Blue and the boys, Neil turns to them and says “My dad is the butcher of Baltimore” for context (he’s surprised to learn they don’t already know but that’s what happens when you’re trying to wake Glendower, you’re not caught up on recent news). He’s tense for bad reactions, blue responds “that’s okay, we can’t chose who our parents are. My dad is a tree”.

Every time Adam scores a goal him and Gansey make eye contact from wherever they are on the Court and say “yeehaw”. The foxes are confused, but Blue and Ronan are used to it and just roll their eyes.

Though the foxes eventually come to accept Gansey as one of them (helps when they all hear his past), the Fox fans are not so accepting. Gansey starts being harassed at the start of the school year for “not being a real fox” and understandably it takes its toll on him believing his friends would be better off if he dropped out.

Ronan: “I told them it’s either all of us or none of us. Fuck them. You are just as much a fox as the rest of us. if you’re out we’re all out” with Adam and Blue nodding right beside him. Gansey is once again reminded of how much he is loved and after the first week the harassment dies off as the fans begin focus on something else.

Adam does readings for the foxes one night. They all think Andrew will flat out refuse, and whilst he hesitates, he’s very intrigued. He had a foster mother who was obsessed with tarot cards. Would do his readings every night. He would always gets ones like the “10 of swords” or “the devil” and even “death”. But Adam is supposed to be the real thing, and though Andrew is not one to believe in fate, or destiny, his curiosity gets the better of him. When Adam draws his card, it is the Ten of Cups. Later, Andrew searches it up it’s meaning, the card shows long lasting happiness and is the card of contentment, looking at Neil sleeping soundly beside him, Andrew allows a small smile to play across his lips and this perhaps it might be right :)

After Dan, Allison and Renee graduate Blue moves in with Gansey, Ronan and Adam and finally gets her dream of living with her boys

In Neil’s final year, after the og foxes have all graduated he also moves in with Blue and the Boys. Just imagine him fitting in nicely with each other and Neil not being so scared now that Andrews gone with them around :)

Everyone expects Neil to pick Gansey as his Co-captain. He is a pro and a born leader and Blue and the boys would follow him to the end of the world so he is the obvious choice. Neil picks Blue instead.

Just imagine Blue thriving in this leadership position. This small, temperamental but loving girl as the captain in her final year. Her boys are fiercely loyal and the rest of the foxes follow her happily.

Ronan only goes pro with Gansey and Blue for the years it takes Adam to complete Law school. When Adam graduates Ronan retires and they both head back to Cabeswater. Ronan becomes a farmer, Adam sets up his own firm and they settle nicely into the quiet life.

Blues leadership role in the Foxes motivates her when she goes pro. She uses her fame to advocate and raise money to go to public school funding for exy, remembering her own lack of resources and how it was a stroke of luck that got her to where she is.

She also brings attention to the socio-economic bias present in the NCAA. Drawing attention to the statistics that show more far more recruitment to plays from private schools than public. She becomes fiercely passionate about the subject and Gansey of course stands right behind her supporting her the whole time. When they both retire blue sets her sights on at position on the NCAA council. She gets it of course and starts making a huge difference within the sport.

read an incomplete fic crossover where blue and the raven boys join the foxes and i didn’t know it was something I needed till now so here are some of my thoughts because the fic hasn’t been updated in 2 years

The gangsey playing Exy in highschool.

Gansey is a pro because he started so young. He plays a dealer and has many opportunities lined up for college. (Edgar Allen Poe tried to recruit him in his senior year but this was when everything that occurred in aftg went down so it was obviously declined)

Ronan is actually extremely passionate about the sport (he won’t turn up to class but you bet he’s at every practice). The teachers and Gansey eventually have to use it as a punishment, if he gets kicked out of school he can’t play. He of course is a back liner

Adam is reluctant to play. Between working two jobs and maintaining his good grades to keep his scholarship, he doesn’t think he has the time, but the others rope him into it. He’s actually a natural at it. He plays a striker.

Blue plays at her school. There’s a competition between her team and Aglionby Academy where she first meets the boys. She’s angry because they clearly have more funds compared to the public school system. They’re stuck up private school boys who will a guaranteed to be recruited. She’s a goal keeper (sticking to the og fic) and is a pro, but knows she doesn’t have what it takes to go further both skill wise and financially.

Ronan is the one who catches Kevin and Neil’s eyes. He obviously fits the foxes profile, but Ronan only agrees on the condition the others can come too.

Wymack hesitates, Adam certainly fits the profile as well, and Blue, due to her social-economic state might just be able to make the cut. But Gansey? The son of a rich Republican who certainly doesn’t need the scholarship? No way. But Kevin and Neil insist that they can have Ronan and no one else.

Ronan insists that it’s all or nothing, even going as far as to tell wymack that Gansey does in fact fit his “stupid profile” (I mean come on the boy died twice)

Poor wymack gets flashbacks to Adrews all or nothing deal but eventually agrees and so blue and her raven boys become the only freshmen’s to join the foxes in Neil’s Sophomore year.

Some of the foxes are not too keen on Gansey (I mean you would be too with him screaming ��privilege” - we still love you though Dick <3). Although there is some solidarity between Gansey and Allison.

Blue, Ronan and Adam protect him fiercely (they love their king) which obviously creates some tension between the original foxes and the Gangsey

But no one can deny their obvious talents.

Gansey of course begins looking into any potential ley lines in the area.

Adam and Neil get on quiet well though both Ronan and Andrew are hesitant with each other.

Blue and Renee become fast friends and go volunteer together at the local shelters regularly.

Kevin clings to Gansey due to his talent (he’d originally caught Kevin’s eye while recruiting but knew he wouldn’t fit the profile so had disappointedly discarded his file. This was actually what led him to find Ronan and so all in all it was a big win for Kevin). The two also become fast friends due to their mutual love for history (Gansey immediately tells him all about ley lines and his research into Glendower, and what he’s looking at now)

Theirs is an interesting dynamic for the reader because Gansey is basically who Kevin wouldve been had he grown in a more stable and healthy environment (both privileged boys with their obsessions towards history and exy)

The gangsey are very closed off at first about the events of their “The Raven King”. It’s not every day someone tells you they can pull things out of their dreams or die and come back

Also in this Noah is not forgotten and in fact makes regular appearances both in the dorms, in classes, at the court, etc. he comes to every game to support his friends

This freaks out the foxes of course. The Gangsey and Noah aren’t shy about the whole “he’s been dead for 7 8 years” but no one believes them

Takes some time and context but when they find out about Gansey dying twice the foxes all collectively are just like “oh” because yes that man right there IS a fox.

Blue and Adam both taking a massive sigh of relief because not only do their scholarships cover for everything but they get to stick with their boys :)

Blues dream of going pro might actually be realised (she’s taken under Renee’s belt and improves and eventually Andrew warms up to her that he’ll give her pointers)

Adam still loves exy but like Aaron he’s in it for the scholarship and university degree (on his way to be a lawyer) and they get on really well because of it

Ronan and Andrew bonding over tattoos and Ronan dreams up a permanent tattoo in the style of temporary tattoos that can be stuck on so Andrew doesn’t have a stranger tattooing him.

Okay Ronan is a bad influence and may or may not have gotten Andrew into the idea of car racing (which both Adam and Neil are NOT happy about that)

Someone making a joke that the real reason Gansey fits the fox profile is because he drives around in The Pig (probably Aaron or Nicky). Andrew hates the sight of it but Neil secretly loves it because it’s orange.

The og foxes all freaked out by Chainsaw at first but she quickly becomes an honorary fox. The press one time makes a bad joke involving a certain connection with the foxes having a pet Raven and their rivalry with Edgar Allen Poe so Ronan teachers her to say “fuck Edgar Allen Poe” on live tv. It goes viral.

Chaotic raven boys sharing a dorm. They all miss the comfort of Monmouth Manufacturing so their first order of business after arriving is moving the fridge into the bathroom (much to Blues disgust).

Blue getting some quality girl time with Dan, Allison and Renee

We all love the Kevin, Neil and Andrew pro dynamic now think about Blue, gansey and Ronan all on a pro team one day. Adam and Noah and Matthew and Declan and Helen and all the ladies and the grey man from 300 Fox Way come to all their games.

Idk about major plot points but just imagine the foxes and the Gangsey all following a new ley line story gansey found (with the help of Kevin).

Like seriously this combines 2 of my favourite things I could go on FOREVER I just love it so much.

[btsqualityy]

I swear all the Kim kids minus Kennedy would just elope! Junior did it in Vegas at 21. Aiden did it in California at 22. Brooklyn and Dae would too. Kennedy was like give me my fairy tale wedding plus baby girl is more traditional.

Also, I see Aiden plying his best games in Denver. Like they boy is on fire and is tearing up the court!!!!! The Lakers are up against major opponents and that whole week they win every game. He makes a basket and the crowd goes wild and Aiden makes the I love you sign in ASL (for Andrew) or finger hearts. Truth be told it’s because Aiden is happy and in love 🥰.

I think all the Kim kids would learn from Mason and Kinsley that when it’s right, it’s right 🥰and yes, getting married would have such a positive impact on him 🥰

[that-was-anticlimactic]

it’s three am and I should I be asleep but today is the ten year anniversary of Ninjago and I’m just... so so so happy and full of genuine joy. Ninjago is the reason I joined tumblr (even if I’m more atla now, I will always be Ninjago at my core), Ninjago is the reason I began to write as much as I do now, Ninjago helped me realize third person was my writing strong suite. Ninjago is... so much to me. I was there in 2011 when it started and I remember all of the raw emotions I felt watching the show.

Finding out Lloyd was the green ninja. The ninja getting younger and Lloyd growing older. Crying at the season two finale when Lloyd broke his leg and the rest of his team got hit and turned evil. I remember being devestated when Zane died. And being so happy when he came back. I vividly remember being in the car to Dairy Queen when I was in eighth grade when I first found out Cole became a ghost and I remember watching season five in other languages on YouTube just to see what happened.

I remember sitting on my bed crying over The Last Resort. I remember the fandom screaming when Maya and Ray entered the picture and when Lloyd said “Twins look alike”. I remember everyone guessing who Samurai X would be and who the baby was. I remember episode 92 of Ninjago when Harumi died and I remember saying “the resistance never quits” and feeling such power and confidence in myself. I remember crying when Cole fell— not just because he’s my favorite character, but also because Ninjago handled that scene so well. I remember learning the scene when Lloyd finds out Cole fell in asl and rewatching that scene at least twenty times a day. I remember telling my math teacher that episode 98 of Ninjago would be live-streamed during her class (senior year of high school) and that I had to watch it because I have been so mentally distraught about the fall all week and her kids loved the show too so she let me and I actually cried in class when Lloyd “died”.

I remember learning about Ninjago anime through tumblr. I remember screeching when Cole had the nightmares about falling and when Zane was the Ice Emperor. I remember getting so excited when I found out Scott and FugiDove were voiced by Adrian Petriw and that Cole fell once more. I remember season thirteen coming out and crying again because Cole finally has a season and it was so freaking good. I remember learning that Kirby Morrow died on November 19th, 2020.

I remember a family. I remember a passion. I remember the home I never felt like I had. I remember the true potential episodes. “I know who I am”, “you are the best you”, “I’m proud of who I am and I want you to be proud too”, “I knew when I had to make a choice”. I remember “we are so hooped”.

I remember love and heartbreak, tears and joy. I remember that the best way to defeat your enemy is to make them your friend. I remember bequeath. I remember “this isn’t about numbers, it’s about family!”. I remember Jay essentially telling Cole that his feelings for him are stronger than his feelings for his girlfriend. I remember “Chen can try his best to split up our team, but he’s about to find out what happens when we put ourselves back together”. I remember that as iron sharpens iron, brother sharpens brother. I will always remember the iconic “that was anticlimactic” from Kai.

I remember “save me, Jay Walker. There’s gonna be a wedding and I want you to do something about it”. I remember that if you want soenhnjng bad enough, you find a way to make it happen. I remember Day of the Departed and how kind Cole was to Yang, how he regained his mortality and was left with his scar. I remember Cole’s relationship with Wu, how close of a bond they had. I remember getting literal chills from Britt McKillip singing “spider’s in the house, sleep, sleep. Spider bit the mouse, sleep deep. Don’t wake up or else you’ll find a spider in your mouth”. I remember laughing so hard when Cole was singing as Rock Dangerbuff. I remember Jay going mad in the realm of Oni and Dragon. I remember seeing the bones of the Ultra Dragon. I remember being so excited to see the elemental masters (and Darreth) again. I remember “there’s more to life than surviving!”.

I remember being so happy to learn that s11-13 were going to happen. I remember Vex and Akita, Unagami and Scott, The Skull Sorcerer and Vania (the Geckles and Munce). I remember Lilly. I remember.

I remember Ninjago, a show that means more to me than I can fit into words. I remember a silly television show that changed my entire life. I remember characters who brought me joy when no one else could.

So I thank Cole, Kai, Jay, Zane, Lloyd, Nya, Pixal, Skylor, Garmadon, Wu (sometimes— if he’s not hiding stuff😂), Misako, Darreth, Ronin, Pythor, the other Elemental Masters, Cyrus Borg, Dr. Julien, Lou, Ray and Maya, Ed and Edna (I love them), Morro, Harumi, The Overlord, Mystake, Faith, and so many other characters.

Thank you, Kirby Morrow, Vincent Tong, Brent Miller, Michael Adamthwaite, Kelly Metzger, Jillian Michaels, Sam Vincent, Paul / Michael / Brian Dobson, Mark Oliver, Kathleen Barr, Jennifer Hayward, Heather Doerksen, Alan Marriott, Andrew Francis, Ian James Corlett, Britt McKillip, Scott McNeil, Tabitha St Germain, Lee Tockar, and so so so many others.

To Dan and Kevin Hageman, Tommy Andreasen, The Fold: thank you so much.

[philosophiums]

info-dumping about my original universes and characters post 1/2 (Hound Isle edition)

i’ll be nice and put this all under a read more kfjbvkjdfbvjkbfv

the world:

located in a fictional city in Maryland (city name is Barsboro but it’s locally known as Hound Isle [it’s a peninsula] though no one’s sure anymore where the nickname comes from)

some people have powers (it’s genetic but it’s recessive) and since those people are typically ridiculed and pushed to be outcasts they usually turn to lives of crime

the Hound Isle Mafia is the main group the story follows

they’re a large org. that more or less owns Barsboro, and they’re infamous along the east coast, so they get a lot of attention from the feds but also get a lot of powered people flocking to them to join their ranks

the characters:

Andrew (protagonist) - son of the mafia’s main hitman, he has an ability (emotion manipulation) but he’s intentionally never been taught how to use it (because he would be far too powerful if he had perfect control and his parents were afraid of that power). he’s grown up beaten for having the simple audacity of breathing, and that’s made him extremely closed off and violent towards strangers. he’s very quiet but incredibly intelligent with a near-perfect recall and an analytic mind. as much as his baseline instinct is to stab first and ask questions later, he’s fiercely protective of who he considers family and he will absolutely make himself a rock they can cling to no matter what. he has very strong personal boundaries but absolutely no sense of self worth, so he will kill you if you touch him but he’ll also die for his family without question. wants nothing more than to make out with Kasen and kill his father, not necessarily in that order. will at some point lose control of his ability and it Will Be Devastating

Kasen (deuteragonist) - kicked onto the street when he was still a pre-teen after his abilities (teleportation and shadow stealing) manifested, resulting in him killing some people. he was recruited into the mafia about a year later, where he met Andrew and immediately saw and recognized his bruises and decided to be friends. he quickly started making a name for himself within the mafia and outside of it, earning harsh nicknames like “demon” and “rabid dog.” the self he projects to the world is callus and cruel, a toothy smile bathed in blood. but to Andrew he’s always been a support pillar. for Andrew, he learned how to stitch and dress wounds correctly. for Andrew, he’ll drop whatever he’s doing, even if it’s a job. he’s an absolute bastard, and he has no care for any life that isn’t Andrew’s or his own. he’s a fierce killer and he’s proud of it, but he’s willing to tear down the the entire structure of the mafia if it means helping Andrew

Kara (secondary) - started her life as a runner for a tiny street gang in a town north of Barsboro, but after she was nearly killed, her gang members told her to go do something better with her life. at the time she was 16, and instead of, maybe, going to school, she decided to try to join the mafia. she doesn’t have an ability, and she’s not always the most tactful, but she’ll go toe to toe with someone as frightening as Kasen, and the Boss liked her gall so she was brought in. she’s under Andrew’s protection for reasons she’s unaware of (her old gang begged him to keep her safe, and Andrew promised them he would), and at this point she’s basically his annoying little sister. she has ADHD and severe anxiety, and while she’s learning to manage on her own, Andrew is a huge help in letting her get a grasp on her mental health. she’s addicted to caffeine and is a huge conspiracy theorist and cryptid lover

John (supporting) - ex-army doctor who was recruited to the mafia by his best friend (lover) who died like... two weeks after John got the job. he’s mostly the medic, but he’s also the Mafia Dad™ to a lot of the younger members. he’s one of the few people that Andrew considers family. no ability. he’s got a bad case of PTSD from his army days and he isn’t exactly dealing with that in a healthy way, but he’s a super big hypocrite about self care when it comes to the kids. the biggest martyr you’ll ever meet, to the point where you might start wondering if he’s really just trying to be killed but is too afraid die in a way that isn’t meaningful. trying his best but is falling apart. the only good adult™ but the bar is super low

Zoe (supporting) - recruited by the mafia at a young age because of her ability (can see 5 seconds into her own future at any time), but turned them away initially to continue helping her family (she’s the oldest of five siblings with both parents working their asses off to support them financially). when she graduated high school, she left home and joined the mafia, though she still visits her family on holidays. total mom friend. takes absolutely no shit and has kicked Kasen’s ass multiple times. very well-respected within the mafia and doesn’t really like Andrew or Kasen, though she does respect them

Poppy (supporting) - was a super normal person without an ability, but after her life was saved by Zoe and a couple other members, she ended up joining the mafia. has a brother outside of the mafia whom she hangs out with a lot when she’s not working. became mute as a result of what she needed saving from (spoilers lmao). has an ability but doesn’t realize it (technically never confirmed in canon either just something that I Know). acts as the devils advocate for major plans within the mafia, because she’s smart and level-headed and isn’t afraid to speak her mind. she LOVES Andrew, because he insisted on learning ASL alongside her so that she would have someone to talk to right away, and he continues to be someone she can vent to and go to when she needs support. her favorite hobby is styling hair, and she’s always working braids into Kara’s curls or touching up Andrew’s pastel dye jobs

[palmettoes]

Aaron/Katelyn 61

(hehe this has only been sitting in my inbox for uhh 6 months i am so sorry! anyway !!!! never written aaron/katelyn before !!! also haven’t written m/f fanfiction since i was 13 but i love these kids thanks for giving me a reason to make up katelyn’s whole backstory)

disclaimer: if ur pro inc*st u are legally not allowed to touch anything i write

read it on ao3! | prompts are closed :(

61. “I told you not to fall in love with me.”

Katelyn, eight years old, loses her mother to white lights and hospital beds. It’s preventable, low mortality rate, chance of survival looks hopeful. Katelyn knows this because she looks it up on her dad’s old box computer when he’s working late one night, her older brother playing outdated records too loudly to notice her disappearing into their father’s private study. Katelyn knows this because the doctors tell her so—not in so many words, because she’s eight, but enough that she knows they are optimistic about the results.

Katelyn, eight years old, wonders why doctors can juggle something so fragile as a life playfully among them and lie through their teeth when they catch the corner of an eye.

Katelyn, eighteen years old, is determined not to be like other doctors. Getting into biochemistry at university feels like winning the sprint but losing the marathon. Her professors crack down on the workload immediately, adamant that medicine is not for those who do not want to be there. And Katelyn wants to be there, maybe more than anyone else, but life has already dealt her so much weight and Katelyn is fast running out of strength to lift these stooped shoulders.

She tries out for the Vixens, Palmetto’s cheerleading team, mostly because her roommate, Marissa, waxes poetic about the nights she’ll spend huddled between football players in one of the downtown bars, and Katelyn figures she could do with the extracurricular.

(The exy team does not factor into her decision, but gossip travels far and fast and the idea of standing in close quarters to them puts her on edge for reasons that can only be explained through hollow whispers and stolen glances behind their backs.)

The Vixens are a rough and tumble team, from the figure eight pattern of cigarette burns on Marissa’s forearm, to the handful of Zoloft Anaïs throws up in her dorm toilet during Freshers’ Week, to the way Billie sleeps with their chin tucked over their shoulder so they can watch their own back. Katelyn is just scraping this side of nineteen, knows the weight of Prozac on her tongue better than that of a meal, and cannot remember the last time her father looked at her without looking right through her. Inexorably, Palmetto State University feels like home.

“How about that backliner though? He’s a tall, dark stranger I’d welcome into my crystal ball,” Marissa says, shaking her pom pom in Anaïs’ face as they stumble towards the bus the night after Palmetto’s first exy game of the season. Anaïs bats Marissa’s arm away, switching her duffel to her other shoulder to put an extra distance between them.

“Didn’t notice. It’s their offensive dealer that I was paying attention to.”

“Their captain.” (It sounds like an innuendo but almost everything does coming out of Marissa’s mouth.) “Anyway, I heard from Mick on the football team that Ainsley told Prati that Mia sits with two of the exy players at lunch on Tuesdays and apparently Mr Tall and Dark is hitting it with the captain. Isn’t that a sandwich you’d love to get between?”

“Not particularly.”

“Boo, you whore.”

Marissa shakes her pom pom again and Anaïs’ shove gains force.

“Don’t boo me because I’m gay.”

Billie taps Katelyn’s elbow and rolls their eyes at the other two, sweeping an arm out to offer Katelyn to climb ahead of them onto the bus. Katelyn hitches her duffel a little higher and climbs the steps. Anaïs likes the seat over the wheel so Katelyn chooses the row in front, tucking her bag under her seat so Billie can settle next to her. Anaïs and Marissa scramble in behind them, still bickering over the attraction of various exy players. Katelyn glances out the window and catches sight of an orange and white gaggle making their way to the other PSU bus parked outside Breckenridge stadium. Mr Tall and Dark backliner is holding hands with the captain but chatting to a lanky boy with a frown too many shades short of pleasant. Most of the Foxes move as a unit, a crowd collected behind their coach, but several steps and a whole chasm behind them trails the remainder of the team.

Katelyn recognises assistant coach Kevin Day because, as strong as her distaste for the sport, she grew up this side of the turn of the century. She doesn’t think she could miss Kevin Day if she tried. He is flanked by two identical blond men and an emphatic, dark-skinned man a head or so above the other two. Katelyn had watched one of the twins block the goal all night with a ferocity like he was exercising a personal vendetta against the ball, seen the other punch an opposing striker square in the jaw seemingly unprovoked. She shudders, remembering the rumours she’d heard whispered about the exy team and, for the first time, believing them. She turns away from the window and bumps Billie’s shoulder with her own, pushing blond hair and murderous glares from her mind.

*

The thing is, Katelyn has no reason to engage with the exy team. She cheers at their games and catches glimpses of them between stadium and parking lot, but she doesn’t learn their names or dance with them at college parties the way she does with the football team.

The thing is, Katelyn’s hands are full enough already. She is unofficially deemed in charge of the first year Vixens—some combination of the fact that Marissa listens when Katelyn tells her to shut up, and Anaïs trusts her enough to press a pill bottle into her hand after her second overdose in as many weeks, and Billie talks to her more than anyone because Katelyn is the only one who speaks ASL. Katelyn finds she doesn’t mind it. The constant demand for attention makes a welcome difference to the stony silence of her family home. With homework, cheerleading, and three new best friends keeping her busy, Katelyn barely has time to dwell on the hollow feeling that has been cutting her chest open for the past decade.

The thing is, the short blond boy from the exy team is hard to miss. (Well, one of them is anyway.) Katelyn figures out he’s the backliner, the one she saw punching that striker from Breckenridge, and not the one that sticks to Kevin Day like glue, or a prickly burr. He crops up in her biochem lectures, at her favourite campus café, tucked behind a bookshelf at the library across from her and Billie’s usual study spot. He is always accompanied by at least one of his little posse, usually the noisy one, except during their shared lectures. Katelyn finds herself seeking him out when she enters the room and, more often than not, she catches him blinking back at her.

They’re two thirds through their first quarter by the time she learns his name. He stops by her desk on the way out of the lecture hall, causing her notebook to slip out of her hand in surprise. He kneels to pick it up for her and doesn’t smile, but there’s a friendliness to his eyes that Katelyn has never seen before.

“Katelyn, right?” he asks. Katelyn has no idea how he knows this but she nods instead of questioning it. “Aaron. Did you get notes on Voltolini’s lecture this week? I missed it.”

She’s so caught out by the disruption to their routine, by the brittle edge to his voice that she hadn’t expected, by the abrupt introduction to the quarter-long suspense of wondering his name, that she almost forgets to answer. When she realises she’s been staring at him for coming on ten seconds, she shakes it out of her system and finishes zipping up her backpack.

“Oh. Yeah, did you want to borrow them? Or,” she swings the strap of her backpack over her shoulder and steps towards the door, Aaron falling into pace beside her, “we could go over them together?”

He is quiet for a moment, as if the question requires extensive thought. Katelyn wonders briefly if she should be offended by his lack of immediate interest, but decides she finds it endearing that the authenticity of his response matters so much to him.

“At the library?” he offers. “I have a study period now.”

“Sure,” she says. She’d been headed that way to meet Billie anyway and doesn’t suppose they’ll mind the small intrusion.

“So how come you missed the lecture?” she asks when it becomes apparent their trek to the library will remain otherwise silent.

“Andrew,” Aaron says vaguely, waving his hand as though this is sufficient enough an explanation. When Katelyn doesn’t look convinced, he adds, “My brother. You’ve seen him?”

She nods, not totally understanding but realising it’s personal enough that she doesn’t want to pry.

Billie is already sitting at their table when Katelyn arrives, Aaron in tow. They have printouts of various articles spread across the desk and a focused frown on their face, but they look up when Katelyn and Aaron stop in front of them.

“Aaron, this is Billie. Billie, Aaron. From the exy team.”

Billie waves at Aaron, then pierces Katelyn with their gaze, tilting their head slightly in Aaron’s direction.

“Do you speak ASL?” Katelyn asks him as she pulls out a chair and begins unpacking her bag. Aaron settles into the seat next to her, tapping the tabletop anxiously.

“No. Was that in the lecture?”

“No, no, of course not. Don’t worry about it.” Katelyn laughs lightly and makes eye contact with Billie.

“Since when do we hang out with exy players?” they sign, eyes flicking to Aaron.

“He’s borrowing some notes. What’s wrong with being friendly?” she signs back. Billie shrugs and turns back to their articles. Katelyn flicks open her notebook and grins at Aaron.

“Let’s do this,” she says. His responding smile is small and fleeting but Katelyn catches the hard upturn of his lips and her skin tingles all over.

*

Aaron falls easily into place among Katelyn’s friends. He becomes a regular at their study sessions, reading notes over Katelyn’s shoulder or catching her eye across the table with that same smile like a secret that hurts his throat on the way up. He never brings any of his teammates, but Katelyn can’t complain. Study Aaron and Exy Aaron, she decides, are two sides of the same coin. He’s softer around her and her friends, all secret smiles and nervous tapping. She can’t imagine Study Aaron punching anyone in the face.

He spills into her other routines intrinsically. She stops making excuses to invite him out for coffee or to lunch or on a walk around the campus green when she’s feeling antsy. She struggles to remember a time when the sight of him intimidated her, when she believed the rumours turning the air sour at his heels wherever he walked.

Katie he calls her from across the hall to grab her attention, and Kate when he talks about her to her friends, and K (intimate and familiar and warm in her chest) over text. Katie-Lyn he teases when they’re alone on one of their walks and he relaxes enough that his smile stops looking like barbed wire. She laughs and elbows him and writes Double-A-Ron on the back of folded notes they pass between them during lectures.

Katelyn doesn’t engage with the exy team, but every rule has its exceptions and Aaron is hers. Brilliant, beautiful Aaron, who keeps his smiles a secret and his family a mystery and who holds her gaze across a crowded hallway like it is the most fragile of things.

They never call it dating, though Katelyn suspects that might be what it is. She hardly qualifies as an expert but the shared lunches and secret notes and blushing eye contact feel too reminiscent of her high school girlfriend to be anything else. (She asks Billie, once, if they think Aaron thinks they’re a couple and they roll their eyes and wave her off. She cannot bring herself to put up with Marissa’s crowing long enough to ask for another opinion.) So it’s hard to say where he falls in the categories of her relationships, but when she invites him out for dinner he doesn’t say no and, though she doesn’t call it a date, it doesn’t feel platonic.

They go to an Italian restaurant on campus, partly because Katelyn figures everyone likes pizza and partly because Marissa says the sundae for two is a date-saver. (Not that Katelyn likes to think their sort-of-date will need saving, but it’s always nice to be prepared.) And she’s right, because Aaron does like pizza and the sundae is delicious and the date doesn’t need saving. Until it does.

“I had to beg Nicky to cover for me tonight,” Aaron is saying, no trace of the curl Katelyn has come to search for at the corner of his lips. “He doesn’t like disrupting the balance.”

Katelyn isn’t sure she follows but she doesn’t have to ask to know the only explanation she’ll get is Andrew. His name is the answer to every question, no matter how she phrases it. His name is the flat line of Aaron’s mouth and the fierce swing of his uppercut. His name is the undeniable truth behind the rumours that tail Aaron wherever he goes.

“We can’t do this,” Aaron says and the ice cream turns to dust in Katelyn’s mouth. She thinks bitterly that at least she can prove Marissa wrong; no sundae for two is saving this date.

“Do what?” she asks and her voice is too small for her mouth. She is eight years old and Aaron is the doctor dangling hope too far out of her reach.

“You, me, us,” he says, frustrated and lonely and scared all at once. “You can’t fall in love with me.”

It aches in more ways than she could have known it would. Because how do you predict the outcome when you’re missing the beginning? How do you prepare for the fallout when you aren’t part of the equation? When you’re just collateral damage?

“Says who?” Katelyn asks, and then, “Andrew” in unison with Aaron because, of course. Because, who else?

Aaron’s cheek dimples between his teeth and he lets his spoon clang against the rim of their shared bowl. Katelyn pushes hers through the half-melted ice cream, appetite fast disappearing. She wants to demand answers or argue the absurdity of their situation or maybe just cry. Instead, she folds.

“Okay,” she says.

“Okay?”

“I get it. It’s okay.”

She doesn’t get it, but Aaron looks at her like she’s handing him the moon so she breathes through her nose, counts to five, and offers him a shaky smile. Moulding herself into the shapes other people need her to be is Katelyn’s specialty. She grew up a chameleon in order to survive. This is no different to her father looking at her like he needed a clinically detached housemaid more than he needed a daughter mourning the loss of her mother.

“Ready to call it a night?” she says, because there is something irreparable in the air between them.

“I’ll walk you back,” Aaron agrees.

They say goodnight outside Katelyn’s dorm building, but what they mean is goodbye. What they mean is this is it. What they mean is we had a good thing and neither of us are good enough people to deserve that.

Katelyn, nineteen-and-three-quarter years old, watches hope shatter in all too familiar shards.

*

They never called it dating, so they don’t call it a break up, but that’s what it feels like. It is broken where Katelyn can’t reach to fix it because she does not know what fractured it to begin with. There is a week between Katelyn’s return home for the holidays and her brother’s scheduled time off, during which the silence of her childhood home sits heavy on her shoulders. She passes the time under a mound of blankets, drowning out her father’s refusal to acknowledge her with television static.

When Antoni returns, so does the life slowly trickling out of the air. He wields noise like a blade to the abrasive reticence of their home, and goads Katelyn out of bed to help him make potato fritters.

“Chiquita, college has made you so mopey,” he says, watching her instead of the eggs he’s whisking. Katelyn slices onions and pretends they are the only reason her eyes sting.

“More like being in this house makes me mopey. College keeps me too busy for that.”

Antoni hums, and watches her, and whisks his eggs.

“And how is college? Top of your class yet?”

Katelyn rolls her eyes but tells him about her lectures and her friends and her cheer practice. She finishes with the onions and starts combining the second bowl of mixture while Antoni scoops the first into misshapen ovals. When the fritters are under the grill and Katelyn’s eyes have stopped stinging altogether, Antoni pours them each a glass of iced tea and leans across the kitchen island to smile at her.

“So has the little Vixen caught a Fox yet?” He pauses to consider her a moment. “Or another Vixen perhaps?”

Katelyn sucks in a breath but doesn’t answer the question, and the silence rings deafening in her ears. She tells her brother everything but she cannot tell him this. (They never called it dating. There is nothing to tell anyway.)

“Oh, Kitty-Kat. Come here,” Antoni says. He doesn’t wait for her to move, instead rounding the island to wrap his arms around her from behind. She leans her head against his bicep, turning so her face is mashed into his woolen jumper, and closes her eyes. They stay like that, his chest to her back and his chin against her crown, for as long as it takes her to stop holding air in her chest until she’s gasping and shaky. She doesn’t cry, but her throat feels raw enough that she could have.

“Ant,” Katelyn whispers, her voice shaking on the vowel, “do you think I’m broken?”

“Of course you’re not.” His arms tighten a fraction around her shoulders. “Why would you think that?”

“It feels like everything I touch shatters.”

She thinks of her mother’s life splintering to pieces in Katelyn’s eight year old hands, of her father’s voice splitting in two and washing away whenever he tried to speak to her, of Aaron’s face contorting as their date cracked and caved around them. She feels like a fractured bone, cleft down the middle, never whole as she is.

Antoni lets out a soft breath against her hair and presses a kiss to the curve of her skull.

“No, chiquita,” he says, “you’re not broken. The world is.”

*

Returning to Palmetto is easier than Katelyn expects it to be. Antoni only has three weeks leave, so Katelyn spends the last month of vacation alone with her father. She is almost ready to welcome the noise and clutter of her college dorm.

Returning to the Vixens is more of a homecoming than entering her family house. As sophomores, they’re expected to throw themselves both into their own practice and that of the freshmen, and Katelyn and Marissa’s room becomes something of a communal ground for the first and second years. Katelyn doesn’t mind so much, because it takes her thoughts off the scowl she hasn’t seen leave Aaron’s face since they returned from break.

She watches the exy team walk to and from the stadium on game nights, their divide in half somehow having become thirds, until she realises the centre group is actually a solitary affair: a dark-haired, rabbit-eyed boy curled in on himself, alone in the rift between his teammates. She focuses on him because it stops her gaze from betraying her resolve and straying to where Aaron walks several paces behind.

And it almost lasts; this painstaking stalemate, this mutual ignorance. Katelyn sits with her back to his table in the library and Aaron walks past her without pausing on the way out of their lecture theatre. It almost stops feeling like a bruise underneath her skin.

But somehow he trickles back into her life as easily as he did once before. Katelyn finds she can smile at him when they pass each other on campus and she can make eye contact when she waves his teammates onto the court during games. She remembers the way he cupped her name in the curl of his tongue as if it were reverent and fragile as glass. She remembers how he held her gaze like he was trying to keep her afloat, and how he saved his smiles to share in the privacy of her company. She remembers he did not build the wall between them, only said he wouldn’t climb it, and she can’t blame him for resting his weary hands.

So when she misses her morning lecture because Marissa woke with a bad taste in her mouth and a tremor in her hands, Katelyn catches Aaron on his way to the library, a hand in his path and a question in her eyes.

“I had to skip this morning. Do you mind sharing notes?” It’s a surrender of sorts, an end to their face-off. Aaron made the first move all those months ago, so this time Katelyn dresses in white armour and guides her pawn forward. They have come full circle.

Aaron’s smile is slow, a tentative curl that crawls quietly up his face, and Katelyn realises for the first time how much she has missed seeing it bloom for her.

“I’m headed to the library now if you’ve got time,” he says. The words are marrow filling the cracks of Katelyn’s broken bone and she feels herself coming together as their steps line up with one another.

It’s easier, after their not-breakup, to build their routine around honesty. Andrew is still an answer, but this time one that comes served with an explanation. Katelyn still doesn’t get it, doesn’t understand the chokehold that Aaron calls family, but she respects it. After all, she isn’t in a position to point fingers at dysfunctional.

They confine their dates to the library café and the medicine building, avoiding places that Aaron’s family are likely to haunt. And it isn’t perfect, it isn’t textbook romance, but for the first time it is something whole that Katelyn cradles to her chest and it does not shatter on impact.

When Aaron leaves for a weekend and comes home a broken man—brotherless, breathless, hands a bruised and bloodied mess—Katelyn does what she has always done best and builds him back together with her own chipped pieces. She fights his nightmares with nothing but her fists and takes his hands in her own when he cannot look at them without seeing blood beneath his fingernails. She does what she can but she is still just collateral, she is still on the outside looking in on a rupture that happened long before she became a spectator. There is still a tear that Katelyn does not know how to stitch up.

*

(The dark-haired, rabbit-eyed boy is called Neil and his hair isn’t actually quite so dark and he is fixing the broken parts Katelyn can’t reach and when he says Andrew’s name it sounds like a question, not an answer.)

*

Getting Aaron back is the gift Katelyn doesn’t think she deserves. Cutting him off feels like shattering her own hope. She watches the pieces slide between her fingers, shoves the remnants deep where she can’t cut herself on their serrated edges, and tries not to think of the way Aaron’s face split apart when she told him Andrew was the answer to a question he did not ask.

She tells Billie, late one night as they pass a bottle of Marissa’s claret between them from opposite ends of the couch, that she doesn’t know if she’ll be whole again. It is a vulnerability that no one but Antoni ever sees, but Katelyn is wine-drunk and fractured, too disheartened to care that her misery has an audience.

“Why not?” Billie says, holding the bottle between their knees to free up their hands. “You were whole before him. He didn’t take anything you can’t replace.”

“He was the first thing I had that I thought I could hold on to.” Katelyn’s hands falter as the weight of her honesty hits her. She doesn’t know who she is when she isn’t fixing other people and Aaron is a fissure that is out of her hands. “What’s the point if I can’t keep anything without breaking it?”

“You have us. You have the team. You have a career path you’re good at and a hobby you love. You have a brother who adores you and you have Marissa and Anaïs and me. You are whole on your own but you’re part of bigger things too. He’ll come back to you or he won’t and either way you’ll still be the person you always have been.”

It doesn’t seem appropriate to cry, but Katelyn is wine-drunk and fractured, so she does anyway. Billie hooks their ankle around hers on the couch between them and knocks the claret bottle against her knee. Katelyn alternates between drinking and sobbing, and loses the rest of the night to the breaking of her heart.

*

Aaron comes back to her piece by broken piece. He shows up at her dorm with his pain a palpable weight in his hands and tells her he’s trying, he’s breaking faster than he can put himself together but he’s trying. And Katelyn knows a thing or two about falling apart.

They pour their fragments into one another in Katelyn’s bed because Marissa is out with some of the older Vixens and they both know better than to waste an empty dorm room. Later, with his back to Katelyn’s chest and his legs slid between either of hers, Aaron finds the parts of his voice he has been missing.

“You were the first beautiful thing I ever called mine,” he says and Katelyn remembers midnight with Billie, remembers the saccharine claret slipping down her throat, remembers thinking Aaron was the first thing she could ever keep whole. “I won’t lose you for him.”

Katelyn slides her hand across the bare expanse of his stomach, presses her face into the base of his neck, and breathes and breathes and breathes.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she says, and means it.

They patch themselves up in tandem—Aaron knits one, Katelyn purls two—and they are old hands at this now. Katelyn watches their healing overlap in familiar stitches and she waits and she hopes and she breathes. Because this thing between them is chipped and bruised but it is whole. It is theirs.

When Andrew comes for her, Katelyn wonders if she should be surprised. She has heard his name in response to too many questions to be shocked when he treats his words like an arrow and her the target. He and Aaron are identical twins but when Katelyn looks at him up close for the first time, all she sees are the differences. He carries none of the regret that bleeds through Aaron’s teeth and too much of the horror that feeds behind his eyes.

“You won,” rabbit-eyed Neil says, gaze already chasing after Andrew like he might not be just any answer but the answer. “Aaron’s not in class now, if you want to call him.”

Aaron, Aaron, Aaron, her brain says and her fingers, though numb with fear, respond on reflex. He picks up while Katelyn is halfway through a choked sob and she hears his breath sharpen like a dagger.

“Katelyn?” His voice is a rush of concern, a spear and shield readying itself in her defence. “What happened?”

“Andrew,” is all she can say between broken breaths, and it is the answer to every question. After all this time, she gets it.

In the time it takes Aaron to get from his dorm to the library, Katelyn has found her breath but not her strength. She is still curled in on herself behind the bookshelf in the far corner and she knows her friends will be wondering but she doesn’t yet trust her legs to support her. Aaron sinks down next to her, an anchor holding her steady in the aftermath of Andrew’s storm.

“Did he hurt you?” he asks quietly and Katelyn doesn’t know how to answer. She thinks if she opens her mouth she might not know how to do anything but cry.

It’s enough of an answer though. Aaron vibrates with an anger that he almost never wears around her and Katelyn thinks of the Breckenridge striker who took Aaron’s fist to the face. He looks more like the other side of the coin, more like Exy Aaron, than she has seen him in a while.

“I told you not to fall in love with me,” he says. It is frustrated and lonely and scared, and Katelyn has heard him sound like that once before and she will do anything before she lets him shatter again.

“I didn’t listen.”

He falls into her at that, half straddling her lap, arms around her waist and face pressed hard to her shoulder. Katelyn raises her arms to cradle his body against her, rests her cheek in the nest of his hair, and thinks this is it. Thinks he is the answer. Thinks we won.

“My Katie,” Aaron whispers into her skin and it is the glue drawing her broken shards together.

[dreamslaunched-blog]

tagged by: @velvetsoyeon tagging: @ghcstbvster @thelixira @rvmcr @pexchesxcrexm and whoever else wants to do it (feel free to ignore this tbh)

Name: indigo 

Nickname: indy / technically indigo IS a nickname already but my real name starts with ‘i’ too

Gender: nonbinary

Age: 20 (21 in october)

Sexuality: uhhh lesbian

Average amount of sleep: i guess like 6 hours

dogs or cats: cats

Dream job: cryptozoologist lmao

Zodiac: libra sun, scorpio moon, pisces rising

Height: physically 5′5 but mentally like 5′9

Hair and eye color: hair is green and eyes are blue/grey

Tattoos and piercings: standards in my ears, gonna get my nose pierced soon, and i have 1 tattoo on my arm

Lucky numbers: 13, 28

Number of blankets: uhhh 4

When did I make this blog: probably a few weeks ago

Why did I make this blog?: a fresh start

Hogwarts house: hufflepuff

Nationality: american

Languages: english, ASL, and base level korean. i wanna start learning mandarin soon

Favorite fruit: blueberries

Favorite color: pink and black

Favorite animals: cats, chameleons, rats, snakes, cows

Coffee, tea or hot chocolate: tea

Favorite fictional character: andrew minyard

Dream trip(s): rome and japan

Last film seen: deadpool 2 last night lmao

Songs on repeat at the moment: lil touch - snsd oh!gg, young - baekhyun & loco, stay - exo, to heart - fromis_9, sing alone - oner, complete - onf

Favorite book: i’m trash but it’s the song of achilles

Followers: 70

[deeeelightfuldee]

surveyss 015.

WHO ... was the last person you saw face to face? gram

... was the last person you texted or messaged online? Ummm, Harrison? We were talking about health.

... was the last person who asked you for a favour? Kile asked me to respond to him. I came so close to doing it, but we are almost at a week without talking.

... was the last person you lent something to? Uhhh, probably my sister.

... was the last person who told you a secret/confided in you? Em

... is the tallest person you know? Nick. I think hes 6′5?

... the shortest person you know? Goodness... I don’t know.

... your oldest (in years) friend? My mom?

... is the oldest (in length of time) friend? Alix. Since i was 5.

... is your youngest friend? I’m the youngest of my group... so ...

... is your newest friend? Probably my school friends

... is your closest relative? my sister? nephews? niece?

... was your favourite teacher? Mom looool. Or in college I really liked Dr. T

... was your least favourite teacher? ugh. shelly?

... did you spend the most time with when growing up? scott

... knows you the best? kile

... always beats you in games or sports? probably nathan lol

... who is the most creative of the people you know? Thats a great question. maybe my sister.

... is the funniest person you know? EM. definitely a goofball.

... is the most organised that you know? Em. 

... that you know has travelled the most? Nathan travels a lot, roger has gone to so many countries.

... has always been there for you? Hmm. 

... has given you the most personal gift? Mike

... has an annoying laugh? Marcia

... never forgets a birthday? sawyer

...,do you have the most in common with? I really don’t know. I don’t share a ton of the same interests with anyone.

...is the sportiest person you know? devin?

...was your last missed call? I think my sister

...did you last open your door for? mom

... has your heart? sigh. I don’t think it’s wanted right now.

... has your respect? people who are honest 

...do you share a special song with? i got my first kiss to the song “my best friend” by tim mcgraw

...do you miss right now? kile andrew. I miss who i thought he was. I miss talking to him all hours of the day. He felt like an extension of myself... almost like we shared this secret life where we could just .. exist together. without him, I just feel like I lost part of myself.

...last made you angry? the hose.

...did you last buy a gift for? I got my mom and my brother and kile something on my vaca.

...did you celebrate your last birthday with? So kile spoiled me like crazy. I spent the day with mom and then at night, em, nathan, devin, and I got tanked lol.

...have you gone to a concert with? sister, janelle, uhhhh nicole

...can make you laugh? It is easy to make me laugh

...has taught you how to do something? Uhhhhhh, thats a very good question. Probably kile teaching me how to do a stats problem? 

...has lost something of yours? Uhh, not sure.

...has broke your heart? kile

...has stood you up? I haven’t been stood up

WHAT Is your favourite colour? blue

Can you do that most your friends can’t? memorize really well, deny bread, sign, talk neuro

Is your birthday? next weekend

Colour eyes do you have? blue with navy and gray

Form of transport do you take to work/school? typically the car.

Music do you like to listen to in the car? Oh goodness anything that I put on spotify

Languages can you speak? english. some spanish and some asl but not fluently

Was the last thing you drank? diet coke

Was the last thing you ate? trail mix

Time did you wake up this morning? I wake up all hours lately and just stare out my window or at the ceiling. Eventually I just give up and get up for good. I think today was like 5am

Colour are your bedroom walls? They’re kind of a mauve-y brown-y purple

Drink do you usually order when eating out? sometimes, not always.

Food can you cook well? I’m a great baker but I don’t cook all that often. Or rather I should say I am insecure about my cooking.

Animals have you had for a pet? Oh goodness. Dogs, cats, bunnies, chickens, turtles, pigs, horses, birds, parrots, fish, flying squirrels, lizards, ...

Are your initials? dls

Kind of activities do you like to do on the weekends? I like to play games, go on drives, see the world, see friends, window shop, idk

Movie do you know line by line? father of the bride, finding nemo, sleepless in seattle, youve got mail, something borrowed, how to lose a guy in ten days, made of honor, while you were sleeping

Band(s) have you seen in concert? I don’t remember all of them. relient k was one.

Do you buy/get to treat yourself? food or clothes lol.

Colours your phone cover? right now it’s like a teal color. 

Part of the world would you love to visit? switzerland. europe. 

Question do you dislike being asked? when are you going to be married.

Subject were you good at in school? science

Careers do your parents have? mom is a manager of a store and I’m not entirely sure of what dad does. I think he owns a company.

Brand of clothing do you buy most often? probably ON

Chocolate bar is your favourite? right now, probably uhmmm 

TV show have you watched every series of? tbh I couldn’t tell you

Radio station do you listen to the most? 99.5, 98.3, 103.5, 96.3, 

Podcasts are you subscribed to? I’m not the biggest fan of podcasts

Is your favourite dessert? anything mega rich

Can’t you do that most around you seem to? roller blade, skateboard, ice skate

Are 5 qualities you value in a friend? honesty, loyalty, kindness, consideration, humor

Are 5 qualities you value in a partner? honesty, loyalty, kindness, slow-tempered, loving

Size pizza do you usually order? goodness I havent had pizza in so long.

Cuisine do you like to order or cook? I suppose right now mexican

Colour(s) dominate your wardrobe? Black. I want to wear more colors I think I refrain because of drawing attention to my figure.

Toothpaste brand do you use? I think right now it’s crest!

Sounds can you hear right now? one of the most dear movies to me.. Serendipity. I think about this movie all the time in my current situation. Maybe.

Is the weather like today? Steamy. But I have been very comfortable in the AC tbh

Are your plans for tomorrow? I’m going to sleep in. Relax. Spend the day reading in the pool, trying to not think about my situation. 

WHERE Do you keep your phone when not using it? I used to always keep it on me, but now I’m trying to get used to leaving it in the other room or just leaving it at home so I stop obsessing.

Were you born? Palos.

Do you go to unwind? On a drive

Is your best friend right now? I’m not sure where Kile is anymore. Emily is likely asleep. Nathan’s probably out lol

Can you go nearby to have a good time? Tbh, I can be alone and have a great time.

Is the nearest restaurant? like 3-4 blocks away.

Is the nearest beach? There is lake michigan, indiana dunes, or lakes. depends what you fancy.

Did you meet your closest friend? kile and I met on CM. em and I met thru Alix. 

Did you go for your last vacation? Pigeon Forge, TN.

Is the nearest mall or superstore? mall would be orland. Superstore would probably be like a walmart or a target. 

Did you last get an injury? I screwed up my foot somehow so I’m trying to nurse that.

Is the most extravagant place you’ve stayed at? Hmm, probably when my sister would travel and we would stay in these exotic hotels.

Do most the local kids play? If you mean kids like 21 ish, there are some great local bars on Oak Park Ave

Have you been with your family? I mean, I’m going to need more detail in the question

Did you spend Christmas last year? home. Then the boys called for us to come over and see their new toys lol

Did your parents grow up? they grew up in roseland which is now a chicago ghetto lol

Did you buy the shoes you’re wearing? barefoot at the moment.

Would you like to go right now if you could? if I can be totally transparent, I would give anything to go sit on a park bench next to kile. 

Do you miss the most from your childhood? The innocent beliefs. the lack of trauma. 

Is the best restaurant you know? I donno, I’m fairly easy-going about restaurants.

Will you never go again as it was so bad? lol this local burrito joint

WHEN ...was your last vacation? two weeks ago. 

...did you graduate? this may. I really thought it would have been more exciting, but it was such a tragic time. 

...did you have your first kiss? on my 16th birthday

...did you learn how to swim? young. like 5-6? 

...did you have your first relationship? uhhhh 19.

...do you feel the most at peace? on a drive.

...do you usually fall asleep? I have no idea. I’m all over the place these days.

...do you usually wake up? thats a wide range of times.

...did you last watch a movie? i’ve been watching movies in bed all day. 

...did you last go to a party? yesterday

...did you last cry? today

...did you laugh really hard? I laughed yesterday. 

...did you buy something pricey last? my vacation I suppose. I really need to get new gym shoes because it has been a few years but man they are pricey.

...did you have an argument last? I haven’t argued this past week. I don’t know if I’m just worn down or if I have lost the fight in me? I’m not entirely sure.

...did you last have a sick day? donno really.

...did you last recieve a hug? I got about 400 hugs from the kids yesterday lol

...when is your best friend’s birthday? aug 16. april 20. march 13.

...did you learn how to drive? I refused to drive as long as possible. mom tricked me into drivers ed when I was about 18.

...did you last receive a surprise? umm.. I really don’t know.

HOW Many pets do you have? Two.

Many houses have you lived in? one

Often do you shower? once per day usually.

Well can you cook? I am mediocre at the moment.

Many close friends do you have? just gets smaller and smaller.

Many Brothers or sisters do you have? one sister two brothers

Often do you go swimming? I WISH all the time. tomorrow will be my first time in a long time. it’s hardly swimming cus its a small pool, but still.

Many times have you texted today? I’ve hardly touched messaging apps. I’m really behind on my correspondence. 

Do you like your toast (colour, topping)? I used to love it toasted with light butter and then pb

Do you like your tea and/or coffee? no coffee. I’m not huge on tea.

Do you like to celebrate your birthdays? typically the way I spent it last year. this year was supposed to be with Kile. For some reason I just glanced at the calendar and it had our weekend trip for march all highlighted. 

Are you feeling today? I’m ok. I mean, I’m not but it’s closer to being OK.

Serious are you about your career goals? I’m passionate about it.

Many rooms are in your house? 11 I suppose.

Many bedrooms in your house? 4.

Did you do in your school exams? I excelled at them. 

Close do you live to your parents? very close to mom. thousands of miles from dad.

Close do you live to your siblings? My brother is around the block. another brother is maybe 30 mins away. my sister is thousands of miles.

Sensitive to criticism are you? pretty sensitive. its a fault.

Motivated to make changes are you? quite motivated.

Creative are you (1-10): 5

Hard working are you (1-10): 11.

Sporty are you (1-10): 1

Musical are you (1-10): 0

Do you prefer your eggs? uhh, moms scrambled, over easy, or sunny side up.

Often do you go out to eat? like once a month.

Would your best friend describe you? I don’t really know. probably studious, the caregiver, patient

Can someone cheer you up if you’re sad? if they know me well enough. 

Often do you meet up with your friends? like 2-3x a month

Important is religion to you? faith is important.

Old were you when you first stayed overnight from home? like 5

Old were you when you got your first pet? I was an infant

Tech savvy are you? decent. not great but decent.

Do you show you appreciate those you care for? I learn what matters to them and I support their dreams obsessively. I research things that matter, I ask questions, I write cards, buy gifts, and just tell them.

Often do you cut your hair? I need to cut it. asap.

Often do you paint your nails? I’ve stopped painting my hands since graduation. I just .. i cant.

Many countries have you visited? 1

Boyfriends/girlfriends have you had? haha

WHY  ... did you choose your username? because it’s one I use

... did you take this survey? it seemed to have some decent questions. I’m trying to work through stuff regarding kile right now, so it had some opportunities. right now I’m wondering if he still reads these. It doesn’t tell me if someone does, only if they like or comment on it. what does it matter, I don’t know. my mind just swirls.

... did you choose the career you did? I had a professor who showed me a video during a neuro class on aphasia and it was a CLICK moment.

...did you last leave the house? running errands for the party

...did you last give up on something? I am in the process. I don’t want to. my whole body aches and screams not to let go, but my brain is recognizing it is time.

...did you search the last thing you searched? i was converting celsius to fahrenheit 

...would you give up on someone completely? I think sometimes I have this mindset that I can help. I can support. I can enhance your situation. I want to help you grow. I want to be there for it all. I think the reality is I am learning that not everyone wants that. I don’t know that i’m helping as much as I hope, and it destroys me to think I was maybe making his life worse. 

IF You could live in any country which would you choose? switzerland

You could choose any animal as a pet which one? cat or dog

You could be famous for something what would you like? I don’t know that I would want to be.

You are sad, how do you combat it? Right now it is sitting with the feelings of loss. I’m trying not to just blow over it or pretend it isn’t real, but to just let it suck as bad as it sucks. I don’t know. I don’t have any magic way of moving through the sadness.

You can drive when did you learn? when I was 18

You could have any job what would it be? I would want to be somewhere with little human interaction tbh.

You could go anywhere for a vacation where would you go? europe. 

You could eat anything right now what would it be? nothing. loss of appetite.

You wrote a book what genre/topic would it be? maybe a book of poetry. or a biography.

You had a theme song what would it be? that would take me a while to come up with.

You could meet any band/singer in person which one? harry connick jr.

You could act in any movie which would it be? I’m not sure I would

You get married what venue would you like? i think I would want to elope 

If you have kids do you have names picked out? I have names I like on a list.

Could describe your dream home what would it be like? farm. land. big ole porch with comfy furniture. lots of trees. a dreamy bedroom. i really want a window seat. You could go back in time what would you change? for the longest time I wished I could have gone to see John immediately. However, had I done that I would have left here and moved there and I wouldnt have the life I do now. So I guess maybe i dont really know.

Could use 3 words to describe your childhood which ones? the memories without my dad were extremely pleasant. My mom tried her best.

Could get the answer to any question which question would you choose? right now I’d want to know why Kile kept things from me. Like how do you wake up everyday OK with knowing I’m unaware. I wanna know what the plan was.. was he planning to meet me and just secretly break up with her? was he ever planning to move to me? Why did he never fight for me? how was I so easy to let go of? why wouldn’t he just break off what he was was “breaking off” to keep me? what was the alternative? keep us both?? why couldn’t he see how he was hurting me? why didn’t it matter? how does he just let go of me so simply and not c ---- but honestly I’ll never get those answers. I would probably be better off asking will i have my own family one day

You could have an endless supply of something what would it be? Money, because of course.

CAN ... you ride a bike? yes

... you ski? i want to learn

... you bake a cake? oh yes.

... you sing well? mediocre

... you do your own taxes? badly

... you remain calm in a crisis? extremely calm.

... you do first aid? like... bandaid level yes.

... remember your best friend’s family members’ names? almost entirely.

... you fire a gun? yes

... your parents drive? Yes

...your best friend dance well? probably not.

...you make people laugh easily? mom, yes lol

...stand up for yourself? if i get pushed enough, yes.

...you do a martial art? Nope

WOULD You like to learn a new language? absolutely.

Save the life of a stray animal? Absolutely.

Know what to do if there was a hurricane? sure, but it would be very very very very unlikely for me to need to utilize that sort of skill set considering I live in the middle of a loooooooot of land. Not coastal at all.

Try a new cuisine? yes

Risk your life for anyone? Yes.

You like to get back in touch with someone? oh boy. how i wish.

You drive in the middle of the night to get a stuck friend? Ina heartbeat.

You Know how to perform CPR? I mean.. vaguely.

You likely win in a game of chess? I promise you no.

You stop talking for a day for $100? happily.

[werealljustwinginit]

The 20s and the 30s

For the “These are actually nice, you fucking nerd” ask:

20. what is your favourite song at the moment? Oh lord, I have a great deal of fave songs…I’ve never been able to pick when it comes to music. I guess some recent jams I find to be total bops are One Foot by Walk the Moon, American Girl by Tom Petty, and the entirety of The Greatest Showman Soundtrack.

21. age and birthday?This is a creepy ask to publish online…so I’ll give you I’m 23!

22. description of crush.Fictional characters and heroes.

23. fear(s)Spiders…that’s all I can think of? There has to be something else…but I can’t think of a single thing besides spiders.

24. heightTall my dude.

25. role modelHmm, my Dad, my two professors, and my favorite fictional characters.

26. idol(s)Tony Stark? Idk, I’m such a nerd…any celebs in shows and movies that I blog about on here. Beyonce, RDJ, Hugh Jackman, Zac Efron, Daisy Riddley, Zendaya, Obama, Julie Andrews, Tom Hanks…the list goes on.

27. things i hateSpiders, bad drivers, people, eating things from the ocean, waking up early in the morning or by alarm, cats, allergies, Donald Trump and most of the republican party…the list goes on. Why was this the easiest thing to answer so far.

28. i’ll love you if…You’re kind, you’re passionate about what you do, you are good with kids, you love shoes, are athletic, are tall, or are a nerd. Lol. You at least need to be prepared to listen to me talk about film and television.

29. favourite film(s)I LOVE THESE TYPES OF QUESTIONS. LET”S DISCUSS FILM. (Sort of in order:)Forrest Gump, La La Land, Les Miserables, The Lion King, Hook, HP, Marvel, and Walter Mitty.

30. favourite tv show(s)(In no particular order:) The Nanny, Parks & Rec, Boy Meets World, Steven Universe, The Office, Black Mirror, Bob’s Burgers, and Classic Spongebob.

31. 3 random factsI’m deaf, I can snowboard, anddddd did you know you breath mainly  through one nostril at a time? You can breath out of both but there is a stronger air flow to one nostril at a time; it changes every half hour or so. This is why when you are sick sometimes your nose just clears and you’re like “WHAT IS AIR???” …because it’s changing nostrils. I’m currently on my right nostril.

32. are your friends mainly girls or guys?Girls

33. something you want to learnIt’s on my bucket list to learn ASL and calligraphy. 

34. most embarrassing momentOf life? Recently? I’m gunna just share the most recent embarrassment of mine…Back in March I had shoulder surgery and was in a sling, unable to move my arm for 8 weeks. (and even after that but at least the sling was gone). A few days after my surgery, my parents had gone out to this local bar and tavern and invited me out for the first time since my surgery. They called and asked me to meet them there and while I didn’t feel well enough to stay and hang, they were gunna buy me some food to bring home and eat later. But mind you I only have the use of my left arm and this was all new to me…so I couldn’t shower yet, couldn’t brush my hair or put it up and out of my face on my own, couldn’t really dress myself yet, def couldn’t put a bra on, couldn’t tie shoes, etc. It was a mess. 

But I end up getting myself there in the rain. So I 134% look like a huge mess–not even a hot mess. Just literally looking like garbage, and I’m still in my sling, and it’s raining. But I at least wanted my mom to put my hair up for me to look somewhat decent in public and in a place where I know a ton of regulars. So I’m outside in the rain, calling my mom’s phone asking her to meet me by the back door to put my hair up, but to be discrete about it. She drunkenly interprets that as “go and bang on the bathroom door in the pool room as loudly as possible and start screaming for me to open the door (because I’m deaf so I might not hear the knock).” So the back door is cracked and I can see her doing this in front of all of these VERY handsome, fit, young men playing pool. The bathroom door is locked because some poor soul is in there, and I am trying to whisper through the crack in the door for her to get her stupid ass outside. Literally like a minute and a half goes by of this fucking scene and she finally notices me. But again, fuck everything, she just opens the back door wide, exposing me to all of these beautiful men, while the lady who was in the bathroom starts yelling at us. And then she says she isn’t going outside because it’s raining so she pulls my garbage looking ass into the pool room. Now all of these hot guys are staring at me, wondering why any of this is happening, and my mother then proceeds to start bushing my hair and putting it up for me in front of all of them. As if I was five. These men literally are just staring and trying not to laugh. And then I notice I know one of the guys and they are all his friends hanging out…so once she is done I (mortified) try and flee the room immediately, but she then calls out and says I need to turn around and come say hello to Brad (the guy I know). So not only was I horrified, but she made me walk back into hell to say hello to this handsome lad and his friends.UGHHHH. SO EMBARRASSING.

35. favourite subjectEnglish! Art History!

36. 3 dreams you want to fulfill?Get married, have kids, and meet a really cool celebrity. 

37. favourite actor/actressTom Hanks, RDJ, Julie Andrews, Hugh Laurie, Hugh Jackman

38. favourite comedian(s)Amy Poehler, Christine Sydelko, Jimmy Fallon, idk.

39. favourite sport(s)Track and Field, Snowboarding, Soccer.

THANK YOU FOR ASKING!

[syntheticaesthetic]

50 More interesting questions

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

I was tagged by @praxid!

1. What kind of food can’t you stand?: I’m sort of picky about texture. Not big on things that are sort of gelatinous - so no jello for me. I’m also not big tropical fruit person so I don’t like pineapple or most melons.

2. If you could choose one minor inconvenience to never have to deal with again, what would you pick?: Brushing my hair. It mats up while in a braided bun as I sleep. It takes hours to brush out. 

3. Have you got any useless talents?: I don’t have any talents really.

4. If you could be really really good at one thing, what would it be?: Film/photography/writing.

5. Name a few people you think are extremely good-looking: Melissa McBride, Sonequa Martin-Green, Andrew-Lee Potts, Kit Harrington, Karen Gillan, David Tennant, Scarlett Johansson, Jamie N Commons, Danai Gurirra, Donald Glover, Milla Jovovich, Tatiana Maslany, I should top. I find lots of people pretty. 

6. What was your favorite way to pass the time as a kid?: Reading, interneting, hitting my brother with sticks and getting hit back.

7. What is something you’re proud of?: I decided I wasn’t going to let another student film festival go uncaptioned at my college. I was the only one who captioned every film and I don’t think anyone has captioned the film festivals since, but I know that there were a few students that were able to attend the festival I did because they felt welcome for once. Fuck the kids who bitched about the captioning, it wasn’t for you.

8. What’s one character flaw in people that you just can’t tolerate?: Lying. For fuck’s sake just tell the truth. Also, don’t be cruel or intolerant of people’s differences or differences of opinion. Fuck you, there’s room for everyone and everyone’s thoughts. 

9. Do you consider yourself to be more of a leader or a follower?:  I’m a leader when I feel I must be - if absolutely no one else will step up, but I much prefer being a follower.

10. What kind of student are/were you?: I worked harder than anyone else to achieve mediocre status. 

11. Butterfly effect question! Has there ever been a seemingly minor decision you’ve made (at the time) that ended up having a profound influence on your life?: I told someone I liked a wristband/sweatband they were wearing and we became fast friends. I picked a school based on school colors. I followed my roommate to an ASL club meeting because she wanted me to get out of the dorm. I got a tumblr hahah. Honestly though the people I’ve met on tumblr have saved me so thank you.

12. Name your most irrational fear/aversion: Eyes - I don’t like eye drops, people touching their eyes, eye things happening in movies. I don’t like spiders. I’m still a little afraid of the dark. 

13. Are there any fictional characters you find especially relatable?: Tim Wright,  Jay Merrick, Clint Barton, Abby Maitland, Connor Temple, VERONICA MARS, Jessica Jones, 

14. If you drink, what kind of drunk are you? Alternatively, what sort of person are you at parties?: I get the munchies. And giggly. And sleepy. And I desire Left 4 Dead. Its my drunk video game. 

15. Do you fall in love easily? Or does it usually take a long time for you to trust someone?: I fall in love with concepts. I fall in love with characters. I fall in love with every dog I meet. But I’ve never had the opportunity to fall in love with a person. I love my friends, but I think that’s a different question? 

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

17. Do you consider yourself to be more of a slob or a neat-freak?: I’m a neat-freak who has given up. Dog hair will never be eradicated. I don’t have the energy to clean the way I want. My mind is too chaotic and I need clutter around me or I feel uncomfortable. Weirdly enough I was watching a documentary on Carrie Fisher and her mother, and I saw Carrie’s house and went “that’s me!” It seemed that her house was that way because of her bipolar status. I’m not bipolar but I do have major crippling anxiety and I think I clutter and throw art and things all over the walls as some sort of comforting mechanism. I’m unable to decorate like Adults do - I can’t do minimalism. It stresses me out. 

18. Describe a place (imaginary or real) that you would find incredibly cozy: Pacific northwest. Woods near a big lake or the ocean. Older farmhouse with brick and reclaimed wood. I have a room decorated in my usual chaos. There’s a bay window big enough for me and Ruby to both be on it at the same time. Its raining and the fall leaves are piled on the ground. I have candles and incense burning. Good music. Maybe a friend sitting on the computer next to me. There’s coffee and marionberry pie. Its october and everything is foggy and spooky and gentle and calm. Its probably sunday.

19. Do you have kids? If not, do you want them someday?: I don’t have any human kids. I like them, I think they’re funny. I’d want some if I was confident in my ability to care for them and raise them right and take care of them in all the ways they deserve.

20. What was your favorite book as a child? Harry Potter. To find something that not everyone else my age would say....Everything’s Eventual?

21. Name one thing you just don’t get what all the hype is about: Undertale. Its fine but I can’t get into it in the way everyone else does. 

22. Name one thing that you think is tragically underrated: Films on YouTube by indie filmmakers.

23. If you had to be glued to a person for a month, real or fictional (who you have never met), who would you choose?: Andrew-Lee Potts during the early days of Keychain Productions. Blood On Benefits made me want to make films, and I think spending a month with him working on all those short films would have made me actually live my dream rather than giving up on it. 

24. What’s something you’d like the chance to do someday?: I want to make films. I want to write an original story. Maybe make a video game? I want to make something. Do some crafting. Meet someone and actually date them. I’d like to have a kiss at some point, to see what that’s like. Have friends that live nearby that I can see frequently. 

25. Do you typically speak your mind when you have a controversial opinion? Or do generally prefer to not rock the boat?: No! Opinions are dangerous and people don’t like having friends that have different opinions than them, and I’d never have friends because I either don’t share the same opinions or I don’t feel strongly about my opinions. I’m very open to having people change my opinions. I’m not married to them. Please change my mind, I like thinking about things in a new way. But I am not going to share my opinions because it just causes so many fights among people - I just don’t feel safe doing it. 

26. What’s the dumbest fad you’ve been caught up in?: I’m sure it was fashion related but honestly I don’t care to think too hard about it. 

27. What’s something you thought was cool as a kid/adolescent, but now cringe at yourself for?: Only doing eyeliner on my bottom lids?

28. What’s a trait you consider to be very admirable?: True empathy. The ability to have practical skills that help people. 

29. Is there a particular kind of item people always tend to give you as gifts? (For instance, people always get you things with ducks on them because you like ducks, etc.): Hmmm....nerdy things? I mostly get gifts from Tumblr friends because we share fandoms so while the fandoms vary its usually homemade things based on our favorite things. And bless you all for it too - As my mom could tell you I beam for weeks upon receiving your guys gifts! I wish I could repay the kindness!

30. Do you speak multiple languages? Which ones?: I can do some really basic ASL. I used to do some basic spanish but that was many many years ago and I don’t think it would come back easily.

31. Would you rather live in the big city or the countryside?: Woods, middle of. I need my million dogs and my lots of land and fresh air. 

32. Has there ever been something you were certain you’d hate, but ended up loving?: the MCU lol

33. Do you mind being the center of attention, or do you prefer the spotlight to be on someone else?: Being the center of attention gives me anxiety.

34. Favorite holiday?: SPOOKY SCARY

35. Are you a more go-with-the-flow type of person, or do you need to have things planned meticulously?: My anxiety demands I have plans. Now, those plans are allowed to change, but I need to start with plans. 

36. Is there something you loved so much you wish you could forget it and experience it all over again? (A tv show, book, series–anything.): No.

37. What hobbies do you have?: Internet. Fanfiction writing (hahahahahaha). Photography. When my hand heals I wanna do leatherworking.

38. If you could have a superpower, but it was only mildly useful, what ability would you want to have?: I just want to know what my dog is thinking. So a superpower that lets me know what dogs are thinking/saying?

39. Something people are always surprised to learn about you: Could someone answer this for me? Because I don’t think anyone’s ever given me feedback on this one. 

40. Something that took you way too long to figure out: That I needed to do something about my anxiety. It gave me so many health problems and kept me from living my life. 

41. Worst injury you’ve had?: I’ve slammed my head against giant rocks. Hurt my knee in volleyball.

42. Any morbid fascinations?: Weirdly enough, not really! Post-nuclear apocalypses maybe? http://althistory.wikia.com/wiki/1983:_Doomsday was something I spent weeks immersed in to the detriment of my mental health.

43. Describe your sense of humor: Sarcastic, bitter, shitty puns? 

44. If you had to be born in another era/place, which would you choose?: 80s? Goth scene, I could have seen Depeche Mode and The Cure in their prime. 

45. Something you are irredeemably bad at: life

46. Something that sucked but you’re glad you went through: Being a shitty friend. Now I know how to not be that shitty?

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

48. Are you more of an optimist or a pessimist?: I like to think pessimistically so that if its true I’m not surprised but if it turns out better I can be pleasantly surprised!

49. What would be the most flattering compliment someone could give you?: That they genuinely loved me and that I made a difference in their life. 

50. Something you feel people often misunderstand about you: I don’t know........ How bone achingly lonely I am? Maybe someone can help me out on this one too. I don’t know if anyone really “understands” me - I don’t communicate my mindset well. 

I’m tagging: @gallifreystands @the44thpilot @autumnxtoxashes @ms-fagerstrom @marionarnold

[hvti]

AFTG!Siblings AU

Louisa Anastasia Damia Josten (Damia Dolores Wesninski) 

Damia (english. “to tame, to subdue, to kill”) Dolores (spanish. “sorrows”)

Louisa (french. “warrior”) Anastasia (greek. “resurrection”)

the name anastasia was given to her by mary when she unofficially adopted her and took her on the run w her & neil

like how neil keeps the middle name abram in all his identities, louisa keeps anastasia in all her identities

she also keeps damia, much to mary’s chagrin

when they were younger neil used to call lousia ‘DD’ for damia dolores

now he calls her sia (which, btw, is hebrew for victory)

she calls him abe & abram in private (mostly abe)

neil was the one to come up with the name louisa when they went to millport

she’s nathan’s and lola’s daughter so she’s neil’s half sister

she’s older than him by a year or two

they look exactly the same so they often had to pretend to be twins

also she’s shorter than him (by like an inch) which he teases her about constantly

btw dolores is the full name of lola and means the same thing

she was born deaf, master at reading lips in 5 different languages (including english, obvi)

also a master at sign language but has hardly ever had a need to use it because she can communicate w neil using eye contact so,

has trouble pronouncing words because of her hearing; her voice is all hollow and choppy

neil finds comfort in it anyway

super strong & super fast; her arms are thick and muscular af

she has a curvy athletic w a tiny waist that’s super sexy btw un f

also she can most definitely bench press anyone of the the foxes

maybe not matt or kevin but,

can also run as fast as neil

she isn’t a ‘rabbit’ like neil is though

she also doesn’t have an obsession w exy like neil does either, she only plays to be closer to him

she’s a dealer btw

she’s also a freakin’ amazing dealer like woah

she tends to be quiet and aloof; louisa usually only speaks out of irritation or to defend neil when necessary

part of the reason she doesn’t bother communicating is cus it’s too bothersome to try and talk to people who either 1. don’t know asl or 2. can’t read her like neil can

she has sociopathic tendencies,,

maybe borderline psychopathic

she gets pissed easily (but it doesn’t show thanks to her usually display of blank indifference)

enjoys picking on people; she has a dark and sarcastic sense of humor

also,,, she’s v sadistic and has a temper that rivals her fathers

it’s a couple of the things she inherited from nathan besides his looks

loves toying with her enemies and prolly feels most alive when she’s in a fight and/or about to kill someone

she killed a lot of nathan’s men while on the run

usually when his people found them she’d be the first to figure it out & tell mary to take neil and run ahead & she’d catch up with them when she was done

at the beginning she cared only for neil; she’s always had a strong sense of loyalty, devotion, & maternal instincts towards neil ever since he was born

neil is the only person louisa treats with a sort of gentleness

i.e. when she touches him: her fingers are always light and soft as if she’d break if she put too much force,

she often plays with his hair, it relaxes him,

they cuddle a lot

they’ve done it ever since they were kids, it started when neil was too afraid to go to sleep at night cus of his father

when they first moved into the fox tower louisa would sneak into neil’s dorm room and cuddle w him for the first few weeks

(they also shared the couch when they were staying w wymack before school started),

she’d sometimes sing lullabies or tell random, made up stories to help calm him down when he has nightmares or panics, despite her voice

neil highkey finds her voice very soothing

when she becomes closer to the foxes she becomes just as fiercely protective of them as she is of neil (but, ofc, she’ll always hold neil to a higher standing lmao)

she also starts talking with them, not by much tho like a short sentence every now and then

but the foxes learn to read louisa as well as neil can so

they also as neil to teach them asl to surprise louisa (when they showed her she had the biggest smile on her face and so much love in her eyes all of the foxes started crying; except andrew ofc)

she’s never cared for neil’s mother, like, at all

it was mostly because mary beat neil and no one hurts neil

whenever mary would raise her hand to beat neil louisa would crush her wrists or bruise her ribs in return

nothing too major cus they needed mary to still be able to run when needed

she respected mary on some level tho because she stole money and ran to protect neil which lousia can relate too

tho lousia wouldn’t have been so cowardly. she would’ve just killed nathan

she isn’t scared of nathan, her mother or the moriyamas like neil is

she doesn’t have nightmares

she doesn’t live in constant fear for her life

she isn’t worried about making it through the year alive

she isn’t worried about becoming like her father (she basically is as this point)

she isn’t afraid of her natural appearance because it looks too much like nathan’s

she is afraid of not being strong enough to protect neil

she’s afraid of losing him; it’s the one thing she has nightmares about

she’s very skilled with knives and carries like 50 different sized ones on her person at all times

she actually has a great sense of fashion

she hated the shit mary made her and neil wear and lowkey blames mary for neil’s sad excuse for fashion

when mary dies she fixes neil’s wardrobe

she usually only wears pants & long sleeve shirts & jackets

not because she’s hiding her scars tho (which, trust me, she has a lot of scars, like 50% of her body has scars and she get more when she goes with neil to evermore)

she actually likes her scars; she’s quite proud of them, shows she’s survived a lot of shit

part of the reason she covers up is cus of neil (ofc)

when he used to he see her scars he was also reminded of how most of those were because of him, because louisa was protecting him

he always hated that he could never protect her when all she’s done is protect him

he often feels like a burden to her and her scars kinda amplify his self-hate

and louisa noticed this a long time ago so, she covers up

the other have of the reason is cus it helps to hide her disgustingly large amount of knives (like srsly she has so many)

she often forgets to put in her contacts at times or redye her hair when her roots start growing so neil has to remind her

even though louisa is way more like nathan then neil will ever be, he always feels safe with her and loves her more than anything else in the world

he’s just as protective of louisa as she is of him

tho he spent his life running so he isn’t has strong as she is and can’t protect her like she can protect him

he’ll try to nonetheless ofc cus: martyr.

and being the Sass Master that he is neil is always the first one to drag a bitch verbally when they insult louisa

neil does the talking, louisa does that fighting; brain and brawns i guess you could say???

btw louisa is a history geek like kevin is (her favorite is mythology)

remember when i mentioned louisa telling neil stories?

most of them are mythology ones

her best subject is history

surprisingly enough louisa becomes closest with nicky, renee & kevin

she’s close w all of the foxes ofc

but nicky is her Sunshine

and renee gets her the most besides andrew

but andrew is neil’s and she respects that

and for some reason her and kevin share this weird bond and they become inseparable like she is w neil

and to the utter shock of everyone louisa is also as close w aaron as she is w neil & kevin

and i know this is an unpopular opinion but i like aaron

i hate his homophobic slurs with a passion but Goddess Nora mentioned that he became that way because of the environment that he grew up in

and i feel like aaron has potential to be better (there are so many aaron hcs out there that relate to how i perceive him in this hc but im too lazy to find them and link them,,)

so! somehow, someway aaron and louisa have a bonding moment idk what yet i haven’t thought that far yet

(and this is basically an about hc not a fic hc so,,,)

i do know that it happens sometime after the drake incident possibly??? idk

and they talk, a lot mostly in asl (besides neil, andrew and herself aaron is the best at asl)

aaron confesses to her about all the shit he went through with her mom and andrew and how he hates andrew or that he hates nicky

and he tells her how he hates himself the most and that he doesnt really hate andrew or nicky and that he wants to be better

so louisa helps him, listens to him when he needs an ear, drops little pieces of advice here and there

and no one knows this is going on for like the longest time

they only find out when nicky catches aaron and louisa sitting on the couch together in their dorm room playing video games and aaron is at shouting in disbelief because how can someone whos never played a goddamn video game in her life be so fucking good!? and louisa cackling like a freakin’ cartoon villain as she continues to crush aaron in w/e game they were playing

nicky was Shook

he told everyone of course

or something like that again idk,,,

also, louisa doesn’t go pro like neil does

instead, she becomes ichirou’s right hand

when neil finishes talking to ichirou about his life, ichirou tells neil to wait outside while he talked to louisa

and ichirou asks louisa if she wants the same thing her brother wanted

and louisa was confused cus like she didn’t say or do anything during the entire time ichirou was talking with neil so why ask?

she didn’t care what she did when she got out of collage as long as she was near neil so she can protect him

but neil had andrew to protect him now so… was she really needed?

ichirou spoke to her about how she killed her father’s men (he got reports i guess, nathan’s men were kengo’s men technically)

people were sent to the last place they heard from nathan’s followers and they found their bodies bloody and mangled

louisa smirked ever so slightly, nodding her head to ichirou’s implied question (“was it you?”)

so, ichirou makes a different deal with louisa and she becomes his right hand and is held at a much, much higher status than nathan

i don’t know how i’d want their relationship to be though im caught between it being just a business thing, a way for her to protect neil from the inside as well

or have them have like a mutual respect for each other w louisa being almost as fiercely loyal to him as she is to neil (but again, neil will always be #1)

i also kinda want her and ichirou to get together at some point

most likely when louisa graduates from college

p.s. when her and neil get kidnapped by nathan and lola louisa puts up a hell of a fight

like she hurts lola bad

and nathan too

but they drugged her so she was pretty weak and couldn’t kill them like she wanted

it was the most scared she’s ever been cus lola was hurting neil while nathan was hurting her and she knew lola was only toying with neil for fun but god what is lola killed him?

she’s never felt more useless in her life

is was also the first time she’s ever felt so scared

p.s.s. louisa does change her name officially to louisa anastasia damia josten w neil

i think that’s it for now? maybe i’ll write lil drabbles or smth in the future?? i’ve never been good at writing but i do wanna see louisa come to life,,, the struggle is real

i might post more of louisa on here or my writing blog @principi and my main blog is @cimelio

also if you want come talk to me about hcs!!! i love sharing ideas n junk lmao

[newyorktheater]

Stephanie J. Block as “Star” Cher

Bryan Cranston

Lauren Ridloff from Children of a Lesser God

My ten favorite individual human performances in New York stage shows that opened in 2018 are listed alphabetically, with explanations for my choices largely excerpted from my reviews, but let’s begin with a few noteworthy ensembles:

The cast of Dance Nation showed us what it’s like to be an adolescent girl, though the actresses were as old as 60.

Noah Robbins and Edmund Donovan in Clarkston

The six performers of Lewiston/Clarkston confess, kiss and fight literally inches away from the audience

The two dozen actors of The Ferryman, most making their Broadway debuts, are all terrific, believable even when the play takes a turn into fantasy, especially the ones charged with taking care of the live baby, bunny, and goose that accompanies them on stage nightly.

The 1,000 performers of the Mile-Long Opera, stood in their position along the entire 30 block length of the High Line elevated park, singing snippets or reciting short monologues  over and over and over again about life in New York City. It was an astonishing, spectacular, moving, and deeply odd work of theater that required a massive collaborative effort.

Broadway veteran Stephanie J. Block goes beyond just a spot-on impersonation of the mature Cher, called Star, in The Cher Show. As one of the three actresses portraying the entertainer at different stages of her life, she captures not just her look, her mannerisms, her moves, and her voice, but her attitudes and even her aura.

Nobody can do a nervous breakdown like Bryan Cranston. As Howard Beale, long-time network news anchor gone mad, he sits in front of the camera, unable to speak, his face a dramatic repertoire expressing varying shades of reddened desperation. And that’s just one of Cranston’s many memorable moments in the Broadway production of Network. Cranston became a star thanks to his Emmy-winning performance as chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin on AMC’s Breaking Bad, but convinced Broadway of his theater chops in his Tony-winning turn as LBJ in “All The Way.” His performance in “Network” is further proof.

Johnny Flynn portrayed Mooney, the mysterious, sly, sexy intruder in Martin McDonough’s Hangmen. Flynn, who originated the role in England, and played the lead in the bingeable Netflix series “Lovesick,” seems a likely candidate for larger stardom.

  In The House That Will Not Stand, Lynda Gravátt portrayed Beartrice, the matriarch of an all-female African-American household in 19th century New Orleans, giving the gravitas it required, but with her character deepened by the suggestion of a willfully suppressed vulnerability. It’s one of the three distinctive roles she performed on New York stages this year  – a prophetic cellist in This Flat Earth, a scheming funeral director in The Revolving Cycles Truly and Steadily Roll’d.  She keeps her sense of dignity even when playing a con artist.

Tom Hollander

Tom Hollander carried Travesties. His energetic clowning never wavered, but he also managed to bring clarity and feeling to Tom Stoppard’s mind-boggling collage of a play.

Glenda Jackson

Glenda Jackson returned to Broadway in Albee’s Three Tall Women after an absence of thirty years to portray a rich, regal old lady who’s become a monster, and is also dying, a performance that manages to be simultaneously ferocious and vulnerable. Although Jackson herself is now 82 years old, she has that ability that great actresses have of convincing us that her portrayal of a dying 92-year-old is an act; that the actress herself is fully in command of an endless depth and power. In other hands, Albee’s play might seem cold. Jackson’s meditation on facing death finds the heartbreak in it.

Liz Mikel in Fruit Trilogy

In Eve Ensler’s Fruit Trilogy, Liz Mikel gave a final, breathtaking monologue that suggested to me something close to Molly Bloom’s monologue at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses, a passionate outburst about the pleasure a woman’s body can give her – but in Ensler’s play laced with a decidedly feminist message. Mikel completely disrobes, but immediately admonishes the audience not to give her labels like exhibitionist. “What if you were there not to be titillated but instead to watch, learn, appreciate, to perceive and understand my pleasure but not in a lascivious way.”

In what was (incredibly) her professional stage debut, Lauren Ridloff portrayed Sarah Norman in “Children of a Lesser God,” whose language (like the actress’s) was American Sign Language. The actress proved passionate, eloquent and graceful in the upper body ballet that is ASL.

Anika Noni Rose as Carmen Jones

Anika Noni Rose conquers in the title role of Carmen Jones, from the moment she enters wearing that red dress and carrying a red rose, and inspects her silk stockings. It is a subtle gesture that shows us a woman out for herself. Sultry, seductive and destructive, her Carmen Jones is an operatic character of outsized appetites, and Rose’s voice one of operatic force and beauty. But her performance, rooted in her training as a Tony-winning actress in both plays and musicals, offers no hint of the stilted formality we might associate with opera stars.

In her timely and informative play, What the Constitution Means to Me, Heidi Schreck plays herself at age 15 and at her current age. As winning as her play is, her performance as herself is remarkable. There is a certain slyness in her depiction of a teenager, but when she’s herself talking candidly about the history of domestic abuse in her family, or about her abortion, her emotions feel real. It’s bracing to realize she does this eight times a week

One thing about New York City: There’s no end to the stage talent. I could easily fill another Top 10 list of performances in 2018 And so here it is (again alphabetical):

 Lauren Ambrose in My Fair Lady, Anthony Boyle in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Nathan Lane in Angels in America, Elaine May in the Waverly Gallery, Lindsay Mendez in Carousel, Laurie Metcalfe in Three Tall Women, Chris Perfetti in The Low Road, Angie Schworer in The Prom, Shannon Tyo in The Chinese Lady,  Michael Urie in Torch Song

And, it doesn’t feel right to leave out the puppets of 2018.Behind every successful puppet is a person – usually many people.

King Kong

King Kong in King Kong (Manipulated by Mike Baerga , Rhaamell Burke-Missouri , Jovan Dansberry , Casey Garvin, Gabriel Hyman, Marty Lawson, Robeto Olvero, Khadija Tariyan, Lauren Yalango-Grant , David Yijae — collectively referred to as King’s Company)

Jelani Alladin as Kristoff and Andrew Pirozzi as Sven

Sven the reindeer  in Frozen (Adam Jepsen and Andrew Pirozzi)

Frozen: Greg Hildreth as Olaf

Olaf in Frozen (Greg Hildreth)

Jester, dragon, prince and princess finger puppets by Una Clancy in The Jester and the Dragon

The seventy-five puppets (or one thousand depending on how you cat) amoeba-looking plastic cut-outs and pieces of tinsel , psychedelic pinwheels etc. – in Symphonie Fantastique (Kate Brehm, Ben Elling, Andy Gaukel, Jonothon Lyons, and Rachael Shane, with Basil Twist)

20 Favorite New York Stage Performances in 2018, and 5 Top Puppet Performances My ten favorite individual human performances in New York stage shows that opened in 2018 are listed alphabetically, with explanations for my choices largely excerpted from my reviews, but let’s begin with a few noteworthy ensembles:

[hcsmca]

Promoting Equity and Increasing Accessibility For All

The term “health equity” is broadly used, yet somewhat abstract. The World Health Organization defines it as “the absence of avoidable or remediable differences among groups of people, whether those groups are defined socially, economically, demographically, or geographically.” One angle of health equity that we don’t often think about is that of accessibility for individuals facing the barriers imposed by disability. This year at TEDMED 2017, we will hear from Speakers focused on improving equity for people with disabilities and who are working to make the world a more accessible place for all.

(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/de_DE/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.10"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));

Automatic Alternative Text

Facebook accessibility specialist and engineer Matt King lost his vision completely in college. When he joined our accessibility team after more than 20 years in the accessibility field, one of the projects he was most excited to work on centered on using object recognition technology to automatically describe photos for people who are not able to see those photos. Today, with our launch of automatic alternative text, we're taking an important step towards achieving that goal.Automatic alternative text, or automatic alt text, is a new feature that generates a description of a photo through object recognition technology for someone who cannot see the photo. Before today, people who are visually impaired could only hear the name of the person who posted the photo as they scrolled past photos on Facebook. Now, if they're using a screen reader on iOS, they'll hear a richer description of the photo thanks to automatic alt text. For example, for a group photo on the beach, a person using a screen reader on iOS would now hear, “This image may contain: Three people, smiling, outdoors.” We are rolling this out in English over the next few weeks and will add more languages and platforms soon.Facebook's mission is to make the world more open and connected, and that means everyone, including the visually impaired community. Worldwide, more than 39 million people are blind, and over 246 million have a severe visual impairment. While this technology is still in its early stages, tapping its current capabilities to describe photos is a huge step toward providing our visually impaired community the same benefits and enjoyment that everyone else gets from photos. As Facebook becomes an increasingly visual experience, we hope our new automatic alt text technology will help the visually impaired community experience Facebook the same way others enjoy it.

Posted by Facebook Accessibility on Montag, 4. April 2016

  Matt King is making technology and social networking more accessible and user-friendly for individuals with disabilities. As Facebook’s first blind Accessibility Engineer, Matt recognizes that as technology evolves, there is an opportunity to design it in a way that is inclusive and accessible for all users. A record-breaking tandem cyclist and three-time Paralympian, Matt is skilled at breaking through expectations and barriers. Driven by the belief that providing accessible platforms for creativity and social networking benefits everyone involved, Matt has channeled his determination toward creating equitable opportunities for people with disabilities to engage and make connections online. Matt challenges us to look at technology through a broader lens, make it more equitable, and work to redefine what is meant by “user experience” in Silicon Valley.

Amber signing with Wiz Khalifa

Much like Matt is making technology more accessible, American Sign Language (ASL) music interpreter Amber Galloway Gallego is providing the Deaf community with full access to the experience of music and live performance. Prior to launching her own production company, Amber had only witnessed lackluster ASL interpreters at concerts—performances that left her Deaf friends feeling bored and devoid of the same personal connection to music that Amber felt so strongly. After watching the expressive work of a Deaf dance company, she was inspired to bridge the access gap in the music industry. Her work is captivating, conveying emotions, tone, and guitar riffs through sign, interpreting for stage artists like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live! with Wiz Khalifa.

Amber’s work to make music more accessible to the Deaf community shines a spotlight on another area of inequality: health care. Often, health care settings fail to provide qualified interpreters for their patients or providers lack cultural competence when communicating with their Deaf patients. Because of language and cultural barriers, Deaf patients experience higher risk of morbidities such as cardiac disease and obesity, often entering the health system at a more expensive point in their care.

Another population often afflicted by a lack of access to care and feelings of isolation is the elderly. Numerous studies have shown that chronic loneliness and social isolation can have negative health consequences; in fact, loneliness exceeds obesity as a predictor for premature death. The experience of loneliness is not limited to a particular part of the world. In the United States and the United Kingdom, 30% of adults over the age of 65 and 50% of those over 85 live alone. Sophie Andrews, CEO of The Silver Line helpline, is committed to forging social connections and bridging the communication gap for older people in the United Kingdom. The Silver Line is a 24/7 hotline that fields 10,000 calls each week, providing callers with information about local services, friendship to combat loneliness, and a place to report neglect or abuse. Fifty-three percent of callers to The Silver Line say they have literally no one else to speak with. Sophie and her organization provide an accessible platform for older people to engage in confidential conversations without judgement.

These Speakers are taking steps towards connecting our world by creating platforms of inclusion. They have made music, health care resources, personal connection, and technology easier to access for so many people, improving health outcomes and personal well-being. We invite you to join us this November to hear their stories and learn more about their work.

The post Promoting Equity and Increasing Accessibility For All appeared first on TEDMED Blog.

Read more from TEDMED http://ift.tt/2wiVq4r

[crisscolferfanforever]

Jock 10.3

10.3

 Deaf Panel

 Written by Smoothie smith

                        We approach the locker room after king loses to Cleveland hill 64-53

Jake

“we are 4-7 now “

David

“we don’t have an easy road anymore “

Diana

“he’s right we got number 4 locust valley number 6 north Collins and number 5 silver creek “

John

“I say we call in a meeting “

Curtis

“to do what”

Josh

“I think we should switch up the d “

Josh

“that is not bad”

Jake

“what d are you thinking about “

Diana

“I was going to go with zone press to 2-3 “

Jake is frustard

Curtis

“I say we sleep on it “

Everyone looks at Curtis

Jake

“that’s what we should do first “

Everyone looks at Jake

Jake

“this going to be a hell of second half”

He walks out

We see Curtis and matt at home

Matt

“hazel got a win tonight 43-12”

Curtis

“that’s good at least someone in the family is winning “

Matt brings his soulmates hand to the bed

Matt

“what’s the matter “

Curtis looking at his soulmate

Curtis

“we are 4-8 “

Matt

“yes, my father had a 15-10 record and made it to state “

Curtis

“I am just not uses to it “

Matt

“I know “

Curtis

“when is our daughter getting home”

Matt

“albert is picking her up”

Curtis

“good let’s sleep “

They kiss

We see a van with Luke and albert waiting for hazel and Megan  

Luke taps albert

Luke (sign)

“what do you think the team’s problem is “

Albert(sign)

“I think we can’t play man to man “

Luke(sign)

“do you think it has to do with us playing 3 top ten teams in the state back to back to back”

Albert (sign)

“that’s half of the problem “

It begins to snow

The boys just wait

Hazel and meg come out

Hazel bangs on the window

Albert unlocks the door

Hazel

“hey honey “

Albert

“hey you “

Hazel taps Luke and waves

Luke (sign)

“win or lose”

Hazel (sign)

“lost on a buzzer beater”

Albert (sign)

“that sucks “

Hazel is nodding

They drive off

Megan (sign)

“so how bad did you guys lose by”

Albert (sign/talking)

“15”

Megan

“I feel like crap”

 Hazel

“why”

She looks down

 We see the next day as Curtis works on his case load

Curtis

“Margert! “

Marge

“yes”

They come face to face

Curtis

“can you get Mrs. Fisher in here “

Marge

“yes “

Curtis

“thank you, and oh one more thing I need you to get Ms. Hemerial in here “

Marge

“yes”

She runs off

David and josh come in

Josh

“here is the scouting report on John Collins “

Curtis

“I will send it to Jake good job “

Josh

“thank you, Curtis they leave, “

We see the students as albert is singing

Albert

“There’s a boy I know he’s the one I dream considers my eyes take to the clouds above, ooh I lose control can’t seem to get enough When I wake from dreaming tell is it really love ohh”

Albert dancing

Albert

“how will I know? don’t trust your feelings how will I know? how will I know love can be deceiving how will I know; how will I know if he really loves me I say prayer with ever heartbeat I fall in love whenever we meet I’m asking you what you know about these things “

Zach and the students come in

Albert

“hey, how will I know he really loves me I say a prayer with ever heartbeat I fall in love whenever we meet, how will I know”

He finishes

Zach (sign)

“amazing “

Albert (Sign)

“thank you, what are we here for “

Albert kisses hazel

Zach (sign)

“we have the deaf panel tonight “

Albert (sign)

“yes “

The four deaf and hard of hearing students come in and sit down”

They begin

 We see Coach Carter, Coach Bonnell, and Coach Hardy watching film

Coach hardy writing down stuff

John

“so how do we get Zach to play both d and o “

Josh

“we need to help around him look at Evan he’s not in help side “

Everyone looking at Diana

David comes in

Josh

“what is that you are writing “

Diana

“here “

They get a piece of paper

John

“no way”

Josh

“what”

Diana

“I want to consider to coach schalow and coach Anderson to run a little zone “

David

“well lets here after all we are 4-8 “

Josh

“and we are going to get better “

Jake and Curtis look from the gym as they see their staff screaming

Curtis

“I have to go to an IEP meeting for a student “

Jake

“see you at 4”

Jake walks down

Jake

“what do we have here children at play “

Everyone stands

Diana

“coach Schalow “

Jake

“sit down and tell your plan for Collins “

Diana gives him the note

Jake

“I am listening “

Everyone looks at Diana

We see James and Wendy at the airport

James

“this is going to be fun “

Wendy

“you think “

Wendy starts singing New York New York

Wendy

“Start spreading the news “

James looks at newspaper

Wendy

“I’m leaving today, I want be a part of it New York New York “

James

“these vagabond shoes are longing to stray, right through the very heart of it “

They keep walking through Central park

James and Wendy

“New York, New York “

James

“I want to wake up in a city that doesn’t sleep”

Wendy

“and find I’m king of the hill, top of the heap “

James +Wendy

“these little town blues are melting away “

They get in a taxi

James

“I will make a brand-new start in old New York”

They get out of the cab

James

“well we didn’t end the song but we are here “

Wendy

“yes, we are “

They kiss

James

“Where should we head first “

Wendy

“Kurt and Blaine’s “

James

“prefect idea”

 We see Matt and the staff getting ready for the deaf week festival

Matt

“yes, where are the shirts “

Carol

“jerry “

Jerry

“they are in your husband office”

Matt

“great”

Helena

“hey, I got the key”

Matt

“give me give me “

Matt runs up

Carol

“we have trouble “

Jerry

“what now “

Jerry turns

Jerry

“oh, that’s going to be a problem, Jalen go it your dad asap “

Carol

“hello Kurt and Blaine “

Blaine

“hey where is my son in law”

Carol and hele look at each other

 We see a basketball game at a deaf school for New York we see Katylin and Marcus with Rebecca

Rebecca (sign)

“so, you what did you guys do today at deaf week”

Marcus (sign)

“we did a lot of guess speakers on the culture and history”

Rebecca (sign)

“that’s awesome “

Marcus (sign)

“yep”

Rebecca(sign)

“I will see you later tonight “

She leaves

   We see Rebecca and her staff at shoot around

Craig

“why are we doing this “

Amanda

“because we don’t play until Saturday “

Coach Jackson comes in

Alan

“hey “

Rebecca

“hello coach Jackson “

Alan

“what’s the schedule “

Rebecca

“30 min shooting “

Alan

“good “

They watch the players

We go back to the conference room

Jake

“so, this is what you want to do “

Diana

“I want to stay in 20 “

Josh

“so, what is your suggestion on defense that we do “

Diana

“I am saying a mix up “

David

“look at their 3Pt shooting percentage “

Jake takes the notes

Jake

“wow “

John

“what’s your suggestion “

Jake

“let’s talk about it during shoot around “

They leave for the gym

We see Kurt and Blaine and James and Wendy having dinner

Kurt

“so how is San Diego “

James

“good “

Wendy

“how’s life in the big apple for you two”

Kurt

“good we moved back into our loft that we had when we were in college”

Blaine

“and now we are watching Tracy play basketball for Coach Schalow “

James

“I can’t believe he got to state in his first year”

They get their food

Wendy

“so are you going to the deaf panel tonight “

Blaine

“Wendy don’t spoil it “

Kurt

“what”

James

“we are having our first annual event “

Blaine

“Curtis and matt will do amazing “

Wendy

“should we go”

Kurt

“yes”

They leave for the center

Curtis and the student’s come in

Curtis (sign)

“ok go to your places “

We see Zach and Albert signing their ABC’s

We see Hazel and Cindy playing the sign tag game

We see all the students having fun with the community

Both the girls and boys coaching staff come in

Helena

“the basketball staff is here “

Curtis

“thank you “

Rebecca comes in

Rebecca

“hello my darling angel “

Craig

“coach “

Jake

“coach “

They keep shacking hands

Josh

“this is awesome “

David

“totally “

Matt comes in

Matt

“Curtis darling “

Curtis

“hey “

They kiss

Matt

“this is amazing “

Diana comes in with mark

Josh

“oh gosh I got to go get a drink”

David

“I will join “

Jake and Morgan come in

Jake

“hello guys what’s up “

Curtis

“doing great the players are all enjoying themselves “

Jake

“good, Morgan and I are going to learn “

They leave

Curtis asstiants come in

Jerry

“Curtis, Sarah, Joel, Erin are here from Wagner College American Sign Lauanage program “

Curtis

“thank you, guys will you excuse me hey matt let me know when Sam and Andrew come in ok “

Matt

“yes”

Curtis walks up to them

Curtis (signing)

“hello guys welcome to the Smoothie Anderson center “

Sarah(sign)

“this is amazing “

Erin(sign)

“so, what’s up where is this deaf panel”

Curtis (sign)

“that is in hour in the ballroom right now there is a group of students from my ASL 3-4 class who are exposing the New York Community about the Deaf and hard of hearing People with history, culture, and other things”

Sarah (Sign)

“I want to see this “

They all follow Curtis

Erin (sign)

“oh my “

Joel (sign)

“I love it “

They go and join the groups

We see hazel teach Jake and Morgan about the school for the deaf in New York with Ryne

Hazel (sign)

“The New York School for the Deaf was chartered in 1817 as the New York Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb, and opened its first classes in New York City in 1818 just after the American School for the Deaf, and thus is recognized as the second oldest deaf school in the United States. It moved twice in the 19th century to other Manhattan locations, and finally to White Plains, New York in 1938, where it remains”

Ryne (sign)

“In 1892 the school was the first U.S. school of any kind to introduce a military curriculum. For half a century, tight formation drill was an everyday occurrence on the parade grounds. [2] [3]

In 1952, the school dropped the military curriculum and welcomed girls again, and since then has expanded its programs to benefit both deaf and hard-of-hearing school children, and more recently, pre-school classes as well.”

 Curtis and Diana talk about the Saturday night show down

Curtis

“so, what do you think 2-3 for the whole game or a mix “

Diana

“mix it up”

We see albert and Zach talking about deaf culture

Zach (sign)

“in the deaf coummity deaf people are direct then hearing people, the deaf and hard of hearing are better drivers then we hearing people are, I know right ok who here has questions “

We see Tracy and Cindy playing the sign tag game

Cindy(sign)

“pets or sports “

Tracy (sign)

“raise your hands for sports “

Cindy (sign)

“eight people “

Tracy (sign)

“I am basketball this is the sign for basketball”

Diana

“john we have to go get ready for the deaf panel “

Kitty (sign)

“I have the pizza all ready “

John

“good”

Diana

“let’s go”

They come in

Curtis(sign)

“good can you guys get Albert and Zach for me”

Diana (sign)

“I will “

Curtis (sign)

“thank you “

The deaf professors come in and sit down right in front

Joel (sign)

“are they all deaf “

Curtis (sign)

“two deaf students Andrew and Samantha and two hard of hearing student’s Luke and Tina “

Erin (sign)

“so, what are they going to talk about “

Curtis (sign)

“they are going to talk about what it means to be either deaf or hard of hearing for them they will tell about their future “

Erin (sign)

“I like the idea”

Sarah (sign)

“is anyone going to Wagner college for the asl program”

Curtis (Sign)

“the interpotrs “

Joel (sign)

“what are their names “

Curtis (sign)

“Albert Halpert and Zach Mootz”

Joel (sign)

“when can we meet them “

Curtis (sign)

“what’s the rules “

Sarah (sign)

“why do you ask “

Curtis (sign)

“because I don’t want you screw up my alum and this is my center my foundation “

Erin (sign)

“we can meet them without giving them anything like free money after all they get a reduce because they live in New York “

Curtis (sign)

“I just don’t want a scandal “

Joel (sign)

“We know Curtis “

Curtis (sign)

“where do you want to sit “

Erin (sign)

“will sit in the front row”

Curtis (sign)

“prefect timing “

The students come in with the New York Community

Josh

“so, where do you guys want to sit “

Donna

“how about let’s sit right here “

Jake

“two rows “

Rebecca

“ok “

Al

“this is going to be good “

We see Curtis with four people that will be at the panel “

Curtis (sign)

“you guys ready “

Everyone nods

Curtis (sign/Albert speaking)

“hello, I am Curtis Anderson gosz I am the chairman of the smoothie center and the asl teacher at Rufus king and welcome to deaf week and to are first annual deaf panel these are the two intpetors Zach Mootz and albert Halpert both are seniors they will sign your question and speak there for you so you are all taken care of “

James and Wendy come in with Kurt and Blaine

Curtis looks happy

Matt

“hello dad and mom “

Wendy

“hello “

James

“hey you “

We begin

Center caremera

Andrew (Sign/Zach talking)

“hello, my name is Andrew Horton I am senior at Rufus King I am in ASL 4 I love the fact that this guy Mr. Anderson-Gosz gave us a voice in the school that I wanted to be at I plan on attending Fordham for Early childhood”

Crowd waves their hands

Tina (sign/Zach talking)

“hello, my name is Tina Houston I am a junior at Rufus king high school I am in ASL 3 I am so proud of my Asl teacher and case manager Mr. Gosz-Anderson for giving us a voice in this high school what do I want to do with my future I plan on attending Iona in New Rochelle to major In Special education “

Wave of the hands

Sam (sign/Albert talking)

“hello, my name is Samantha weiler I am a junior at Rufus King I am in the ASL 3 class I am also in MR. Anderson Deaf history class I am so proud of this high school for letting a man like Mr. Anderson -gosz teach our school our culture and language I plan on going to college at Long island in the Bronx to study Early Childhood with Empizhe in Special Education and ASL “

Waving

To the final student

Luke (sign/Zach speaking)

“hello, my name is Luke Heller I am a senior at Rufus king I am so proud of this man for giving us a voice at the school that we love to go to he is a true role model for everyone at the school not just us in the deaf and hard of hearing program but everyone “

Wave

Fade out

We go back to curtis  

Curtis (sign/Albert talking)

“now I want you to tell the audience what your is your back story then the audience will ask question about anything like what is your impact is or your view is on the Deaf and hard of hearing community is and where you like to see it go “

Andrew (sign/Zach talking)

“I think the best way to describe my story is when I was two years old my parents notice that I was not responding so they took me to the doctor and they found out I have no hearing in both ears and it happen not just once it happens over time so I guess that was my story “

Tina (sign/Albert talking)

“I had a lot sickness in my early life then I got the worst cold possible a mengiues virus that left me deaf my parents were told to try hearing aids they did and well we wasted money then my father had brains and tough me to sign so that is my story “

Sam (sign/Zach talking)

“I was born deaf my grandmother was deaf in 1970’s so that is where it started I guess a lot of people want to my father to do an implant cochlear and I refuses because that is not who I am “

Luke (sign/Albert talking)

“my story is that I have 75 percent lost in my left ear and 90 in the right I use these hearing aids however I do sign most of the times I can speak but I commutative better with sign my parents are both dead so I live alone with my grandmother “

Question from audience

As everyone looks on

We see the next day in the school hallway

Hazel

“you were amazing last night “

Albert

“thank you “

They kiss

Zach

“well there were some professor that came and sign with us last night “

Albert

“they can’t wait for us to be in the program “

They see the deaf and hard of hearing students signing

Albert

“I think one thing your father is a life saver for the community that was big highlight last night “

Hazel

“I can’t believe both my grandparents came “

Zach

“that was a shocker “

Hazel

“well I got to get to Deaf history I will see you at the center “

Albert and hazel kiss

we see the next day at Curtis office

Curtis

“marge did you enjoy yourself last night “

Marge

“yes, I did “

Curtis

“that’s good what’s up”

Marge

“your fathers are here and your in-laws are as well”

Curtis

“send them in and can you get Rebecca over here please “

Marge

“yes, and what about Matthew “

Curtis

“they saw him last night “

Marge

“ok “

She leaves

The four comes in

Kurt

“hello my boy “

Curtis

“hey dad, papa “

Blaine

“that was amazing “

Curtis

“thank you and thank you for coming both you and of course you coach and Wendy “

Wendy

“it was our honor “

Rebecca knocks

Curtis

“come on in “

Rebecca

“hey you guys “

They all gather as Matthew and Jalen come in as well

 End of 10.3