#But hopefully this is done in the most non-offensive humorous way possible

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ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN ON THE INTERNET | Matthew Gray Gubler | Spencer Reid

Part 1 | Part 2

Pairings: Matthew Gray Gubler x Reader | Matthew Gray Gubler x You | Spencer Reid x Reader | Spencer Reid x You

Summary: Matthew Gray Gubler discovers a fanfiction about Spencer Reid that hits too close to home, igniting an anonymous, irresistible connection with its talented author.

-

It started innocently enough.

He was on Reddit. Just scrolling.

...which he shouldn’t have been doing, frankly, because the comments there either told him he looked like a Victorian wet cat or a “fine wine, if the wine also solved murders.”

The latter, oddly, felt a bit too specific.

Was he wearing a cape in that particular edit? Because that one definitely could have been a thirst trap — if thirst traps came with footnotes about obscure 17th-century literature.

Matthew shook his head. One fan edit titled “Matthew Gray Gubler as a vampire, but make it cute” was more confusing than anything else.

How does one even make a cute vampire? Was he going to be sipping a smoothie in a Victorian parlor while discussing existentialism? It was just a lot to process.

But then a username caught his eye. A link.

Curiosity, his lifelong and possibly most problematic trait, pushed him forward, so...he clicked.

And then he read.

And then he kept reading.

For three hours.

Without blinking.

He wasn’t even sure how he got there. One second, he was Googling whether giraffes sleep standing up (they do sometimes, it turns out), and the next he was elbows-deep in a 20k-word Criminal Minds fic titled “Late Night at Quantico (And Other Terrible Ideas)” by someone named softestsidearm.

It was an x Reader.

About Spencer Reid.

And somehow, impossibly, it felt like it got him. Not just “him” the character — but him. Like whoever wrote this had cracked open his ribcage, peeked at the neurotic little sparrow-heart inside, and whispered, “Yeah. That tracks.”

He set down his phone.

Picked it up.

Set it down again.

Laid down on the floor for a while, like a Victorian woman recovering from scandal.

Then, at 2:41 a.m., Matthew Gray Gubler created a burner account.

Username: drfactsandfeelings

Bio: “probably overthinking it”

Profile pic: A blurry owl in glasses.

He didn’t comment right away. He couldn’t. He spent a full hour typing and deleting:

“This was really great. Your Reid is so in character.”

“Hi, I’m... a fan. Of this. Not in a weird way. Unless you think it’s weird. In which case I’m not.”

“Are you a time traveler?? How do you know what he’d say in literally every situation?? I—” (he deleted that one fast.)

Finally, he settled on something safe. Casual. Normal.

“This was lovely. Beautifully written. You really captured the heart of him. Thank you for sharing.”

He hit post.

Threw his phone across the room.

Regretted everything.

-

Within twenty minutes, he saw a reply:

“OMG thank you 🥺 comments like this keep me going. I’m literally pacing my room like a regency wife who just got a letter from war rn. Thank you thank you thank you.

He reread it four times. His ears turned red.

But then… curiosity gnawed at him again.

He clicked on her profile.

And that's when he saw it.

Age: 25

25.

Matthew blinked, feeling like a deer caught in headlights. Not because she was 25, of course — that was perfectly fine — but because he was 44.

He scrolled down, slightly distracted now. So she was close(ish)…well, not really…. to his age... but still, he shouldn’t be on Reddit at 2:41 a.m., really shouldn't.

Yet here he was, spiraling down a rabbit hole of fanfic, somehow emotionally invested. He tried not to overthink it, but his brain immediately started overanalyzing everything.

What was it like being 25 in this wild world of fanfiction and anonymous fandoms? Was she a professional writer?

Or just someone with an extraordinary ability to read between the lines of a fictional character?

Was this weird?

It didn’t help that the more he read your replies, the more he realized just how you understood Spencer. It was almost eerie. He couldn’t help but feel a little… flustered?

Like he was being admired in a way that was a little too... honest.

so, naturally, instead of sleeping like a person with functioning social instincts, he went back and read all your other fics. All of them.

By sunrise, he had developed:

A deeply parasocial crush on your brain.

An aggressive respect for your metaphor usage.

And a secret favorite line that he screenshotted and saved in Notes. (It was from the fic where Spencer couldn’t sleep, and Reader said, “Then I’ll keep watch. Someone should guard the genius.”)

He paced.

He spiraled.

He made tea and forgot to drink it.

And then he did something wild.

He DM’d you.

drfactsandfeelings: Hi. This is random, but I’ve been reading your work and I think it’s… really, really special. You understand Spencer better than most writers I’ve read — like you’re not just writing him, you’re listening to him. Sorry, that’s weird. I just wanted to say thank you. For putting something like that out there. (Also, you made me cry a little with the “guard the genius” line. Rude.)

He turned his phone screen-down on his nightstand. Turned it off. Put a hoodie over it. Just in case it glowed at him in the morning light like some digital Eye of Sauron.

(Which, in Gubler Language, translated directly to: "I'm catch up on sleep and pretend it never happened.")

...

He did not sleep.

But he tried.

And somewhere around 8:02 a.m., brain still fizzing and heart still chewing on the words “i literally based it on how i think you would play it??, Matthew Gray Gubler — actor, artist, author, former Vegas magician’s assistant — fell asleep mid-spiral, dreaming of owls in glasses and fictional FBI agents who knew how to say the right thing.

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Michael After Midnight: “Pregnant Pussy” by UGK

[TRIGGER WARNING: RAPE, PEDOPHILIA, ETC. NOT SAFE FOR WORK, NOT SAFE FOR LIFE. THE SUBJECT OF THIS REVIEW IS A SONG FEATURING EXTREMELY DEPRAVED LYRICAL CONTENT.  PLEASE PROCEED WITH CAUTION.]

 In the year 2010, A Serbian Film was released. The movie is something I refuse to ever watch or review, and for very good reason: the film is unrepentantly bleak, miserable and, oh yeah, it features an infamous scene involving, as the movie describes it, “newborn porn,” where a newborn baby is raped onscreen. As I’m sure you can imagine, I (and anyone who enjoys keeping the contents of their stomach firmly within said organ) really do not think baby fucking is alright. But of course, no one could possibly ever come up with something more depraved than this, right?

Well, I wish I could say that, but almost two decades before that twisted movie, the rap duo UGK (comprised of members Pimp C and Bun B) managed to one-up that fucked up shit. 

The early 90s was a wild time for rap music, where violent, edgy gangster rap and the most ludicrous, over-the-top shit thrived. Look at some of the early work by rappers like Snoop Dogg or Eminem, with the cartoonish, boundary-pushing violence and offensive lyrical content. This was the norm. But UGK, most famous for guest starring in Jay-Z’s “Big Pimpin,” went one step beyond everyone else on their Banned EP. On said EP was a song called “Pregnant Pussy,” a song so absolutely fucked up and depraved it would probably give GG Allin pause.

I am going to go line by line of this song and dissect the sheer depravity of this be-all end-all of edgy, offensive humor. This is your last chance. You can still walk away.

The song begins almost normally, with a slow buildup to the music, but as soon as the main instrumental hits we are slapped in the face with the chorus, which unfortunately is one of the tames lyrics in the entire song:

Pregnant pussy is the best you can get Fucking a bitch while her baby sucking dick

So hopefully you can see the problem here. The problem is that Bun B and Pimp C have a crucial misunderstanding of how pregnancy works. Also they’re pedophiles I guess. This line is repeated a couple of times to let it really sink in, let it really hit you what exactly is being sung, to the point where you might not even notice the line that closes out this opening chorus:

I got your fat pregnant bitch in my waterbed And I'm 'bout to bust a nut on your little baby's head

To be fair, this one is kind of tame in comparison.

Now for our first verse, Pimp C takes the mic and comes in strong!

I guess you can call me a family man Cause I care for bitches' babies every chance that I can

As we are about to find out, no. We can’t call Pimp C a family man. We should not even allow him near babies, and here’s why:

I don't give 'em clothes, or diapers and shit But I like to feed they babies with my big black dick

This is actually a running theme with this song. I’m not simply talking about the rappers and their desire to get fellated by unborn babies, I’m talking about how they casually drop lines like that before switching to stuff that’s comparatively normal and even tame (or tame by the standards of a song about getting blowjobs from fetuses).

Like, look at the lines immediately after the above:

Cause I'ma tell you if you didn't know You ain't did shit 'til you fucked a pregnant hoe The pussy is hotter, it's got a extra kick It feel like hot potato pie around your dick Sometimes I swing high, sometimes I swing low Sometimes I like to fuck a pregnant bitch on my floor Hit it kinda hard, and speed it up fast Fuck her 'til she get the cherry blisters on her ass

It’s filthy and extreme, yes, but this is honestly the sort of horny, crass shit you’d expect from a rap song like this. This is normal, this is... well, “good” is a bit of a strong word, but you know, I’ll take it. Of course, immediately after those lines we get hit with this:

Cause if she expecting, I can satisfy And at the same time, give her kid a pacifier And I love it when I bust that old nut Cause I know that her baby's just gon' lick it all up

This is why we can’t have nice things.

The second verse has Bun B, the other half of UGK, step up to the mic and he delivers more comparatively normal, raunchy, old school rap sentiment:

Ain't no pussy like one impregnated A pussy made for nutting in, I could never hate it A swoll pussy hole is the best on earth And a big dick helps make an easy childbirth I love the big titties but I hate the taste of milk And a bigger, fatter ass on my dick is smooth as silk

Like yeah, this is vulgar and all, but this is pretty good. In their own weird rapper way, they’re showing love for pregnant women, and who says pregnant women shouldn’t get a rap song about how sexy and desirable they are? Maybe this is a turning point for the song, maybe from here things get bet--

Now if she got a boy, it ain't fun But if she got a girl, then it's two pussies for the price of one

The more I listen to this song, the more I feel like these two are just joking, but... why tell this kind of joke? I can’t deny this is funny in a shock humor kind of way, like “Jesus Christ why the fuck are these guys talking about cumming on unborn babies?” but it’s such a fleeting feeling. 

Eventually as I listen to the song more and more I become desensitized to the shock and it just leaves me wondering why they thought this was a good idea to record? Did they just decide to go to the most repulsive extreme possible so that no one else ever would?

Once again the song seems like it’s going to be normal. We get like one normal rhyme this time, and then we’re hit with this:

I'm fucking all over the womb Now I move your baby to the side so I can get a little room

This song is pretty definitive proof as to why God no longer speaks with us.

I love to fuck them pregnant hoes Your baby's sneezing out nuts because I bust one in his nose So when your little child is born I bet the motherfucker tell you pregnant pussy got it going on

So, this part here is interesting. We’ve now heard from Pimp C and Bun B, we’ve heard both of them talk about how they love fucking pregnant women and indulging in their weird unborn pedophilia fetish, and that last line is delivered with the exact sort of tone you’d expect from a song wrapping up. It’s followed by the chorus and you think “Sweet fuck, they can’t go any further, can they? This has to be it. They dropped the fucking title in a verse, that’s it, they’re done.”

Sorry to disappoint you, but we live in a cruel, uncaring world.

You see, fuckin' pregnant pussy is simple All you gotta do is hope the baby think your dickhead is a nipple And if the cum snatcha stimulate my sack He just might get a fat load of Similac And if he start kicking, I'ma keep sticking Go a little deeper, give his bad ass a whipping Within nine months, I can hit it late or sooner It's me, Miss Jones, and Mr. Jones Junior And once I get the bitch in the raw Me and her kid can have a nice ménage à trois So believe I ain't kicking no bullshit Cause pregnant pussy is the best you can get

So yes, Pimp C drops this final, nightmarish verse, and then the chorus plays us out.

So, what do I think of the song? What was the point of all this? Is there enough bleach in the world to get this song out of your head?

Well, I think this song is utterly repulsive... but also rather fascinating. It makes songs like Eminem’s “Kim,” which is a six-minute murder fantasy where Em slaughters the titular woman, a six year old, and her boyfriend look incredibly tame. The lyrical content is just a non-stop pedophilic nightmare that goes beyond edgy humor and just leaves you feeling gross and uncomfortable.

But it’s just... fascinating because of that. This shit right here isn’t just a trainwreck. This is a train genocide. Pimp C and Bun B rounded up good taste, lined it up against the wall, and executed it with extreme prejudice. I almost don’t want to get mad, or offended, or disgusted at this, because I feel like if I do the boys of UGK win. The more I listen to this, the more I feel like this is just the ultimate troll song, sputing the most utterly repulsive lyrics one could ever conceive of just to garner a reaction. And I mean, it works.

Frankly, like or hate this song. Either reaction is understandable. I don’t know if this song can even be measured in metrics like “good” or “bad,” it’s just so beyond the realms of good taste, regular taste, human sensation...This shit right here is the sort of thing that almost tanked James Gunn’s career, and somehow these two went on to rap alongside the man Jay-Z himself. Is there any justice in this world? No, no there isn’t, not even a little bit.

But there is pregnant pussy. And I guess that’s something. 

[radiodespieds]

The 4-Hour Freewheel

I don’t often write book reviews, but as both a chef and an instructional designer, I have some specific feedback for this one. The 4-Hour Chef, by Tim Ferriss, purpots to do a lot of things : teach you how to cook from novice to master-level, teach you to survive in the wilderness, teach you the science of cooking, teach you how to teach yourself any topic. Unfortunately each of these things try to take up so much space in this book that they prevent the others from working at all. And at every point, Ferriss will earnestly interrupt what he’s explaining to bring you an anecdote about his wild, awesome life.

Cuisine

Let’s start with the core promise of this book : the cooking. Instead of a recipe catalogue, Ferriss has done the smart thing here and organized a training course, starting with the easiest, lowest-equipment dishes. He thus avoids the pitfall of most cookbooks for true beginners, which dump a pile of recipe on you and leave you to sort through. These structures don’t foster progression or learning in the reader : either you’re already skilled and you’ll pick the recipes that inspire you, or you’re a beginner and you’ll forget about the book after 2 or three less-than-perfect attempts. The 4-Hour Chef, in comparison, gives you a plan spread out over several months, where you only commit to the titular 4 hour every week, with a clear sense of progression and an enticing goal. The 4-Hour Chef also makes sure to walk you through the often-forgotten non-food activities in cooking : prep first, cleaning, minimizing multitasking, entertaining people, managing inventory, etc. Topics that are almost always omitted by cookbooks, even though their absence quickly turns cooking into hell.

And if you go into his 2-meals a week plan as a novice, you will indeed graduate in your cooking. The book doesn’t try to cram all of one cuisine’s basics into you and only feature recipe designed by Ferriss to fit in the plan, which is a good thing unless you were planning to staff at a bistrot or a trattoria. Many of his recipes are “hacked” in a way to require only the skills you have already mastered from your progress in the book, so some might not make the best of their ingredients until after the first few weeks, like the unseared lamb in his Osso “Buko”, the first recipe, but they all sound appetizing. Plus, chefs of any skill level benefit from remembering how far you can pare down a dish and have it still taste amazing.

There are some very odd choices here and there : sous-vide is a very interesting technique and it can teach you about the way meat really cooks, but it is really in its place in the basics section (first part out of four) of the learning plan, given how much effort it requires when you don’t have the equipment ? Does a two-kettle, digital scale, hand grinder and thermometer coffee really fit the theme of minimal equipment, progressive skill level ? If you’ve been cooking at a good level already, you’ll also know that cleaning as you go requires more than just a bonus afterword at the end of the first section. There’s also a few outdated cooking tips, but the book is from 2012 and it’s nothing major. The few relatively unknown neat tricks that are sprinkled throughout the recipes will help balance these stumbles out.

Fortunately, you’re free to skip anything that doesn’t make sense, and a difficulty spike sometimes benefit learning. And you will have to skip some, because by the end of the Domestic section (stylized as DOM, everything has to be short-handed here), you’re supposed to master the basics and be able to graduate up an order of magnitude closer to being chef-level cook. With only 14 lessons and 7 bonus activities, will definitely leave you unprepared for these ambitions (but maybe not demotivated ? depends on the person), especially for the two next levels : Hunting/Foraging and Modernist cooking. Both of these would indeed make better chefs of any of us who haven’t dived into it, and they are technically achievable for many households, though the fare on this cooking journey is starting to be extremely steep. It’s becoming clear at that point that Ferriss is optimizing for calendar compression and woah factor, not for money (or man-hours) : even following the most budget-friendly alternatives he proposes, he’s still inviting you to spend thousands of dollars over a few months. And that’s fine, as long as you understood that was the point of the book ; my issue is that even with a 700-pages book, you’re still left very short in any of the 4 sections. Each of them would require their own tome or possibly several in order to realistically bring you close to proficiency, especially with the book’s structure of a learning course rather than a recipe catalogue. (Which again, is a good choice of structure. It would just need to take up more pages in order to work.).

[Sidenote : I’d be tempted to present the last recipe of the book, Carpe à L’Ancienne (or as it’s , as another example of badly-paced teaching, but it’s made pretty clear in the book that it wouldn’t be an easy feat even for serious followers of the book method. Rather, it’s good entertainment to read about a recipe so ridiculously lengthy and pricey, for a result that most people wouldn’t enjoy anyway. It’s one of few recipes that you won’t feel guilty about not making but will still read to the end. However, its presence kind of makes you wish there would be a graduating exam recipe (or dinner party), one that’s actually geared towards the skills that the book professes to teach.]

Studying historical texts

The main problem here aren’t the random difficulty spikes or the imperfect advice, though. What sends me up the wall is the whole damn book wrapped around the cooking.

Part of it is the writing style, systematically peppered with clichéd expressions that an extremely-online positive-thinking man would have thought cool in 2012. Saying these fall flat would be an understatement, making the reader wince in second-hand embarrassment is more like it ; but again, the book is indeed from 2012, this is what to expect when working on historical texts.

The content itself though, could make you go as far as grinding your teeth in annoyance. Even if you start only at the actual recipe section (a good hundred pages in), you will regularly be interrupted right in the middle of an explanation so that Tim Ferriss can take his Very Important Tone and tell you about this awesome person he’s met and became friends with, or about an adventurous anecdote where he seems to think his self-deprecating humor will hide the bragging. Less often it’ll be some random factoid, and quite a few times it’ll be about having sex with women. Which is a weird thing to interrupt a cooking advice column for, especially while implying that the two topics might be essential to each other. Does the meatloaf recipe really require an explanation about how your friend’s wife gives her husband regular blowjobs ?

There’s the diet and supplementation advice, which I don’t take too much offense from : it’s written in the 2010s lifehack diet era, and follows the model of making big promises backed up by early, limited data and hopefully is not taken too seriously by contemporary readers. The science is likely to be very outdated, especially in its most hack-y promises. The “slow-carb” model that Ferriss championed in his other book The 4-Hour Body and uses here as a base for his claims, did not take hold in the world of diets. He does not go into the details in this book, but it seems to be mostly a low glycemic index diet, where small amount of low-GI carbs are allowed. GI-oriented diets seem to work often enough, but they have come under scrutiny for their unreliability and the incomplete picture they give of nutrition. His supplement advice, centered on compounds that were not very studied at the time, is also likely to be very outdated. Then there’s Ferriss obsession with raising testosterone, which, unless you’re a man with a low-testosterone condition, should not be a primary concern, and belongs to the a weird conception of masculinity that’s all muscle and attraction.

Is that how you learn to write ?

The first thing you’ll read when you open the book without skipping is the worst offender of them all : the pedagogy section. Just like the cooking sections, the points he makes here aren’t all particularly bad and even include some things that are often forgotten. The power of establishing stakes when self-teaching for example, or the importance of triaging your learning material up-front and being ruthless about it. The power of triaging your material and priorizing, which can help you take fast strides in the beginning of learning. These ideas would not be equally efficient for any topic, and Ferriss doesn’t provide evidence that they are, but they are useful tools to employ as a learner.

But it all amounts to not much, as it becomes clear the advice is primarily used for party tricks or obsessive, purposeless cramming. You will have a starkly different experience mine here if you have envied Ferriss’ lifestyle : jumping from one activity to the other, meeting celebrated personalities and travelling everywhere. To me, it feels not only extremely elitist but also empty : the goal is the chase, and the rush that comes with the chase. Ferriss gets his hands on cooking and learning in the same distracted way he got his hands on selling supplements and drop-shipping : he’s intensely engaged with it, but would be completely uninterested if there wasn’t the thrills of fake promises like “best in the world” “achieve in less that three months“, “receive unanimous praise”, “become rich”, etc.

That first section is also the worst offender re: Ferriss interrupting his own train of thought with barely-relevant anecdotes. It is infuriating to be hooked by an exciting promise of a founding principle of learning, only for the third paragraph start explaining in detail how he got himself ridiculed at a high-status gala dinner. By the end of the anecdote, it will have brought next to nothing to prove the initial point and Ferriss will never expound on that concept, rather content to switch to another which he will undercut once again with boring retellings. Sometimes an anecdote interrupts another anecdote. Sometimes a section just starts with one such anecdote, which Ferriss seems to believe is an appropriate substitution for in media res writing, and when it’s time to get to the argument you’ll realize the story didn’t cast any light on the issue.

Buying advice

Should you buy this almost-a-decade old book ? Depends. I do believe there’s something for everybody here : complete novice, experienced home cook, food nerd. Even an actual professional might find some inspiration in the nature or the modernist section. But that valuable nugget will not present itself easily, and you’re going to have to sift through a lot of bullshit to get to it. The best use I can imagine is going in with just a little home cooking experience, do most of the recipes in the DOM part in order, do the dinner party, then skip around the WILD and SCI part for anything that catch your fancy, then do most of the PRO part (since there’s still basics being studied in there), then close the book. Once you have the experience, you might be tempted to go back to it and look in the two middle parts for inspiration in some new things. Dutifully ignore everything else (several hundred pages’ worth) unless something strikes a chord within you. That’s it. That’s not much, but it’s slightly more than your average unused recipe book.

Now, is it worth the pricetag ? Given its age, it’s gonna depend on how much it goes for on ebay when you’re looking. I personnally wouldn’t be paying much for it, but you do you.