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esglatestmarketnews · 10 months ago

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ESG Innovations in the Bottled Water Industry

Concerted efforts to boost water conservation have prompted bottled water brands to bank on environmental, social and governance (ESG) pillars. Maintaining the delicate balance between the ecosystem and human needs will foster environmental sustainability. Brands are vying to bolster their sustainability journey with commitments across packaging, climate change, water and sourcing. Moreover, emphasizing labor management, supply chain labor standards, corporate governance, board diversity and transparency will develop resiliency and help produce high-quality and safe products.

Prioritizing ESG has become paramount for leading companies to stay ahead of the game amidst stiff competition. Consumers have increasingly sought bottled water. According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, bottled water outnumbered soft drinks in the U.S., amassing 15.7 billion gallons of water as of 2021. The total volume of packaged drinks surpassed the all-time peak of the carbonated drink of 15.3 billion gallons in 2004. Industry players are expected to bank on the three pillars as ESG reporting is poised to garner headlines while framing sustainable strategies.

Key Companies in this theme

• Nestlé, PepsiCo

• The Coca-Cola Company

• DANONE

• Nongfu Spring

• National Beverage Corp.

• Keurig Dr Pepper Inc.

Environmental Perspective

Sustainable packaging solution has received an impetus to negate the environmental impact of plastic bottles. According to the survey conducted by the Harris Poll for the International Bottled Water Association (IBWA), nine out of ten Americans sought the availability of bottled water wherever other drinks were sold. Soaring consumer preference for bottled water has prompted industry leaders to use recycled PET and HDPE plastic.

Prominently, PET bottled water containers have reduced material usage and weigh less. Moreover, rPET (recycled PET) and rHDPE (recycled HDPE) have become pronounced. In February 2023, Revalyu announced an infusion of USD 50 million to build a PET bottle recycling plant in the U.S. The company will use water- and energy-conserving advanced recycling methods on 12 million PET bottles per day when operation starts in 2024. With recyclable and sustainable packaging more in demand than ever, industry leaders will likely bolster their environmental profile.

Is your business one of participants to the Bottled Water Industry? Contact us for focused consultation around ESG Investing, and help you build sustainable business practices

Social Perspective

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) has become imperative to narrow the gender gap across organizations. Recruiting from diverse backgrounds, social dialogue and emphasizing workplace safety can provide promising growth opportunities. In 2021, Danone rolled out the “Future of Work” study to redefine the ways of working. Besides, it fosters equal pay for men and women and has deployed a parental policy globally, covering 91,628 employees.

Companies have left no stone unturned to underpin and promote human rights. In 2021, Danone bolstered a partnership with UN Women and Bonafont in Mexico to equip and train women with entrepreneurship skills. The company has propelled its human rights policy as it has pledged to deploy and develop Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD) systems emphasizing forced labor in its operations. In 2020, it attained the 5-year ambition of reducing lost time accidents by 50% between 2015-2020. Ensuring health & safety with a safe working environment will remain indispensable to streamline operations.

Governance Perspective

The business practices and principles designed to propel corporate governance, tax transparency, ethical behavior, accountability and board diversity have become pronounced. The Coca-Cola Company has an Audit Committee, a Committee on Directors and Corporate Governance, a Talent and Compensation Committee, an ESG and public policy committee, a Finance Committee and an Executive Committee to help smoothly discharge governance duties.

In 2022, the Talent and Compensation Committee gave the nod to link the ESG performance measures to annual and long-term incentive programs, thereby fostering executive compensation. The beverage giant has also incorporated its 2030 Water Security Strategy and World Without Waste packaging strategy (50% recycled material in all packages by 2030) into the 2022-2024 incentive awards.

The growing prominence of water security and the need for smart water policies has amplified the topic of water governance. Coca-Cola has incorporated certain ESG metrics to underscore water issues. It has over 225 bottling partners across 200 countries and territories. Moreover, in 2021, the drink company earned a spot on the “A-List” of CDP for leadership in corporate transparency and action on water security.

Incumbent players have depicted increased traction for organic and inorganic growth strategies to tap into the global ecosystem. Brands are likely to map opportunities from collaboration, technological advancements, innovations and research & development activities. To illustrate, in December 2022, PepsiCo set a goal to double the reusable packaging for beverages to 20% by 2030. These trends suggest that the global bottled water market could expand at 6.7% CAGR between 2022 to 2030.

Related Reports:

Luxury Footwear Industry ESG: https://astra.grandviewresearch.com/luxury-footwear-industry-esg-outlook

Handbag Industry ESG: https://astra.grandviewresearch.com/handbag-industry-esg-outlook

Disposable Gloves Industry ESG: https://astra.grandviewresearch.com/disposable-gloves-industry-esg-outlook

About Astra – ESG Solutions by Grand View Research

Astra is the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) arm of Grand View Research Inc. – a global market research publishing & management consulting firm.

Astra offers comprehensive ESG thematic assessment & scores across diverse impact & socially responsible investment topics, including both public and private companies along with intuitive dashboards. Our ESG solutions are powered by robust fundamental & alternative information. Astra specializes in consulting services that equip corporates and the investment community with the in-depth ESG research and actionable insight they need to support their bottom lines and their values. We have supported our clients across diverse ESG consulting projects & advisory services, including climate strategies & assessment, ESG benchmarking, stakeholder engagement programs, active ownership, developing ESG investment strategies, ESG data services, build corporate sustainability reports. Astra team includes a pool of industry experts and ESG enthusiasts who possess extensive end-end ESG research and consulting experience at a global level.

For more ESG Thematic reports, please visit Astra ESG Solutions, powered by Grand View Research

#Bottled Water Market #Bottled Water Industry #ESG Report #sustainability #Bottled Water Industry ESG

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koenigami · 1 month ago

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tags : fem!reader, fluff, comfort, mentions of anxiety, suggestive, cw shidou ryusei

It’s just another press conference. Just another few journalists shooting questions at you and your team, but mostly you. You stiffly lean back into your chair and watch as more and more people gather in the room. Cameras are being set up, microphones everywhere, more cameras, more people. Some are already taking pictures, and the incessant flashes blind you.

You sigh when you feel something warm engulf the hands in your lap. Whether it is because you’ve been way too deep in your own head, or because SHIDOU for once decided to opt for a humble appearance, you haven’t noticed him take a seat beside you until his hand found yours.

“They weren’t even shaking that much the first time you wrapped them around my big-”

“I swear to god, if you finish that sentence, these hands are going to be wrapped around your damn throat.” you grit and eye him from the side, the light of the flashes casting shades along his perfect side profile.

“It’s not like that hasn’t happened before either.” He grins at the disturbed expression on your face, and the unusually soft chuckle he lets out seems to alleviate some of the pressure on your chest. You free yourself from his grasp and huff, seemingly annoyed, but the silence that settles between the both of you is a comfortable one.

With a lazy, almost bored look on his face, Shidou watches you as you busy yourself with the bottle of water on the desk in front of you. Your finger mindlessly traces the brand name on the packaging, while the loud buzz and whir of people slowly seems to settle down. Journalists and entire reporting teams are gathered in front of his soccer team, impatiently waiting for the start of the conference to be pronounced.

So many gazes are already averted towards the star player Shidou Ryusei, and yet all he can see is you. All he wants to see is you because all these fancy schmancy interviews, marketing formalities and conferences- He couldn’t care less about all of it. As long as he can play soccer the way he wants to, he guesses he can accept the fact that he has to entertain these lowlife puppets.

As one of the puppets eventually asks you their first question, Shidou nonchalantly leans back in his seat with his legs wide spread as if he was on his couch at home. His knee touches yours under the table, successfully gaining your attention and he hums satisfiedly when you accept the open hand that he has splayed out on his thigh in a silent offer.

With your fingers interlaced with his, you redirect your attention to the public in front of you, and speak so clearly and steadily like you always do once your initial uneasiness fades away. And once the journalists move on to the team’s coach, Shidou softly squeezes your hand. You did good. Two squeezes from you. Thank you.

And he’s convinced that all he needs is soccer and you.

#shidou ryusei #shidou x reader #bllk shidou #blue lock shidou #shidou ryuusei x reader #shidou ryusei x reader #ryusei shidou #shidou fluff #bllk x reader

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simp-ly-writes · 3 months ago

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Crush

─────── · ·

Pairing: Spencer Agnew x Shy!Reader

─ · · SUMMARY: You try and hide your crush on your co-worker.

─ · · TAGS: mutual pining, gender-neutral pronouns, fluff, hurt/comfort, meet-cute, cheesiness, confessions.

─ · · MASTERLIST | TAGLIST REQUEST | WORDCOUNT: 1,765

─ · · A/N: I told myself I would never write about IRL people nor ever post this or even go back to my smosh phase but somethings in the water today I guess!

─────── · ·

↳ You had originally worked for Good Mythical Morning as one of the leads of the marketing team before you switched over to Smosh as they re-bought the company. You would miss your team, your friends for the past several years dearly. But you were invested in the new challenge of getting these channels back to their glory days with new content and ideas to work on.

↳ You kept to yourself as best as you could as your new co-workers came up to you and introduced themselves by your desk side. Spencer was not the first to come up and say hi to you, in actuality- it was you who rather abruptly walked into him at the end of your first week. The distinct smell Mountain Dew Kickstarter spreader across every fiber, drenching your shirt as it spilled equally over his hoodie.

You remember placing your hands to your mouth in horror, a string of apologies set upon heated cheeks before rushing in to the nearby staff room and back out with a wad of paper towels as you started to dab at his chest before throwing them in his face once remember you did not know your co-workers good enough yet.

Spencer laughed, taking none of it to heart as he dried himself off as best as he could while not making any eye-contact towards you. You apologized once more, extending your hand awkwardly to greet your new acquaintance.

"name," you stated softly in seeing the growing number of people exit the room that he just exited from, it appears the filming just finished for lunch.

"Spencer," he shook you hand, offering a polite smile before looking down the hall. Various cast members you remember meeting slapped him on the shoulder and gave you a wave before continuing down the hall.

"You're not going to report this to HR for anything, right?" you asked, half-joking half not as you looked down to see that your undershirt was indeed visible.

His laugh caught your own as you it died down to chuckles before you rushed towards your car for spare clothes.

─────── · ·

↳ In the next coming weeks, you found your footing once more. Standing behind camera as you recorded little teaser snippets. Quickly edited some pictures for the instagram team and sent off your reports all on your tablet.

↳ You enjoyed sitting towards the back, far away from any possible cameras in a dark corner with your water bottle by your feet. Texting the members of your small team through the group chat as you became lost in your own little bubble before the lights were coming back on.

↳ Looking at the time on your device, you quickly stood up and rushed out the room ahead of everyone else. Your social battery was already low from the mornings meetings and made your way back to your desk

↳ A sudden clearing of someones throat had you jumping out of your chair as Spencer stood at your side water bottle in hand. "You forgot this at set earlier." And placed it on your desk.

"Thank you, Spencer," you said with a smile, doing your best to ignore the way your palms were beginning to sweat and praying that you could go back to your hermit corner.

He offered you a smile in return before exiting the space and back towards his own desk as you slumped in relief. "Tough day?" Courtney asked in a light tone before forcing you towards the lunch table.

─────── · ·

↳ You were growing closer to everyone, making friends with people from other departments and still keeping up with your old co-workers on the weekends. Yet you were still to embarrassed from your first few interactions with Spencer to move your relationship from sharing files or the dreaded small talk.

↳ The audience seemed to be growing to you as well. Somehow your little murmurs to yourself had gotten picked up on the microphone and used in the final edit. When watching with Courtney the most recent episode of TNTL, you were surprised to find that it was you who made Olivia laugh that hard. You were really rooting yourself to this company.

↳ A few cast members and producers had tried to get you to move closer to the cameras for more of your comments or even get you on set as you shook your head violently and turned down every offer- still preferring to stay in the shadows.

↳ Yet even when doing your best to hide away, Spencer would sneak his way over with a snack or offer to review what clips you decided on for the reel later that day. You felt childish in many ways on how afraid you were to speak with him, using short sentences or nods of your head but he never took them as rude and was in a way, way too understanding that lead you to feel how you do currently.

─────── · ·

↳ You hated everything to do with Spencer. You hated how much he would always check in on everyone and somehow find all your little hiding spots in the office and on set. Hated the way his smile and laugh would make your heart race. Hated the videos he would attach to his emails that he thought you would like, and you did.

↳ You despised how he wouldn't force you to talk, yet he would just sit there with you at lunch or offer to walk you to your car after work. Your heat couldn't say no nor did your co-workers allow you to as Courtney was practically shoving you both out the door without another word.

↳ A few of them even asked if you did in fact have a crush on the Director and by the look on your face and the shake in your hands, they knew the answer all to well.

─────── · ·

↳ You stated to feel indebted for your shyness as you offered Spencer a fresh can of Mountain Dew during lunch or even provided morning pasteries for the both of you. The whole office took note of his smile that day while filming and how you both started to work at one another's desks.

↳ The more time you spent together, the more confident you grew and you thought to be getting over your crush now. You would have your chair closer to the front of the set, Spencer would often stand or sit beside you between breaks- resting his arm on the back of your chair as he would peer over to see whatever was on your tablet.

↳ Rumours spread, you could practically feel the eyes for sure on your back as you walked around the office together. HR had even sent you a few hinting emails that had you flashing back to your first week working at Smosh.

↳ Cameras were picking up on it too. The attention was growing all too much, your feels were growing all too much before you were taking a step back and allowing more opportunities for your team as you took a step back.

↳ Of course, Spencer took notice of this as well. Asking around, and even once during filming where you had gone only to find you put other people to film the clips and take the photos.

─────── · ·

↳ "Are you okay," Spencer asks, bursting into your new office space as you stood up straight from your desk, a smile a bit to wide as you stiffly welcomed him into the space.

↳ He rounded your desk, sitting upon it, concern written in his features with the slightest tilt to his head. You fumbled with your fingers, struggling to come up with words, "Im okay, just taking a break is all- working on other things."

"I'm just worried for you my friend, never mind work. Are YOU, doing okay?" Spencer pressed, knowing that the answer you gave wasn't entirely truthful.

↳ Friend. The word wounded you as you blinked away tears, suddenly feeling ridiculous. You were an adult and yet this stupid crush you had was coming in the way of everything you worked so hard towards.

"Yes. I am doing okay, thank you for checking up on me."

─────── · ·

↳ You hoped that the time apart would help you, only finding yourself hurting more. You fell right back into the schedule you and Spencer developed together and you hated to admit to yourself but you had never felt better.

↳ They were filming who meme'd it? And yours had yet to come up until now. It would be your first seconds fully on camera as everyone cheered you on before hand. The comments from earlier in the week were excited to finally see who you were, that night you had even found a compilation of every time Spencer mentioned you, to your suprise it was over 5 minutes long- or maybe you just watched it a few dozen times.

↳ Nonetheless, your meme was instantly guessed by the man. His eyes immediately found your own from behind the camera as you started to shrink away, slipping down the couch and onto the floor was a blush as he calmly wrote your name. Shayne seeing this laughed, it echoed the room as he and everyone else also knew the answer from your combined reaction.

↳ Everyone else in the office was loving it. You meme'd your first time meeting with poorly drawn MS-Paint visuals and a simple caption and as your name and picture flashed up on the screen. Cheers rung throughout the room as one of your team members gently rubbed your back in reassurance

↳ After gaining back your will to live, you were suprised to find a pair of arms bringing you into a hug. "I am so proud of you, first time on camera!" Spencer spoke into your hair, you could feel his smile as you stood there still in shock before retuning the action.

↳ Not knowing if it was the adrenaline still running after the showing, the physical comfort, or what you thought to be hearing his heart beating as fast as you own, you blurted out to the shock of many others still cleaning up after the shoot- "I like you a lot."

Spencer chuckled, bringing you back into a hug as you hide your face in his neck from the cheers, "I like you a lot too. But please now finish your turn on game pigeon 8-ball."

─────── · ·

#smosh #smosh games #smosh fanfic #smosh fanfiction #spencer agnew #spencer x reader #spencer agnew x reader #spencer agnew fanfic #spencer agnew fanfiction #spencer agnew imagine #fanfic #fanfiction #simp-ly #simp-ly-writes

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everythingne · 1 year ago

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marketing ploy — LN4 / ch.2

Saudi and Aussie. How bad can it go? Well, bad enough for Max and Charles to start asking questions. And maybe for Lando’s behavior to be a little off.

piastri!oc x lando norris / fake dating, brothers best friend

warnings/notes: no big warnings other than some language, probably inaccurate f1 info (spare me here), written while sleep deprived

prev | next

18 MARCH 2023 - JEDDAH, SAUDI ARABIA ↴

The Saudi Arabian heat burns across my shoulders as I duck into McLarens paddock behind Oscar. The tanktop I'm wearing doing nothing to help regulate the heat under my uniform shirt that I've unbuttoned and have tucked at my elbows. Oscar takes a long swig of his now empty water bottle before tossing it away and giving Lando a hug over the shoulder.

"Ready to die in this heat?" He asks, making Lando snort and nearly spit out his water. I giggle as Lando coughs after swallowing and find myself stepping up to stand right next to Oscar, peering up at Lando through my eyelashes as a few cameras click in our direction. It’s certainly odd for me to be here, and not already tucked away in Red Bull’s paddock. Hopefully other people notice that.

"I'm trying not to, man." Lando shakes the sweat of his water bottle in Oscar's direction, making him shriek and wipe the icy water off his face. I can hear the more of the media teams and reporters in the paddocks approaching, almost like a weird sixth sense.

"Morning, Mini Piastri." Lando leans down and gives me a proper hug, one I'm not expecting, but nonetheless I kindly return it. Reminding myself of the contract I'd signed nearly a month ago.

God, it had been a month already?

"Morning, Norris." I step back, adjusting my hair with a tiny giddy smile I let myself easily fake. He looks at me like I've hung the moon and stars for him, and I'm shocked at how easily he can fall into faking utter and complete love. He's a natural.

Someone calls Lando over from the other side of the paddock and as he excuses himself, he places a hand on my lower back as he moves behind me, and it lingers. His fingers glide along the fabric of my shirt, nails scratching at the skin underneath enough to make me look over my shoulder at him as he looks at me one last time before fully stepping away to whichever engineer had called his attention.

"When do you have to be with Red Bull?" Oscar asks, drawing my attention back to him as I try to swallow the blush on my face, "to see your second brother."

"You're so dramatic about Max." I laugh, punching his arm, "and not for another like... ten or so minutes, Kaycee, who works under me. She’s running all the analytic stuff this morning. She's gonna move up to be a co-head analyst."

"Oh! She’s the one with the red hair right? She's so sweet." Oscar takes a water from a worker who hands us both plastic bottles, and Lando ends up snaking back over and taking me by the wrist as Oscar is called over in his place. As Oscar turns away, Lando pulls me back to a far corner and lets me rest against it as he hovers in front of me. Shielding me from view.

"So, how exactly are we handling media?" He says, "like paparazzi?"

"I guess we should just act the same?" I hum, looking over at a few media personnel who hover around the car, the team, and Oscar. The paddocks are slowly buzzing to life as everyone's arriving for the day.

"Then, you have to act like you like me a little bit, Ollie." Lando leans in a bit, breath fanning across my cheeks and I tilt my head up to challenge him. But before I can say anything in retaliation my phone rings with a call from Christian.

"Gotta go, Nori." I smirk, poking his chest as I lean up into his personal space, lips inches apart. He looks down at my lips for half a second, before I step back and call over my shoulder as I leave,

"Tell Oscar I said good luck!"

Luckily no one had passed out at training.

I'm standing at the edge of the paddock, laughing as I flick water at a very heat-exhausted Max Verstappen. He'd done just as well as I had expected him to, everything with the car working just as we had expected, but once again he skews my data with faster laps than I've seen in his car ever.

This rivalry thing was going to cost someone a car at some point.

"Hey, Livie!" A voice shouts, and I turn to see Oscar. Considering he's the only one allowed to call me that, I can't even feign surprise at his sudden appearance outside the Red Bull paddock. Still in race gear. Fuckin’ Aussie.

"Ossie!" I grin back, and Max crosses his arms and wipes sweat from his hairline with a towel as Oscar approaches.

"Hey, Max." He says, wiping sweat from his face with the sleeve of his undershirt. Whistling to get my brothers attention, I toss him a plain white towel, a spare I had tucked in my pocket. I swear Oscar almost melts with appreciation when he sees it and then prompty wipes his entire face down.

"Good to see you, Oscar." Max nods, leaning on the shaded wall adjacent to me. He's been out of his gear for a while, considering he has almost thrown up from the heat twice today. We had pretty much shoved it off of him as soon as he was done with training.

"You weren't answering your phone, and I needed to give you your stuff, so I came over to tell you I've gotta stay late, they're making sure somethings not overheating or something." He tosses me a hotel key and my purse from his passenger seat, I can tell his vagueness is due to whatever issue there is probably being not fully explained. Or because Max is here, because he's usually tell me everything.

"I'll catch a ride back, no worries." I pat his shoulder and he nods, lifting his phone to his face and groaning. I can see Andrea's contact on his screen and I laugh softly at his clearly exhausted expression.

"Gotta go, again, see you for dinner?" He starts backing up and I nod.

"Seven, sharp!" I shout and he nods before turning and just taking off in a run before I see him vanish into the McLaren paddock, which is only separated from Red Bull by Williams, so it's not terribly far. Max and I stand in quiet for a few moments before I hear some keys jingle and look over to see Charles tossing his keys to Max. The two share a quick greeting as I readjust and tip the last drops of my water bottle into my mouth.

"Need a ride back?" Max asks as I lower the bottle, but a whistle takes my attention sideways where I see Lando approaching.

"Nope. See you guys tomorrow!" I cheekily grin, slipping off the wall to approach Lando who twirls his car keys absentmindedly. He smiles at my approach, adjusting his bag as he stops so I can meet him midway.

"Nice to see you, Ollie..You need a ride home, right?" He grins, placing a hand on my lower back once more and I lean up to tuck a stray hair back against the others.

"You too." I say, peeking behind me to see Max and Charles watching the two of us interact and a small idea pops in my head, "yeah, actually."

"Perfect." Lando's eyes lift to look at Max and Charles, and seconds later he's escorting me by the small of my back out of the paddocks. "Starting strong, aren't we?"

I can't help but laugh, hiding my mouth with my hand as we slip into the car park as we peacefully walk along various other racers whose eyes linger on Lando's hand a bit too long.

"Really strong, it seems." I say as he opens the passenger door to his car and I step in as if it's normal for this to happen, wasting no time settling in as he shuts the door and god damn why is that actually so hot?

As Lando settles next to me in the car, shutting his door, he smiles over at me.

"At least they can't say we aren't keeping up our end of the deal."

—

19 MARCH 2023 — TWITTER ↴

URF1NEWS: LANDO NORRIS was spotted yesterday leaving the track, and coming back today with OLIVIA PIASTRI at the Saudi Arabia GP. With tensions at an all time high between Red Bull and McLaren, you can’t tell me you arent wondering what this might mean.

567k LIKES, 350k RETWEETS.

no.rizz: adam sandler what are u doing here??

mclarensnumba1: they have to be dating be so serious.

ferawrri: brothers best friend ‼️‼️

monacosbtch: i think they did it but i just can’t prove it.

norris4: OLIVIA AND LANDO??? BE SO SERIOUS ILL SOB. FREE FLOW TEARS.

30 MARCH 2023 — CALL BETWEEN ADA AND OLIVIA ↴

“Welcome home, Miss Piastri.”

“Morning, Ada.”

“You and Lando need to start pushing this rhetoric of your dating a bit harder. Astrid is already speaking with him about it but we need a strong push here in Australia. It’s you and Oscar’s home race after all.”

“Were the paparazzi photos of me getting into his car not enough?”

“Oh they were, but we really wanna cement it.”

“So… what are you asking of me?”

“Today, Lando has been instructed to drive you to the track with a gift.”

“A gift? Like what?”

“You’ll see. But, we expect you to post that gift on your public instagram story. Preferably with some sort of McLaren indication—the orange hearts work well.”

“Christ. Okay, what else?”

“Oh. it’s time for the soft launch and the pictures in his team shirt. I’ll find you before the race tonight with more details.”

“Great…”

—

Lando’s luckily not in a papaya orange car this time. A black SUV fits him well, and will hopefully blend us in a bit more.

“Morning, Ollie.” he says as I climb in, Oscar somewhere behind me in the hotel still. I yawn in response, waving as I settle in the seat before I notice what he’s holding.

“Oh, Ada was serious.” I laugh at the little bouquet of flowers he holds towards me. They’re daises, my favorite flower, and then some yellow chrysanthemums and little pink roses sit behind them.

“She just said to get the daises.” Lando hands the flowers to me, and I happily take them, and then I notice one final thing resting in the cup holder.

“The girl at the coffee place I stopped at was a McLaren fan, so I asked her to write a ‘cute note for my girlfriend’ on the lid.” his voice lifts in octave as he recounts his words and then he lifts the little coffee in his cup holder so I can see it. That gesture alone makes me swoon just a little bit harder.

“Damn. My real boyfriend after this is gonna have some competition.” I giggle, taking the coffee from his hands and repositioning so I can snap a photo for instagram. He laughs in response to what I say, but I hear the leather of his steering wheel squeak as he grips it a bit tighter.

“Yeah. Boyfriend.” I swear I hear him mutter, but when I ask what he said, he swears he said nothing—so the conversation gets dropped there as he pulls out away from the hotel.

—

OLIVIAPIASTRI POSTED A NEW STORY! ↴

MCLARENRACING MADE A NEW POST! ↴

liked by landonorris, oscarpiastri, maxverstappen1, and 965k others…

mclarenracing: @ oliviapiastri visiting the paddock is always a good luck charm. Wishing the best home race for our Piastri siblings!

ryoooraces: NUMBER WHAT NOW??

oliviapiastri: always lovely to see you guys 🧡

no.rizz: IS THAT LANDOS FUCKING JACKET.

logansargeant: gears are turning.

— williamsbaby: LOGAN BE ONE OF US!!!

—

“Charles?” I pause in the doorway to my office, a Red Bull in my hands, bag and purse over one shoulder. The thick jacket I wear making my arms—which hold the flowers, an empty coffee cup, and files I couldn’t fit in my purse tightly to my chest. Both him and Max are pressed along the wall where the door opens and in my rush, I nearly whacked Charles with the door as I kicked it open.

“I have a question.” Max states as soon as I’ve plopped my mess of stuff on my desk, and I hold up a finger as I chug the rest of my lemon Red Bull, make a face, and toss the can along with a coffee cup in the tiny trash can under the desk.

“Well, I do too.” I turn to both men before kneeling down to grab an empty vase from my cabinet along with a stray pair of scissors, “so, fire away.”

“Why are you spending so much time with McLaren?” Max asks as I start moving my files and such to my chair so I can cut and put the flowers in their new temporary home before they live on my mothers kitchen window until their inevitable death, “it’s usually impossible for you to leave the paddock here unless Oscar himself comes and drags you away.”

“And the Lando jacket?” Charles tacks on at the end, smacking Max’s shoulder as if they’d agreed to mention it. The two are as close and you can be at this point, so I’m not surprised at their brotherly antics. I can tell that the two of them have taken it upon themselves to figure out what exactly is going on, just as brothers—or in my case sisters, do.

Oh, a perfect opportunity just appeared in front of me. A way to really get the ball rolling on this whole ‘dating’ thing.

“It’s nothing serious.” I wave a hand, sorting the flowers into the vase with one hand. I shrug off the new Lando Norris varsity jacket merch once it gets too hot, plopping it on the back of my chair.

“Really?” Charles says with a dangerous curiosity in his tone that only makes me smile wider as I keep cutting stems, and popping flowers into the vase. I glance up once I’m done with the daises, eyes challenging Max’s and Charles’ sharp, curious gazes for half a second before I stand fully and let a fake, giddy, nervous smile cross my face.

“Maybe…” I ponder saying it, feeling heat rise to my face naturally as I imagine the way Lando grins at me whenever he sees me walking up, or the way his warm hand feels on my back as he guides me, “a certain McLaren driver has caught my eye.”

The two stare at me for a second, before there’s overlapping shouts with accents so thick in the heat of the moment I can barely understand a word being said.

“Good lord!” I shout through them and dissolve into laughter, Max smacks a hand on my desk—pointing at me.

“So you are dating him?” he asks and I immediately shake my head.

“No, no. Again, it’s nothing serious.” I reply as calmly as I can, feeling a bit bad for lying but knowing in the end no one would be hurt. It wasn’t even like I actually loved Lando, I just liked the way he pretended to be my boyfriend. It was… really cute.

“But he buys you flowers and coffee, you wear his merch, visit him instead of Oscar, he drives you everywhere—is that not dating?” Charles says, crossing his arms over his Ferrari team shirt, “and why are you both being so sneaky about it?”

“He’s a friend for now, guys, and we aren’t really being sneaky!” I sigh as I finish up with the small amount of roses and chrysanthemums, beginning to organize the flowers to hide the shakiness of my hands.

I hate lying so much. If it’s this bad with Max and Charles, the conversation I’m going to have with Oscar will be unbearable.

“Well.” Max pauses, and Charles shrugs, “I guess it’s fine.”

“Wait—are you giving me your approval of Lando? Like a brother?”

“We both are.” Charles makes his way to the doorway, grabbing the handle to the door and stepping out, “he’s a good kid!”

I stare after Charles for a few seconds before my gaze lifts to Max, who grins at me.

“And now half of the Red Bull garage owes us money. Thanks.” He punches my shoulder and as he’s leaving the words register and I can only shout at his retreating form—

“—You guys bet on this?!”

#formula one #lando norris #lando norris x oc #ln4 fic #ln4 #f1 #f1 fanfic #formula 1 #lando norris fic #nicole wrote this

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hometoursandotherstuff · 6 months ago

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Well, I'm sad to report that earth ships are having a bad year. So many on the market, it looks like the concept has failed, when once they were all the rage. So, here's another one for sale. It was cobbled together in 2002 in Tres Piedras, NM. Has 2bds, 1ba, and looks a little neglected. They're asking $400K, but Zillow thinks it's worth $376K. Let's look around.

It has the standard entrance w/the little garden along the hallway, and the garden is on the small side.

Off to the right is a living room with a round garden separating it from the kitchen.

The kitchen isn't too bad. But, I'd want a bigger fridge so I wouldn't have to keep running to the store.

And, there's a little banquette and built-in table.

This home has a second level, which is something I've never seen in an earth ship. Note the cracked step. There are bottles decorating the stairs and wall.

Curved wall with glass block trim.

Bedroom #1 has a garden. It needs some TLC.

Bd. #2 looks like it was a studio.

And, this is the slightly icky bath. I could never understand how these porous clay things hold water and how you clean them.

Looks like a regular toilet, not a compostable.

These stairs on the exterior lead up to the roof and an outdoor area.

It appears to be larger than what's shown in the photos.

This is also different. I've never seen an earth ship buried under the earth. The lot is 1.28 acres. Smaller than most desert properties.

I don't know anything about this, but it looks smaller and less elaborate than others I've seen.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1-N-Lemuria-Rd-Tres-Piedras-NM-87577/2053053780_zpid/

#earth ships #desert homes #houses #house tours #home tour

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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Dow promised to turn sneakers into playground surfaces, then dumped them in Indonesia

Dow Chemicals plastered Singapore with ads for its sneaker recycling program, promising to turn old shoes into playground tracks. But the shoes it collected in its “recycling” bins were illegally dumped in Indonesia. This isn’t an aberration: it’s how nearly all plastic recycling has always worked.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/26/career-criminals/#fool-me-twice-three-times-four-times-a-hundred-times

Plastic recycling’s origin story starts in 1973, when Exxon’s scientists concluded that plastic recycling would never, ever be cost-effective (#ExxonKnew about this, too). Exxon sprang into action: they popularized the recycling circular arrow logo and backed “anti-littering” campaigns that blamed the rising tide of immortal, toxic garbage on peoples’ laziness.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/14/they-knew/#doing-it-again

Remember the campaign where an Italian guy dressed like a Native American shed a single tear as he contemplated plastic litter? Funded by the plastic industry, as a way of shifting blame for plastic waste from the wealthy, powerful corporations who lied about plastics recycling to the individuals who believed their lies:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-indian-crying-environment-ads-pollution-1123-20171113-story.html

When I was a kid in Ontario, we had centralized, regulated, reusable bottle depots — beer and soda bottles came in standard sizes, differentiated by paper labels that could be pressure-washed off. When you were done with your bottle, you returned it for a deposit and it got washed and returned to bottlers to be refilled again and again and again.

After intense lobbying from soda companies, brewers and the plastic industry, that program was replaced with curbside “blue boxes” that promised to recycle our plastic waste. 90% of the plastics created has never been — and will never be — recycled. Today, the plastic industry plans on tripling the amount of single-use plastic in use worldwide:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/26/plastic-fatalistic/#recycled-lies

You know those ads from companies like Bluetriton (formerly “Nestle Waters”) that promise that your single-use plastic bottles are “100% recyclable…and can be used for new bottles and all sorts of new, reusable things?”

Bluetriton is a private equity-backed rollup that has absorbed most of the bottled water companies you’re familiar with, including Poland Spring, Pure Life, Splash, Ozarka, and Arrowhead. When they were sued in DC for making false claims about their “recyclable” water-bottles, their defense was that these were “non-actionable puffery.” According to Bluetriton, when it described itself as “a guardian of sustainable resources” and “a company who, at its core, cares about water,” it was being “vague and hyperbolic.”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/26/plastic-fatalistic/#recycled-lies

With this high standard for plastic recycling, Dow’s Singapore scam shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it seems to have surprised the government of Singapore. Writing for Reuters, Joe Brock, Yuddy Cahya Budiman and Joseph Campbell describe how they caught Dow red-handed:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/global-plastic-dow-shoes/

The method is actually pretty straightforward: Reuters hid tracking devices in cavities in the soles of sneakers, dropped them in one of Dow’s collection bins, and then followed them. The shoes were passed onto Dow’s subcontractor, Yok Impex Pte Ltd, who sent them hopping from island to island throughout Indonesia, until they ended up in junk-markets.

Not all the shoes, though — one pair was simply moved from Dow’s collection bin to a donation bin at a Singaporean community center. Of the 11 pairs that Reuters tracked, not one ended up at a recycling facility. So much for Dow’s slogan: “Others see an old shoe. We see the future.”

Dow blamed all this on Yok Impex, but didn’t explain why its “recycling” program involved a company whose sole trade is exporting used clothing. Dow promised to cancel its deal with Yok Impex, but Yok Impex’s accountant told Reuters that the deal would be remain in place until the end of the contract. Yok Impex, meanwhile, shifted the blame to the low-waged women who sort through the clothing donations it takes in from across Singapore.

Indonesia bans bulk imports of used clothes, on the grounds that used clothes are unhygenic, displace the local textiles industry, and shipments contain high volumes of waste that ends up in Indonesian incinerators, landfills and rivers.

In other words, Singaporeans thought they were saving the planet by putting their shoes in Dow bins, but they were really sending those shoes on a long journey to an unlicensed dump. Dow enlisted schoolchildren in used-shoe collection drives, making upbeat videos that featured students like Zhang Youjia boasting that they “contributed 15 pairs of shoes.”

Dow does this all the time. In 2021, Dow’s “breakthrough technology to turn plastic waste into clean fuel” in Idaho was revealed to be a plain old incinerator:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/environment-plastic-oil-recycling/

Also in 2021, in India, a Dow program to “use high-tech machinery to transform the [plastic from the Ganges] into clean fuel” was revealed to have ceased operations — but was still collecting plastic and promising that it was all being turned into fuel:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-environment-plastic-insight-idUSKBN29N024

Dow operates a nearly identical “shoe recycling” program in neighboring Malaysia, and did not return Reuters’ requests for comment as to whether the shoes collected for “recycling” in the far more populous nation were also being illegally dumped offshore.

The global business lobby loves the idea of “personal responsibility” and its evil twin, “caveat emptor.” Its pet economists worship the idea of “revealed preferences,” claiming that when we use plastic, we may claim that we don’t want to have our bodies poisoned with immortal, toxic microplastics, that we don’t want our land and waters despoiled — but we actually love it, because otherwise we’d “vote with our wallets” for something else.

The obvious advantage of telling people to vote with their wallets is that the less money you have in your wallet, the fewer votes you get. Companies like Dow have used their access to the capital markets (a fancy phrase for “rich people”) to gobble up their competitors, eliminating “wasteful competition” and piling up massive profits. Those profits are laundered into policy — like replacing Ontario’s zero-waste refillable bottle system with a “recycling” system that sent plastics to the ends of the Earth to be set on fire or buried or dumped in the sea.

The ruling class’s pet economists have a name for this policy laundering: they call it “regulatory capture.” Now, when you hear “regulatory capture,” you might think about companies that get so big that they are able to boss governments around, with the obvious answer that companies need to be regulated before they get too big to jail:

https://doctorow.medium.com/small-government-fd5870a9462e

But that’s not how elite economists talk about regulatory capture: for them, capture starts with the very existence of regulators. For them, any government agency that proposes to protect the public from corporate fraud and murder inevitably becomes an agent of the corporations it is supposed to rein in, so the only answer is to eliminate regulators altogether:

https://doctorow.medium.com/regulatory-capture-59b2013e2526

This nihilism lets rich people blame the rest of us for their sins: “if you didn’t want your children to roast or freeze to death in the climate emergency, you should have sold your car and used the subway (that we bribed your city not to build).”

Nihilism is contagious. Think of the music industry: before Napster, 80% of the music ever recorded was not for sale, banished to the scrapheap of history and the vaults of record companies who paid farcically low sums to their artists.

During the File Sharing Wars, listeners were excoriated for failing to pay for music — much of which wasn’t for sale in the first place. But today, fans overwhelmingly pay for Spotify, a streaming service that notoriously pays musicians infinitesimal sums for their work.

Spotify is a creature of the Big Three labels — Sony, Universal and Warner — who own 70% of all the world’s recorded music copyrights and 65% of all the world’s music publishing. The rock-bottom per-stream prices that Spotify pays were set by the Big Three. Why would the labels want less money from Spotify?

Simple: as co-owners of Spotify, they make more money when Spotify pays less for music. Musicians have a claim on the money they take out of Spotify as royalties — but dividends, buybacks and capital gains from Spotify are the labels’ to use as they see fit. They can share that bounty with some artists, all artists, or no artists.

Not only that, but the Big Three’s deal with Spotify includes a “most favored nation” clause, which means that the independent artists who aren’t under Sony/UMG/Warner’s thumb have to take the rock-bottom rate the Big Three insisted on — likewise the small labels who compete with the Big Three. The difference is that none of these artists and small labels have massive portfolios of Spotify stock, nor do they get free advertising on Spotify, or free inclusion on hot Spotify playlists, or monthly minimum payouts from Spotify.

The idea that we shop at the wrong kind of monopolist in the wrong way is a recipe for absolute despair. It doesn’t matter whether you listen to music with the Big Tech-owned monopoly service (Youtube) or the Big Content-owned monopoly service (Spotify). The money you hand over to these giant companies goes to artists the same way that the sneakers you put in a Dow collection bin goes to a recycling plant.

Think of the billions of human labor hours we all spent washing and sorting our plastics for a recycling program that didn’t exist and will never exist — imagine if we’d spent that time and energy demanding that our politicians hold petrochemical companies to account instead.

At the end of Break ’Em Up, Zephyr Teachout’s outstanding 2020 book on monopolies, Teachout has some choice words for “consumerism” as a theory of change. She writes that if you’re on your way to a protest against a new Amazon warehouse but you never make it because you waste too much time looking for a mom-and-pop stationers to sell you a marker to write your protest sign, Amazon wins:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/29/break-em-up/#break-em-up

The problem isn’t that you shop the wrong way. Yes, by all means, support the creators and producers you care about in the way that they prefer, but keep your eye on the prize. Structural problems don’t have individual solutions. The problem isn’t that you have chosen single-use plastics — it’s that in our world everything for sale is packaged in single-use plastics. The problem isn’t that you’ve bought a subscription to the wrong music streaming service — it’s that labels have been allowed to buy all their competitors, creators’ unions have been smashed and degraded, and giant accounting scams by big companies generate minuscule fines.

The good news is that after 40 years of despair inducing regulatory nihilism and “vote with your wallet” talk, we’re finally paying attention to systemic problems, with a new generation of trustbusting radicals working around the world to end corporate impunity.

Dow is a repeat offender. A repeat, repeat offender. Chrissakes, they’re the linear descendants of Union Carbide, the company that poisoned Bhopal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

They shouldn’t be trusted to run a lemonade stand, let alone a “recycling” program. The same goes for Big Tech and Big Content company and the markets for creative labor. These companies have repeatedly demonstrated their unfitness, their habitual deception and immorality. These companies have captured their regulators, repeatedly, so we need better regulators — and weaker companies.

The thing I love about Teachout’s book is that it talks about what we should be demanding from our governments — it’s a manifesto for a movement against corporate power, not a movement for “responsible consumerism.” That was the template that Rebecca Giblin and I followed when we wrote Chokepoint Capitalism, our book about the brutal, corrupt creative labor market:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

We have a chapter on Spotify (multiple chapters, in fact!). For our audiobook, we made that chapter a “Spotify Exclusive” — it’s the only part of the book you can get on Spotify, and it’s free:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

Next Thu (Mar 2) I’ll be in Brussels for Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy, along with a who’s-who of European and US trustbusters. It’s livestreamed, and both in-person and virtual attendance are free. On Fri (Mar 3), I’ll be in Graz for the Elevate Festival.

[Image ID: A woman kneeling to tie her running shoe. She stands on a background of plastic waste. In the top right corner is the logo for Dow chemicals. Below it is the Dow slogan, 'Others see an old shoe. We see the future.']

#pluralistic

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priyankap0018 · 1 year ago

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Exploring the Essence of Global Maple and Birch Waters

The bottled water industry, a thriving sector in beverage manufacturing, meets the growing demand for convenient hydration. With diverse offerings and eco-friendly initiatives, the bottled water industry ensures access to purified and refreshing water. Explore the innovations and sustainability practices that define this dynamic sector, shaping consumer choices worldwide.

#bottled water industry market share #bottled water industry news #bottled water industry overview #bottled water industry report #bottled water market data #bottled water market report #bottled water market research

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zoesblogsposts · 10 months ago

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o 625 words to know in your target language o

There is a really interesting blog called "Fluent Forever" that aids foreign language learners in tricks, tips and techniques to guide them to achieving fluency "quickly" and efficiently. One of the tricks is to learn these 625 vocab words in your target language, that way you have a basis to start delving into grammar with ease as you can understand a lot of vocab right off the bat. Plus this list of words are common across the world and will aid you in whatever language you are learning. Here is the list in thematic order

• Animal: dog, cat, fish, bird, cow, pig, mouse, horse, wing, animal

• Transportation: train, plane, car, truck, bicycle, bus, boat, ship, tire, gasoline, engine, (train) ticket, transportation

• Location: city, house, apartment, street/road, airport, train station, bridge hotel, restaurant, farm, court, school, office, room, town, university, club, bar, park, camp, store/shop, theater, library, hospital, church, market, country (USA,

France, etc.), building, ground, space (outer space), bank, location

• Clothing: hat, dress, suit, skirt, shirt, T-shirt, pants, shoes, pocket, coat, stain, clothing

• Color: red, green, blue (light/dark), yellow, brown, pink, orange, black, white, gray, color

• People: son, daughter, mother, father, parent (= mother/father), baby, man, woman, brother, sister, family, grandfather, grandmother, husband, wife, king, queen, president, neighbor, boy, girl, child (= boy/girl), adult (= man/woman), human (# animal), friend (Add a friend's name), victim, player, fan, crowd, person

• Job: Teacher, student, lawyer, doctor, patient, waiter, secretary, priest, police, army, soldier, artist, author, manager, reporter, actor, job

• Society: religion, heaven, hell, death, medicine, money, dollar, bill, marriage, wedding, team, race (ethnicity), sex (the act), sex (gender), murder, prison, technology, energy, war, peace, attack, election, magazine, newspaper, poison, gun, sport, race (sport), exercise, ball, game, price, contract, drug, sign, science, God

• Art. band, song, instrument (musical), music, movie, art

• Beverages: coffee, tea, wine, beer, juice, water, milk, beverage

• Food: egg, cheese, bread, soup, cake, chicken, pork, beef, apple, banana orange, lemon, corn, rice, oil, seed, knife, spoon, fork, plate, cup, breakfast, lunch, dinner, sugar, salt, bottle, food

• Home: table, chair, bed, dream, window, door, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, pencil, pen, photograph, soap, book, page, key, paint, letter, note, wall, paper, floor, ceiling, roof, pool, lock, telephone, garden, yard, needle, bag, box, gift, card, ring, tool

• Electronics: clock, lamp, fan, cell phone, network, computer, program (computer), laptop, screen, camera, television, radio

• Body: head, neck, face, beard, hair, eye, mouth, lip, nose, tooth, ear, tear (drop), tongue, back, toe, finger, foot, hand, leg, arm, shoulder, heart, blood, brain, knee, sweat, disease, bone, voice, skin, body

• Nature: sea, ocean, river, mountain, rain, snow, tree, sun, moon, world, Earth, forest, sky, plant, wind, soil/earth, flower, valley, root, lake, star, grass, leaf, air, sand, beach, wave, fire, ice, island, hill, heat, nature

• Materials: glass, metal, plastic, wood, stone, diamond, clay, dust, gold, copper, silver, material

• Math/Measurements: meter, centimeter, kilogram, inch, foot, pound, half, circle, square, temperature, date, weight, edge, corner

• Misc Nouns: map, dot, consonant, vowel, light, sound, yes, no, piece, pain, injury, hole, image, pattern, noun, verb, adjective

• Directions: top, bottom, side, front, back, outside, inside, up, down, left, right, straight, north, south, east, west, direction

• Seasons: Summer, Spring, Winter, Fall, season

• Numbers: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 21, 22, 30, 31, 32, 40, 41, 42, 50, 51, 52, 60, 61, 62, 70, 71, 72, 80, 81, 82, 90, 91, 92, 100, 101, 102, 110, 111, 1000, 1001, 10000, 100000, million, billion, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, number

• Months: January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December

• Days of the week: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday

• Time: year, month, week, day, hour, minute, second, morning, afternoon, evening, night, time

• Verbs: work, play, walk, run, drive, fly, swim, go, stop, follow, think, speak/say, eat, drink, kill, die, smile, laugh, cry, buy, pay, sell, shoot(a gun), learn, jump, smell, hear (a sound), listen (music), taste, touch, see (a bird), watch (TV), kiss, burn, melt, dig, explode, sit, stand, love, pass by, cut, fight, lie down, dance, sleep, wake up, sing, count, marry, pray, win, lose, mix/stir, bend, wash, cook, open, close, write, call, turn, build, teach, grow, draw, feed, catch, throw, clean, find, fall, push, pull, carry, break, wear, hang, shake, sign, beat, lift

• Adjectives: long, short (long), tall, short (vs tall), wide, narrow, big/large, small/little, slow, fast, hot, cold, warm, cool, new, old (new), young, old (young), weak, dead, alive, heavy, light (heavy), dark, light (dark), nuclear, famous

#second language #language #learning #rory gilmore #smart #tips

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defira85 · 7 days ago

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Having to tidy up our feral wasteland of a backyard that we have let run wild for a few years (me working full time with chronic health issues equals no energy to garden, Mr Defira working full time plus to keep our head above water with bills and doing 75% of the household chores to look after me equals no time to garden) because dog adoption here is insanely competitive and the standards for house and garden maintenance are going to make me cry

In the back corner it has come to my attention that my fuckhead neighbours have been throwing beer bottles, shot glasses, laundry AND FUCKING CIGARETTE BUTTS INTO OUR GARDEN

I REEK FROM TRYING TO SORT THROW THE FUCKING LEAF LITTER WHICH THEY COULD HAVE SET ON FUCKING FIRE TRYING TO GET THE LITERAL HUNDREDS OF CIGARETTE BUTTS

I'm trying to pass the world's shittiest exam just to get a dog that isn't selling for three thousand dollars (again, dog market insane here) and if I fail because the dog eats a piece of glass I missed I will be on the news for killing someone

#Defira rants #trying to tidy a garden when you have no money and fibro is great fun

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schemmentisjacket · 5 months ago

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Chapter 4 - First Day pt 1

Authors Note: Little something something about non binary queer new teacher coming in, leading to Melissa finding the one.

Alarm blared pulling you from the depth of sleep, throwing on a pair of boxers and a sports bra, you headed from your bedroom into the room down the hall that you had converted into a gym room. 20 minutes of yoga to wake yourself up and relax your muscles, you moved into weights. Today was your first proper day of school with the kids. It was the first day you’d be going in properly dressed in your teaching clothes and a little bit of you really wanted to impress Melissa. It felt like there had been the start of some subtle flirting, especially after the outfit comment on Friday you really wanted to impress her.

You’d dropped her a message about the hockey on Saturday and then exchanged a couple of messages on Sunday when she told you about some great stuff she’d got at a famers market.

You’d also been talking to Jacob about introducing him to one of your friends, Ant.

They were planning to meet up later this week at a cosy gay bar you often frequented.

You snuck in an extra few reps to get a good pump in the biceps and shoulders. It was upper body, but you did a set of squats too. It wouldn’t hurt to add them today as well.

You cooled down with some stretched and rolling before jumping in the shower. The rainfall in the ceiling let the water cascade down your chest and back, skin glistening in the natural light that came through the big windows in the bathroom, the frosted glass to the walk in only hiding your body from the outside, not the light.

You towel dried off and headed into your closet to pick out your outfit for the day, before grabbing a quick breakfast downstairs. Teeth brushed and a quick hit off cologne completed your morning routine. Before you knew it you were out to the car with bag over one shoulder.

Melissa was leant against the hood of her car talking to Barbara as the black Jeep pulled into the carpark, pulling into a bay across from them.

She watched as Charlie stepped out of the car, black leather boots with a silver chain. Tailored black tapered trousers with a subtle check led to a fine knitted sweater in deep navy, a grey shirt collar buttoned poking up from beneath.

A short charcoal wool coat topped off the outfit, accessorised by a smart leather backpack.

Black leather gloves. Always with the gloves. She’d heard Barbra mention it briefly during a chat in prep week, but they’d just said it was ‘poor circulation’ and Barbara hadn’t pushed further.

‘Nice backpack, your first day?’ Melissa heckled over, eying them from head to toe as they walked over, trousers clinging to their thighs showing toned quads. Her brain short circuited briefly imagining how they looked from the back.

‘Yes Ma’am.’ Charlie replied in that low tone, ‘Dr Flinn reporting for duty and looking forward to it.’

‘At ease.’ Melissa laughed, hand falling on their arm, a soft smile on both their faces.

Barbara eyed them again. She had seen Melissa go through a few dates over the years post Joe but never really open up fully to anyone.

They all headed into school together, Charlie said they’d go ahead to drop their backpack off in the classroom and that they’d catch Melissa and Barbara up.

They shucked off their jacket and hung it up on the rack near their desk, set their water bottle on the desk from their backpack before heading to the teachers lounge.

Ask they walked into the room they noticed Melissa looking towards the door, her face lighting up seeing them, before a light blush came across her cheeks. Without their jacket on she could see way their jumper hugged their shoulders and arms, god they looked so strong. The way their bicep flexed as they lifted the coffee pot. They were still using her cup she’d said they should keep it for now, she didn’t want to ‘fight them with those guns’.

The way they threw an arm around Jacob giving him a side hug as he came into the room, immediately jumping into a conversation. God they looked so strong. What if they just took her by the waist, pulled her against their chest, peeled off their gloves and ran a hand across her jaw and into her hair. Brought her closer. Their breath mingling…

The trill of the bell broke her from the daydream.

(Below are a few scenarios I want to share between the two characters. All of them will happen but which should I use for the reveal of whats beneath their clothes.

A. There is an accident and they remove their jumper revealing themselves to Melissa (potential for this to be hidden from other characters for now) as they care for her. Also leads to Melissa visiting their house.

B. When Jacob and Ant go on their date Charlie is there doing a side gig, Jacob messages Melissa and other teachers (or just melissa) and again a reveal happens. Again potentially just melissa and Jacob could know for now.

Also Should Jacob and Melissa be living together like in the show?)

#abbott elementary #abbott elementary fanfiction #melissa x other #melissa x reader #melissa schemmenti #melissa schemmenti fanfic

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starbabyg · 2 years ago

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When In Italy | Jack Hughes Instagram edit

Y/n and Jack take a little spontaneous trip to Italy together. ~<3~

all photos from pinterest and yes all the fc girls look different idc they’re supposed to be you deal with ehttt 🌚

liked by trevorzegras, lhughes_06, and 116,281 others

yourusername: buongiorno sole 🌞

trevorzegras: He gettin that tan alreadyyy 😮

lhughes_06: 3 bottles of water?? Thirsty ass.

user1: he’s so 😍😍😍

_quinnhughes: brt gonna go snatch that chain #icy

— reply to _quinnhughes jackhughes: I’d like to see you try

❦ ❦ ❦

You woke up alone in bed, the sun shining in through the sheer white curtains, a faint breeze blowing them softly. This was unfamiliar, you always woke up before Jack. You got up to look for him, cause where the hell could that boy be? You pondered for a moment before hearing clanging in the kitchen, that clumsy boy, knocking all the pots and pans over.

“What are you doing bub?” You laughed, taking a seat at the table watching him attempt to cook. Jack definitely wasn’t the best chef, but it was cute watching him do his little thing.

“Wellll, I went to that little market shop down the street that was closed when we got here last night. Got some stuff for breakfast, wanted to make you something. It’s kinda hard cause all the cooking instructions are in Italian and I have to translate it. But I did make some toast!” Jack lifted his finger in the air, excited that at least something he made came out good. He put a plate on the table, with a few pieces of buttered toast with different jams on each one.

“This is cute bub,” you smiled, “you’re getting better in the kitchen huh.” Jack laughed at your little poke at him. He was focused on finishing what he had on the stove, which you couldn’t tell what he was doing, he refused to let you see. All you saw were some pots on the stove with him stirring.

“Yeah, yeah. Just a little. But here, I’m almost done. Just gotta do thisss and finished,” he poured a glass bottle full of white sauce into the pot. Jack made two servings, setting them at the table for the two of you to enjoy. He opened up the curtains to the kitchen windows, letting the two of you see the marvelous view of the cityscape below. “Ravioli a la Jack style, bon appetito.”

❦ ❦ ❦

liked by elblue06, jackhughes, and 109,034 others

yourusername: amore mio @ jackhughes

jackhughes: mia bellaaaa ❤️‍🔥

trevorzegras: uglyy

—reply to trevorzegras yourusername: funkyy

elblue06: my lovies 🤍

—reply to elblue06 yourusername: love you miss el 🫶🏽

lhughes_06: okayyy stink!!

—reply to lhughes_06 yourusername: I look guud huh stinka ;)

liked by _quinnhughes, lhughes_06, and 102,662 others

yourusername: vampires in the lemon grove 🍋

_quinnhughes: tuh totally stole caption from our book club

— reply to _quinnhughes yourusername: don’t worry boobie it’s still our thing don’t be madd

lhughes_06: awe so cutee *reports post*

—reply to lhughes_06 yourusername: waah *don’t care didn’t ask* :]

—— reply to yourusername lhughes_06: touché, y/n, touché

liked by yourusername, _quinnhughes, and 262,019 others

jackhughes: bonjour, or whatever hi is in Italian

yourusername: close bubby, so close

_quinnhughes: ur dumb

—reply to _quinnhughes jackhughes: ur dumber

liked by lhughes_06, trevorzegras, yourusername, and 207,776 others

jackhughes: so apparently fettuccine Alfredo isn’t a real thing out here?? Anyways here’s my baby looking guud

lhughes_06: wow @ yourusername you just let him steal our lingo like thatt

—reply to lhughes_06 yourusername: it’s not like that stink I swear 😩

—— reply to yourusername lhughes_06: then what is it like huh 🤨

trevorzegras: so uncultured, hughes, so uncultured 🤌🏻

—reply to trevorzegras jackhughes: ya mama.

liked by jackhughes, _quinnhughes, and 113,572 others

yourusername: hey mona lisa, come home you know you can’t rome without cesar

jackhughes: my favorite picture of us from the trip 🫶🏻

_quinnhughes: waitt who took the picture??!?!

liked by yourusername and 198,442 others

jackhughes: flashing lights - kanye 💫

yourusername: omgg always stealing my captions you boob!!

—reply to yourusername jackhughes: haha snatchedd

_quinnhughes: again who tf is taking these pictures????

#jack hughes #Jack hughes Instagram edit #Jack hughes edit #Jack hughes imagine #Jack hughes Instagram imagine #starbabyg #nhl #hockey fic #nhl fic #nhl fanfiction #nhl hockey #nhl imagine #nhl players #hockey imagine #jack hughes fic #New Jersey devils #Quinn hughes #luke hughes #hughes brothers

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kervl-klear · 8 months ago

Note

💥 For Yuseong

💥 - A witch has turned your OC into a militaristic vehicle. What vehicle would that be?

…………………………………………………

Huchu and Yuseong sneaked into a mysterious storage in the middle of nowhere. There were a raised of terrorism on the eastern part of nation C and C2ISTAR was hired to find out where did these terrorists get money to fund their activities. Angae’s sleeper reported that the group is self sustained through some form of business and Noeu found some traces of underground transactions on private water vessel in the high sea which Beagcha confirmed to be a common practice between illegal goods dealers.

Orenji had identified the location of congest activities through surveillance by air and Seoltang analyzed the photos. They found that there’s one particular isolated storage clearly under a camouflage attempts with interesting security measures and so the scientists duo are dispatched to identified the chemical compounds hidden in that storage.

Huchu and Yuseong are now inside, it’s full of cardboard boxes stacked upon each other. Huchu swiftly cut one of the boxes open to take a look, a bunch of brown glass bottles are arranged inside but what caught Huchu’s attention is their caps.

Huchu: “It’s cough syrups”

Yuseong: “But if this is what they sold, why be so secretive and suspicious?”

Huchu: “Probably because they are not selling these for medical use, to simplified; cough is a respond to an irritation in your throat where the brain tells muscles in your chest to push the air out of your lungs. This resulted from the stimulated nerves sending a message to your brain and cough syrup suppressed that function”

Yuseong: “Wait, so all allergy pills directly suppress your nerves system?”

Yuseong frowned at the horrifying implication toward the current allergy treatment and how many MDD patient have history of allergy pills usage due to some form of chronic allergy but then he beam other sunny smile.

Yuseong: “That’s so cool!”

Huchu doesn’t know what to make of Yuseong’s reaction.

Huchu: “Yeah…..we call them antihistamines. When mixed with the right NSAID in the right amount, you can creat a handmade drug that are a lot cheaper than heroin or amphetamine”

Huchu prays that this will not give Yuseong any weird ide-

Yuseong: “That gives me an idea”

Huchu sighed, now he has to ask Seoltang to kindly re-indoctrinate Yuseong again.

Huchu: “Yuseong, NO”

Yuseong: “But-But a food that prevented body from getting Ghrelin is really interesting, it could be use as a cure for some case of obesity and eating disorders! We can get a funds for this research by advertising to the executives that these are food that make soldiers unable to feel hungry no matter how little nutrition they have, it will sell well and all we need are antihistamine that bind to H-2 receptors-“

Before Yuseong could accidentally invent other market of people’s right violation. They hear a sound of shatter glass followed by a small thud, like someone had collapsed. They took a second to quickly check on each other before deciding the next move; should they move toward or away from the sound?

The scientists duo are way too curious to considered their options and just immediately go to checkout where the sound came from because SCIENCE.

They found one of the terrorists collapse on the ground alone next to one of the open box and a shattered cough syrup bottle, no blood, no injuries.

Despite the risk, Huchu reach out to check on this terrorist. Looking at the skin beneath his fur, it’s somewhat yellow. Indicating that his liver has difficulty functioning, the heart is okay and the breathing is normal. Huchu dig into the terrorist’s pocket to check if he has chronic illness or is taking any medication which he found a small package of Naproxen. This lead to Huchu checking the terrorist pupils which appear to be expanded, having a theory in his mind he lean in and smell the leftover substance in terrorist’s mouth to confirm his diagnosis.

Huchu: “It’s a case of overdose. Unlike Ibuprofen, Naproxen last longer in your blood so it is harder for your body to clean it off and so it is easier to get an overdose once diluted in cough syrup that are designed to be easily absorbed”

Huchu slowly inserted a tube through his patient’s throat, careful to not trigger a gag reflex. Through it, he feed terrorist some activated charcoal to absorb as much Naproxen and Dextromethorphan as possible.

Huchu reach into his pocket for Acetylcysteine, but he found that the bottle is empty. It appears he accidentally took a used bottle with him…either that or Angae wasn’t seeing correctly when he help Huchu pack the supplies.

Huchu: "He needs a liver transplant, I will let him borrow my liver for a bit. Let’s see if his body is compatible with mine"

Huchu unbutton his uniform, prepare to open his skin and dug a tube into his Portal vein and Hepatic artery but Yuseong stop him.

Yuseong: "No! You already trade your liver and kidneys off a couple of times this year not counting when you replace the broken blood-pumpimg machine with your heart! You can’t always resort to these kind of method!"

Yuseong shakingly squeeze Huchu's hand but then suddenly, Yuseong lighten up and he wags his tail somewhat excitingly. Huchu is clearly startled by the sudden shift of expression.

Yuseong: “You just need Acetylcysteine right? Can you tell me its chemical formula?”

Huchu: “…..C5H9NO3S…..?”

Yuseong: “Okay, so it’s Cyclopentyl radical, Nitrate and Sulfur”

Yuseong start to look around. He goes to the open box and took the foam piece that keeps the cough syrup bottles in place. These foam are called polystyrene foam. The blowing agent use for these foam is Pentane which has the chemical formula of C5H12, only a couple of Hydrogen atoms away from Cyclopentyl radical.

Yuseong then took terrorist’s gun on the floor then took a couple of bullet. Sulfur can be found in gunpowder, and lastly Nitrates can be extracted from Potassium nitrate which can also be found in the gunpowder.

Having all main ingredients, Yuseong start constructing his portable miniature chamber. He make this chamber a while back and he always carried it with him, it cannot breakdown every atomic bound at will like the life size one but removing 3 hydrogen atoms and extracting Nitrate from potassium nitrate is not beyond it capabilities.

Although atomic physics is not Huchu’s specialty, he does recognize the procedure to take a while and so injected Beta blocker into his patients to keep his heart BPM as low as it will allows him to live so that Naproxen and Dextromethorphan spread at slower rate.

After a while of breaking some atomic bounds as well as rearranging molecular structure, the liver detoxification chemical is done.

Huchu injected Acetylcysteine into his patients followed by Epinephrine to return his heart BPM to normal rate.

The overdosed person woke up, dazed at first but then jolt up trying to get away from Yuseong like a pilot spotting SAM.

Yuseong on the other hand is smiling brightly. This is the first time anyone he cannot recognize had a specific reaction to him. It gives Yuseong a lot of hope, so much so that his knees are on the floor. May be this overdosed person knows who he was, a first lead to finding his daughter.

Yuseong beam his sunniest smile to the stranger and quickly crawl to him while speaking excitingly.

Yuseong: “Greetings mister, my name is Yuseong! I suspected myself of having one daughter and that I committed arson with the intention of robbery, do tell me if you recognize my name or appearance-“

Ignoring Yuseong, Huchu slowly and carefully approach his patient.

Huchu: “Shhh… it’s okay, I’m here to help. I will not let anyone hurt you…”

The overdosed stranger pointed at Yuseong and yell that a Mobile CBRN laboratory is chasing him.

This prompted Huchu to forcefully grab the overdosed terrorist by his collar and shone some light into his corneas.

Huchu: “Ah, He’s still high. Probably hallucinating but at least he would probably survive now if we leave him alone”

However, Huchu didn’t let go of the guy’s collar.

Huchu: “Right..?”

He look deep into his patient’s eyes….who doesn’t exactly seeing correctly and is slowly slipping away from Huchu’s hand because he’s still high-

Huchu: “You think you can get away and go ingest unhealthy stuff again?? NOT A CHANCE, you are my patient now you hear me?! I didn’t spend-….Yuseong, how long does it take us to treat this guy?”

Yuseong: “……about 2 hours?”

Huchu: “2 HOURS of sweat and effort so I can let you out to die in the outside world like the other soldiers I’ve treated!!”

The terrorist attempted to get away from Huchu who legit is just trying to kidnap the man at this point, but Huchu gripped strength is too strong, and the guy got slap in the face by Huchu.

Huchu: “SToP ResISTINg mEDicAL HeLP”

Guess the ‘I won’t let anyone hurt you’ part didn’t include Huchu himself-

Huchu carried the terrorist over his shoulder.

Huchu: “You will never lay eyes on cough syrup or NSAID ever again! You will live with ALT of 34 U/L, AST of 32 U/L, ALP of 92 U/L, Albumin of 4 g/dL, total protein of 8 g/dL, Bilirubin of 1.0 milligram, GGT of 30 U/L, LD of 175 U/L and PT of 10 seconds until you are 65 at minimum!“

Yuseong pick the rifle on the floor up then approach Huchu.

Yuseong: “Hu, I know you are concerned but wouldn’t it cause problems if they realized that one of them went missing”

Yuseong spoke with nurturing empathy.

Yuseong: “Also if his liver actually manages to reach these values then I think his liver will become a world record statistical anomaly”

Just when they are about to leave, a couple of footsteps can be heard. A big group of terrorists surrounded the duo with guns.

But then the terrorists hold their gun up. They stare at Huchu and Yuseong and oddly that's all they do, no one shoot or charge at neither of them which really confused the scientists duo.

Yuseong: “Wait could it be…”

Yuseong’s light up into the sunniest smile.

Yuseong: “…because we save their comrade..?”

Suddenly their earpiece buzzed and Angae speak through it.

Angae: “Huchu, Yuseong, what’s going on? I got the report from my sleeper about the situation but how did things lead to that?”

Huchu: "It appears they refused to do harm to us because we save one of their friends"

Although he knows that Angae cannot see him, Yuseong still do a little nod while smiling.

Angae went quiet for a second.

Angae: “That doesn’t quite alight with what I received, my agent said there’s a hostage situation in the storage”

Yuseong, Huchu and the overdosed terrorist look at each other then at the other terrorists who surrounded them.

Huchu: “…..Who’s the hostage..?”

Angae: “The leader of this terrorist group?”

Huchu and Yuseong look at the overdosed terrorist who is still a little high.

Angae: “Wait a minute….You two didn’t-“

Huchu furiously stole the rifle from Yuseong and smacked the terrorist leader head with the handle.

Huchu: “YOu SOld tHis ShiT So YoU KnOw iT’s bAD bUt YOu STiLl InGEsT It-”

…………………………………………………

I considered going with YuSAM joke at first but my conscious say no.

Thank you for your patience in the TFC circuit and thank you for tuning into my frequency. 32G1, RWY CLR. 🛫✨

#my oc #my art #c2istar #huchu #yuseong #angae #cw: drugs #YuSAM

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everythingne · 1 year ago

Text

marketing ploy ln4 - ch 6

Austria goes to shit. Great Britain follows.

piastri!oc x lando norris, bestfriends brother/fake dating

warnings/notes: inappropriate comments, lando being overprotective, arguments/cursing, mildly severe car accidents (guys its an f1 fic what we were expecting. gotta do the cliche for my first fic), vague descriptions of injury, a few sexual comments, this is SO LONG. like 5k-6k words?

prev | next

01 JULY, AUSTRIA.

I woke up with a bad feeling in my chest and an odd headache. My lone hotel room, to give Oscar and Lily some space since she was finally able to tag along again this season, felt so enclosing. Slowly pulling myself out of bed, I groaned and immediately went to get ready when I noticed the time. Luckily, it was only qualifiers today, so I didn't have much to do other than hide in my office and make sure no one's car was going to explode.

But god, on my worst day, everything has to go wrong.

First, Max's tires never got warmed. Something was broken, and I had to do so much boring bullshit paperwork. Then, Checo's brakes got sticky and we had to have him DNF. Then for some reason, half the fucking sensors hadn't even recorded anything so I couldn't even tell why they had gotten sticky. But I did feel a bit better (not at all) knowing it had also happened to a few other drivers so it wasn’t just us.

So I was having the greatest time, sarcasm fully intended. And then I completely missed seeing Oscar and Lily for lunch because I was in an emergency meeting. And by the time I got out of Red Bull's garage, it was nearing five at night and I hadn't had anything to eat or anything to drink after one water bottle and my headache still had gotten worse because of it.

And then got immediately swamped by reporters.

Luckily, I saved some class and patience and was able to make it through fine but by the time I got to McLaren's garage, I was about ready to snap at someone.

"Ollie!"

Thank god.

"Oscar." I hum as he wraps an arm around my shoulder, and then he makes a face as he notices just how exhausted I am.

"You guys had it rough today." He says and I just nod, rubbing at my jaw and rolling my neck as he steps back, leans over, and hands me a packet of some sort of assorted chocolates.

"I love you so much." I sigh as I open the packet and he laughs, dragging me further into the garage where everyone else is settled and just relaxing. McLaren had a really good day, both Lando and Oscar in Q1 and I can see everyone laughing and celebrating. A completely different feel from the tense garage at Red Bull. Lily gives me a tight hug when she sees me and urges me to come sit with her so we can catch up, we end up in a bit further and in a corner so we can have a bit of privacy. All is fine, and Lily is very quickly improving my mood as we giggle and share stories (and I happily answer all her questions about Lando and me) before we're approached by a guy I don't recognize.

"You guys need water?" He asks innocently, and though it's not extremely hot in Austria, I take one from his hands. Lily denies it, showing off the water bottle she's still drinking, and the guy seemingly just blips out.

"Weird." I hum, cracking open the water bottle and taking a sip of the cool liquid, "Never seen him before. Maybe he's new?"

"Or a volunteer?" Lily suggests and I shrug in response, eventually, Oscar comes over and wraps an arm around Lily's waist and she grins, popping a kiss on his cheek. Finally, the two of them were actually looking like a couple in public. Which, is probably what happens when two introverts start dating. I swear they didn't hold hands for months.

"Lando's being interviewed if you wanna wait for him for the media shit." Oscar pokes my hand and I pretend to flick the water bottle at him. The two of us make faces for a few seconds before I nod, taking another sip of my water bottle.

"Yeah, he and I are going out to eat again tonight. Andrea's idea." I sigh, looking over my shoulder where I can see Lando sitting with some people with a microphone in hand. I notice though it's not Sky, but rather ESPN, and I hum before turning back to Oscar and Lily and wishing them on their way. I pull out my phone, answering a few texts before someone walks up beside me. And it's the same guy from earlier.

"Oh. Hi." I say softly as he smiles at me, looking a little flustered for a second before he starts talking.

"Just wanted to say hello, I'm one of the mid-season hires. I'm an engineering assistant, Jordan." He held out his hand and I grinned, shaking his hand firmly.

"Olivia Piastri, Oscar's younger sister. I'm Red Bull's head analyst." I let go of his hand and Jordan nods, he wrings his hands before he continues talking and I feel the confidence he's trying to exhume here.

"Ah, I've seen a bit about you. Kinda hard to miss such a pretty face." Jordan grins, running a hand through his hair and tilting his head with a tiny grin.

Is he flirting with me? Is this guy daft?

"Well, thank you. But uhm--" I look around the garage, hoping to maybe signal another person in the garage to come over and get me out of this just terribly awkward situation. Lando's wrapping up his interview, handing back his microphone and laughing softly as he shakes hands with the reporters.

"Seriously, you're by far one of the most gorgeous girls I've seen." Jordan steps a bit closer and leans on the wall beside me with his body covering my view of the majority of the garage, "are you free tonight? I'd like to get to know you better."

I step back, putting myself back into the view of the garage as I try to keep my patience and shake my head no. I'd never had this issue before, how exactly does one stop unwanted advances? I'd never had to, I was never alone when these sorts of things happened to me.

So, I stammer, "Ah, I'm sorry, I have a boyfriend and.."

"Ay, is he here? Because I don't see anyone staking their claim on you." Jordan grins and I tighten my grip on the water bottle and click my tongue against my teeth. Okay, if he was gonna be like that I could be bitchy too. I glance back across the room one final time, making eye contact with Jon who gives me a sharp nod, but I don't see Lando anymore. Which... could be good or bad.

"He works for McLaren, and is a part of your team, so you might wanna... not... flirt with me?" I turn back to Jordan, make an uncomfortable grimace at him, and end up tightly crossing my arms over my uniform shirt, "So..."

"Yeah, who's your boyfriend then?" Jordan hums, looking over, "Jon?"

"Me," A hand slides across my waist, fingers digging into my skin harsh enough to likely leave bruises as I'm tugged back into Lando's chest. With one hand still firm on my waist, his other hand comes to my jaw so he can turn me to press a soft kiss to my lips before he leans back and whispers, "Hi, baby."

"Hi, Nori." I smile, turning back to Jordan who raises an eyebrow. And I can already tell this is going to be terrible because he hasn't exactly backed down. I see a reporter tilt their camera at us, and I grip Lando's wrist to tell him to back off. But Lando stays close, and my cheeks tint red as Jordan starts to speak.

"Got yourself a good-lookin' girl there, Lando." Jordan grins, winking at me and making my skin crawl. Lando's hands tighten on my waist, pulling me into him a bit more if that's even possible, and now I'm not even mad that he's doing this anymore. I wanted to be doing anything else than being here.

"Mhm. Olivia's my girl, don't you know? She's been my girlfriend for a while, so why dont'cha step back?" Lando smiles, but his threat is not hidden very well.

"Ay, it's all good Lando, I don't like to share my meals."

"Oh-kay!" I shout but Lando takes over, stepping around me to point at Jordan and get in his face. I see half the McLaren garage turn, and someone shouts to send the media out of the garage as the cameras scramble to try and take photos and videos of the altercation.

"If you know what's good for you--" Lando grits, eyes narrowing as Jordan smirks in his face. His confidence was a far cry from the scrawny guy who had walked up to me prior, Lando continues through his teeth, "You won't say anything like that again or I'll make sure you can't speak anymore."

"Sorry, man. Didn't realize this would piss you off so much," Jordan takes a step back, his smile making it known his apology was fake, and my tight grip on Lando's wrist makes it so he won't follow.

"Bye, Jordan," I say, voice soft but level. A sort of period to the end of whatever conversation Lando and Jordan had silently through their eyes before Jordan backed off and slipped into the crowd of McLaren officers off to the side. I keep my iron grip on Lando's wrist and he slowly turns around to look at me. At this point, my exhaustion and anger from the whole day is bubbling just under my skin. Unlike my twin, I was never good at completely holding myself back when I got like this.

"Lando." My tone comes out much colder than I'm expecting, and I grab his wrist again and forcefully tug him to my side as I hiss, "What the fuck was that?!"

"Did you hear what he said?"

"Yes! But was that worth threatening him?"

"What did you want me to do?" He said and when I peeked over his shoulder and saw everyone watching, I grabbed Lando by the collar and pulled him into Andrea's vacant office, slamming the door shut and pointing at him.

"I had it handled, okay?" I snap, "He was just being a jackass, you didn't have to threaten to make him unable to speak--Lando! Who the fuck says that?!"

"Did you have it handled? That was you having it handled?" Lando asks, incredulously, sitting on the edge of Andrea's desk as I stay at the door, using my heel to keep it closed just in case someone tried to push it open at any point since I knew the door didn't lock.

"You don't need to protect me like that, Lando, it's not your job!"

"It's not, I'm your boyfriend--" And the rest of what Lando says fizzles out in my head. Boyfriend. Boyfriend. The word that had been taunting me for weeks. Lando Norris, my boyfriend for the media. The boy who could never be mine. And something in my chest breaks, I can feel the tether finally snap, and I shout.

"No, you are not!" My volume surprises me, and I know McLaren can probably hear us immediately after saying it, so I drop my voice down to a hard snapping tone, "You aren't my boyfriend, Lando. You aren't! You can't be, no matter how much I love you, or you love me, or if we fall in love after all of this is over--you are not my boyfriend and you will never be because we can't be in love, Lando!"

"We can't? Who said that?!" He snaps back, "Do you think I've been doing all of this for media? For a fucking paycheck? God, no Ollie. I fell in love with you the first time Oscar brought you around! Do you think I agreed with this for a check? No, I agreed to that stupid contract because it's you! If it was anyone else I would've just walked the fuck out of that office, it's you I want, only you, only you, Olivia."

"But you know you can't have me, so why string me along like this? We can't be together, no matter what we want, we're gonna have to break up at some point! So why should we even try?"

"Who cares what they say? Zak, Andrea, Christian? You're gonna let them run your life?" Lando steps closer to me, taking my jaw into his gentle hold, voice so soft I feel my heart drum against my lungs, "We do what they say, sure, but once we've completed that contractual obligation... can they tell us we can't ever be this again? Be... us, again?"

"I can't do this Lando," I whisper, bringing my hands to my chest and he steps back. The space between us suddenly felt so vast, and something in me clicked and I knew something irreversible was going to be said. That maybe I had started the downfall here, and Lando's hurt expression tells me I have.

He can only whisper, "Why?"

"I just..." I stammer, making a vague gesture to the room. There's no way for me to express the thousands of thoughts that race through my head, a constant loop of some F1 circuit of emotional mess slamming into every reasonable thought and fizzling out reason.

"Because you're scared of being loved? You're scared of what will happen if you fall in love?" Lando accuses and I can't answer those questions, because I am. I'm so scared. But not because of Lando. Because of media. So I shout the next best option.

"I never wanted the attention! I didn't become a driver because I can't handle the media like you all can! And yet I end up here, and--" I go to keep talking and Lando holds up a hand, shouting over me,

"Okay, then back out! You clearly want nothing to do with me, or this, or everything that's happening, so go tell Christian you're done!"

Silence. I swallow thickly because no. I don't want to be done. I want to fight tooth and nail for everything in this relationship, but also, was this what was best? Should I back out now, before everything we've done catches up to us? A hubris that needs to be checked? I knew from the beginning I was going to burn, but not like this. Never did I think it would be like this.

"Olivia..." Lando whispers, and I feel something roll down my cheeks. I'm crying I realize. The world is blurry, my throat is dry, and I'm crying over a relationship I can now see we both want but... at least to me, we can never have.

Do I ask Christian..?

"No, Lando." I sigh, doting under my teary eyes, "This is why. This is why. We will end up here one day, and I can't do that. I... I'll talk to you later."

"Ollie, wait!"

I turn, leaving the office in a hurry. I shove through the McLaren workers who try to stop me and once I'm in the clear, I run. The Red Bull paddock isn't far and once I get there I can't breathe, shoving through people who now wear the same uniform as me. My office doesn't even feel safe, the flowers on my desk mocking me, and I grab them and in a fit of rage, I throw them across the room. It doesn't make the pain in my chest leave.

“Olivia!” Someone shouts and I turn, Christian just barely in the doorway. I shout, without thinking, without even pausing.

“I’m backing out! I’m done with that media stunt—!” And a hiccup breaks my sentence, “Get me out of it!”

“I—“

“—Now, Christian!”

The garage is silent after my scream, and poor Christian looks horrified as he nods, and shuts the door to my office. I let a shaky breath out as I realize what I’ve done is irreversible, but there’s so much pain in my whole heart I can’t tell if that’s what’s hurting me. I sink to my knees on the floor, a hand on my chest, a hand on the carpet, and I sob.

I don’t even know why I’m crying.

An arm is around my shoulder, a set of hands resting on my elbows as someone whispers to me. I don't even know who the people are when I look up, and the sight of both Max and Checo kneeling in front of me makes the tears double. At some point, Checo leaves, once I've calmed enough for Max to convince me to lay down with his jacket covering my legs as I hiccupped and slowed down my breathing with Max's hand applying solid pressure to my chest.

Charles and Daniel come back with Checo, who then leaves the room entirely, and I end up with my weird little mixed driver support group on the floor in my office.

Something so odd, something that should not be happening in any way, but yet here we are.

Somehow, one relationship shattering had made the other relationships in my life more clear. Relationships that had started casually and professionally, and ended up with me now having twenty or so brothers at this point.

Brothers.

Just like Oscar.

Max drops me at Oscar's hotel room a few hours later when he returns from his date with Lily. She ends up going off on her own, with a few of the other WAGs, to give Oscar and me privacy. I settle on the couch, sipping a water bottle as Oscar looks out the window. I hadn't told anyone else what Lando and I had argued about, Max had kinda picked up on it as had Charles, but they had given me a berth. A space to explain. When I didn't take the invitation, they didn't try and pull me in to say anything. Which I appreciated beyond words.

"What happened?" Comes the soft voice of my twin. I knew Oscar wouldn't have been like them though.

“I backed out,” I say, rubbing a hand along the fabric beneath me.

"What?" Oscar turns to face me, "You backed out?"

"Of the shit with Lando, I can't do it anymore. I can't have my emotions being toyed with like this anymore. And we both like each other but one day they're gonna come along and tell us we need to break up and we have to listen to them." I find a stray string in the couch stitching and begin picking it. My nails dig into them, making a slightly bigger hole. It feels like the way I'd ripped a hole into my own heart earlier.

"I had a feeling this was gonna happen." Oscar walks across the room to sit on the arm of the couch, looking over at me, "what happened?"

"I just had a shit day, and... and when this guy at McLaren started flirting excessively with me he got super overprotective and threatened the guy. Which... isn't the worst but he could've handled it better." I wave my hands, "But I had such a shit day I just blew up at him over it, and we fought, and he told me to back out if I couldn't handle it... and when I got back to Red Bull I just did it. I didn't even think and now I think I made a huge fuckin' mistake but I can't go back on it now."

"Could you talk to Christian? Ask him to wait?" Oscar hums, his hand coming up to card through my hair again and I melt into his touch as per usual.

"I dunno." I murmured, closing my eyes, "I just wanna sleep the rest of the day off."

"We can talk about it tomorrow after the race, okay?" He says, looking down at me before turning to look at his phone as it buzzes on the table. I look up at him and see his jaw tense, hand pausing on my head as he makes a face.

"Oh, Christ." He whispers, turning his phone to me. I climb up to sit next to him, eyes widening as I look over the post he shares and my stomach falls to my chest.

"This is not what Christian told me would happen," I whisper, Oscar's hand squeezing my upper arm in some sort of semblance of support. Of course, getting out of this mess with Lando wouldn't be easy.

Now I needed to talk to Christian. As soon as possible.

01 JULY, TWITTER ↴

written by Julia Sine, 01 July, 2024.

Cars aren't the only thing racing down the track in Austria this weekend, so are some hearts! In an exclusive interview after the qualifier today, multiple McLaren and Red Bull workers spoke with reporter Julia Sine about what might become the next 'it couple' after Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift.

"Lando and I first spoke about it in Bahrain. He said the two of them have been close since Oscar's rookie season last year and he was worried Olivia's job would be at stake if their relationship ever leaked to the public," Steve Atkins, McLaren's Head of Communications explained while standing in the paddock with Chief Executive Officer Zak Brown and Team Principal Andrea Stella, "I went and spoke with Christian Horner, the Team Principal of [Oracle Red Bull Racing] and we agreed that since they were on separate teams, and Olivia was an analyst and not an engineer, there was no conflict of interest. Olivia did sign an NDA, just to make sure she wasn't leaking race information to Lando but it was never brought to our attention if Olivia and Lando ended up dating."

"If the two of them are dating, which again I've had nothing clarified to me if they are or aren't, I'd imagine they've been keeping it private due to concerns with the media and fans."

"Olivia and Lando have a very unique connection, and we here at McLaren are all supportive of relations between teams. All our drivers are friends at the end of the day and we support [Lando and Oscar] being friends with any of the drivers outside of racing. However, I will say we have seen some tensions growing between our drivers and Red Bull." Andrea spoke with me and Zak right before leaving for a meeting, Zak agreed with Andrea, and he further stated, "A lot of the tension we've been seeing with Max and Lando on the track stems from this, in my opinion."

When I made my way to Red Bull to ask some more questions about the situation, I was only able to briefly speak with Alice McLoughlin, Red Bull's Head of Communications who said, "The relationships our staff members get into is not any of our business as long as it's not a conflict of interest or damaging to the staff member themselves. I have not been told if there is for certain a relationship, but if there is I wish both of them well but we will be waiting for their announcement before we decide anything.