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star-wars-scribbles-ff · 3 years ago

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IN SERVICE OF THE REPUBLIC

Art depiction from Where I Belong of my OC CT-1917/Lucky

Sneak peak scene snippet from chapter 13 of Where I Belong below!!

The sound of the nearest set of blast doors opening does little to pull a reaction from Arwen as she feels a presence emerge from the interior of the base and out onto the walkway where she was. She didn’t need much time at all to guess who it was. After that speeder-wreck of a conversation, General Kenobi was the only one who’d likely try to speak with her.

Despite having had almost half an hour to think about the conversation she’d just had with the Jedi Council members, Arwen could feel the anger bubbling back up to the surface. She was angry with them, but even more so with herself for thinking such an arrangement could actually be authentic.

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” General Kenobi announced himself, despite knowing she was aware of his presence already.

Arwen let her eyes shoot to the left as the Jedi came to stand a few feet away from her before he turned to face the view of the Cruiser Staging Area. His aura was relaxed but his tone and posture gave away the most subtle hesitation he was bringing with him. He definitely wanted to say something; he wasn’t just coming for small talk. It’d be awkward if he did.

“I feel that our conversation took something of a wrong turn.”

“Wayii (good grief)- Just spit it out, General.” Corcer turned abruptly, pushing off of the railing her forearms had been rested upon to face the Jedi. His expression was calm, only a slight furrow of his brow indicated his reaction and potential concern or perhaps consideration to her anger bubbling over. “You used me to get what you needed for your investigation. That blasted contract was just a load of fodder-”

“The Council is still deliberating on your greater role, Corcer.” The General responded. “The contract is genuine, I assure you.” He sounded just as genuine however that did little to convince Arwen as she shook her head and looked out over the railing once more, hands grasping the railing tightly.

“You must understand that the Council simply needs time to evaluate and consider the situation.”

“All due respect, what else is there to consider?” She shot daggers over her shoulder before throwing the look ahead of her. “My service record? Jobs I’ve taken as a merc just to get by and survive in the mere months since my team was-” The abruptness of Arwen cutting off her own words had to have caught the Jedi’s attention as he physically shifted where he stood.

“Your team,” He stated the phrase with a casual quietness that made Corcer tense.

“Wer'cuy… Jetiise ke nu suvarir (forget it/it doesn’t matter… Jedi don’t understand).” She muttered under her breath with a shake of her head.

“I beg your pardon?” The question seemed to be one of surprise more than anything.

“A Jedi wouldn’t understand!” Arwen finally barked, not bothering to look towards him. She only kept her gaze ahead, forearms coming to lean back on the railing as she looked down over ledge towards the lower deck where a small airfield was.

After everything; all that had happened. She didn’t know if she had the right to feel insulted or even upset about the position she was in. Granted she did everything in her power on that mission- gave everything she had and intended to give her life if not for the fact that she was somehow still here despite the odds. She gave everything. Herself. Her team- the only family she’d ever known - for the Republic… Was that not enough?

Arwen wished the sound of the ion engines of one of the Republic’s Venator-class cruisers powering up was loud enough to drown out any further conversation that could take place. She felt oddly trapped with this Jedi, despite having plenty of space to move away from him as he stood idly by a few feet away. He was being more civil than she’d like. Mentally trying to stomp out the crumbs of guilt sitting heavy in her stomach at her behavior around this General - a superior - didn’t seem to be working.

He’s done nothing but be genuine so far. She had no reason to be angry with him specifically. But then again he was a Jedi. Jedi didn’t deal with emotions like other people did. They were cold, calculated individuals; weighing life rarely by worth but by majority… unless you were weighing the worth of a Jedi against Clones of course. Then the worth of one outweighed that of the majority. Jedi were just like everyone else… viewing this army like nothing but canon fodder; easily disposable and replaceable. Her team was nothing but numbers on a spreadsheet to them. She could count the number of Jedi she trusted on one hand. That number was even smaller when considering how many she trusted that weren’t already dead.

The Jedi General was quiet in his movements as he came to stand by her side, posture straight as he rested his hands upon the railing and eyed the view before them. Moving his gaze subtly he eyed the mercenary, noting her eyes had fallen and her expression, for a brief moment, appeared more exhausted and broken than any he’d seen in some time.

“The Republic owes you and your team a great debt.” He’d considered the proclamation before coming to find Corcer. It was true after all. He’d read the details on the file; what she, as well as her team, had been a part of; how their actions may have very well saved the Republic just months prior due to the information they’d obtained and kept out of Separatist hands. However, that victory came at a cost.

Arwen shook her head at his words. Whether it was out of denial of his words or something else, Kenobi wasn’t completely sure. He was reluctant to dig deeper into her aura, but wanted to at least attempt, if not to get a better understanding of her.

“Nice payback.” Arwen muttered before crossing her arms over the railing, risking the action of resting her chin down on her forearms. Her back was still tense, and she was ready to act at any time, however this Jedi posed no threat to her. Not at the moment at least.

General Kenobi considered her response before he nodded to himself.

“I understand you feel betrayed, and I apologize for what took place and- has… since taken place.”

Arwen could tell by the split second hesitation at the end of his sentence that he was treading carefully, however she didn’t plan on holding him to his words. She wanted to just knock his statement up to him sweet talking to get her cooperation however she could feel his sincerity. It was clear as day in the air and she couldn’t deny or ignore it.

“I’m sorry about General- Kazar and- Padawan Vorruk… sir,” Her voice lost its confidence rather quickly as soon as she uttered the names. She hadn’t said the names of the Jedi General and Padawan she’d worked with on that last mission since… the mission itself. “I-...” She couldn’t bring herself to continue as her throat tightened and suffocated the words before she could utter them.

I did what I could.

She hadn’t said it out loud, but she knew she didn’t have to.

“I know,” The response didn’t surprise her as much as his tone did. His voice held emotion, despite his professional output. He projected a sense of understanding and mentorship. There was also certainty to his tone.

He must’ve watched the holorecording.

Arwen closed her eyes, brow knitting tightly as she tried to push the images from her mind. She could almost feel the weight of the Jedi padawan in her arms sometimes; when she’d held his half conscious body, clinging to life, while she tried to relay coordinates and need for extraction to the nearest Republic fleet and simultaneously fend off incoming hostiles.

And now the Jedi had the footage of her message.

It angered her that it was memorialized as a recording, but it enraged her that they’d seen it and still saw her as a threat. Like nothing that happened that day held any weight.

A slight shift in the Jedi’s aura caused her to look subtly out of the corner of her eye and she evaluated his posture as it straightened and he cleared his throat quietly.

“I am currently negotiating with the Council to have you ship out with General Skywalker and I.”

Arwen’s brow scrunched together at the Jedi’s words and she pushed off of the railing to stand straight and face the Jedi.

“Sir- the Council said-”

“I am proceeding to try and convince them otherwise.” Kenobi responded, hands coming behind his back as his gaze arched over the view in front of them once more before it returned to her. “I read your file and reviewed your training as well as completed missions. Your skillset will be of the most use in the field. Now, it will take some time before we can have you operating openly if this pans out. But for the time being, I am going to do my best to get the Council’s permission to have you work in the background of any ongoing operations within my battle group.”

Alright… This Jedi isn’t half bad.

Corcer eyed him for a moment, overall uncertainty written in her expression before she swallowed and let out a quiet breath through her nose.

“Thank you, sir.”

I feel like a di'kut now.

The General eyed her quietly for a time before glancing away towards the blast doors down the walkway.

“0700 tomorrow there will be a meeting on standard operating procedures in the east wing for new clones joining the ranks of the 212th. You’re welcome to attend.”

The offer surprised her, however that surprise was quickly overshadowed by solace. Corcer’s hands swung around behind her back subconsciously, posture straight and attentive as she gave the Jedi General a nod.

“I’ll be there, sir.” Arwen’s tone voiced assurance and even confidence.

Giving her a curt nod and a hint of a professional smile, General Kenobi excused himself and turned to head back inside.

Corcer watched him leave and once the blast doors closed behind the Jedi, she found herself mulling over the breath sitting in her chest before she slowly let it out and returned to her spot leaning on the railing.

The sense of reassurance was starting to leave a subtle bitter taste in her mouth. On the surface she felt relief, knowing this Jedi appeared to be coming at her from the right direction; easing her into situations where she’d be surrounded by the troops. However the deeper she sifted through her mind… she was terrified.

How the kark am I gonna fit in with these troopers? I don’t know the first thing about Infantry SOPs.

Then there was the matter of how she would be received. The last thing she wanted was to be on the bad side of these troopers. Then again her very presence was already proving a negative to the 501st troopers as they’ve had to cart her around twice today. If things kept going down the same road, she’d have a difficult time fitting in.

Until she knew exactly what her job would be, if the General could square something away for her, she couldn’t get too comfortable with anything on the base, and especially not with any of the men. That was the only thing she’d need to be sure to do. Don’t let yourself care; don’t get attached. If it’s one thing her past had taught her; it only ends in heartbreak and it leaves you more alone than ever.

Not one of my best arts, but I’ve had it sitting on the shelf for a long time so I figured it was better to share it sooner rather than later. Check the story out if you’re curious for more! Feedback is always appreciated 💕

#my art #my writing #star wars fanart #clone wars fanart #star wars fanfiction #clone wars fanfiction #republic commandos #obi wan kenobi #grand army of the republic #clones #star wars ocs #clone wars ocs #clone ocs #clone commandos

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rockwell-light · 6 years ago

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Goals for the New Year (2019 edition!)

Looking back at last year's journal I was pretty unfocused about my goals |D I think I had a vague idea of essentially wanting to share more of my OCs, wanting to post more, and wanting to make more time to interact with folks and draw. This year I've got a lot more substance to what I want, er, maybe a little too much? Let's review 2018 and then my new goals ;v;

What I did accomplish:

I ended up starting to make character reference sheets as a start to sharing my OCs, which wasn't a bad way to go <: This year I'd like to continue that trend for sure! It's helping me nail down appearances for some characters that have only been strictly written before, and finalizing/updating appearances for characters that I've drawn for a long time. I initially started with really clean references and then moved into more sketchy ones for the sake of saving time, and I'll probably continue to do that for most of my characters and side projects, minus the really important ones (I intend to give Rock, Cale, and Vox clean refs, for example). I also managed to post at least once every month here which was a goal of mine last year, and I'm very proud of myself for that

It seems like such a small amount of times to upload art (a minimum of 12 times all year) but it's a goal that seemed challenging with my lack of free time.

I am still working on making more time to draw and be social. The job I started at the beginning of last year really dug into my time and energy, and I ended up springing for a new one during the holidays. I've been told that somewhere probably from mid to late January (or maybe early February depending on how long it takes to train new folks) I'll be able to have less hours on my plate. This is a big deal because art is what I want to do most, and with more people slowly offering to commission me, I desperately want to have the time to do said commissions. I have turned down several friends and clients when asked (or not responded because I was unsure how to explain myself), purely because I didn't feel I could do even a single image in a timely manner, and I didn't want them waiting months for something they paid for. Fingers crossed this will be changing soon!

But that rolls into more things I did do! I took way more commissions last year than I have before, and I have a small steady queue of folks who would like more that I want to get back to! I also tried some YCHs and adopts and had some success there as well ;v; It was a goal of mine to really work at that stuff and even if it's a small amount compared to other artists, I'm really excited about it!

I also had my first ever convention table! My fiancee Cristal ( @hellscythearts ) and I got to sell our prints at an anime/geek convention and that was a dream come true! I've wanted to do that ever since attending my very first convention when I was really young. I also got a lot of practice in with clean line art and cell shading, which are two things I've always wanted to get better at, but had no confidence in ;v; and this year I really liked a lot of my pieces, enough to sell them as prints even!

What I didn't do:

I didn't end up sharing as much about my characters as I wanted to, or starting any big projects (curse you anxiety and time management!). While I did start making references for a lot of them (and their alternate universe variations because we have way too many AU versions hanging around), I didn't actually finish all of the references I wanted to. I also haven't actually TALKED about them that much outside of those posts.

There haven't been a lot of written snippets with large illustrations, or drabbles/plain writing shared. I also only did a handful of small comics when I'd hoped to do more to showcase their personalities. I do like the ones I did, I just want to do more! I'm still nervous to go in depth with many of them, even if their appearances are appealing I worry about their characterization or stories being uninteresting ;v; but I need to remind myself that I like writing them, and that should be the most important part. It's just a bonus if you guys end up liking them too!

I also didn't end up with a job that gave me more time but WE'LL SEE ABOUT THIS NEWEST ONE NOW THAT THE HOLIDAYS ARE WINDING DOWN.

What I want to do:

Okay, I have a lot of different ideas for what I'd like to work on this year. I'm going to lay out WAY TOO MANY GOALS, with the understanding to myself that I don't need to accomplish all of them. Even just one is okay. Please remind me of that too if I get too down on myself and my progress ;v; I want to do a lot but I need to take it easy on myself when it comes to productivity and output just because art isn't my main occupation yet. These goals are not listed in any particular order or priority!

Keep making references! There are lots of characters I didn't get to yet, and I want to at least get to the "main" ones and their original versions. Other sketchy AU refs are a bonus.

ACTUALLY SHARE PARTS OF MY OC'S STORIES AND MORE ABOUT THEM. This could be comics, drabbles, journal memes, or written snippets with art. It doesn't matter, make me post about my OCsand not just leave cool doodles and no information. I want you guys to start getting to know them like I know them.

COMICS. I want to start making comics. Both one off comics about my characters like I did in 2018, but also more structured ones. Cristal and I have so much writing done, and a few character stories that are basically finished, so no more excuses not to get drawing on at least one of those ones!

More Youtube: I have two different ideas about this. Last year I posted one speedpaint video almost every month, excluding November and December (although I did three in October so???) I want to try and keep that momentum. But I also want to try my hand at some other things-- specifically small animations. These would be pretty non-serious stuff, and mostly a lot of memes that fit my OCs, or maybe small 10-30 second scenes with music. So every month if I can, I'd like to post EITHER A SPEEDPAINT OR SHOT ANIMATION (with or without audio).

Attend more conventions! We've signed up for some so this is really just not to get discouraged and to keep signing up as more open. I know we won't get into all of them but I want to try to start doing it more regularly, being a part time convention artist is really appealing to me. Our first time was honestly like being paid to be on vacation and it was super good for my anxiety and stress issues.

Keep accepting commissions: It would be cool if I could take more of them this year, but I'd at least like to keep doing them at all. For the tail end of last year my momentum really died down and I stopped taking almost any. I'm not sure what a realistic goal/number here would be, so I'm sort of stuck on -take them at all- right now.

Continue posting art at least once a month to dA/twitter/tumblr! My standards with this goal are pretty loose. Big illustrations would be the ideal, but comics and references or weird experimental art are also a-okay. I want to stay lax about this.

Again, I don't need to do all of these goals. Heck I could probably rotate them a little through the year. These are just all the things I'd like to work on. Drawing and writing and animating are like, the things I've always wanted to do with my life, and I keep being afraid to put myself out there more. It can be hard to balance work with this (at the moment I'm doing A LOT OF OVERTIME), but it's ultimately what would make me the most happy. I want to be financially stable, but still be creatively fulfilled. Ideally I think working part time and then taking commissions/doing conventions/comics is where I want to shoot for, so we'll see what the year brings ;v;

Now!!! Tell me about YOUR goals. What do you want to do this year creatively? How do you want to improve your art/writing? What about none art related things? How did you do with last year? Did you make progress? Did you find something new you're passionate about/interested in? What about non-art goals?

#long post #robot buzzin'

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sapphicscholar · 7 years ago

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A/N: Thanks to @theglassesareafacade for giving me the more fun and alliterative National City baseball team name and saving me from being boring by going with the canon National City football team mascot (the sharks)

Chapter Preview:

Alex basked in the glow of the setting sun, letting all her worries about the DEO and alien threats slowly fall away—at least for the evening. What mattered was that she had a cold beer in her hand and a perfectly legitimate excuse to yell as loud as she wanted for several hours.

“You sure you don’t want your hat?” Winn’s voice, muffled as it was by a large bite of hot dog, broke Alex out of her daze, and she chuckled at the sight of him, hot dog in one hand, her hat in the other, the tips of his hair peeking out the sides of his own bright blue baseball cap, a long silver horn protruding from the front of it.

“I’m sure.” As much of a National City Narwhals fan as she was, Alex could do without the hat, finding other, less embarrassing ways to show her team pride—like yelling at the refs more loudly than anyone around her when they made poor calls.

“Excellent!” Winn stuffed the spare hat—part of a giveaway to hype up the crowds for the big National City-Metropolis rivalry game—into his bag, the tip of the horn still peeking out over the edge. “I’ll make a Narwhals fan out of James yet.”

With a snort, Alex patted Winn on the shoulder. “Good luck, Schott. I swear that boy is more attached to the Metropolis Meteors than Superman—and he’s their freakin mascot!”

“Unofficial mascot,” Winn corrected.

“Ah yes, how could I forget?” Alex rolled her eyes and snagged a bite of popcorn from the tub sitting in Winn’s lap.

A few minutes later, the first few notes of the National Anthem began playing, and some local celebrity Alex had never seen or heard of pulled the microphone toward her, her image projected up on the jumbotron. Alex and Winn stood at attention, and Alex stifled a laugh at the sight of Winn’s cartoonish hat held in his hand over his heart, looking like one of the vampires Buffy had staked in the moments before they disintegrated into a cloud of dust.

Alex had already begun her running trash talk about the opposing team by the time the first pitch was thrown—a fastball straight down the center that one of Metropolis’ newer players managed to clip, sending it arcing high up into the air behind him for a foul ball.

“Swing and a miss,” the announcer called for the second pitch, and Alex let out a whoop, while Winn scribbled down the information on the scorecard that had come in the back of the program.

“You know those statistics will all be available later, right?”

“After the game. But if I can get a read on the trends, I can make enough money betting on the outcome to cover the cost of all my snacks.” Alex looked unimpressed until he added, “And all of your beers.”

“You offering to buy for me?”

“Maybe… You stop teasing me and help keep an eye out for bad calls so I can record accurate information, and you’ve got yourself a deal.”

“Got it.”

A smattering of applause went up around the stadium, drawing Alex’s attention back down to the game, and a few moments later she nudged Winn. “Strike number three on a curveball, so jot that down.”

After a three-hit, no-run first half of the first inning, National City was up to bat, and Alex inched forward in her seat enough to keep a better eye on the action. She made a mental note to thank Kara for scoring free season tickets right along the first baseline after writing a glowing piece about the new coaching staff for The Tribune’s sports section.

The first batter up struck out, but then the Narwhal’s second baseman managed to hit a groundball right down the third baseline and easily made it to first. Alex cheered along with the rest of the crowd, pausing only at the annoyed scoff coming from a woman one seat over.

Seeing the look in Alex’s eyes that could only ever spell trouble, Winn shoved the tub of popcorn in front of her. “Snack?”

“Did you hear her?” Alex hissed. “Who comes to a baseball game if they’re not even gonna cheer?”

“I know, I know.” Winn kept his voice even quieter than Alex’s. “Look, the seat between you two is empty. Maybe the person that really likes baseball is running late, and she’s stuck here alone.”

“Oh good.” Alex rolled her eyes. “So soon enough I’ll get her jock-bro boyfriend sitting next to me spreading his legs too wide and pausing every few hits to insist that she’s so much more important than the biggest game of the season.”

Biting back a laugh, Winn shoved the popcorn more insistently in Alex’s direction. “Eat.”

“Yeah, yeah. Flag down the guy with the beers, and I might even stay quiet for the whole second inning.”

Read the rest on AO3!

#sanvers #fluff #meet cute #alex danvers #maggie sawyer #fanfic #supergirl #alex & winn brotp #ao3feed #alex x maggie #winn schott #fairly canon compliant

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because-its-important · 7 years ago

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transitions & transformations

i. the rest of my batch at RC

I spent the first six weeks of my batch at Recurse Center in an out-and-out sprint. I learned Python, built and released projects, and wrote blog posts every week. I wasn’t sure where my limits were, but I was determined to find out - preferably by overshooting them, then adjusting after the fact.

A curious thing happened. I kept finding that I was more than capable of starting and finishing projects, especially when I had a firm mental image of the end goal. There were at least as many unexpected good-turns as there were setbacks, and I certainly didn’t come up against any inscrutable barriers. Mostly the challenge was in overcoming the distance between a thing that doesn’t exist and a thing that does, which I was able to sort out pretty handily through a consistent application of effort across time.

Who’d have thought?

A selfie taken on my birthday, which also happened in the last few months and was really great!

The second half of my batch was not so visibly productive - with the exception of The Question Game. The Question Game is a simple game designed to help groups of people get to know each other better IRL. I designed it with my friend Brittany a few years ago as an icebreaker when we found ourselves in a group of folks who knew us but didn’t really know each other. The game only really needs a method of generating random numbers for a small but arbitrary group size, but building it out as a toy webapp was a good excuse to get practice working with a JS-only stack. I learned React, got a lil more familiar with node, and even went as far as to attach an otherwise completely unnecessary PG database and Sequelize ORM. You can see the code for it here. Outside of this project, however, I didn’t publish any code. I didn’t publish any writing, either.

So I’d like to take a moment and shine a bit of light on the work that I did during the rest of my batch.

🌒 🌓 🌔 🌕 🌖 🌗 🌘

First, I made the decision to leave community.lawyer, the social impact startup I co-founded in 2016 following the Blue Ridge Labs Fellowship.

I’m happy to report that I left on the come up, which seems a rare and privileged thing for a founder to be able to say. Gaining traction in a hyper-specialized industry like legal tech takes a gargantuan amount of sustained forward momentum, and I departed just as we began to reap the fruits of our labor. In the last few months community.lawyer has reached final approval on partnerships a year in the making, won federal grants we’d submitted to in 2016, and every day our software is being used to help connect people who have legal needs with credible lawyers. Our first two partners were exactly the types of legal organizations at the heart of our mission: the Justice Entrepreneurs Project and the DC Reduced Fee Lawyer & Mediator Referral Service.1 Based in Chicago and Washington DC respectively, these orgs are specifically chartered to deliver quality services at rates that more Americans can afford. I am so proud. ⚖️

Second, I started my first ever job hunt as a software engineer. Wowee, this was scary! I knew that I had to prepare for interviewing, which meant a) getting my career change narrative straight, b) studying Data Structures & Algorithms 101, and c) learning how to perform my handle on both of these in a live, semi-adversarial environment.

At one point during my batch my laptop broke. I read through this wonderful illustrated book during the two days it was being fixed.

In order to direct my search I also had to craft a set of selection criteria of my own. Foremost: “What good will my work do for the world?”2 Additionally, “What degree of access will I have to supportive mentors?”

Getting started with interview prep was a challenge, at least partly because I had so many options for where to start. But I did get started! I read Cracking the Coding Interview, I did the free trial and weekly free problems on Interview Cake. I attended a few group mock interviews at Recurse Center and signed up for a 1-1 mock interview with an RC alum. Her name is Leah, and she’s amazing - the superbly friendly and encouraging Comp Sci TA I wish I’d had years ago. 💚Brittany also set up mock technical screens for me with her pals, Leaf and Ian. They were the vanguard against my outsized anxiety about programming for an audience and they each took the time to give me solid feedback.

Third, I extended my batch at Recurse Center by another 6 weeks. I had decided early on I wouldn’t extend (for no real reason) and stuck with this decision up until two days before my batch ending. A small group of folks - Lily, Connor, Alicja and I - went to NYX in Union Square to try out lipsticks. We played with different colors and finishes (satin! matte! shimmer!) for half an hour or so. There came a point when I looked up, glanced across the narrow makeup store at my beautiful friends’ beautiful faces and thought, “You know, you don’t have to leave yet, right? What’s the rush?” I’d already accomplished my primary goal, to forcibly rework my identity as an engineer, but it sure seemed that I could stand to reach for a second one. That night I decided to extend my batch, with the intention of sampling a more open method of self-directed learning, i.e. with a little more chill and a lot less panic. Specifically, I wanted to practice connecting meaningfully with my limited supply of social energy.

In my bonus six weeks, I: gave three talks (2 planned, 1 impromptu) under encouragement from Ayla and Lily, learned to juggle thanks to instruction from a fellow RCer, Edward, who also loaned me a book about learning, made it into weekly Feelings Check-in (read as: opt-in support group) fairly regularly, picked my first ever lock, saw a live-coding show and then later attended two live-coding workshops (one on TidalCycles, another on Super Collider), sat in a dark room and played howling wolf clips while Microsoft Sam read grimoires aloud, got my hair braided for the first time in a decade, made dumplings and DJ’d for a dinner party, connected with folks about queer-poly relationships, gave fiery advice, and received compliments so earnest and rational and persistent that it was difficult to refute them.

Zine fair plus Lightning Bolt concert inside a movie theater in Times Square??

I also put my interview prep to use and interviewed with a handful of Recurse Center partner companies. Job searching meant squaring off against impostor syndrome and a ton of related anxieties in rapid succession. I successfully choked most of that down when it mattered, though, and it was only a couple short weeks before I received my first offer.

To that end, I’m super happy to say that I’ll be joining Blink Health as a Fullstack Product Engineer! Blink Health is a healthcare startup in SoHo. They make it easier for people to afford prescription drugs, especially for those with limited insurance plans or none at all. These savings aren’t trivial either: an extra $50 can spare someone from choosing between groceries or medicine that week, and for some folks Blink saves many times that. I’ll be starting at the end of this month. ✌️🤓

The last two years have been a wild ride: participating in a social impact fellowship and accelerator, busting my product chops and learning web dev to get a public benefit company off the ground, then diving into four months of self-directed learning at Recurse Center. I’m really looking forward to having some externally imposed structure again. Real health insurance, too.

ii. some hard truths

I made a few radical life changes in 2016, like getting involved in activist spaces, dating more, biking everywhere, building strong friendships, going capital-B Boogying, programming full-time. As I carried those changes forward through 2017, I began to notice a lot of mental and emotional reconfiguration happening to me.

Did you know that along its way to becoming a butterfly, a caterpillar nearly completely liquifies inside its cocoon?

Psychological growth is confusing, full of false starts, and generally painful. You’ve got the static pain of stretching beyond your limits, the pleasure-pain of feeling an old knot finally release, the frustrating pain of stubbing your toe because some helpful asshole has been rearranging your psychic furniture when you weren’t looking. There’s the more dramatic knife-in-the-gut pain of realizing that just because you’re growing doesn’t mean the people closest to you are, and that now in certain cases what you previoulsy regarded as friendship actually looks a whole lot like run-of-the-mill exploitation or even emotional abuse, if you're being honest, and it's a realization that only hurts more because it’s so irredeemably cliche and boring. And despite all that pain you gotta go ahead and grow anyway, claw your way out of the relative comfort of ignorance. Transcendence may not be the only show in town but afaik it’s the one most worth watching.

Prior to attending Recurse Center I’d spent lots of time exploring my surroundings and cataloguing people and places worth coming back to. My view of myself did change (and positively!) as a consequence. But sooner or later, ya get tired of the taste of low-hanging fruit.

So, armed with the bookshelf of a philosophy grad and a burgeoning psychoanalytic vocabulary begging to be let off leash, I decided to use my time at RC to try confronting a few of my Hard To See truths in addition to becoming a better programmer.

Here’s what I’ve found so far.

Truth #1: People like me a lot. This causes me problems.

I’ve been metabolizing this one for some time. I remember having a conversation with Brittany in January of 2016. I don’t remember what social anxiety I’d been vocalizing, but I must have been worrying that someone “hated me.” Brittany cut me off, exasperated in the way that only a friend can be in the face of utter delusion: “No one hates you Nicole! You’re always worried that people don’t like you and it’s never true!”

I carried that admonishment with me through two years of voracious friendship-building. On the whole, seeing that people do in fact enjoy and seek out my company has curbed the most egregious overreaches of my social anxiety. But reckoning with my anxiety honestly has also meant acknowledging that my compulsive instinct to withdraw from social situations is also a protective (if suboptimal) response to a few very real dangers.

Most acutely: being friendly, generous, and intensely empathetic makes me a ready target for users. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt for as long as I can, which makes me proportionally susceptible to being taken advantage of and then gaslighted about it. A lifetime of socialization as a petite woman don’t help, neither. This leads to a pattern where, semi-regularly, I look up and take stock of how someone has been treating me and realize that the answer is Very Badly, For Quite A While. This in turn leads to rough periods of cutting ties and moving on. Ideally I’d like to be be able to filter bad actors out sooner, but I also want to stay open, giving, and hopeful beyond reason. Those desires are fundamentally at odds with each other - raising vs. lowering one’s defenses - but it’s clear that I need to come up with a strategy that balances both.

More broadly, though, I operate under an ever-present dread of inevitably disappointing everyone who knows me. Whether people project onto me because they already like me or like me more because they project positively onto me, I am extremely sensitive to the fact that when people meet me the conception they form has waaay more to do with what they want to find than what’s actually there. My body is a surface readily projected upon: young, female-shaped, ethnically ambiguous, small, smiling. These well-intended projections cause me the most trouble when people see me interacting socially; they’ll witness fifteen minutes of seemingly effortless extroversion on my part and extrapolate out massively. As far as they’re concerned I’ve got plenty of social energy to spare, and if I don’t spend it hanging out with them, it must be because either my friendliness is fake or I don’t like them.

Pretty much none of this is conducted consciously, of course, but it still creates a lot of unnecessary pressure that I can’t pretend not to feel and resent. I know there are people who dream about attaining this kind of “popularity” - to be assumed Cooler than one truly is - but getting buffeted around by folks’ totally unexamined, unarticulated psychological desires mostly sucks.

Truth #2: I’m non-binary.

I’ve also spent a very long time resisting this one. Two decades on the rack, easy. As such, the story of getting here is long. Perhaps one day I’ll tell it. 😛

The short of it, though, is this: I’m probably at least as much of a boy3 as I am a girl. Outside of where my life has been mutated by the chronic background radiation of sexism, “benevolent” and otherwise, I don’t strongly identify as a woman. Furthermore, I find the two-gender system to be infinitely more alienating than comforting. Gender is a social construction designed to impose order on the natural messiness of sexual experience, and as far as I’m cool with that, I am decidedly Not Cool with the “normal” state of affairs, i.e. aggressively shoving whole human beings into an absurdly reductive false dichotomy.

Between its either-or-ism and its forced assignment, the traditional approach to gender reveals itself to be obviously bullshit to anyone who spends more than a few minutes thinking about it. Its boundaries are arbitrary, inconsistent, and generally ill-fitting at the level of individual experience, which why they require such an outrageous amount of coercion and bodily violence to enforce. As much as other folks want to participate in a system of ritualized violence I guess they are free to? Personally, I’d prefer to see it actively dismantled.

If gender is to be saved it’ll be by subverting it, taking it apart, remaking it into something life-affirming. Not the dehumanizing garbage we’ve got now.

As of yet I don’t have any plans to change my presentation because I don’t fuckin’ gotta!

I do have a preference towards They / Them pronouns, but She / Her is still fine. For most of my friends this isn’t going to be at all surprising nor will it in any way negatively impact our relationship. Anyone who needs me to just-be-a-girl, however, can expect turbulence.

Truth #3: My righteous anger is justified and I am good at using it to help others.

I have felt conflicted about my anger for a long time. Since a very vocal childhood I have been regularly frustrated by prejudices and injustices, and I was frequently the first voice of dissent against them, whether that meant challenging adults or my peers. Unsurprisingly, I became well acquainted with the standard strokes of the backlash.

When you are confronting bigotry in a mixed environment, the voice of the status quo will generally manifest in one of two ways:

Gaslighting, e.g. “you are wrong to have said this at all, obviously I am a Good Person, you are just imagining that what I said sounded like XYZ, honestly how could you even think this, as a matter of fact it is I who is offended!”

Tone policing, e.g. “you’re too upset about this! after all, I, the person who did Fucked Up Thing, am perfectly calm about Fucked Up Thing, so any amount of anger makes you irrational by contrast, and I get a raincheck on whatever this is about!”

I know these responses are repulsive. I know they are merely the signs of a weak and imperiled ego acting out of fear. And yet I still spend an inordinate amount of time second-guessing my own anger. Gaslighting and tone policing are a favored weapon of the status quo because they work, and they work in direct proportion to how agreeable their target wants to be.

content warning: the following segment talks about sexual harassment and assault

About couple weeks ago I had the misfortune of being sexually harassed at a club in Bushwick. After numerous rejections and explicitly telling a creep bothering me, my friends, and other women in the club to get lost, I finally went to get a bouncer to eject him. The bouncer got the creep to leave. When I went to thank him, the bouncer told me a whole story about how the creep was “a harmless guy.” Then he reached down and grabbed my ass. Presumably he felt entitled to do this after helping me get rid of a person I asked him to remove... for unwanted touching.

It Really Sucked.

At every turn during the whole ordeal (and its aftermath) I had to hold onto my anger, convince myself that I wasn’t overreacting, remind myself that anyone who thought this was acceptable to do to me is almost certainly doing worse to more vulnerable people. I kept picturing myself the way this guy, this man in a position of power, must have seen me in order to feel okay doing what he did. That I was young, small, female, too friendly to say No, already indebted anyway; that he was one of the Good Guys, that his behavior was also “harmless” because he had decided it was. I conjured up as much anger as I could, pushed down the nausea of envisioning my own degradation from an attacker’s POV, and got to work. I reached out to the club and was quickly put in contact with the owner. The venue now has a publicly posted zero tolerance sexual harassment policy. The entire staff is going through training with a local org dedicated to creating safer nightlife spaces. And that motherfucker has been fired.

I demonstrably made the world better. I wasn’t alone, but all that happened because of my actions. Me and my anger, we did that.

I wish more people were this fucking angry. 💢

~ end of content warning ~

iii. an opinion

My Saturn return is upon me, y’all. As Frank Ocean serenades, we’ll never be those kids again. I have lived a few of these here nine lives and it seems only prudent to be moving forward with some sort of opinion on the matter.

My opinion is this: us folks with financial and physical security should be spending more time fixing shit around here. Figuring out what needs fixing and how you might help are the first steps.

If you’re operating on a similar scale of privilege as I am, maybe that means changing jobs to do more mission-oriented work. If you can’t swing a change of that magnitude, maybe it means showing up to community events and engaging with, caring for, supporting people you otherwise wouldn’t talk to. Churches, libraries, volunteering, supporting local artists, participating in local politics - this all counts. If you’re already doing this sorta thing, that is awesome! Maybe you also have a friend worth inviting who you sense is just itching for a chance to exercise compassion?

I’m using “fixing” pretty loosely here, too. Fixing, to my mind, means making the world brighter, safer, and sweeter for your fellows, human and otherwise. We’ve all got different ideas about what that looks like, and there are definitely folks - myopic or malevolent or both - who will swear up and down that their fear- and hate-driven behaviors will bring about better world. Ultimately, though, I believe that many hands reaching towards their personal vision of Better will in fact make things Better, especially when that vision is informed by meaningful interaction with the real world and its real sorrows and its real triumphs.

But ya gotta reach. Ya gotta try.

I am so tired of hearing my well-fed, well-homed friends piss and moan about late capitalism4 without lifting a damn finger in service of the communities bearing the brunt of material hardship. Unfettered capitalism sure does have a marked tendency to wreak havoc on organic life! But capitalism is not a monolith, and lamenting the abuses perpetuated by its principle benefactors as unchanging or inevitable only normalizes them. Any investigation into the history of capitalism (or the broader phenomena of how a Few come to subjugate the Many) will very quickly disabuse you of the notion that this shit is going to stop without a great deal of active resistance.5

So unless you are personally doing work to put our current strand of democracy-withering corporatism six-feet-under, seriously, just STFU instead. Your nihilism is boring! You don’t sound woke! Save it for your local DSA working group!

Which isn’t to say that I’m not convinced of the wickedness6 of the problems we’re facing: skyrocketing wealth disparity with no relief in sight; the destruction of most of Earth’s biodiversity via mass extinction; a pernicious climate of racism and xenophobia that scapegoats black and brown folks and then visits misery upon them; the weight of an aging population bearing down on the shittiest healthcare system of any nation in its class; a widely disenfranchised electorate further fragmented and fatigued by hyper-polarization; the gendered terrorism that is inflicted daily on women, trans and non-binary folks, and queer people at large; a rising wave of depressive anxiety as people become more aware of these problems and how thoroughly they’ve been disempowered from changing things for the better.

So yeah, I get it. These are hard problems. I just don’t see any better option than trying anyway. I want to spend my time fixing things around here and encouraging others to try their hand too. You already know the bad news: real change is hard and it can take a very long time. You might work your whole life sowing seeds whose fruit you never get to taste.

The good news, however, is that you can get started whenever and wherever you are. The good news is that a sense of purpose is its own reward.

iv. how to get started

When you’ve got hard work ahead of you, your best bet is to use your beautiful human brain and create some leverage. Ask Archimedes about it.7

Lever systems got two parts:

The lever, which is the tool you use to amplify your effort. The longer your lever is, the easier your job will be.

The fulcrum, which is the wedge the lever rests on. The nearer your fulcrum is to the thing you want to move, the easier your job will be.

If you’re starting from zero - “I want to do more for the world but I don’t know how!” - my advice is to forget about the lever arm for now. A lever ain’t shit without a fulcrum, anyway. Your time is better spent exploring the world, keeping an eye out for problems you’d like to solve, and identifying nearby points of leverage. If you want to get into activism, a fulcrum might be volunteering to fold pamphlets for an organization with a mission you believe in. If want to see more self-expression in the world, it might be might be inviting your friends to a zine-making class or hosting your own arts and craft night.

The best fulcrum is one that makes you Feel Good when you apply any amount of effort against it. Too many people get caught up in a self-defeating belief that if they can’t give 110% of their creative energy to something they might as well not try. I can confidently say that trying is itself a virtue. Every time you try even a little bit you make it easier for yourself to try again later, and more importantly, you make trying easier for others. A bunch of people altering their behavior a smidge in the same direction doesn’t add up to nothing; on the contrary, it’s a sea change.

If you’ve got a decent idea of the types of problems you want to solve, though, and you’ve tested your fulcrums, and you are thinking, “Okay, but is this all I’m capable of giving?” then it’s probably time to work on your lever. Given your own interests and inclinations, what skills can you develop that will increase the good you’re doing 10x, 100x over? This is the long game, but it scales a whole lot better than “keep doing what I’m already doing, but more.”

For me right now this means deepening my technical knowledge, building a resilient support network, and sharing what I’m learning. Helping others has been a powerful motivator for self-improvement, not the least of which because it’s a convenient shortcut through the snarl of self-confidence issues.

I am so grateful that Recurse Center was a stop on lengthening my lever! What a concentrated cluster of helpful, considerate beings.

I’ve spent the last two years wandering around New York City in wide-eyed wonder, asking myself the most ambitious question I could think of: how do you save the world?

Getting older comes with a lot of downsides, but asking yourself big questions and living your life as the answer is the primary pleasure of adulthood. It took a ton of courage to get started and I am still frequently awed to find myself moving in the right direction. I’m humbled by the grace and fortitude of the folks who’ve been at this for way longer.

I’m also a hell of a lot happier. This summer’s gonna be rad. ☀️

There are lots of extraordinarily sexy company names like this in the legal world. ↩︎

Having the choice to direct my energies in this way is a privilege. Working in tech gives me this freedom of motion and I have been drawn to software engineering in part because it is the freest of the free (if you still gotta labor for your living). ↩︎

😱😫😖😬😬😬... 😏 ↩︎

Substitute with whatever modifier is en vogue. As a point of fact, “late capitalism” is a term that’s been floating around for literally over a hundred years. ↩︎

Thankfully, history also clearly demonstrates that the tide can be turned. ↩︎

“The use of the term ‘wicked’ here has come to denote resistance to resolution.” Wikipedia page. ↩︎

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world,” etc etc. ↩︎

#recurse center

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humelevel · 7 years ago

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wicdiv #32 post

this is fine. i’m alright with the events that are unfolding currently.

big spoilers and all of that

ok but honestly the first page is really fucking funny and good. emphasizing how persephone’s in this rut she can’t get out of by reusing panels but also using those panels to accentuate the punchline. really good.

i’m sure you all already know this but woden is a slimy little man who i do not like

dio thinking of the other norns after cass sort of restates that he’s already (mostly) gotten over the fact that he’s not a person she’s going to love

god that “i can save everyone” page is good. really great movement

“the red shoes” is a kate bush ref.

i always knew sakhmet wouldn’t give a fuck about persephone killing ananke if they’d just told her!

i think persephone and sakhmet getting a tender moment before things go haywire emphasizes that there was some care for each other there. i think persephone really did love her; sakhmet is different, in that i think she cared, but she was also operating on such a different moral code of predator/prey that she was still willing to throw it away if persephone demonstrated that was needed.

persephone’s statements here are also, i think, her at least attempting to be at her best- her justifications feel real, but they also feel kind of forced. i think she’s saying what she wants to be true, what she’d like to perform in her actions, but doesn’t always- particularly in her statement about who deserves to be hurt. she says you shouldn’t hurt someone who doesn’t want it, but she does that all the time, even in this issue with cass! i think that’s how she wants things to be, not how they really are.

the coloring effects in the entire dio sequence are so great- especially the fizzy, electronic effect to emphasize woden’s presence and taking his powers. matt wilson is a godly being who we don’t deserve

the 1234 bit works doubly because it’s a callback to dio’s debut issue, but also because it’s a heartbeat and we know dio has heart issues.

“maybe i was wrong.” :( i love him and i already miss him

one of the sad parts of dio’s death here to me is that woden’s line about it being an “astounding act of altruistic yet futile heroism” is...kind of correct? dio doesn’t even stop woden, woden runs off. dio did all that for basically nothing!

it’s also kind of horrifying that people were calling for an encore when he was pretty much already gone, and that he was operating that way (”one more time”) in order to do that for people.

the other thing that strikes me about dio’s death is that it’s kind of a soft one; we get the valkyries as the maenads, but they don’t even beat him up that much (or tear him apart) before he collapses. and he’s not even 100% dead, technically. it’s basically giving him the gentlest send-off possible while still mostly killing him.

cass not being affected by woden using dio’s powers because she’s a critic who can see that he’s plagiarizing is amazing.

“it’s not as if that was what i was trying to do, cass.” then what were you trying to do?? why did you need an army??? where did you go??? god i hate the slime man

morrigan refusing to come help because it’s at persephone’s apartment is to some extent amusingly petty until you grasp the consequences. maybe she could have helped things settle down safely! maybe persephone could have gotten away to cass and dio! maybe minerva wouldn’t have had to kill sakhmet! and morrigan didn’t go because she has a grudge! someone pointed out to me that mini might be rightfully pissed at her for this.

on a side note, at the end of this issue the wheel looks parallel, so i would not be shocked if morrigan and baphomet go next to continue that, and i would not be shocked if reacting to recent events- especially dio dying just after he tried to help baph- brings them back into the plot next arc.

i’m so happy sakhmet got that “pussy-whipped” line in before she died, i’m 99% sure kieron was saving that on a doc somewhere

i already talked about sakhmet and persephone’s relationship dynamic before to the point where it really covers the scene before sakhmet dies too, but the panel where persephone can’t make herself kill sakhmet and looks like she’s about to cry is honestly really sad. she really felt something deeply for sakhmet.

persephone’s face looks like it has two matching red streaks on it from sakhmet’s hands and it’s a really cool image/detail.

when will minerva be safe and have a stable life. never i guess. it’ll be good to see her as a more major player in the last year of the book (presumably) but we also already know she’s getting into alcohol so i don’t expect it to be fun.

this entire cass/persephone argument kills me but it’s also brilliant writing in what’s not said- this entire conversation would not be happening if cass’ best friend and persephone’s girlfriend hadn’t just died. i think cass takes the excuse to be angry at her with the fact that persephone didn’t get dio to the hospital as an excuse, although i think she also knows that persephone was fighting sakhmet and couldn’t, but she’s too emotional to act better. and persephone feels the same way, so she goes ahead and continues the argument, and it gets more and more awful until persephone says that line about dio, which is, uh, jesus? i think they’re both going at each other with the first thing that comes to mind, and they don’t really feel any deep hatred for each other- just frustration. and in their current states that’s enough to rip into each other.

i also wouldn’t be shocked if persephone blames herself for spending so much time with sakhmet and not realizing she could be a killer, and if cass blames herself for not stopping dio from doing the party and not noticing woden was up to something. so. there’s that.

anyway, uh. time to meet pink woden?? i hope??

if we meet pink woden i hope they kill standard woden and take his place. please remove him from this comic. i do not like him. thanks.

i was wrong about it being fine. it is not fine and i am sad. thank you for reading

#wicdiv #wicdiv tag #wicdiv spoilers

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katieiscunning · 7 years ago

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MTMTE #10: Sympathy for the Prowl????

Stupid carbots making me feel things.

We open with a page summarising the political and actual situation in pre-war Cybertron, and as this arc is far more complicated than any silly car robot comic has a right to be (stupid people making a stupid series so good that I am eager to read about car robots) I will too.

Proteus - due to become the next Prime- is apparently an alright dude, stating that he won’t blame the Decepticons for the senator’s murder until it’s been proven. He’ll even give them official political status if 1000 of them come forward and register. I think we can trust him! The last Prime, Nominus is getting a full state funeral. The Decepticons continue to be rightly angry about everything. I like this. It’s simple, and it gets the setting summarised fast in a very on the ground way. It is noir-y, and it tells us just how messed up Cybertron is.

BUT POLITICAL COMPLEXITY TIME IS OVER NOW BECAUSE CHROMEDOME HAS A CROOK TO CHASE. It’s over pretty fast because Domey once again uses his power of sarcastic detective narration.

He goes back to find Prowl analysing what went down- this is one of Prowl’s abilities: he can look at somewhere and tell what happened there. Another power is illustrating why he is a very bad boyfriend but then being oddly endearing.

I don’t know guys. Prowl contains multitudes I guess.

The building’s Warden turns out to be Red Alert, which in anything that wasn’t this would be a stupid, unlikely coincidence. But when you have a limited and relatively small population of near-immortal beings it would actually be sort of weird if you weren’t constantly Forrest Gumping into people you know. He reveals that the guy who lived there until the whole ‘thrown from the window’ thing was an ex-senator, Momus, as well as a secret Decepticon. Prowl works out that there was a second attacker- likely still there- and hearing that he’s been discovered the robot flees, crying ‘Death to the Decepticons!’ as he goes. I wonder what his motivations are?

But before we can chase him we head back to the future, where Rodimus is conducting his own investigation.

I mean, I say investigation. He’s pretty much certain that Cyclonus is the one who attacked Red Alert- and yes, just attacked. They found his head, so it’s all fine. Robots are pretty tough.

Of course, what Rodimus thinks, Drift is willing to sign his soul away for. God, he needs some self respect. Look at him trying to be all scary as he bad-cops Cyclonus.

It’s an… un-smart move.

Anyway, Cyclonus makes a pretty solid argument - that if he wanted to kill Red Alert, he’d be dead - and a moment later First Aid confirms that whoever it was, it wasn’t him. The mystery continues.

Back in flashback land, Prowl, Red Alert and Chromedome are under fire from the second attacker and dammit Prowl manages to be endearing again. Ugh, I feel dirty.

Anyway, they’re rescued by-

Orion tells the others that the first murdered senator was also a Decepticon which gives them a pretty solid reason for their deaths, and god dammit Prowl I actually feel sorry for you now and I have no idea what to do with that.

The second attacker dies on the ground- as it turns out he was in someone else’s body (via the Relinquishment Clinics from last week) and his spark couldn’t take the strain. That’s bad, since it means they can’t find out who he was working with. But Orion gets a new lead - he’s needed in the Luna 2 Prison Camp. A prisoner he knows - some dude called Whirl - wants to speak to him.

Whirl interrupts, happy that they’re finally getting to him, and takes the chance to make fun of Rewind’s insecurity while he’s at it.

So Whirl’s locked up for police brutality. As I’ve mentioned before, he was coerced into joining the Cybertronian police force, then told to beat up a then non-violent Megatron while he was imprisoned. Orion stopped him in time to save Megs (though not in time to stop him embracing the knowledge that violence can be used to enforce social change), and now, hated by everyone, Whirl has been having a bad time in prison. That’s not what he wants to tell Orion though: as it turns out his still-unnamed Senator friend is in danger from the Senate, and possibly worse, a giant bomb is about to go off somewhere on Cybertron. And why is Whirl sharing this?

Jesus Christ this is just the sympathy for everyone issue, huh?

Orion sends Ratchet and his BFF Roller round to pic up the Senator from the school he runs- a place where he takes in Cybertronians with weird abiites that would normally result in their ostracization at best. Skids is among them, but we’ll meet the rest later.

Chromedome and Prowl visit a Relinquishment Clinic to investigate, and find a Decepticon rally in full swing outside. But their conversation is the real star here because god damn it Prowl.

Jesus I have to like the guy now. I actually have to like him.

At least Rewind is there to share my annoyance.

Inside, they meet a charming character called Trepan, a name which- in a world where sticking needles into brains is pretty common- just screams goodie. They manage to sneak in further and find a hidden lab, filled with creepy ass brain operations. Chromedome suggests that this could be the mysterious ‘Institute’, a place where out-of-line Cybertronians are sent to be brainwashed back onto the straight and narrow. This is called ‘Shadowplay’, and as that’s the title of the arc I’m sure it won’t be important again.

They escape after stealing some data and make it back to the Senator’s Academy. The Senator, reading the data, recognises it as the registered Decepticon names. Realising that the next large gathering will be at Nominus’ funeral, Orion guesses the Senate’s devious scheme: to blow up a fake Matrix during the ceremony, blame it on the Decepticons and use it as an excuse to start rounding them up. The only solution??

Look at the Senator back there grinning. That is a robot in love. Roller’s baffled excitement is pretty charming too.

This is a high speed issue, and, as a story like that should be, it’s fun in all directions. It’s funny, and it gets everything where it needs to be for next week’s conclusion. As middle acts go, it’s awesome. But what stands out to me here is the tragedy of the characters.

Prowl’s the standout, if only because his past portrayal has cast him as such an ass. It’s even more poignant that the guy he used to be wasn’t perfect- that he had all of the same problems he does later, just at a less extreme level- than it would have been if he were a saint. Past Prowl, while he’s still basically awful, was sweet hearted and optimistic, and he really loved Chromedome. And part of Chromedome misses him- if he didn’t he wouldn’t bother to remember his kinder moments. The war ruined who he was, and he can’t be the person he was ever again.

And in case you needed more, Whirl summaries all the damage of trauma in that one awful image of him holding his claws together. Thank god next week’s going to be a fun heist, right? Right?

I’ve been bad at talking about art, which is so unfair because artists are already underappreciated in comics and I don’t want to contribute to that. But I’m also artistically illiterate and I know that I sound repetitive when I say how awesome everything looks every time. That all said, Milne’s work in pre-war Cybertron is beautiful. Its unearthly and weird and moody and makes it almost seem like these ridiculous robots could really live there.

NEXT TIME: CARS DO MISSION IMPOSSIBLE!

You can get on this fun train by buying the comics over here: https://www.comixology.co.uk/Transformers-More-Than-Meets-the-Eye-2011/comics-series/7279?ref=c2VhcmNoL2luZGV4L2Rlc2t0b3Avc2xpZGVyTGlzdC90b3BSZXN1bHRzU2xpZGVy

Written by James Roberts, Art by Alex Milne, published by IDW.

#transformers review #mtmte reviews

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deepdisireslonging · 8 years ago

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Consequences - Part 1: Ringside

Y/N gets dragged to a boxing match by her friends where she meets Dean “Raisin’ Cain” Winchester. When asked out on a date, she says she’ll only go if he wins. Which is a serious problem.

Pairing: Boxer!Dean x Reader

Warnings: violence in the form of boxing

Word Count: 3100+

Note: I’m not a boxing expert, but I have watched a lot of fights from the greats to make this series. Find any Sugar Ray Robinson fight on YouTube and use it for background music if you’d like. I certainly used some to get in the zone. Feel free to leave comments on how you like or dislike it (with reasons why you dislike it) and guess where the story is going.

The den didn’t look like much from the outside. The brick was chipping on the corners and several of the windows were boarded up. If there hadn’t been a line of patrons waiting at the door, Y/N would have thought it was abandoned.

She looked at her ticket stub again. Admit One: Winter Chicago Amateur Semi-Finals.

“Why are we here?” she asked Jo, her roommate.

“Because Claire got tickets from her friend who works concessions. She’s already inside and said to meet at the seats on the second row.” Jo spun, flaring her skirt and drawing the eye of several men standing around them.

“I feel overdressed.” Y/N looked down at her little black dress, wincing at the grand amount of tulle under the skirt. In reality, it was only a notch above what she wore around town, but she would have preferred to save this dress for a Sunday. “It’s just going to be a bunch of sweaty guys beating each other up. We could watch that any night at your mom’s bar.”

“Y/N,” Jo sighed, “try to enjoy this. The guys fighting tonight are going to look a lot better than the ones at the bar.” Jo leaned close and whispered, “and they’ll be wearing considerably less clothing.”

“Jo!”

A quick cheer resounded from the front of the line as the doors opened. Light poured out into the street, followed quickly by lively music. Barely twenty people had walked through the doors when the bet collectors were yelling the stats. Y/N and Jo showed their ticket to the bouncer and were nearly drowned in the rush to get in. They were separated, but Y/N walked over to a less populated part of the arena to catch her breath.

“You alright, sweetheart?” a voiced asked.

She turned and found herself face to chest with a man in a suit. Taking a step away, she looked up into the greenest eyes she’d ever seen. He watched her with concern, but something about him made him feel dangerous. Like he could easily overpower her in more ways than one.

“Yes. Thank you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get to my seat.” She turned to walk away.

“You might want to wait a few more minutes till the crowd dies down or you’ll get swamped again.” Y/N stopped to listen. It was still crowded. “And I would take a moment to breathe. Once you’re sitting down, it’s probably not going to smell good.”

“Wonderful,” she muttered under her breath. But she stayed all the same. If the smell of sweaty men could reach her up here, then it was going to be unbearable down there.

“I’m Dean. What’s your name?” he asked, holding out a hand. She shook it with her fingertips.

“Y/N. Pleased to meet you.” She turned to watch people find their seat, reminded of the movements of ants.

“Have you ever been to a fight before?” Dean asked.

“Are you writing a book?”

He raised his hands in defense. “Just wanted to get to know you, sweetheart.”

Y/N snickered, “I hope you don’t think you’ll get anything out of it.”

“Well now that you mention it…” Y/N turned to gape at him. He was serious. If he wasn’t so big she would have thought his boyish movements would have been cute. She almost missed his question while watching his tongue dart out to wet his lips. “Did you hear me?”

“Please?”

“What are your plans after the fight?”

“As far as I can see, nothing with you.” Y/N turned to walk away, she could handle the second-row problems better than this.

“Come on, princess. Being one of the boxers should get me somewhere.”

Y/N took a deep breath. He was big enough to be a boxer but didn’t seem to fully fit the type. Not to mention he wasn’t dressed for a fight.

“I’ll tell you what. You win your fight tonight and I might meet you after the prizefight. Otherwise, forget it.”

Y/N walked away from his grinning face and into the pit. Jo and Claire didn’t have time to ask questions as the first opponents arrived at the ring. Y/N was ready to forget Dean.

“Dean! Where’ve you been, boy?” Bobby Singer grabbed Dean by the lapels and tugged him into the prep room. “You need to get dressed before Uriel gets here.” They froze as someone knocked on the door. “Balls.”

Bobby opened the door for Uriel. Dean hated his sneering face, but he was second in command for the match-fixing ring.

“Take a dive in the fifth, Winchester, and stay there. Feel free to do what you want till then as long as it doesn’t keep Cole from taking you out.”

“That’s not what we agreed, Uriel,” Bobby snarled, “Dean’s supposed to go to the big prize match in March.”

“He will. We had to add a week into the schedule so a special guest could meet you there. You’ll get a rematch next week, and then you’ll be on your way as planned.” Uriel laughed, a sound everyone found akin to nails on a chalkboard.

“You’d better not screw me. Not like you did to Cas with Bartholomew.” Dean stayed back, but his fists were tight enough to turn his knuckles white.

“Yeah, wasn’t that a bite? He made the distance till the tenth, though.” Uriel chuckled.

“It was torture,” Bobby spat.

Uriel stepped forward till he loomed over Bobby. “I wouldn’t focus on the past if I were you. Those who look back too much tend to get lost in the future.” He nodded at Dean and walked out, shouting over his shoulder, “the fifth, Winchester.”

They stood in silence, both seething. But it was the life they were in, one that they more or less chose. Sometimes they joked that God himself couldn’t stop them from deciding who lived and who died. They saved that for nights even darker than this.

“One of these days someone’s going to feed him a knuckle sandwich,” Dean growled.

Bobby nodded in agreement. “But it’s not gonna be you. And it’s not gonna be tonight. You’ve got too much riding on your family for you to rebel. It’d take the whole house of players to end this.”

“Or getting caught,” Dean mumbled.

“Bite your tongue boy! If they get caught, we get caught. And then all their attack dogs will get stuck in the same cage as us. We wouldn’t last the night.” Bobby sighed. Dean looked at him from the corner of his eyes. He was getting old, and the stress of the maintaining the fixes was taking its toll. Bobby shook himself with a grunt. “You need to change quick if you want to catch Sam before his fight.”

Dean shed his jackets while Bobby hunted out the shorts and gloves. He’d signed on to do whatever Uriel told him, but the image of the pretty girl from earlier mixed with the shame of being a fixed boxer made him question how tonight was really going to turn out.

Y/N jumped as the bell rang, ending the match. The ref announced the scores, awarding the win to the tall man with long hair. She halfway wondered how he could see his opponent.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer started, “these ring officials have been appointed by the Illinois State Boxing Commission.” He rattled off several names, she couldn’t remember if they were different from the match before, but they did look a little grimmer. “This is the feature presentation of the light heavyweight not exceeding 175 pounds. From Fort Benning, Georgia, wearing the black trunks with the white stripe and weighing 170 pounds: Cole “Avenger” Trenton.”

A quick cheer rang through the arena. The announcer waited for it to die down before continuing.

“And from Lawrence, Kansas, wearing the white trunks with the black stripes and weighing 175 pounds: Dean “Raisin’ Cain” Winchester.”

Y/N nearly fell out of her seat. It was the man she’d met earlier. And he was the title fight! She covered her face with her hands as Dean looked around the crowd before finding her. He smiled and winked, making her blush. She hoped he was too far away to see it.

“And ladies and gentlemen here is referee Balthazar Smith with instructions for both contestants. And ladies and gentlemen, no smoking, please.”

The referee stepped up to the mike and waited for Dean and Cole to meet. Their coaches stayed close, massaging their shoulders, and probably holding them back based on the daggers they were shooting. “You boys received your instruction from the Illinois Boxing Commission. I want a clean break at all times; careful of your kidney punches and your rabbit punches. In case of a knock-down, I want you to go to your furthest corner and stay there ‘til I tell you to come out fighting. Also, in case of a knock-down, you must take an eight-count. It that understood?” Dean a Cole nodded. “Shake hands and come out fighting.”

The boxers separated and went to their respective corners. Their managers took their robes and gave them mouth guards. The row in front of the girls was filled with men from the press. Y/N had been listening to the man directly in front of her all night as he announced the fight for a small radio program. He kept using terms she didn’t always recognize, but sometimes he’d clarify for visiting listeners. She hoped Dean wouldn’t get hurt.

Bobby held Dean back as he bounced and shadow boxed. “I know you don’t want to, but do what Uriel says. Next week you’ll get the rematch, and then we’ll be onto the big time.” Dean nodded and danced towards the center as the bell rang.

“Ladies and gentlemen, that was the opening bell for this scheduled ten rounder, and Raisin’ Cain Winchester, who won the championship last year, is on his way to defend his title against a younger opponent in the semi-finals. Cole the Avenger is fighting in memory of his father, who died due to boxing injuries.”

He labeled several punches and moves as the men started to swing at one another. “Trenton, who is very effective inside, very good at body punching, and Winchester who is obviously good at long range… with that snappy left jab… and the right cross.”

Dean cinched Cole’s arms to his sides, preventing further body punches. Already they were both sweating, and Dean’s grip was slipping. The referee came over and broke them apart. They separated, but Cole chased Dean into a retreat. Dean fired out a jab, which Cole returned. They traded punches, uppercuts, and several different types of blows that Y/N had learned that night.

“That right hand to Winchester was just a trifle short. If Winchester keeps dancing around the ring like he is, he might tire before he can knock some wind out of Trenton. But there can be no doubt that both men came here tonight to fight. A short minute remaining in round one.”

To Y/N, the minute felt like ten as the men quickly exchanged blows faster than the reporter could call them. Cole landed a solid punch to Dean’s face, making him stagger back into the ropes.

“A little trickle from Winchester. Trenton is scoring repeatedly!”

The bell sounded as Dean pushed off. They ignored one another and went to their corners.

“And round one is over! Raisin’ Cain Winchester taking about as much punishment as I’ve ever seen him take in round one except for last year when Castiel Novak nearly punched him out of the ring. Winchester came back to win that fight. Novak fought and lost to Bartholomew in his next bout in a nearly murderous display. Winchester has had a total of 130 bouts, losing seven, two draws, and one technical knock-out trying to win the middleweight championship when he first started.”

The reporter continued to pass along Dean’s stats and Y/N couldn’t help but be slightly impressed. He was actually a good fighter. But she wasn’t sure she wanted to date a boxer. Not yet. There were still nine rounds to go to see if he could hold up his end of the bargain.

Rounds two, three, and four came and went with similar displays of prowess. Dean’s cut on his brow kept bleeding into his eye. Bobby kept patching it up and cleaning it the best that he could. Y/N learned that he had been a boxer back in the day, but an unsportsmanlike hit to his spine kept him out for several years. When he came back, he stuck to training others and found the Winchesters: Dean and Sam. He was a coach for both of them. Y/N wondered how his heart stayed in his chest on nights when they both fought.

“Trenton talking to Winchester constantly. And the eye of Dean Winchester is starting to smear a bit. Right on the right eyebrow.”

Cole swung out, catching Dean in the ribs, making him double over.

“Probably the best blow of the fight! Avenger Trenton overhand right swinging below to catch Winchester in the ribs.”

Dean swung wildly, missing Cole completely as he ducked. Dean backed away and tried to wipe the blood out of his eye, but missed seeing Cole’s left hook. He dropped like a stone, his head bouncing painfully against the canvas.

The world slowed down to single heartbeats. Patrons leaped to their feet like rocks in molasses. Bobby shook his head, refusing to watch. Y/N looked for his eyes, begging whoever would hear her to see the brilliant green instead of the blood over his closed lids. She gasped as they fluttered.

He found hers as well, latching onto them like a ship to a lighthouse during a storm.

The referee started to count.

One.

Two.

Three.

“To hell with this,” Dean mumbled.

Four.

He reached for a rope, using it to pull himself up. But knees don’t count. He knew he had to get to his feet.

Five.

Cole shouted at him, “stay down! Or you’ll be worse than done, Winchester.”

Six.

Dean managed to get one leg under him, but it wobbled too much to support him.

Seven.

Dean pulled again, straining against his bruised ribs to stand on his feet.

The crowd roared with delight.

“Dean Winchester was not down for the count yet, ladies and gentlemen! We’ve still got a match as long as he’s got any fight left in him.”

The bell rang, ending the fifth round. Cole looked pale and a little green around the gills. Dean nodded to him, taking the blame for the manager storm that was going to hit later.

They met again, but Cole let Dean do all the hitting, feigning exhaustion. Dean knew Cole’s fighting and his style. Cole was tired, especially now that Dean wasn’t pulling his punches.

“A slowly tiring Winchester, but Trenton slows as well. Not punching cleanly going into this round, missing. Winchester’s left hook was low, giving him a warning from ref Balthazar.”

Dean gave Cole four quick jabs to the torso, sending him stumbling into the ropes amid a chorus of cheers. He followed with three more to the head and face.

“Come on Dean! You’ve got ‘im!” Y/N screamed.

“Four clean blows into Trenton, and then three more. Winchester was hurting Trenton. He’s hurting him now. Jabs to the ribs and the face. Now a bolo. Trenton is round housing, missing Raisin’ Cain Winchester by a mile. Trenton’s left eye is swollen. Closing gradually. Damn! Pardon my language, ladies and gentlemen, Dean Winchester has spun Trenton around. He’s still standing, but blocking drunk. Ref Balthazar separates them again as Trenton leans on Winchester. Half a minute to go in the sixth round. Winchester set him up with those body blows, damaged his nose. He has Trenton on his feet asleep, holding on. The audience is standing and cheering.”

Dean kept jabbing. Cole wasn’t fighting back and he was a fellow pawn, but Dean was punching red. All those times when he had a win in the bag and Uriel told him to fall, or every time they promised him the prize fight, like tonight, but then took it away. He could hold himself up. They could take their schemes and schedules with them to hell.

“Trenton punching drunk as the bell rings, ending round six. The ringside doctor checking him out. If he doesn’t respond to the bell, the fight will be over. No! He’s up and ready to go. This is round seven, ladies and gentlemen. And Winchester is not holding back, not with the end so close.”

Y/N notices a flurry of movement to one side of the ring. The doctor is waving his arms till a large man nods. The bell rings, but Dean keeps going.

“Winchester doesn’t hear the bell. Ref Balthazar has to break them apart. But it’s too late! Down goes Trenton. The ref counts… and Dean Winchester has won by a knockout, ladies and gentlemen. For six rounds, Trenton gave better than he took. Then Winchester unleashed all of his best guns for the last round. Our score cards showing that Winchester was ahead sixty-three points to fifty-seven.”

The ref pulled Dean towards the middle as Cole’s coach and attendees pulled Cole’s body off the canvas. The announcer stepped on stage and grabbed the mic. “Attention ladies and gentlemen, the winner by knockout, in two minutes and fifteen seconds of the seventh round, and the defending winner of the Winter Chicago Amateur Semi-finals is Dean “Raisin’ Cain” Winchester. He will face his last opponent to defend his title for another year once dates have been determined.”

He raised Dean’s arm above their heads. Y/N joined the rest of the crowd with a standing applause and cheering.

“See! You enjoyed yourself.” Jo yelled above the din.

“Yeah. I guess I did. Thanks, Claire, for the tickets.”

Claire continued cheering, stopping for a split second to gasp out, “he’s coming this way.”

Y/N looked back at the ring to see Dean pushing his way through the managers. Aiming to meet him halfway, she headed to the chaos surrounding the canvas.

Bobby was shaking Dean. “What were you thinking?”

“Nothing,” Uriel’s voice said, breaking into the circle. “He wasn’t thinking at all.”

Dean stopped his struggle to face Uriel. “You want to duke it out here?” he challenged.

Uriel shook his head with a smirk. “No. But we will discuss this Winchester. Enjoy the light… while it lasts. And get that brow checked out; we wouldn’t want it to turn into something serious.”

Dean broke away, surging through the crowd. He bumped into the person he wanted to see most.

“Heya, sweetheart. You got plans?”

“I’m open to suggestions.”

Part 2: Caution

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turnbackquotes · 5 years ago

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Thomas Scott, The Holy Bible: With Explanatory Notes, 1822

[Psalm 44:10] Thou mask us to turn back from the enemy; and they which hate us spoil for themselves.

[Footnote: Psalm 44] V-17-22. (Note, 1-3) ‘Certainly we have deserved … all’ these calamities; ‘though this comfort is still remaining, that we are not so wicked as to be moved by all this to desert the, and violate that covenant, whereby we are engaged to worship thee alone.’ Bishop Patrick. — The formalist commonly escapes persecution, by turning with the stream, and purchasing security with sinful compliances, or open apostasy; but the true church of God cannot be prevailed on, by menaces, sufferings or promises, to forget God, or deal falsely in his covenant; and as the believer’s heart does not turn back from God, so his feet do not decline from his way. Neither the malice, nor the subtlety, nor the poison, of the old serpent, and of his progeny, even when permitted to torment him grievously, can induce him to turn aside to idolatry, or to renounce his God and Savior. This has been proved in ten thousand instances, while the disciples of Christ have been covered as with the shadow of death, in their constant expectation of it; and they have seen their brethren killed, by every tedious excruciating method, “all this day long, and account as sheep for the laughter.” (Notes, John 16:1-3, Romans 8:35-39.) Their regard to the authority of their holy and heart-searching God effectually preserves them even from committing secret wickedness; and they make their appeal to him concerning their integrity. And indeed so far from suffering for their iniquities, they are hated and killed for the Lord’s sake; because they bear his image, profess his truths, adhere to his commandments, and seek his glory. — ‘The place of dragons,’ or serpents, or monsters, gives the idea of man cast into a situation, in which every hateful and dreadful creature surrounds him. Such are persecutors, and such are evil spirits who employ them. (Marg. Ref. s.)

[Footnote: Psalm 44.] The Lord has always hitherto saved his people; they may now “boast in him all the day long;” and they will praise his name forever, for not having made them ashamed of their confidence. Yet, the believer must have seasons of temptations, afflictions, and humiliating discouragements; and the church must have seasons of persecution, when her remaining witnesses prophesy in sackcloth. (Note, Revelation 11:3-6.) At such times the people of God will be tramped on, put to shame, plundered, murdered, banished, enslaved, despised, and reproached: and they will be ready to think that he has cast them off, and to fear that his name and truth will be eventually dishonored; while they continually hear the blasphemies and triumphs of his enemies. But in all our affliction, especially in our sufferings for the sake of scriptural Christianity, we should complain unto the Lord, and “exercise ourselves to have a conscience void of offense:” we should be careful not to seek relief by sinful compliances; and should continually meditate on the power, truth, purity, and knowledge of our heart-searching God. If our heart turn back from him, or our steps decline from his way; he knows it, and will discover it to others. But if we are faithful to our engagements, and are “persecuted for righteousness’ sake,” we are and shall be safe and happy. Even if we should be big up into the hands of enemies, formidable and venomous as dragons, and thrown into dungeons hideous as their holes; be sore broken with every torture which malice can invent, and live in the continual expectation of a violent death; yet nothing can “separate us from the love of our God;” none can go beyond his purpose and permission; and in all the things we shall be more than conquerors.

[Psalm 56:9.] When I cry unto the, then shall mine enemies turn back: this I know; for God is for me.

[Psalm 126.] Practical Observations. The people of God trust in his mercy, truth, and power, and keep his commandments; thy copy his example of goodness; and, with all their defects, are “upright in their hearts.’ Their hops and their souls are built upon that tried and precious Foundation, which God has laid in Zion; on which the whole church is founded, and which “cannot be removed, but abideth forever:” yea, the Lord himself is with them, and a Protection round about them, “from henceforth even forever.” Their dread of sin, and of apostasy, and their prayers to be kept from them, though by suffering or death, are the evidences that thy shall not apostatize: for the Lord will proportion their strength to their trials, and make “all things work together for their good;” the malice and enmity of the wicked shall only prove a correcting rod, and not a destroying sword; even this rod shall not “rest upon them,” lest they faint under the chastisement: and not only the prayers of their brethren, but the intercession of their Savior, secure to them the upholding power and preserving grace of God. — “As for such as turn back unto their crooked says,” they never were “upright in their hearts:” and their apostasy is the detection of their hypocrisy. Their knowledge, conviction, and profession, will but enhance their condemnation, and “the Lord shall lad them forth with evildoers; but peace shall be upon” very “Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile.” Lord, number us with them, in time and to eternity!

[Proverbs 14.] He “who fears God and walks in his ways,” will go from the “presence of the foolish man, when he perceives not in him the lips of knowledge.” Wit, ingenuity, politeness, and eloquence, make no amends, in his judgment, for the want of seriousness, for erroneous and pernicious opinions, or scoffing and jesting at things sacred. Thus he will be kept from the fatal contagion of profane company; and from that worst deceit and folly even of fools, namely, excusing vice by principles subversive of all justice and truth, as well as of piety and religion. — As “there is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but “the end thereof are the ways of death;” “the wise man feareth and departeth from evil:” he not only shuns the profane scoffer, but the soothing or ostentatious deceiver. While “the simple believeth every word,” he prudently “looks well to his goings;” for eternal happiness or misery are at stake. While “the fool rageth and is confident;” he fears lest he should be deceived, and humbly seeks to God, praying to be kept from every delusion. When he sees men, who once appeared to be religious, turn back into the ways of sin; he mourns over them, foreseeing the awful consequences; and becomes more so himself and watchful over his own heart; and knowing that, in general, those who forsake God, do it, “loving this present world;” he becomes more and more afraid of covetousness, and often seems to hear the Savior caution him, as he did the disciples of old, “Remember Lot's “ wife!” and, Remember, that “the house of the wicked shall be overthrown; but the tabernacle of the upright shall flourish.”

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store2oldguys · 7 years ago

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10 Country Do’s and Dont’s

Summary: When we moved from the big city life to the mountains near Butte, Montana to realize a life long dream of opening the Fish Creek House B&B , I kept my eyes open and my mouth shut and and paid very close attention to other people’s botchery. Personally, I’d really rather watch someone else screw up than have to do it myself. Keywords: montana living, montana lodging, log home, country life, home improvement, renovation, bed and breakfast Article Body: What follows are 10 lessons from my “now I know better” collection. Perhaps these lessons learned will ease your transition from the city to wilderness.

1. Know thyselves. If you are a couple who bickers over which way to hang the toilet paper roll, don’t buy raw land.

The path from raw land to indoor plumbing is fraught with hundreds, if not thousands, of decisions. If you can’t pull as a team over the little things, how will your relationship survive decisions like where to sink a well (that one can be worth, oh, $20,000), where to put the kitchen, do we buy or rent equipment, do we build a log house or glue it up out of egg cartons? We built hte log house to make our Bed and Breakfast dream come true.

We have several guys (one of our neighbors included) sitting around our county amidst their half-finished projects all by themselves because the little woman couldn’t handle it and ran off mid-construction. On the other hand, we have another neighbor couple who knew that they weren’t cut out for the house building process. They bought undeveloped land and put a manufactured home on it. Save your marriage (or whatever) and buy a house.

2. Know thy neighbors. You may be under the false impression that since you are moving from more crowded to less crowded conditions that you will have more privacy and that neighbors matter less. Au contraire.

When looking at rural property, you will find yourself driving down many a dirt road. If there is more than one home on that road, it is a neighborhood, like it or not. Look closely at the homes and residents on that road. If your house catches on fire or you hack your leg off with a chainsaw, do you think you can depend on them to help? Fortunately here on our road up to the Fish Creek House, we have the greatest neighbors that’d help you out in the proverbial New York minute

When we were searching the great wilderness for our dream property,we drove down some rural roads that actually triggered the theme from Deliverance in the back of my brain. Find some excuse to go chat up some of the neighbors before you buy. Introduce yourself and ask them how bad the winters are, whatever, just get a feel for the folks you may have to trust with your life and property.

3. Know thy driveway. I rarely see this subject discussed, but in the country, the length of your driveway can make or break the whole experience.

On the other hand, our driveway is a winding 700 feet long. We can’t even see the road. We love it. But we also live at about 3000 feet and see a lot of snow all winter. This is OK with us because we have good plowing gear and 4-wheel-drive cars.

It also cost big mo ney to put gravel on that much driveway, which is necessary in our area if you want to use your driveway year-round. We have a neighbor who has been out here for years who had to park at the end of his driveway half the year due to the snow and mud until just last year when he got a 4-wheel drive. A long driveway is great for privacy and air quality, but if you actually want to use it, it will cost you.

4. Don’t share. If you are in such a hurry to move that the only way you can afford it is to “go in on” some property with another buyer, don’t. This is a recipe (pardon the pun) for disaster.

5. Kill some trees. We are tree-huggers who moved to the woods. As we wandered around gawking at all the pretty trees, we decided where to build our first building, a 24 x 40-foot shop. By now, we were one with the trees and couldn’t bear to part with any of them, so we sited our shop where we could take out the fewest trees.

The trees were happy but now along with Fish Creek running through the property, we have a greenhouse for our organically grown produce, a barn for our horses, round pen and arena. So guests are welcome to bring their equine companions.

6. Do the wave. In the city, avoiding eye contact can be a survival skill. Congeniality can get you shot, or at the very least, panhandled.

Not so in the country. Out here, the wave is the primary social currency. Wave at everybody, whether you know them or not. If you see a guy standing by the road holding an axe dripping with blood, smile and wave cheerily. He might be butchering a deer and may choose to share some with you. If you don’t wave, you could be Mother Theresa and everyone will think you are growing something illegal in your basement. Which leads me to . . . .

7. You will earn a reputation. The reputation is a quaint concept that no longer applies to the concrete jungle. You can be any kind of scuzzball you want in the city and no one cares. In fact, some people think it’s cool and they’ll probably give you your own TV show.

Out here, you will earn a reputation whether you are a hermit who only comes out once every five years or the mayor. You can care about it or not, but if you ever want to do business, or anything else for that matter, your reputation will precede you, so consider how you want to be known. Be aware that anything you say will be held against you and it will also be spread all over town.

8. Guns are part of the culture. Guns are loud. In rural America, people have guns and they shoot them. You may no longer have freeway noise in your bedroom, but it could sound like the Battle of Gettysburg in hunting season.

One of the newer residents on our road is a pacifist-tree-hugger-gun-hater.We’re in great hunting territory and even have a shooting range where our resident NRA instructor who also tests guns and gives shooting clinics. People travel far and wide to attend these as well as to take advantage of having gunsmithing services available . If you can’t live with that concept in a rural area, you might be happier either in town, where everyone needs a toilet paper permit to you-know-what, or on a road with (shudder) codes and covenants. At least you know then that your neighbor won’t be raising hogs on the property line and shooting them at three in the morning.

9. Pets—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Out here in the hinterlands the term pet food has a whole different meaning. Sure, it’s great to live someplace where Fido can run free, but just remember, so do the Fido eaters. Let’s face it, most of us city transplants grew up on a TV diet of articulate, well-dressed animals. But in reality, cougars, coyotes, bears, and even large predatory birds are all on the lookout for a nice fat Fido or clueless cat to snack on. While the thought of Yogi Bear pick-a-nicking on my animal is too gruesome an image for me to entertain, I’ve been here long enough to know that the risk is part of the natural life of animals.

10. Electricity is not a fact of life. It is the luck of the draw.

We provincials, especially we of the woodlands, are the recipients of periodic phone and power interruptions. Trees fall on lines, aliens sever them with anti-matter beams. The utilities can even go out for no apparent reason in the middle of summer. Maybe it’s just a drill. If you have big, full freezers and no backup, you will be having one heck of a steak feed that night.

Go with the flow, is the name of the game when you’re living the country life. Fortunately at the Fish Creek House, we offer a combination of luxury with a taste of the rugged outdoors.

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