#His image was blurry on google images so I went to find the clear image of him through the link to the page

[themagicalghost]

If you are wondering what the fandom wiki is up to these days

Links to the 'Employee' page would only go to Yesman's page, but while making this post it got turned back to normal with no way to revert it. Good thing I recorded this gif

Someone seems to like him

[youwontlikethisblog]

Armando Mendoza: A Brief Analysis

Hey, how are you? It's been a while. This will be a lil update so if you want you can skip down to the [GREEN] to start with the post :)

It's been a hectic few months. I finally decided to stop setting it aside and get real about my writing and begun the tedious task of editing the final draft of my original manuscript. I'm a perfectionist(Although if we're considering my posts about YSBLF as an example of that, than you wouldn't expect it lol. I suppose that's what I get for writing post when I haven't had a lick of sleep and don't stop to take breaks while writing the posts and then, half brain dead, I sit down to "edit" the grammar). When it comes to something that truly means a lot to me I do not feel satisfied until it has reached my exact expectations. I've made a few updates on my writing and how it's been going. There's some exciting development on it but I want to wait a little more to be able to fully talk about it and share the news with y'all.

That being said; I still have not continued watching YSBLF since the last time I did a post about the show, y'know, life and all but without further ado, here is the post :)

Armando Mendoza: An Objective and A Not So Deep Dive

Now that I've had some time and space away from the show, I can look at the characters in a more objective manner. I've been considering a lot of things regarding them and I feel like this post might come right out of left field —seeing how I normally seem to "defend" Armando, or some might assume I do— and this post will most likely not do that. In reality, it won't. It'll rightfully so call him out.

See, the stark difference between Marcela and Armando, not personality wise, but writing wise, is that Marcela doesn't really have a backstory. Her past is pretty blurry and the very few clear images we get of it always paint her to be the exact same person. However with Armando his past, while also not clear, is more visible and a little bit more precise than hers. In the post I made for Marcela I wasn't as empathetic as I should have been.

Marcela's past is basically unknown and the very little information we do get doesn't paint her in the best of lights. However, that doesn't mean that she deserved or that what Armando was doing to her was okay. I should have said that in her post. I placed a lot of emphasis on the fact that while Marcela had a right to feel what she did, she didn't have a right to act the way she was. Feelings are valid, actions are not.

Well same goes for Armando.

Armando could have been dating a helicopter as a girlfriend, someone who was possessive and controlling of him, but that doesn't justify nor excuse his horrible behavior towards her. While yes, one could assume that his cheating had to do with his lack of control with life, it still doesn't justify or excuse it. Nothing, ever, justifies cheating.

As I said in the Marcela post: This isn't about her so I won't be explaining her reasoning, her behavior, her actions, or anything of those sorts, therefore, don't take it as me excusing her bad behavior. It's simply being mentioned.

With modern times come modern solutions. Nowadays it's very easy to be able to pick up your phone and google something, read a self-help book, find the root of your childhood trauma and even a therapist. Child development isn't easy to understand to the naked eye and you have to have years of experience on the subject to fully understand how point A gets to point B. I'm no expert of it, just done some basic research on certain topics of childhood trauma and such so while I might have some form of understanding, it's not an exactitude on the subject.

We can estimate that Armando had emotionally absent parents, witnesses how his parents turned their backs on his sister for falling in love with a poor man and the way the elite society they're a part of was about the whole subject. How do we draw to this conclusion?

His father doesn't even know what he went to college for or what he got his degree on. His mother coddles him, only when he acts to her standards, enables a horrible relationship that does not benefit neither her biological son or her basically-adopted daughter. Quite the contrary the show does a good job at showing the drastic parallels of Betty's relationship with her parents compared to Armando and his parents. Consider the fact that any time Armando is on screen with his parents they only talk about two things: His relationship with Marcela and the company.

They don't sound like the warmest of parents do they?

I talk a lot about being a writer and how knowing your characters IS one of the most crucial and important parts of developing your story. I mention this because when you write characters, fleshed out ones, you have at the very least an understanding of their past. Not an exact one, but an understanding in order to have them say the things they do and act the way they do.

Roberto was always cold towards Armando, from the very start. He clearly showed signs that he didn't very much care for him. He cared more about the company, his wife, Daniel, Marcela, Beatriz, and then, at the very end, Armando. With obvious reasons we understand why Roberto didn't trust Armando. It's always been told that he's always been a player, doesn't commit, and is immature, plus with the devil on his shoulder he calls a best friend, Armando isn't the most trustworthy.

Yet, that does not excuse Roberto's lousy father role in his son's life. Children need strong(by that I mean emotionally, physically, mentally, and spiritually present) male role models in their lives, especially father figures. I've said it before that it could be a possibility that Armando's childhood was very much with an emotionally distant father. This creates the perfect breeding ground for a child to constantly feel like they must excel in every part of their lives(perfectionism), have an anxious attitude, a fear of losing the love of their loved ones if they aren't excelling(low self-esteem), and other difficulties. Basically this ball of fear, resentment, anger, perfectionism, and anxiousness(being avoidant) . These issues on their own bring their separate problems that mixed together make for an unlikeable person. I don't know about you, but this sounds a lot like Armando.

Of course there's people who grew up with emotionally unavailable parents and grew up to be fully companionate, kind, loving, and wonderful people. That's the tricky thing about trauma, not one size fits all. Just because two people grew up the same doesn't mean they'll deal with it the same way.

Emotionally absent parents equal physically absent parents when it comes to their children's development.

His mother was the same, though, unlike Roberto, Margarita did love Armando and was present but very conditional with her love. You can have examples of this when Armando and Marcela would be fighting. She always took Marcela's side and pressured Armando to continue the relationship. She also guilted Marcela into staying with Armando. She was never there to comfort her son when he was at his lowest or even before. She was just only ever present in his life and made an effort to talk to him when it came to his engagement to Marcela. Plus, the whole causing Camila to divorce her husband and move to a different country fiasco.

Armando did a fine job of taking after his parents, as he is a perfect reflection of them.

There's one thing that Armando said that has ran laps around my brain for a while now; "I know I did things wrong, damnit I always do!" outside of el Meson.

He's aware of the things he does, even if it's at the heat of the moment, Armando is a self-aware jester, who never cared enough to change until he lost everything.

This change, while outside forces moved him to change, were not the reason why he changed. That's another message that is lost with this show.

Armando didn't change because he fell in love with Betty. Armando only learned to be brave enough to be the person he always aspired to be, because he fell in love. Doesn't matter who he fell in love with, he simply did. The love he received from Betty only taught him to be brave enough to love the same.

The same way Betty was naïve to how depraved any man can be, whether educated or not, rich, poor, or from a "high" society or lower class, Armando too was naïve to what was actually good and bad because he never really had parents that cared enough to teach him. Now this in no way frees Armando from accountability. Lets not forget that the whole point of his personality at the beginning of the story is that he sucks, and is a horrible man.

[TAKE A BREAK IF YOU NEED ONE.]

Sex addiction is a serious addiction. As I've mentioned before, in one of my earliest posts, that Armando shows to have signs of it but I'm no expert so I wouldn't say he does. For example, his affairs often cause issues in his relationship, his professional life, and for himself. While he's aware of all the risk that these affairs cause in his life, he still part takes in them! These are all signs that he has an addiction. However, I don't think that was the intent behind this part of his personality when he was being written, simply there to show how he was a Casanova of sorts.

These are all things I've already talked about in different posts but I wanted to dive a little bit deeper here in case some people haven't read those.

Let's get to the real juicy stuff now.

Armando's horrible, terrible, abusive, treatment of women.

Yeah Armando defended Aura, he wasn't a misogynist, and he didn't abuse his position of power nor assaulted any women(not talking about the constant harassment of Betty after she found the letter yet). Still, Armando was abusive.

He constantly manipulated women into believing he was serious about them just to use them, he gaslit —not only Marcela but all his side chicks— people in order to control a situation, and at times even got physical. Let's not forget the hair pulling, choking, and dragging of Karla, Marce, and Larson. Let's not forget Betty! While he never hit them, the way he acted, was not okay!

Armando was aggressive, he was controlling, and he was manipulative. God, he was awful!

There's no excuse or even a justification for him in this part.

While you can argue that his intentions weren't to harm those girls, he still did it. The moment they didn't behave to his standards, he removed his "love"(infatuation) from them. Does that sound similar to a pattern? like someone else? (Margarita).

However Marcela for this instance was a victim of his. His constant cheating made her so controlling, resentful, and bitter.

A cycle starts somewhere. Whether it be Marce being possessive from the get go of their relationship or Armando cheating first, somewhere the cycle began.

One thing I want to make clear is that both Marcela and Armando were abusive and victims of each other.

From the start of the novela Armando isn't a good person. He's horrible. However, he was meant to be charismatic, which would cause people to over-look those red flags.

There's a lot of sides to Armando's character and that's what makes him complex.

There's obvious reason as to why Armando, in a sense, has some redeeming qualities compared to the people he's surrounded by. You know, he feels remorse for the way he acts, especially towards Marce and Betty. He feels the pressure of not letting his parents down and the responsibility of keeping people employed. However, even if it's remorse, the problem always lays in the fact that he doesn't truly change.

In this half of the post I'm focusing more on his relationship with Marcela.

I've talked about reactionary abuse, toxic relationships, abusive tactics, and patterns in all of my posts regarding Armando and Marcela. I've explained in a simplified way and yet I feel like some people either reject the idea or only want to blame one party.

What makes Marcela and Armando's relationship toxic and not D.A. is that they both enable each other and their bad habits. See, even if Armando were the one that started the conflicts, Marcela also acts out abusively. Basically they up one another in any fight. As if saying "Oh so you're going to threaten to leave? Fine! Then I'll ruin your life! If you leave me it would be like losing my parents all over again." while the other responds with "Marrying you is simply a favor to you! If you speak up about this than the wedding is off!" get the idea?

Marcela enables Armando by acting out in her rage, further pushing him to act out in his cheating and gaslighting. Armando enables Marcela by his cheating and gaslighting. They both feed the cycle and reject any accountability for their actions.

What makes this drastically different in what a typical D.A situation in where the abused reacts abusive(aka mirrors their abuser) is that they BOTH switch sides. One moment Armando is the abuser, the one with the upper hand in the relationship and then, the next, Marcela is the one that is being abusive and in control. Often times they bounce off each other. It's not Armando constantly and only being the Abuser with Marcela mirroring him. They BOTH DO THIS.

However, at the very least, Armando at the end of the series took accountability and broke the cycle.

When you write two explosive and complex characters meant to be together you have to separate them from each other. By this I mean that Marcela is her own person away from Armando, just like Armando is his own person away from Marcela. Together, however, they are a volcanic eruption. While, for Marcela, this can translate to just being passionate and intense, for Armando it can be an absolute tragedy that must continue in order to keep every party of people in his life "happy" while in the end, at the very least, he has his affairs to give him something.

Together Armando and Marcela are a horrible duo because all they do is cause harm to one another. That's what makes their relationship toxic, not one sided abuse.

One can argue that the ONLY reason Marcela acted this way was because of Armando, meaning, if you remove the cause of the problem, the issue would be resolved, right?

Not entirely as we're often shown and told that Marcela is this way with everyone. She keeps up with public appearances for the sake of their elite society but she treats people outside of her economic class poorly, en fin she treats anyone that isn't to her standards poorly and inhumanly. What does this tell us? That she on her own is toxic and abusive so even if she were in a healthy relationship, her prejudice and expectations of things causes her to be this way.

Armando was a cause of the problems in the relationship! That's where the tricky part and what makes them complex, is.

We know that Armando and Marcela were basically forced to be together, or groomed. From a young age all they've heard is how they must be together to unite the families, how her dead parents wanted that more than anything. That's placing a lot of pressure on two people.

However, even if this were the case(which it is) Armando's go about and treatment of Marcela was not okay. For the sake of this post let's say that Armando is the reason Marcela is the way she is(meaning we ignore her personality all together). He caused her to be possessive, controlling, toxic, and cold. Marcela was once a kind and sweet person who did nothing but show devotion and adoration for him, and Armando's constant cheating and lying pushed her to be this way.

Armando could have handled it a lot better. If he felt obligated to be with Marcela from the get go, he could have at the very least, like the very minimum treated her as a human being, and not cheated. That's the very least she deserved.

Obviously, we don't know how the start of their relationship was like. All we know is that when they got engaged that he made a promise to Marcela to be faithful and that Marcela knew about the affairs. We know that Armando and Marcela at least had somewhat of a "happy" relationship, despite the affairs and fights they'd get into. (Which this on it's own establishes that Marcela was fully aware of Armando's unfaithfulness before their engagement, that and his promises to be faithful show us that it's been a problem for years.)

Let's consider this; If Armando fell for Betty when she was ugly SIMPLY because of the adoration and devotion she had for him, why didn't he do that with Marcela at the start?

Had she held this devotion and adoration for Armando from the start it would imply that Armando would have fallen for her, same way he did with Betty, and therefore Marcela would have never turned out to be the way she did, right?

Let's be honest here. That's the sole reason why Armando even began to have some sort of confused emotions towards Betty. It made him feel good, boosted his pride and ego, and tide with the fact he trusted her, he liked Betty. So if Marcela would have been the same way at the start, don't you think Armando would have felt the same? Therefore he wouldn't had cheated on Marcela?

Again, that sounds like I'm solely blaming Marcela for the dissolvement of their relationship but I'm not.

Armando is part/responsible for Marcela's possessiveness in their relationship and there's no excuse for it.

What is cheating and why do people cheat?

Cheating can range from emotional intimacy with another person that isn't your partner to physical. The physical can range from simple hand holding to full blown intercourse.

(source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-people-in-relationships-cheat/#:~:text=The%20participants%20admitted%20to%20cheating,desire%2C%20and%20situation%20or%20circumstance.)

In the article linked as a source it mentions that most partners cheat due to a lack of validation, love, or due to neglect in their relationship. What does this tell us?

While cheating is not a valid response to whatever is a lack in a relationship, there's always a valid reason the person feels the way they do. Let me say that again. Cheating is not valid, but the emotions of the person who is cheating, are. Cheating is not valid, but emotions are. What does this mean? (Unless we're talking about a narcissistic abuser. In that case, no. They are not valid) This is overall just a an idea of why cheating occurs in otherwise "healthy" relationships.

If you feel like your relationship lacks validation, love, neglectful, abusive, or there's no spark or desire: LEAVE or go to couple's therapy and work on it with your partner(EXCEPT FOR THE ABUSIVE ONE. LEAVE! LEAVE! LEAVE! LEAVE! There is help for you.).

Emotions are valid, actions are not. A person's feelings are valid but that does not excuse nor justify cheating.

While Armando's cheating was a huge reason why they had fights and arguments, there had to be a reason why he cheated in the first place and while his emotions were valid, his actions were not.

His cheating could have very well begun at the start of the relationship feeling as if he had no real control over his life because of his parents persistent push for him to be with Marcela, which means it had nothing to with Marcela, everything to do with his parents, and ultimately this caused Marcela to be so possessive. Or it could have simply been Marcela who was like that from the start because she too had to deal with the ever guilting of Margarita's "this is what your parents always wanted, for you two to be together and unite the families." In all honesty the real villain of this show is Margarita.

Yes, their relationship was a paradox of sorts. If they broke up, Armando would lose the presidency, the company would dissolve, his parents would hate him, and he'd be a failure. Marcela wouldn't have really lost anything except Armando.

We can go with the 'could have' and 'should have' or 'what if's', but at the end of the day all we've got is what is actually canon in the show and not just speculation.

A few weeks ago I saw this video on my IG feed of FG talking about the ending of YSBLF. He said he didn't give them their happily ever after, since Armando was Betty's executioner(verdugo).

If the writer himself is saying that Armando wasn't all that amazing, I suppose that means he wasn't.

Yes, Armando went through a redemption arc but even then, Armando wasn't the best person. He was simply a better version of himself. He learned to be honest, to view people as his equals, women as humans and not properties, and to be selfless and caring, that's a huge difference from the Armando from the beginning but Armando was still neurotic. He was still a control freak, and was prone to his anger outburst.

However, this is realistic! Armando didn't change to be the perfect man that was deserving of Betty. He came to be real. He had his traumas and he was healing from them. The love of Betty didn't fix him, contrary, when she stopped showing a pure love towards him, osea, removed her love from him, Armando had no other choice but to LEARN to love properly. In order to do that, he needed to revaluate himself, his goals, his life, and what had pushed him to such a low point in his life and the ironic thing is that Armando's low point wasn't him drunk and suicidal at the bar that night. Armando's low point was the moment he agreed to manipulate Betty in order to retain her devotion and the company.

The downfall of Armando began the moment the novela started. It was a slow trickling drip from the throne he believed he deserved for simply existing and just as that, so was Marcela's.

Unlike with Betty, who was basically seduced to be bad, Armando and Marcela's downfall began from the very beginning.

So many people dismiss the abysmal abuse that was plain in the novela when it's the women acting out this way but are quick to crucify any male who acts the same way.

Now, I'm not saying Armando was only a victim of circumstance because that's not true. If I believed anyone was a victim to circumstance I'd say it was Marcela or Betty.

Why?

Because Armando, with chest puffed in pride, cleared headed, and sober CHOSE to manipulate these women. That's the abhorrent part of his character. That above all he always wanted to save his own skin and while his feelings were complex as to why, at the very end of it, he didn't want to deal with the repercussions.

While Armando wanted to be good, to prove he could be good, to himself, Marcela, and his parents, there lacked a true conviction in him. He felt like he needed to be good in order to have his parents love and approval and one of those things was that he also marry Marcela but he didn't feel inspired to be good.

There's a difference between knowing what's good, wanting to do good, and feeling inspired to be good. See, with inspiration comes motivation and with motivation comes action.

Writing complex characters means that good motives are acted out wrong. It means that bad motives are disguised as good acts. Not fully good, not entirely evil.

When you get to know your characters the rest of the story comes to you naturally and by that I mean that the actions they take, the words they speak, how they are, kind of rolls out of you naturally. You need to know your characters before you sit down to write your story.

Armando's actions are horrible. He was abusive but he was also a victim and I know someone is probably wondering "well why aren't you talking about the way he was towards Betty when she found the letter?" and that's simple.

Armando perfectly mirrored Marcela and Betty perfectly mirrored Armando.

I mentioned this in the Marcela Valencia post but I'll try and talk a bit more about it here.

Armando's constant abuse and violation of Betty is an exact mirroring of Marcela, however, he still chose to act this way knowing that instead of drawing Betty closer to him, that he'd push her further away and while in moments of lucidness Armando attempted to resolve the issues he had with Betty in a calm manner, she wasn't on the same page.

Armando chased Betty all over the place, threw jealousy fits, and forced himself onto her. Marcela did the exact same to him.

However, here's the tricky part of it.

Betty.

Betty was the perfect mirror of Armando. She lied to him, manipulated him, and "cheated" on him. The same way he was towards Marcela.

Obviously this is a simplified version of it but it's the same thing at the end of the day.

Had Betty never acted this way, would Armando have treated her the way he had?

To a lesser degree, I do think so.

I think he would have manipulated her and that he would have thrown some jealousy fit here and there.

See the thing is that if Betty had never given him a taste of his own medicine Armando would have never changed. No matter how much he wanted to or how badly he was in love with Betty.

Armando, to his core, was a coward. That's what he was in the story. Due to this he resorted to manipulation and cheating.

While some of his actions were due to some sort of trauma or the fear of rejection, and came from a place of hurt and self-preservation, Armando still acted wrong.

At least at the end Armando took accountability for his actions and somewhat changed his ways. Was he deserving of getting the girl? Not entirely but was Betty deserving of getting Armando? Not entirely and see that's the problem with writing romance.

Often times the most important bit of the story is cut out because "people don't want to see the reconciliation, they just want to hear about it. "

From what I know, Betty never took accountability for the way she treated Armando after she found the letter and this I will later discuss whenever I get around to watching YSBLF and write a post about the episode but in simpler words: Betty chose to exact revenge on Armando and yes, her emotions were so valid! but her actions were not!

Betty treated Armando the exact same way Armando treated Marcela.

Lastly, I've said Armando is a complex character from the start and while that may be true, this complexity does not excuse his horrible behavior because complexities never do.

Well, I hope y'all enjoy this long over due post, and I apologize for the long hiatus on the YSBLF breakdown posts.

Also, again, sorry if there's any grammar mistakes, I'm working on it! Lol.

'Til next time :)

[spcncershybrid]

Their the One

GIF IS NOT MINE!

Spencer Reid X Witch!Reader

Luke Alvez X Reader (Platonic)

(Summary: When a series of “witches” start dying in your hometown. You and the team try to solve it while keeping your secret under wraps.)

Word Count: 2.5K (i went off)

Warning: Swearing but like one word and crappy google translate Latin.

You walk towards the elevator seeing Luke holding it open. "Are you ever going to tell him?" He questions as you step into the elevator. "That is a secret that stays with us, Alvez. No one can know." You say sternly staring at him. "Look they might suspect something. From friend to friend, you need to tell him Y/N. Or someone might get the wrong impression." Luke says swaying back and forth. "Wrong impression how?" You question turning towards him. "They might think...you know." Luke says scratching the back of his head. "No Luke I don't. But whatever you do, this incident stays between us." You say stepping out of the elevator heading to your desk, Luke following. "My lovely little birdies don't get too comfortable. We have a case and it's a bad one." Garcia says walking up to us. Luke glances at you as he puts his stuff down in his respected place. "This isn't over." You say pointing towards Luke. He raises his hands feigning defense. "Shall we?" He says as we start walking towards the conference room. You spot your boyfriend Spencer and give him a peck on the cheek. "Missed you earlier." You say sitting next to him. "Sorry I was the first one Garcia called." He says sheepishly looking down at the file. "We are all headed to Salem, Massachusetts." Garcia says as she flips through the images on the screen. Oh my.

"These four women were found dead dressed in similar fashion to then the obvious witch trials." Garcia says. You gulp down the lump in your throat. "My guess would be the unsub thinks these women are direct descendants of the women killed back then." Tara says adjusting herself in her seat. You purse your lips together looking at the crime photos. Luke sighs softly as you glance over towards him. The glance doesn't go unnoticed by the room full of profilers. "These women were all killed in the span of a week from when they were abducted." Hotch says reviewing the photos. "So he abducts his victims and keeps them hostage for 3-4 days then kills them why?" Spencer says. "Maybe he believes he's found justice you know the ideas and beliefs behind witches." You say aloud to the team. "He could be living in a delusion that he is a witch hunter and these women are witches." You continue. "What were there C.O.D's?" Luke asks Hotch. "There were ligature marks found on the neck and ankles of the first two victims. The last two were stripped and found in water." Garcia says.  "Our latest victim Jeana Morris was found this morning our unsub can have his potential next victim. Wheels up in 30." Hotch says standing heading to grab his go bag. You stay and collect your thoughts as everyone leaves. "You okay?" Spencer says walking up to you. "Yeah Spence... this case just hits close to home. My family believes in witches but this unsub is on a whole other level." You say smiling softly at him. "I'll save you a seat next to me on the jet. JJ hogged up all of our talk between case time." Spencer says smiling heading out to the bullpen. You start collecting your things. "You okay with this?" You jump slightly hearing a voice come from the doorway. "No. I knew these women, Luke. We went to school together. Juliet told me last week to watch out and now she's dead." You admit to Luke. "Were they apart of your circle?" Luke says questioningly. "You mean my coven. No um our families do the do's individually but we talk amongst each other on the things we cast, say, or write." You say shoving your stuff in your bag and head out with Luke. You catch JJ's gaze over towards the both of you. You quickly look away continuing your conversation with Luke. "They each were powerful enough to stop him. I wonder what happened. Oh gosh what am I going to say to her parents." You exclaim towards Luke. "Nothing Hotch can't know you know the families that'll be a disaster." Luke says grabbing his go bag as we reach his desk. You sigh heavily grabbing your bag and head towards the elevator with the team and onto the jet.

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The team talks amongst themselves about the case wondering what the unsub's stressors are. You glance out the window getting lost at the scenery not even focusing on the words exchanged by the team. You feel a large hand on your knee pressing in a comforting manner. "Hey." Spencer's voice snaps you out of your trance. He smiles softly rubbing your leg. "Hey." You sigh. "What's the deal with Luke you seemed tense when you guys were talking earlier before we left." He whispers glancing over to the team to see if they're looking. "This case hits close Spence. My family knew the victims families we all weren't close but it still is sad as they're near my age and from my town." You admit to Spencer only slightly lying. "When we land Luke, Y/N, JJ head to the crime scenes. Reid, you and Dave head to the M.E. Lewis and I will set up at the police station. Is that clear?" Hotch states as we all nod in unison towards him.

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Luke, JJ and you head towards the first crime scene. JJ takes the lead as you stay trudging behind with Luke. We examine the scene in front of us. "Poor Jean." You say as your stomach flips. "What?" JJ says turning back to you. "Nothing. The victim reminds me of my old friend named Jean. They look similar, they have the same hair and eye color, just different skin tones." You say quickly to JJ. She looks at your facial expressions and hums turning her attention back onto the body. You crouch down to the body and whisper "ostende vision." You shut your eyes as images of her death and blurry faces flash through your head like a movie. You open your eyes standing up nearly passing out. Just in that moment Luke's phone rings. "Yes Rossi. Okay we'll check now." Luke says moving his phone away from his ear. "Y/N check if she has a tattoo on her wrist. A crescent moon with a four pointed star." Luke says staring at the body. You crouch down and grab Jeana's wrist although you already knew the answer as you had the same tattoo. "Yep why do the other victims have it." You say to Luke as he nods in conformation. "Yes Rossi they do. I'll send the picture to Garcia." Luke say's into the phone before snapping a picture of Jeana's tattoos and sends it to Penelope. Luke pulls you to the side. "You have one too right?" He says. You nod slowly. This can't be good.

━━━━━━ ◦ ❖ ◦ ━━━━━━

We just finished giving the profile but Garcia is narrowing it down to find our unsub. You feel your phone vibrate in your pocket. You pull it out to see 'Magic computer woman' aka Garcia. "Yes Pen. Hold on I'm putting you on speaker." You say bringing the phone forward for everyone to hear. "Okay Sir with the info you have oh so blessed me with I was able to come up with our guy." Penelope says. "Mr. Wes Barber. Born and raised in Salem, Massachusetts went to high school with our precious Agent Y/L/N. His mother died when he was ten, when he went to give a statement on his mother's death- oh dear this is awful. He said he saw flames emerge from her feet and swore he saw an older woman do it saying some phrase in Latin. He never disclosed her name though. Afterwards he was in and out of foster homes due to reckless and violent behavior. Once he turned 18 he moved to LA and slowly made his way back to this town. He mentioned to his therapist 'Wanting to get revenge on the people who wronged him'." Garcia says. Wes is behind this. Oh gosh that means you're probably next. "Garcia, what is his connection to the victims." Hotch says. "High school mostly. Jeez I wouldn't want to cross this guy. I'm sending his work and home address now as well as an abandoned warehouse under his name. Go get our guy." Garcia says hanging up. "Y/L/N, Reid, and Alvez you go take the house. JJ and Lewis work address. Rossi and I take the warehouse." Hotch says as we all start moving out putting on our vests. Luke goes into the driver's seat immediately as Reid hops in the back with you. 

━━━━━━ ◦ ❖ ◦ ━━━━━━

We make it to the house and step out drawing our guns. You head towards the back as Reid follows Luke. They walk towards the front door. "Wes Barber! FBI!" You hear Luke say as he pounds on the door. No noise is heard as Luke kicks in the door. You enter the house through the back door. "Hello witch." An unknown voice says. You whip your head to the voice. Wes... "Excuse me?" You question not trying to give into his game easily. "I know your bloodline it's infested with evil witches who killed my mother!" He yells. "Jeana got what she deserved. They all did." He spat angrily. "Look buddy I had nothing to do with it." You say stunned at his words. "Liar!" He says reaching into his pocket and pulls out his gun. "Wes Barber put down your weapon." Spencer says standing next to you with his weapon drawn. "No they need to feel my pain. Remember the river Y/N. Huh? You and your little friends used to go there and perform all sorts of stuff." Wes says twirling the gun in his hand. You grit your teeth at his words. Spencer steps in front of you in a protective manner. "You brung back a mini bird with her. You moved twigs with your mind." Wes says directed heavily at you. "Does your team ever know?" He asks. "What is he talking about?" Spencer whispers. "Wes don't you dare involve my team. What happened was in the past." You say stepping towards him. Luke enters the room with his gun pointed towards Wes. "I want them to know I'm not crazy come clean and I'll confess my wrongdoings Agent Y/L/N. '' Wes says. "I will put my gun away Wes what do you want to see?" Spencer asks as he holstered his gun. "The use of her powers in the flesh. Pyromancy and Telekinesis." Wes says staring at you intensely. "Wes you are living in a delusion. Witches aren't real." Spencer says. You look over to Luke taking in his expression. Anger mixed with sadness. "She knows what I mean. Raise up her sleeve, she's one of them. She has their marking." Wes says. You look towards the floor stunned. You take a deep breath. "If I show you, you'll drop your weapon." You say stepping towards him. "I promise." Wes says stepping back unloading his gun. Spencer and Luke immediately step forward, going to arrest him. "Wait." You say as the boys look over at you like you've grown multiple heads. You look over to Wes' unlit fireplace. "Ignem." You say focusing your energies on the fireplace as it lit up immediately. "D-did you?" Spencer stutters whipping his head towards you. You nod uncomfortably. "Again." Wes says smiling wickedly, obviously enjoying the situation. "Ignis pila." You say flattening your hand as a fireball emerges from it. You flip it over making it disappear immediately. Spencer looks over at you shocked but mainly sympathetic towards the whole situation. "Now telekinesis." Wes says, stepping forward, smirking. "Gladly." You say mirroring his expression. "Motus." You say pushing your hands forward sending him flying into the wall. Luke and Spencer flinch stepping backwards drastically. You grab your handcuffs walking towards Wes. "Next time you decide to make me use my magic in front of my boyfriend and friend it'll be to snap your neck. As for sending you into a wall, that was for Jeana, Alice, Octavia and Juliet. My best friends who you killed for your sick and twisted fantasy." You say cuffing him and pull him up to face you. "I'm actually thankful they burned your mother. She was a sick bitch anyway." You say walking him outside towards the cops that have accumulated outside. Luke is the first to step out after you. "At least you don't have to hide it. Go easy on him." He says sympathetically. You chuckled softly at his words and nod seeing Spencer walking out of the house confused. You walk up to him and nudge his shoulder. "Hey." You say softly. He immediately brings you into a hug which is surprising as he doesn't necessarily give them.  You bury your head in his neck. "I wanted to tell you I promise I just couldn't." You say wrapping your arms around his waist. He steps back smiling. "It's okay you had your reasons but is it true he said you had a tattoo like them." He says grabbing your arm. He pulls up your sleeve revealing the same tattoo the victims had. "Can you do more things?" Spencer questions, smiling at you, his eyes lighting up with excitement. "Yes Spence. I can do a lot." You say as you open the door to the FBI van hopping into the back with him Luke again taking the driver's seat. "What could your friends do?" He asks sadly at the fresh subject. You smile sadly. "Jeana could move things like me. Octavia could control water. Juliet had premonitions mainly she was the one that warned me. Alice could summon these light balls of 'doom', which were basically mini explosives that she summoned, she used to call it her 'glow stick blow stick'." You say laughing at the last part. "As for the woman that burned his mother. In all reality it was a man, the old woman he saw was someone manipulating his reality to make him believe one thing but it's another. He probably found out and they told him actual witches in the town." You say staring out towards the window. "Luke you didn't seem phased by it. Are you one?" Spencer asks. “No. I may have magic hands but I am no witch.” Luke says laughing. You roll your eyes playfully as you guys head back to the police station and soon enough back to your now home in Quantico. 

Bonus:

“Hey babe!” You hear Spencer yell from your shared living room. “Yeah.” You respond yelling back. Receiving no answer you head down to see him fiddling with the fireplace. “Can you… um light this up?” He says scratching the back of his neck. “You are never living down this magic thing are you?” You ask grinning at Spencer. “After you popped popcorn with your bare hands I am never going near fire ever again.” He says smiling as you light up the fireplace with your hand. He walks towards you giving you a kiss mumbling thank you and guides you to the couch for your monthly movie marathon.

[magicalthoughtsendinterriblefics]

Fangirl, Interrupted - Becca’s Saturday

Summary: Have you ever felt like you’re too far up your fandoms that you’re not really living your real life? Well, that. But more.

Word Count: 1,817

Pairings: Dean x reader, Sherlock x reader

Warnings: You’re not gonna like it. Sudden fandom changes, bit of smut which is not really smutty, lazy writing, suicidal attempt, usage of drugs and alcohol, OOC scenes. 

Original A/N: Because of who I am, I like to exaggerate everything. With that being said, let me tell you that this is how I felt for many years, with multiple fandoms. I have lived a tortous life, therefore I was always seeking to live somewhere else. Almost all of my childhood and teenage years were an on-going loop between my fake life inside my fandoms and my real life. I barely remember anything now outside that make-pretend life I created for myself.  Now I am living my life, in a way that I can no longer hide inside that fake life. Call it what you want. Anxiety is coming back to me, fyi, and I tried to hide there but I just can’t. This is my way of expressing it. The Girl, Interrupted theme is because I watched it yesterday after performing Lisa’s monologue at my acting class - a way of giving therapy to myself through art. Anyway, I hope you don’t read this fic. I didn’t like it at all, but I feel the need, nonetheless, to share it somewhere. To have evidence that I went through that. Probably, someone out there has too. Idk.

New A/N: I wrote this MONTHS ago, long before I got diagnosed, and I got scared of posting it because it could be too depressing. But I hate leaving drafts all alone so here goes nothing.

Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought you were moving while sitting still? Maybe I was just crazy… Maybe it was loneliness…

“Put her in restraints!” A woman yelled. “Withdraw blood… Give her five milligrams of Valium, IV”

“Turn her head so she doesn’t aspirate,” another woman advised. I felt my head being turned by a pair of terribly warm hands.

I was attacked. I had been attacked.

“You should check my hand. There’s no bones in it anymore…”

“What were you thinking?” The first woman asked.

“I was trying to save the world…” I replied, “Don’t worry, you’ll thank me later.”

Sometimes it’s hard for me to stay in one place.

“Hey,” I opened my eyes at the familiar voice. The image at first was blurry, but I could recognize the colors of their flannel shirts. My back was killing me, and my arms felt numb. “(Y/N) are you okay?”

“Yo, sweetheart! Wake up!” A rough voice called out. I could see his red flannel.

Red flannel. Dean was wearing a red flannel, and Sam had the green one. That could only mean one thing…

I looked down at my own clothes, I was wearing a brown flannel.

I smiled childishly, and my vision finally cleared. Both men were staring at me, worried. “I’m home,” is all I could say.

Dean sighed and rolled his eyes, Sam smiled back at me.

“Yes, you are,” he said, “you’re home with us. Where else would you be?”

“At a hospital or some shit,” I replied.

“We don’t do no hospitals, sweetheart,” Dean reminded me from afar.

“Did we get him? The djinn?” I inquired, with wide eyes.

“Yup,” Sam nodded.

Dean appeared back again, handing me a cold beer. It was closed. Sam took my hand and guided it to my forehead, so I could press the bottle to my forehead. I was probably wounded there too.

“We Jafar-ed the shit out of him,” Dean snorted. Sam inhaled profoundly, as an attempt to not slap his brother. “I Jas-min that we almost didn’t make it…” Dean continued, “but enough Abu me,” he giggled, “how was your daydream, sweetheart? Where’d Iago?”

“Please, stop,” Sam begged. Dean tried to argue but Sam was already looking back at me. “But do tell us where did you go?”

“I…”

“Where did you go?”

“(Y/N)” a strong light blinded me for a second. I suddenly felt something in my eyes, pulling them open. “(Y/N), we’re calling you!” The voice chanted. “Hello, Earth requires Ms (Y/N)...”

“Wha-what?” I stuttered, pulling away from the light.

The scenery had changed. I was no longer at a motel room with awful wallpaper, but instead at a very nice living room, though the wallpaper was still awful.

“Are you okay?” The man that had been calling my name asked. He kneeled in front of me.

“Are you real?” I tilted my head to the side, and he smiled tenderly.

“As real as your nose,” he said and booped my nose. His touch was soft and warm.

“What happened?”

“You fainted,” another voice answered. I looked back, only to see the familiar figure of Sherlock sitting on his desk, typing furiously on his computer. “I told you not to get too close to the evidence, but did you listen? No, why?” He gazed back, “Because ‘oh Sherlock, don’t be so stern, it’s just a flower bouquet!’ but I was right, as usual.”

“Let her breath,” Watson commanded. “We both smelled it too and nothing bad happened.”

“Yes, but so did the police officers… All male, I must remind you” Sherlock snapped. “The flowers were sent to a woman who, where is she now? Oh, yes, DEAD!”

“I don’t get it,” I interfered.

“I suspect the flowers are poisoned with some sort of chemical that only affects women, by reacting to their production of hormones.” Sherlock informed me.

“Right… And what does that have to do with your intoxication?” The female voice asked again.

I suddenly snapped back to the hospital. I was laying in a hospital bed, with lots of tubles connected to me. There was a woman in white, sitting by my side with a notepad on her lap.

“Well, obviously I’ve been affected… It’s the flowers, you see…” I spoke.

“Flowers? What flowers?” The nurse, she was a nurse, asked again.

“The poisoned flowers!”

“Do you see them now?” She inquired.

“Of course not!”

“No?”

The djinn stood behind her. “Say no,” he said with an ominous voice.

“No,” I obeyed.

The nurse looked behind her and the djinn disappeared instantly. “Are you seeing anything out of the ordinary at the moment?”

“No, why would I? I’m not crazy,”

“At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if you were…” Dean sighed. He was sitting by my side, in bed, and was connecting his phone to the charger. “I am a little crazy too, you know?”

“Oh, yeah?” I trembled.

“Yeah,” he muttered and finally let go off his phone. He turned to look at me for a second before cuddling me. I was the small spoon, he was shirtless. “I’m crazy about you.”

“Smooth,” I replied sheepishly. I could feel the ghost of his arms around me… Ghost, because I couldn’t really feel him. He was hot, yet cold as if air was blowing over my skin.

“Are you okay?” Dean asked.

“I am.”

I wasn’t. I’m not okay.

“Good night, sweetheart,” he whispered and pecked my shoulder. Again, I felt it but not quite.

“Dean?”

“Huh?” I closed my eyes, not wanting to see what would happen after I said what I wnated to say.

“I feel like I’m still inside the djinn’s daydream,” I confessed.

Dean sat up and fixed a lose strand of hair that was falling over my eyes.

“You’re not inside a djinn’s daydream…” He said, calmly.

“How can you tell?” I asked, still not opening my eyes.

“Because djinns don’t exist, that’s why,” he said.

I finally opened my eyes. Black locks and blue eyes were all I could see for a moment.

“Djinns are mythological, and that is all…” Sherlock continued. I could hear his voice turning from Dean’s to his own. “I understand that maybe the toxins from the flowers could affect your perception of life, but there is nothing to fear. The effects will pass and you’ll be good as new.”

“I don’t feel good as new.”

“Clearly,” he grunted.

Noticing my state, he decided to go a little further from his usual behaviour. He pressed his head to my arm… I was still laying on my side, as if I was still being the small spoon.

“I will be here, by your side, as long as you let me.”

My heart fluttered, but not in love but rather in pain.

“I can’t control that.”

“The pills are having a positive effect on her now, we can get her to be conscious for a bit longer than before…” I heard a voice coming from the hall.

“What is that?” I asked. Sherlock tilted his head.

“What?” He furrowed, “I don’t hear anything.”

“Well, I do.”

I got up from bed and opened the door. At the other side of it was a hospital hall rather than Sherlock’s. All white, with blinding white lights. The nurse was talking to what I assumed was a doctor.

I felt like I would faint again.

Sherlock got up as well and dragged me back to the bed, closing the door behind us.

“You know what could help?” He smirked. “I know… Because I know you.”

He got me back in bed, facing up to the ceiling. I was about to talk, when I felt him pulling down my pijama shorts. A sigh left my lips, as I felt his tongue rubbing my clit in circles. I closed my eyes, filled with pleasure, and tried to keep it quiet so neither Mrs Hudson nor Watson could hear us.

“Come here,” I begged after a while.

I opened my eyes and saw Dean crawling up to my face. His tattoo was covered in sweat and his hair was ruffled.

“You thought I would just leave it there, sweetheart?” He flirted and, without a warning, he thrust inside me. “You feel good today… Tight, and so wet for me…”

I moaned, getting lost in his green eyes. I wanted to kiss him, but I couldn’t.

I didn’t even feel his weight over me.

I blinked.

TARDIS.

I blinked again.

Dean was looking at me, dumbfounded as he made love to me.

I shook my head and closed my eyes again, letting my body fall back into the pillows as I succumbed to the pleasure he… they were giving me. I called both of their names in between whispers until I climaxed.

I sighed and opened my eyes.

I was in my room. Darkness surrounded me. I was alone, and my fingers were still between my legs.

I wiped them quickly with the bed sheets and took my phone to googled Dean Winchester’s name, only to find out that he was not being looked at by the US government, but rather a fictional character. Not only that, but I saw pictures of him in the most intimate moments… Moments I could recall from living them with him.

I clicked on one of his pictures.

Jensen Ackles… Married.

I clicked on Sam’s.

Married.

I clicked on Castiel’s.

Married.

They were all married. Click by click I undercovered the lie I was living in.

“But what about Sher?” I thought to myself.

I googled him. Fictional character, based on the books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

There he was, my Sherlock, next to others who had also played him.

“I thought I was in a hospital,” I whispered.

“Maybe it’s just your unconscious mind asking to be treated by a professional.” Castiel’s voice spoke.

“Maybe it’s because that is where you’re going,” Sam gestured to the side of my bed. A bottle of vodka laid there empty, next to empty sets of aspirins.

“Is there an end to this?” I asked.

“I’m afraid not,” Jim Moriarty spoke from the darkness. “But aren’t you having fun?”

“What if I die?” I insisted.

“You won’t,” Sherlock said, “you still got enough energy to call an ambulance for yourself.”

“Please do,” Watson begged softly.

I grabbed my phone and dialed the number.

“I need an ambulance…”

“We’ll see you on the other side, sweetheart.” Dean smiled with a glimpse of sadness.

“I love you, guys.”

Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought you were moving while sitting still? Maybe I was just crazy… Maybe it was loneliness… Or maybe I was just a fangirl… Interrupted.

No tags for this one.

[pterodactylterrace]

Adventures in Amateur Palmistry!

First and foremost, I am in no ways an expert. Take everything said here with a grain of salt. Also, I had a hard time finding a clear picture of Henry’s palms, so it is pretty generalized. 

Images from Google, not mine.

Here his hand is out of focus, but a few generalizations can be drawn from it. 

First, his hand shape. His palms are fairly short and squared. His fingers are proportionally sized. I would say he has what are called “earth” hands.  He is likely practical and grounded, but lacks long-term planning. 

His shorter palms also indicate that his man is stubborn as shit. This finding is further backed by his star sign as a Taurus. He will dig his heels in and not be swayed if he thinks he’s right.

Next, the lines I can see in his hands. 

The head line, the one going from his index finger inwards, the middle most line in his hand. This line is deep, which means he has complex thoughts and ideas. However it is also fairly straight, which indicates a more traditional view. Likely not a kiss on the first date type. (IMO)

There is one visible break in his head line. This can mean either a struggle with mental health, or a time of huge mental breakthrough. It has been said he has anxiety, so this break could be pointing towards his struggle with it. 

The heart line, located above the head line, begins below his middle finger. A line beginning there can mean he doesn’t exactly do well in long term relationships. He can grow bored with his partner and want something new. The line is not broken, however, which means he is not an unfaithful partner. The heart line is also very deep, which points towards close interpersonal relationships. He is a very good friend, brother, son etc. He loves deeply, though the short line can mean he doesn’t stay content in a romantic relationship for very long. 

Below the head line, is the life line. In the above picture, I can’t get a good look at it. That can mean that he has a shallow life line. This could mean he had a rather sheltered upbringing.  In this picture, we can get a slightly better look at it.

It’s hard to see, but that small line parallel to his thumb is what I’m looking at. You know what I draw from that? A very short line. Homeboy doesn’t give a fuck about what other people want him to do. He’s doing his own thing. A short life line indicates other’s lack of influence in your life. His doesn’t seem to even reach the base of his palm. 

Those are the only clear lines I can make any sort of reading on. Blurry, out of focus pictures aren’t the best for this sort of thing. 

What I draw from this, is he is hard working, grounded, STUBBORN, with a deep and traditional way of thinking. He is a very passionate person, but he can have trouble with long term relationships. That’s not to say he doesn’t crave one. after all, he has a traditional mindset. He needs someone who can keep his interest in the long run.

Anyway, this was my first adventure into amateur palmistry. I have no idea if any of that was accurate, but I was bored, so I went ahead and had some fun with this. 

[barnesthesarge]

Here For You (3)

Bucky X Enhanced!Reader

Summary: The Avengers have a new enhanced on their radar when they run into you during a HYDRA extraction mission.

Warnings: swearing, lots of time gaps lol

TAGLIST: @dreamyalienz

You watched the TV in absolute disbelief, your own face alongside Bucky’s was on the screen.

“Witnesses say that the woman had some sort of powers, and used them to injure the HYDRA agents. Speculation that this woman is the same one that Tony Stark rescued is currently unclear, we’ve reached out to Shield, but so far we’ve received no response. As you can see from the security footage, which is very graphic, she cuts an agent’s hand clean off. Many are wondering if the Winter Soldier And this new enhanced are on their own te—“ Bucky turned the TV off.

“That channel is garbage. Real big on hating the Avengers.” He plopped down beside you, “Don’t worry about this, I just talked to Tony and while you will have to sign some hefty paperwork, it’ll all be okay.”

“Bucky, this is bad.” He shook his head.

“No this is fine, who cares? You were on the news. It was a blurry shot.” You turned to face him.

“I care! How on earth am I supposed to hop around the world when everyone sees me as a dangerous Enhanced?!” You stood up and started pacing, “That’s it. I have to leave.”

“Woah woah doll, you’re going to burn a whole in the floor.” He put a hand on your shoulder and you pushed him by his chest away.

“Bucky I have to go. Please..I need you to do something for me.” His face fell.

“You can’t go doll, you need to sign the—“

“I need you to delete my file. Everything you have on me, I need to get rid of this.” You pulled the Stark Phone out of your pocket and set it on the table. “Please, Bucky..” He shook his head again.

“Y/N, they aren’t going to stop looking for you, and trust me, when they find you they won’t take you politely. They might go HYDRA style.” He grabbed your wrist and you pulled it away.

“Bucky, I don’t think you understand. I’m leaving, you won’t see me again, and you’ll tell them I’m going to hide back in London, tell them I have a safe house there. I can’t let them find me. They’re going to ruin everything.” You cupped his cheeks. “You have to promise me, delete my file, lie.”

“Let me go with you! I can take care of you, watch your back!” You shook your head.

“Bucky, it’s too risky. When I know it’s safe you’ll hear from me. Just promise me. I won’t tell anyone but you.” You paused, his eyebrows were knitted together, a frown etched on his face, “please.”

Bucky nodded, “I’ll delete what I can. If I do it all they’ll know. You promise I’ll hear from you?”

“When it’s safe Bucky.” You squeezed his hands, “thank you. I’ll talk to you soon.” And with that you went down the elevator and used the car Stark gave you, driving to the docks.

———————————————————————

You loved it in Spain. A year had passed and you loved it so much you never left. While you didn’t work, you had plenty of money under another name. It was easy to blend in, slipping between the chaotic streets, shopping in local markets. It was a new home. Every once in a while there would be a sighting of the rogue enhanced once known to associate with the Avengers, but you knew better now. You wore a mask, concealed your skin and hair, the only distinguishing detail being your purple powers.

Tonight another plane flew overhead and woke you up in a cold sweat, had the Avengers found you? Was that Tony? A swat team? The UN? It was always just a plane.

You got up and got dressed, heading out to the market for fresh fruit, staying within the ordinary. You windowshopped for a while, and then headed home, turning on the TV. You flipped to one of the only English News channel you had.

“Today marks one year of the enhanced that somehow slipped through the UN’s fingers. While there’s no clear image of her, there’s still hope that the Avengers, or anyone can step forward and reveal who she is. Tony Stark conducted a press conference earlier.”

“There’s been word that you’re able to track her, is that true Mr. Stark?” Tony stood at a podium, an indifferent look on his face.

“Don’t you think that if I could, I would? She’d be a great asset to the Avengers.” You blushed, Tony was lying for you. He could find you if he wanted.

“So in your time of helping her, you didn’t even get the enhanced’s name?” Another piped up.

“She gave me a fake name, we’ve already dig into it and the investigation hit a dead end.” He lied again.

“Why can’t you release an image of her face?” A woman shouted, a couple others talked over her as well.

“This is a UN and Shield case, and the enhanced is dangerous. I’m sure if she was confronted in public, there would be mass casualties. We would’ve already if we knew it was safe.” He paused, waiting for everyone to quiet down, “Besides she seems to be living peacefully and taking down suspects silently.”

The footage stopped and the news anchor was back, “we have the rest of the press conference on our website, now back to—“

You turned the TV off and moved to make dinner, settling on chicken and rice. Within the next 30 minutes you sat at your table and ate dinner, watching people walking home to their families.

You thought about Bucky a lot more than you’d like to admit. Sometimes you imagined what would’ve happened if you actually let him come with you. Right now he could be coming home to see you, and sitting down to eat with you. You felt stupid for thinking like this, in such short time you knew him, you fell for Bucky Barnes. The stupidest part was that he probably only found you to be a nuisance now. Dealing with the aftermath of your departure had to of done a number on him.

Without thinking much else, you moved to wash your dishes, thinking about the sad creases in Bucky’s forehead as you told him goodbye. It didn’t matter that he made you promise to reach out when it was safe, by now he would’ve moved on and changed his mind. You longed sometimes to go back and see what could be different if you stayed.

Later you were getting ready for bed, when you remembered something. You quickly raced into your bedroom and unscrewed the case on the light switch, pulling out a flip phone. You had a great idea.

The next morning you purchased another flip phone, filling up minutes on each phone. Then you put your phone number into one of the flip phones and prepared to send it, sending a quick text message to the other.

I believe it’s safe.

You grinned and turned the phone off, wrapping it neatly into a box, you put a bunch of stamps on the box, and addressed it to Bucky’s P.O. Box in the Avenger’s compound. To grab his attention, you put your first name in the corner. You raced to the post and sent the package, paying extra to have it sent right away.

But it it’d been a week, and you hadn’t received anything.

———————————————————————

Bucky hated being in public, Steve was starting to think maybe his anxiety was getting worse. It wasn’t like that. Bucky didn’t want to leave and miss a message from Y/N, it’d been a year, and she still hadn’t reached out, but maybe it was coming up.

“Bucky, you haven’t left the compound in weeks.” Steve had his signature worried face. “Do you want to talk about anything?”

“Steve, for the last time, I’m fine, I just need a break from all the stress.” He lied easily. “I’m gonna check my mail. Get my steps in.”

Bucky went to his P.O. Box, it was never as full as anyone else’s, but that was okay to him. It was weird to see a package, but it made it through screening, so it’s not like it was a bomb. Bucky picked up the white box, turning it over and gasping loudly. He quickly looked around and then grabbed the couple letters in the box and racing back up to his room. Bucky looked the door behind him, ignoring the slam.

Bucky used a knife to cut the tape and opened the box, unwrapping bubble wrap to reveal a flip phone. It was dead, so Bucky pulled the charger out and plugged it in, waiting not-so-patiently. When it turned on, there was a message notification from Y/N’s contact.

I believe it’s safe. Simple, cut right to the chase, classic Y/N.

I hope so Y/N, how are you? Bucky looked at her number and saw it had a foreign number. When he googled it on his other phone, it revealed she was in Spain.

There was a reply almost instantly, I’m doing good, you were right about how lonely being on the run is. I actually really miss having my Stark phone and having people to talk to whenever I needed it. How’s everything in NY?

I miss talking to you if I’m being honest. It’s not fair that you came into my life so abruptly and left just as quick )-: I wanted more time with you. I don’t like it here. It’s too crowded.

I don’t think it’s much safe for me to be on my own. My apartment doesn’t exactly have security. I’m sorry I had to leave Bucky, I didn’t want to leave a friend like that, but I wasn’t ready for “Avenger stuff” you sound just as lonely as me

Are you saying you want to be one now?

An Avenger? Hell no, but if it gets people off my back, I might bite. I hate having to hide now, I don’t know how I loved it for so long. Don’t get me wrong I love it here in Spain, having a normal life, but I’m lonely. It was nice feeling cared about. I watched Tony lie on TV about being able to find me and knowing anything about me, and honestly it fucked me up. I think I’m gonna come back.

Holy shit please do.

Wanna do me a favor and pass the knowledge of me coming back to Tony? I’m gonna take a boat from Spain so it’ll be a bit.

Yes doll, I will, I’ll see you soon.

———————————————————————

“Tony, hey, I’m sorry to barge in like this but—“ Bucky froze, Tony wasn’t alone. Rhodey got up from Tony’s office chair and chuckled.

“I’ll take my leave, Tony please consider, alright?” He left the room and shut the door gently, and Tony crossed his arms.

“You really don’t know how to knock?” He grumbled, Bucky frowned.

“I’m sorry, the door was open, I didn’t think it mattered. There’s something I needed to bring to your attention.” Tony crossed his arms and moved stuff aside on his desk to sit down.

“Is it about your arm? I don’t think the color is flattering either.” Tony sassed.

“It’s about Y/N.” Bucky mumbled, Tony perked up and looked around his office, holding up a finger to silence him.

“That’s still a stupid name for a fish Bucky. You’re wasting my time.” He beckoned Bucky to follow him, and dragged him into the elevator, talking about anything but Y/N. When they got into Tony’s car, he sighed.

“They bugged my office.” He rubbed his temples, “they don’t trust me about Y/N. They know I haven’t been honest.”

“She wants to be an Avenger now.” Bucky blurted, “I um, okay this is gonna sound crazy. Remember how she left under my watch? She didn’t attack me at all. I lied about that. She heard about having to sign the Accords and went nuts. She was getting hysterical—“

“She asked you to delete the file, didn’t she.”

“Yes, she asked me to delete the file and lead everyone on a wild-goose-chase in London. She told me that she would contact me when she knew it was safe.” Bucky confessed, Tony shook his head.

“Bucky, God’s sake, I can’t trust you with her. I can’t believe she convinced you to delete the file. Do you have any idea how much shit I got for having such a weak system that some random woman was able to hack it?!”

“I’m sorry Tony! I wanted to go with her, she just wants to be free and safe and she looked like a trapped animal, she was so antsy and upset. I like her a lot Tony, shit I’m falling for her. But she’s not mine, and I wouldn’t be the one to trap her.” He paused, “Look. Y/N sent me a flip phone in the mail with her number in it, I texted her for a bit and she said she wants to come back, and that she’s finally ready to join us.”

“Give me her number, actually no, give me the phone.” Tony demanded. Bucky pulled it out of his pocket and Tony opened it, scowling at the outdated device. He opened the contacts and started calling Y/N.

Within a couple rings, you answered, “Hey Bucky.”

“It’s Tony.” His voice was flat. “So you’re coming back?”

“Yes, I’ll come back. I’m sorry I left, it was stupid and immature, but I’m ready now.” Tony sighed.

“Look, Y/N, as soon as you get here, it’s not going to be fun. There’s a lot of shit we have to cleanup, I’ll send you a suit to pick you up tomorrow, there’s going to be officials from the UN who’re going to need you to sign stuff. I’ll have FRIDAY brief you on everything you need to say, otherwise Barnes and I are both looking at jail time, alright?”

“Yes of course, thank you Tony. Thank you for covering for me, I know it hasn’t been easy. I promise I’ll make it up to you.”

He sighed again, “It will be nice to have you around Y/N. I’ll have a suit tomorrow, so be ready to leave in the morning. See you soon.” He hung up the phone and handed it back to Bucky. “Come on, we have a phone call to make.”

———————————————————————

As soon as you arrived to the Avengers compound, you had a collar placed around your neck, and you were pulled into what you believed to be Tony’s office. Around the room was UN officials, who did not look thrilled to see you. You were forced into a chair and recorded, your official statement of the last year.

Next you had to sign a million legal documents, given a strict set of rules, and you had your own copy of the Accords to read over to next week. Once everyone left, Tony took the collar off and apologized.

“Not everyone here thinks you want to be a good guy. You should’ve heard them.” He frowned, “as much as I don’t like them, its best you listen to their rules, otherwise you’ll be thrown in a prison in the middle of the ocean with a collar for the rest of your life.” He paused, “anyways, I have training set up for you for the rest of the day, so let’s go.” Tony dragged you to one of the basements with a coach.

While you didn’t mind your new training regimen, you hated having to do it two times a day, and the little time you actually had was spent reading the Accords. You hadn’t even seen Bucky and the date on your phone reminded you that you’d been here five days.

You unlocked your phone and sent Bucky a message, You busy right now?

The question is, are you? (-:

Not too busy for you (; come here

Aren’t you stuck reading the Accords all week?

Come read it to me lol

There was a knock on your door, you opened it and Bucky grinned ear to ear, “Hi Y/N.” You stepped aside and let him come in.

“Hi Bucky.” He bit his lip to try and hide how hard he was smiling, before you pulled him into a hug. “Thank you.” Bucky still wore the same cologne.

“For what?” He chuckled, burying his face in your neck, you giggled and moved away.

“For protecting me, from how I felt.” You paused, “Its so nice to finally see you again.”

Bucky sat down on your bed, and looked at whatever page of the Accords was open, he looked just as handsome as you remembered.

“You still need me to read this to you?” You grinned and grabbed the booklet, setting it on your nightstand.

“No Buck.” You sat beside him now, “I just wanted to see you.” He raised his eyebrows, “I’ve been here for almost a week and didn’t even get to see you, it just doesn’t seem right.”

“It hurts me too doll, trust me.” You felt your cheeks heat up, “I wasn’t kidding when I said I hadn’t gotten enough time with you. As soon as you finish this stupid reading assignment, let’s go out. Celebrate new beginnings. I hear that Tony has you on that god awful training regimen? It’ll be like that for two weeks and then you get normal training hours.”

“It’s horrible. I don’t get enough time. And that sounds wonderful, I would love to spend time with you.” Bucky stood up.

“Well, that’ll start when you finish this.” He gestured to the Accords, “And that won’t be anytime soon if you keep hanging out with me.”

You groaned, “Nooo don’t leave me with that thing!” Bucky laughed loudly, his smile was so contagious and you wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of your life sharing it with him. Had you fallen in love with him?!

“Yeah yeah doll, I’ll see you soon once you finish it. Get to it.” He shared one last handsome smile before leaving the room.

You slumped back onto the bed, after spending an entire year away from Bucky, you had somehow fallen for him. Sometimes you’d go to the libraries in Spain just to look at the news of Bucky, to see if he’d done anything new. You’d even gone the lengths of buying newspapers that featured articles of him. You couldn’t imagine how he felt hearing nothing about you, other than the occasional solo mission you did. Thoughts of Bucky grounded you, it reminded you that someone in the world liked you for who you were, the someone who couldn’t stick to one place. Someone who didn’t want to tie you down and keep you, and someone who treated you as an equal. Bucky was an anchor, a reason to try and get better. Now you’d done the dumb thing of falling for him.

He didn’t feel the same way, you could tell.

———————————————————————

Bucky found it hard to stay away from you. He knew you finished reading the Accords, but now Tony had you doing all different kinds of tests. How strong you were, everything your powers could do, combat skills, mission strategies, and areas you needed to improve.

It went on for days, and Bucky was suffering knowing you were in the same building but you’d never been so far from his reach. He was shocked that somehow you both had a closer bond than before you left.

During the year you left, Bucky never went a day without wondering how you were doing, sometimes months went by without a sighting of you, and Bucky thought you were dead, or maybe HYDRA got you.

Everyday, Bucky thought about the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, how witty and strong you were, how endearing it was that you could intimidate everyone. Bucky loved how you were rough around the edges, and soft on the inside. He’d fallen for you ages ago, and now he was stuck with unreciprocated feelings.

At least he had you as a friend, right?

———————————————————————

You knocked on Bucky’s door, you heard him scuffle around in his room before the door opened, “Y/N!” He smiled and opened the door wider. You came inside, his room was simple and nice, with old decorations and old pictures up. “Are you finally available for me?” He teased, coming to stand next to you in front of an old picture of him and Steve with the Howling Commandos. “See something you like?” You rolled your eyes and elbowed his side.

He grunted, “Watch your mouth. Maybe I won’t spend the next couple free hours I have with you. I wonder if Wanda’s around?”

“No no! She’s with Vision, don’t be ridiculous!” He giggled and turned you by grabbing your arms, “I just got you backkkk.” He whined dramatically.

“That’s what I thought. Trust me I could definitely use the rest, but instead I’ll spend my time doing something better.” Bucky smirked.

“Doing something better? Did you mean someone?” He wiggled his eyebrows boyishly and you gasped.

“Okay that’s it I’m taking a nap!” You hollered.

“I take it back! It was a joke!” You giggled.

“It better’ve been, sicko. Hurry up and put on your shoes, you’re wasting our time.”

“Didn’t know I was that repulsive to you.” He fake sniffled and sat down on his bed to put his shoes on. You started back at the collection of photos.

You focused on one of Bucky and small Steve, Bucky had such a beautiful-full-of-life-smile. You knew at once why every girl in the 40’s fell for him. Maybe it was the same reasons you did.

“Do I look better with short hair or somethin’?” You jumped, realizing Bucky had somehow snuck up on you.

“I’m gonna put a bell on you if you’re gonna start sneaking around.” You threatened, he grinned.

“You didn’t answer my question, doll.” You shrugged and looked back at the picture.

“You look handsome either way Bucky.” His eyes widened, “can we go now?” He was blushing now and you felt your own cheeks heat up. “Bucky?”

He snapped out of the spell, “Yes, of course let’s go.” You followed him to the garage and he brought you to his motorcycle again. “Maybe this time you’ll actually get to enjoy the ride, huh?” He handed you a helmet.

He climbed on and you got on behind him, once he got the engine started, his hands went to the handlebars and yours went around his middle. He slowly left the garage and drove down the private road towards the city. Within fifteen minutes Bucky brought you to a nice restaurant, linking arms with you down the sidewalk. When you got to the table he pulled your seat out for you.

“Aren’t you a gentleman?” You teased as he sat down across from you.

“Only for you madam.” He winked and opened his menu, you rolled your eyes at him and opened your own.

“Have you eaten here before?” You asked and he shook his head no.

“A certain Spider-kid recommended it to me.” A waitress came by and asked for drink orders.

You looked around the restaurant decor, it was modern and niche, big windows surrounding the areas. “See somethin’ pretty?” He chuckled from across the table, “I know I do.” You met his eyes and he looked right at you, boldly smiling.

“What are you implying?” You bit the inside of your lip a little to hide that you liked when he flirted with you, he wasn’t supposed to know.

“I’m implying many things, Doll.” He said suggestively.

“Okay, shoot.” You replied.

“M’definitely implying that despite how nice this restaurant looks, you’re by far a much better view.” You raised both eyebrows.

“Is that so?” You chuckled nervously, “are you trying to flatter me into spending more time with you?”

“We both know I don’t have to bribe you to spend time with me.” Bucky looked smug, “I’m just being honest. Have the times changed where a man doesn’t compliment his date?” His face dropped, “Not date..I meant—friend.”

The waitress came and put drinks down and took food orders at the perfect time, you sipped on something fruity Bucky ordered for you quietly. “What kinds of things did I miss out on while I was gone?”

“Oh just a lot of small scale missions, nothing big.”

“No I mean just like fun things the team did.” You smiled at him, watching his brows furrow while he tried to come up with stuff.

“There was a nice Halloween party, Sam dressed up as me by wrapping tinfoil around his arm, I dressed as him by putting on fairy wings and sunglasses, we did secret Santa for Christmas, Tony and Steve helped host the New Year’s Eve party in Times Square...at one point most of the team went on a team bonding camping trip.” He shrugged, “April Fools was the worst, Clint and Natasha had a prank war and just about everyone participated, it was like a civil war.”

You giggled, “I feel stupid for running away. Really really stupid. I was so scared to be part of something like that, but now it just sounds so—nice.”

“Don’t feel bad about running away from things that scare you, I do it all the time. It’s just something we gotta work on, doll.” You frowned.

“What’s with the nickname? Is that an insult?” You questioned and Bucky’s jaw dropped.

“I—no! Uhh, it’s just a term of endearment.” You grinned at him.

“Alright and mine for you will be..” you thought for a moment, “Ah, Fucky.”

“Thanks Y/N.”

———————————————————————

[itsthenerdwonder]

Avengers: Endgame

So I just saw it again. I should’ve done this the first time I saw it. The audience was amazing. The laughs and gasps and cheers and tears! We were into it. There were a couple tops of heads bobbing across the bottom of the screen of people needing to pee, but overall a great experience with my roommate. 

But my parents wanted to see it too, so my dad bought tickets for an 11:30 a.m. showing yesterday. Earlier is better, but that means we don’t get the kids or teens who love this series. Just the adults who are taking off work. That might not have been bad, but it’s a dine-in theater (so people were constantly moving around in my direct line of sight) with one kid running up and down the stairs (I get you need to pee, but if you stomp one more time I will snap you out of existence) and people talking (if you want to whisper, that’s fine as I constantly whisper through movies, but even my mom talked loudly because she needed me to hear from 4 seats away) but not cheering. Come on! That was an amazing shot! He did the thing! We won! Clap! Cheer! Something!

I also didn’t bring my notebook to write down my immediate thoughts, so I’m going to basically give a play by play as best as I can. Mostly memories of the first showing, as I’m sure you guys would prefer. On with the review!

So the movie starts immediately with the death of the Barton family. The logo hasn’t even started, but here we go! Death and pain await us. 

Once the logo starts, we switch to Tony and Nebula on the...ship. I kinda wanna say Millennium Falcon, but that’s not even close to accurate. *googles* The Benatar. ...yeah, I’m not calling it that. Anyway, Tony’s teaching her how to play tabletop football, and it’s adorable. He’s teaching her how to be softer and she’s letting him eat the last food and he’s fixing the ship and she’s fixing his body and it’s...it’s just so nice. I mean, we have Tony doing a voice over of how they’re going to die which isn’t as nice, but their bond at being the last ones on Titan is just...I love it. We’re barely 5 minutes in and I’m about to cry.

And then we get a Carol ex Machina. Yay? Anyway, they get back to Earth (side note: the end scene of CM was apparently not in this movie, but it probably got cut due to time constraints) and Steve is the first one there. He’s the first one to Tony, the first one to try and help him, the first to hear his regrets, the first to offer sympathy and I don’t ship Stoney, but DANG! That’s how you do it! And then Pepper is there and she and Tony are kissing and hugging and it’s adorable even though we just cut out Steve and he looks a little awkward.

Cut to inside and the death toll rolling and climbing and Tony loses it. He’s still mad at Cap for Civil War. Still pissed about how everyone jumped down his throat for Ultron when he was doing his damnedest to prevent this exact situation where everyone died. And like...no. I still disagree with your idea that it was better to put a “suit of armor” around the world than protect everyone’s “precious freedoms,” but I understand what you’re saying. Dad didn’t back up Mom and now our kids have been murdered by a drive-by hitman. I get it. I’m still not supporting you, but I understand why you’re pissed. 

But, Nebula knows where the purple cockroach scuttled off to and Carol is a fucking tank, so let’s go. But the stones have already been destroyed. ...I’m sure this will have no lasting consequences, especially since the Ancient One said “these things create our understanding of time, reality, space. if you take one away...you risk catastrophic disaster and alternate timelines.” BUT NOW THEY’RE ALL GONE because some fuck boy decided to play with things he didn’t understand to “correct” a problem he didn’t understand and had no business messing with. Thor cuts off the gauntlet and then his head before walking off into an increasingly blurry image and we roll the title. 

FIVE. YEARS. LATER.

Steve’s leading a support group (ONE GUY SAYS THE WORD MAN INSTEAD OF WOMAN ABOUT HIS DATE SO NOW WE HAVE LGBT REPRESENTATION YAAAAYYYY! fuck this) and Natasha’s leading the remaining Avengers. Carol says “I’m busy dealing with other worlds besides Earth, so piece out bitches.” Rocket and Nebula...I’m assuming are doing the same thing. It’s not really clear. Okoye is...here for some reason to say there’s an earthquake, but there’s nothing we can do. Um...rescue teams? We can’t do anything about the earthquake, but if you’re reporting it, I’m sure it caused some mild damage or something? No? You’re useless. Rhodey reports that a cartel in Mexico has been slaughtered by Clint and we’re not supposed to be okay with that. I mean, wouldn’t be the first time he was a bad guy, and he’s more anti-hero/rogue vigilante than bad guy, but you do you.

Then Steve comes in, sees Nat trying not to sob because Clint’s bad and the world is bad and she’s stressed, and tries to cheer her up. But, DING DONG! Scott’s not dead. See, a rat in San Francisco pushed the right button and spit Scott back out into a storage area. After walking home with a little red wagon and finding Cassie, now age 13-15, and getting the 411 on the last 5 years, he got the La Cucaracha van out of storage and drove it all the way to upstate New York. So now he’s jittery and weird (probably because he spent 5 years hours in the quantum realm and he went a little cuckoo) and saying they should try time travel to get the stones back so they can undo what Thanos did. 

It’s just crazy enough to work. LET’S ASK TONY! Who has a child to show that time has passed. The daughter is wearing an iron mask that Tony says is for “mom” so we aren’t confused when Rescue shows up later. Not that anyone would know her name is Rescue outside of comic book fans, but who cares because Tony is an adorable father. But then the plot shows up and says “get in, loser, we’re going time heisting.” Tony’s all like...you’re kidding, right? And so is the audience, but weirder things have happened in comics and Tony always loved a dramatic entrance, so whatever.

Then we have Professor Hulk, as he is apparently called. And...in my opinion, this is the worst scene in the movie. We’re in a diner and the food is in bowls bigger than my head and Professor Hulk gets talked into helping with the time heist. Sure, fine, we need the plot to move forward. We have a nice explanation how Hulk and Banner are one and it’s Hulk’s body with Banner’s brains because they did some soul searching and are better now. That’s nice. I like that. That is a good part of this scene. But then we have some weird kids taking a picture with Hulk/Banner (you know what, I’m just going to use whichever one I want and you can fight me) and Scott says, “do you want one with me? I’m Ant-Man.” And thus begins the longest 5 minutes of the entire movie. It might not even be that long, but it actually feels a little longer. The kids don’t want a picture because they’re Hulk fans instead of Ant-Man fans. That’s fine, that happens. And they don’t know who he is, which...this is New York and he’s over in San Francisco. Plus, no one sees Ant-Man. Giant-Man/Goliath? Sure. But not Ant-Man. And Scott sees it and immediately retracts his offer to keep it from being weird. But Hulk, to be nice, pushes the issue, which makes it weird. And I’m like, if you want to push it, ask if they want Cap’s or Black Widow’s? But no, we have to have the kids smiling but clearly not wanting too and Scott seeing that and being a little hurt but understanding he’s not an A-lister and Bruce being “kind” but about as intelligent as Hulk. We have time for this? The movie is over 3 hours long? We kept this? Why? Did test audiences love it? Cut it!

And back to Tony who shows us a picture of him and Peter goofing off (don’t make me cry yet, save it for the hug or the Simba/Mufasa moment) and thinks that maybe he can have hope again. We don’t know how long he works on it, he just says “one last time before bed and I shut it all down.” But then...“SHIT!” “shit.” Duh! Knew that was coming. Kids say the shittiest things. But it’s okay because she loves him 3000. That’s going to be a knife wound that won’t heal anytime soon. Anyway, he tells Pepper that he figured out time travel. Because that’s something you can just do. And because he knows that if he continues down this path, he’ll probably unretire again. He won’t stop helping because he can’t stop and he doesn’t want to stop. He’ll become Iron Man again. And Pepper says, “but will you be able to rest?” And, if you guys remember back in IM3 how Tony couldn’t sleep? It would probably be like that. It might not be visions of Thanos’s ship, it would probably be Peter asking why he couldn’t come home. So...yeah, mull on that for a bit. 

The next day, Banner, Steve and Nat test out time travel on Scott. But he becomes a kid, an old man, and a baby because “instead of pushing Lang through time, you essentially pushed time through Lang.” Also, Tony’s here! He got a little “I told you so” moment, but he and Steve are definitely on better grounds than the last time we saw them. (Tony’s porch doesn’t count because that was mostly Tony and Scott with a little bit from Steve to say “pretty please with a cherry on top?”) And then Tony asks if we’re getting the whole team.

Rocket and Nebula show up in the ship and blast away the insides of Scott’s taco. “Rhodey, be careful on reentry, there’s an idiot in the landing zone.” *CLANK* *Scott drops the taco shell in fear* “Sup, Regular-Sized Man?” It’s so funny followed by Hulk sharing two tacos with Scott to replace his. Adorable. Anyway, so Hulk and Rocket go to pick up Thor in New Asgard. No idea where this is. I think it was in Kansas originally, but Rocket, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore. Looks more like coastal Maine or something. We meet up with Valkyrie who informs us that Thor is doing a bang-up job leading his Asgardian subjects in their new home. Also that she’s weirded out by Professor Hulk, which is fair. Me too, although I can look at him while my roommate said she couldn’t, but she’s a weirdo so whatever. 

Anyway, Thor’s holed up in his house with Korg and Miek playing Fortnight and Thor threatens a child for being an ass. By the way, Thor’s fat now. Yeah, after watching everyone he ever loved die plus failing to prevent the deaths of quadrillions, he’s wallowing in a drunken stupor and eating carbs. It’s played for laughs, but like, sheesh. It’s pretty rough. This is Thor! A literal god! This is the guy who’s been stabbed multiple times by his brother and continues to love and care for him. He can bounce back from anything...right? Hulk tries to convince him to come back, but he doesn’t consider it until Rocket says they have beer on the ship.

Now to pick up Hawkeye. To Tokyo we go! Hawkeye Ronin is chasing this guy who’s probably Yakuza or some other mafia guy. Clint kills him, which is kinda cool in a visual and choreographic sense, but not super profound. Nat says we might be able to bring your fam back. “Don’t give me hope.” “I wish I could’ve given it to you sooner.” And now we test the time travel thing. Clint goes home (space=check) and grabs his sons’ baseball mitt before hearing the voice of his daughter (time=check) and being pulled back with the mitt still in hand (probably accidental, but return with objects=check). Now we figure out when. Previously on Thor the Dark World...on Guardians of the Galaxy...on Infinity War...on Avengers...on Doctor Strange: Infinity Stone montage. This montage marks the start of hour 2. We are now getting interesting. 

Cap, Scott and Tony to Avengers with Bruce tagging along for five seconds. Thor and Rocket to Thor: The Dark World. Nebula and Rhodey to Guardians and Clint and Nat to Infinity War, but at the same time as Guardians. Natalie Portman’s back and being stalked by a rabbit. Rene Russo’s back and being stalked by fat!Thor. Tilda Swinton’s back and explaining magic to Bruce. Robert Redford is back and being an ass to past!Tony while present!Tony tells Scott “lightly kill me.” Come and Get Your Love is back and cutting out so we can laugh at Chris Pratt. Hugo Weaving is back and just as unhelpful as ever. That one shot of Avengers is back and showing up the framing of this movie. (seriously, I want a good shot of A-force or all of the “avengers.” Apparently the Russo’s don’t understand screenshots.) Also, discussion of America’s ass is a thing (I love it) and MCU!Cap quotes Comics!Cap by saying “Hang glider” (I hate it.) But apparently Tony forgot about Hulk’s mini-freak out over the stairs (should’ve let one of the fliers go down the stairs instead of Hulk) so in the middle of their heist, the case flies open, Loki grabs the tessaract and gets the heck out of Dodge. ...I’m sure it’s fine.

Now Steve and Tony go back even further STAN LEE CAMEO! RIP! and Scott, being new here, doesn’t understand that Mom and Dad are finally on the same page and now is when you just sit back and watch in awe as they do their thing better than you ever could. So they go back to 1971 and Steve sees Peggy and Tony runs into Howard. We’ve switched to old Howard, not the one from First Avenger/the Agent Carter series. And Tony and Howard bond over being dads (he was still shitty. Just because he wasn’t horrible all the time doesn’t excuse his emotional and [at least in the comics] physical abuse) while Steve dreams for 5 seconds before tricking Michael Douglas out of his office to grab more Pym Particles for them to get home. 

Meanwhile, Nat and Clint fight on a cliff while Red Skull sits back eating popcorn or some shit. Why are they fighting? Well, who’s going to die, of course. Because Clint feels guilty over becoming a vigilante and Nat has nothing else to live for? Okay, pros? Clint has a fam. Nat is managing the Avengers. Cons? Clint went a little crazy for a couple years, but he was doing what he thought was helping, so...??? Nat has red in her ledger, but she’s been trying to wipe it out since day one, so...? They basically do that thing where one person gets up and the other person trips them as they go by. Eventually Nat dies and it’s pretty sad. But...now we have all the stones! Yay?

Oh, and Thor and mom had a heart-to-heart where Frigga said “you’re a failure and that’s okay because we all fail. Now, look on the bright side, find your hope, and start eating better.” Then Thor grabbed Mjolnir (I’m sure there were no implications there, unless Cap gave it back with the Aether) and was super happy because he was still worthy. Even fat and a failure, he’s still worthy of wielding Mjolnir. So sweet. So nice. Anyway, it’s rabbit season duck season rabbit season duck season and Rocket and Thor skedaddle and meet up with everyone else at the same time, but without Nat. They mourn, but Thor says “knock it off, she’s not dead.” Which, considering how many times Loki’s died plus he’s wielding his destroyed hammer with the destroyed Infinity Stones ...yeah, that’s fair. But “she can’t come back” because her contract’s up and she doesn’t wanna.

And now we enter hour 3! The best part, in my opinion. We have the stones. Tony’s made an Iron Gauntlet to hold them. Thor wants to do it so he can finally feel useful and like he did something right, but Tony won’t let him because he’s not in the right mindset. Fair, Thor’s probably still drunk as a skunk, but the guy needs a win. You should understand that, Tony. Hulk says “I’ll do it cuz I’m bigger than you, and Thanos was big and his arm got turned into a chicken wing, extra crispy.” So he puts on the Iron Gauntlet and screams in agony. That’s what happens when you use subpar materials. Probably should’ve gone to Nidavilir instead of using Earth tech, but whatever. Hulk snaps and then birds are singing and Mrs. Barton is calling her husband like...where did you go and where’s all the food? We probably won.

But, uh oh, apparently Nebula has a network (...sure?) and they forgot to put her on airplane mode when she went back to 2014. So the broadband was crowded and Nebula kept making the dial-up sound. Thanos took present!Nebula in 2014 on his ship and past!Nebula takes her gold plating and puts them on top of her blue plating (...no, but whatever) and she goes back to the future instead of present!Nebula. Now that past!Nebula and her continued obsession with getting daddy’s approval are in the future, she can bring the entirety of Thanos’s ship with her. I guess Thanos replicated the Pym Particle? Or Maw did? Whatever, we need a final battle, so here we go.

Just as Clint is gaining hope and Scott’s saying “ooh pretty” to the birds and Tony’s trying to keep Hulks arm from turning grey, Thanos says “surprise, muddafucka,” and drops a single nuke. Rhodey, Rocket and Hulk are all trapped together with rising water and Hulk keeping the building off of them with one arm. Scott’s running as fast as his little legs will carry him to help, although it’s probably good that he’s so small in the continually collapsing building. Clint has the Iron Gauntlet and is running away from those ugly things from Infinity War. You know, the Mieks that kill themselves at the Wakandan border? Yeah, gross. And Tony is joking with Steve and it’s nice even in this scary time. Thor suits up with a cool braided beard, Thanos says “I’ve changed my mind. Forget wiping out half, let’s start from scratch,” and it’s time to start fighting for another 45-50 minutes.

Thor, Steve and Tony go at it. Combo moves and team ups and Thanos is getting beat up, but not going down. Then he throws Iron Man away. He flicks Cap off of him. He grabs Stormbreaker and starts to do the thing that Thor does to his future self last movie. And a girl in the audience just starts shouting, “Come on, Thor! Come on, Thor!” And internally I’m right there with her, but then THE AUDIENCE. LOSES. THEIR. SHIT!!!! I know there were more people screaming than just me, but I probably contributed about 50% of the collective volume. STEVE ROGERS IS WIELDING MJOLNIR! YES! We’ve been waiting for that since Ultron! Probably my favorite part of the whole movie. I’m totally going to find that video on YouTube and save it for myself because FUCK YEAH! 

Meanwhile, Hawkeye has been playing keep away with the evil Mieks and past!Nebula shows up to grab the Iron Gauntlet. Present!Nebula convinces past!Gamora they’re on the same side and we can kill Thanos. They start by saving Hawkeye from past!Nebula and kill her. ...I’m sure it’s fine. 

Thanos kicks America’s ass. He calls down the 4 uglies we killed last movie plus more armies. I guess his ship was there on Earth while he was dicking around on Titan? Otherwise, how did the the triangle ships get to Wakanda? Whatever. We have a gorgeous shot of Cap in the high ground backed by white walking down to face Thanos with the low ground backed by darkness. And then...“Hey Cap...Cap, it’s Sam. Do you copy?...On your left.” And a magic wormhole opens up and Okoye, T’Challa and Shuri all walk through and nod at Steve for a whole minute before Sam flies through. And then, all the circles show up and everybody walks through. Valkyrie on her horse; Spidey thwiping behind the Guardians; Wong and his sorcerers; Wasp and Bucky; Scott growing big and saving Hulk, Rhodey and Rocket; it’s a who’s who of the MCU. “Is that everyone?” “You want more?!” (yeah, actually. Where are my Defenders?) We’re all eating it up. Clapping and cheering and then Cap raises Mjolnir and says, “AVENGERS...assemble” and they charge and the audience goes wild. I personally think the assemble shouldn’t have been so quiet. Like, how did they hear him and know to charge? But it’s fine. I don’t care. KICK THE ANNOYING GRAPE’S BUTT! And they do.

In between the fighting, we get several nice moments and call backs. Rocket and Bucky fighting side by side again, although Rocket doesn’t make a prosthetic joke. Scott and Hope start up La Cucaracha van to take the stones back in time and Hope calls Steve “Cap,” because “that’s what we call him. If you’re a friend.” Iron Man and Rescue are fighting back to back and I love this power couple so much. Doctor Strange gets sidelined taking care of a burst damn (guess he’s too powerful and we can’t have him showing up the og Avengers) but Tony’s like “Is this the one where we win?” Strange is all “if I tell you what I wished on the birthday candle, it won’t come true,” which I guess is as good an explanation as any. Hawkeye’s getting overwhelmed and T’Challa says, “Clint, give it to me,” because he doesn’t know his name is Hawkeye since he introduced himself as “We haven’t met. I’m Clint.” “I don’t care.” Spidey takes it and tells Karen to “turn on Instant Kill” because this is a time where it definitely qualifies. He then gets rescued by Mjolnir and Cap telling him “Hey, Queens, head’s up,” which is adorable. And then Tony hugs Peter because he loves him but also “That’s not a hug, I’m just getting the door for you. We’re not there yet.” Past!Gamora saving Quill and when he sees her and caresses her, she knees him in the balls. “Seriously? Him,” she asks. Present!Nebula replies, “It was either him or a tree,” which is fair. Drax isn’t interested, she’s like his murderous little sister and Rocket is...no. We’re having so much fun.

Wanda shows up in front of past!Thanos and says “You’ve taken everything from me.” “I don’t even know you,” which is fair. But then she’s like, “You will.” And dang! If that’s not a badass line, I don’t know what is! She and he go at it and it’s awesome and then he’s pressing down on her, but she smiles and destroys half of the dual sword, making him effectively fucked. And she’s got him. He’s a goner, until he cheats again. He cheated with Vision and he cheats here. So what’s important is while Iron Man or Thor or Captain America are super powerful, Thanos can easily take them on in hand-to-hand combat. But Scarlett Witch? She’s too awesome! He can’t beat her playing fair! The cheating prune has to call for air support to get her off of him. Screw everyone and everything else, get this powerful witch off! And it works, but luckily, the sorcerers put up shields to protect people from the falling nukes. And then...they stop and point up...oooooh BABY! LET’S GO! I mean, it’s totally a Carol ex Machina, but I love seeing her just tank everything. 

She takes out the ship, allowing everyone a second to breathe and Peter to slightly uncurl and hold the Iron Gauntlet. “Hey, I’m Peter Parker.” Sweety! Use your made-up name! “Hey, Peter Parker, you got something for me?” And it’s confident and badass, but you know what’s even more badass? FUCKING A-FORCE! “Don’t worry. She has help.” FUCK YEAH! Every single female in the MCU (minus Widow)! I love it so much. I wish we could’ve had a single frame where all of the ladies are visible, but it was still so awesome. And Captain Marvel is charging towards La Cucaracha van and is about to win until the purple toad throws the other half of his big sword into the back of the van. Jerk. Doctor Strange takes a hand away from dealing with the water (which...isn’t doing anything. Yay?) to tell Tony, “1.”

Now we get to play keep away on a smaller stage. Thanos vs Carol is badass. She doesn’t even flinch when he headbutts her. So fucking awesome. But then he cheats and pulls out the power stone (that hurts to hold but not the blue stone in infinity war? okay) to punch her. That does it and takes her out, then Thor and Cap try and team up but he throws them off and give Steve a massive headache. He puts on the glove and is about to snap his fingers--but Tony swoops in at the last second. And we know he’s no match. We’ve seen him lose to the purple gorilla twice! So what’s he gonna, oh. Nanotechnology to the rescue. Unfortunately, the suit was not designed to hold 6 Infinity Stones, so while Tony stays conscious enough to spout a great one-liner “And I...am...Iron Man,” and snap his fingers, that’s it. Thanos and his entire army are dust. ...I’m sure it’s fine. Like, get fucked, but...time travel? Anyway, Tony is...he’s done. He’s only human. Thanos is...a big alien. Hulk is...a big monster. Stark is...Iron Man. It’s at this point my roommate is sobbing into my arm. And I can hear sniffles in the theater until the end of the movie. 

Rhodey finds Tony first, and I thought he was already dead, not going to lie. Tony can’t do anything. He can’t move, blinking isn’t happening, his eyes are very unfocused. One might assume he was dead. But then Peter comes in and, oh! If you weren’t already crying, now we have Peter telling Tony “we won” like Steve did all those years ago. But now it’s...it feels like Simba at the death of Mufasa. “HEEEEEELP! SOMEBODY! Anybody. Help.” And so Pepper comes to the Rescue (sorry, you’re right, not the time) and tells him, “it’s okay. We’ll be okay. You can rest now.” I don’t know if “we” is Pepper and Morgan, the Avengers, Earth/the galaxy, or the MCU, but man! This thing that Iron Man started 11 years ago is...it’s come into it’s own. And saying goodbye to Tony Stark, the man who’s been in almost as many MCU movies as Stan Lee, to RDJ, the man who is Tony Stark in his early trials and path to redemption, to Iron Man, the superhero who gave us hope in a world of bad Marvel movies, is hard. 

And then we have a funeral because we really needed it. Tony gets a last speech of “if I die, I still love you.” WE LOVE YOU 3000! And then we get everyone standing around for the funeral for Tony and no one else. (Black Widow? Gamora? Loki? No? Why not?) Pepper lays down a wreath with the “Proof that Tony Stark has a Heart” and we have a tracking shot of pain. Pepper, Happy, Morgan and Steve. Ant-Mans and Wasps. Gaurdians of the Galaxy minus Gamora. T’Challa, Okoye and Shuri. The Barton Family. Bucky, Falcon and Wanda. THAT KID FROM IM3! Maria Hill and Gen. Ross. Captain Marvel. And then Nicholas J. Fury with Coulson standing behind him. And Morgan wants cheeseburgers! And Happy’s gonna give them to her!!!!! DON’T MAKE ME CRY AT CHEESEBURGERS, RUSSOS! 

Thor gives Valkyrie kingship over New Asgard (which is awesome) and dicks off with the Guardians. Barton retires, for good this time. And Cap’s going back in time to put all the stones back. I don’t know if that means the stones are still gone or back or what because...The Ancient One said something about we need all six to exist or catastrophe, but Thanos is an idiot so...idk. Anyway, Cap goes and gives the stones back and then decides to live the rest of his life with Peggy Carter because apparently he’s still not over her. I thought he kinda was. He started dating Sharon or something, right? You know what, it’s cute and adorable. Anyway, Steve’s old now and passes on a fixed shield to Sam. Bucky’s perfectly okay with it, and I am too. Captain Falcon and Bucky? I like it. Might not be the dynamic duo that Captain America and Bucky were, but still good. And then the credits roll and the og Avengers sign their names and we’re all clapping and cheering and crying and it’s so beautiful.

This movie...you know. If you’re reading this, you’ve already seen the movie, so you know. You know how good it is. It’s not perfect. The beginning is slow, some of the jokes don’t land and some people don’t like where the Russos took certain characters. “Steve shouldn’t have gone to live with Peggy!” “How dare they kill off Tony!” “They fridged Natasha! It should’ve been Clint!” “I don’t like that they made Thor a joke! FAT PEOPLE AREN’T FUNNY EVER!” “Ronin was stupid!” “I couldn’t look at Hulk!” “Captain Marvel needed more screen time!” “Captain Marvel had too much screen time!” “TIME TRAVEL!” SHUT UP! 

Look, the movie isn’t perfect, but if you want to constantly bitch about this movie, go watch CinemaSins. This movie is great. Not perfect, but great. It is epic. It is grand. It is a finale for the ages. We the fans have seen the movies, made the fanfiction, bought the merch and just enjoyed the heck out of this massive franchise for the past 11 years. We wanted an ending of monumental proportions and that’s what we got. I’m not going to defend their take on how Thor was funny because he was fat. I’m not going to say Steve should or shouldn’t have married Peggy. I’m not going to say who should have died or not died. I am at peace. Because this is a great movie. Not a good one, a great one. It ties up so many plot points and character arcs from Iron Man and brings it back for us to enjoy. We love this movie because they loved us. And if you disagreed with something, Archive of Our Own is always taking new fanfic. We’ll read it and enjoy it, but right now, I want to enjoy a cup of cocoa to drown my sorrows in. This has been a journey of epic proportions, but my tears are still coming and I’d like to read some happy fanfic. I’ll see you on the flip side, nerds, for a new live blogging series. Later.

[shark-myths]

Folie A Deux

I promised to write FAD meta like, forever ago. It took longer than I planned. Here it is, at last.

Folie is anthemic, artistic; it’s cynicism and heartbreak all layered up in failing hope. It’s Pete saying goodbye to his band and embarking on a new life as a husband and a father. It’s Patrick finding his confidence as a showman just in time for it to turn to ash on his tongue and prompt him to remake himself utterly. It’s Joe finally feeling like he has a role in FOB and creative ownership of his own band. It’s Andy, um, drumming. Super well. Without any particular emotional interpretation on my part because Andy’s, you know, pretty content to just play with his friends.

Without further blathering, allow me to present, at long last: a rambling, tear-filled, official Tryst Theory ™ interpretation of FOB’s fourth-and-almost-final studio album.

I am always struck most by the quality of obstruction in the albums produced during the Commercial Success/’Sell Out’ era. Pete begins obscuring himself for the first time during Infinity on High and especially Folie A Deux: the lyrics become increasingly senseless, more about cleverness and sound that saying things plainly. But he’s so honest during this era too. He tells us exactly what it feels like to be him, to be so pulled apart and scrutinized and sad, to be sick on his own hope. To be sick and fuzzy, made of stuffing, and far away on way-too-many anxiety meds. We get lines that don’t make much sense on the surface, like ‘I’m not a chance, put a heat wave in your pants,’ and we get the self-aware aggression of bops like I Don’t Care.

In the previous era, Pete didn’t really know what it meant, yet—being Pete Wentz. Being so public. Being the face of the band, being the bad guy and the heel. What it would cost. Now he understands that anything he touches, or looks at, or says at loud is going to change. Once he does it, says it, thinks it, feels it, it’s out of his control. It’s owned by someone else. Even his private body, his private phone. Even his decision to defend his friend from an aggressive bouncer onstage. The brand of phone he carries, the girls he texts, who he stands next to in photos, the cities where he plays shows and the cities he does not. Now he understands that his life is not his, but something the public will use to hurt him if we get bored. This is drugstore cowboy Pete. This is a Pete grown so heavy under the weight of his own misery and bullshit that he can barely go on. This is a Pete preparing to say goodbye.

Which is a long way of saying: Folie A Deux fucks me up.

 A little history (sourced heavily from Wikipedia):

The album was recorded from July-September 2008, beginning two months after Pete and Ashlee were married, and released in December 2008, shortly after Bronx was born. They started recording ahead of schedule, without telling the label, and deliberately limited their studio time. They wanted to recapture what they had felt during Grave, when they were racing against their drained back accounts to get the album set down. They wanted that simplicity and rawness, the feeling of being mixed-up kids half living out of a van and making music that felt vibrant and essential. Patrick told AP, “There was something really interesting about that creative process when we were starting out. The more time you have, the more potential you have for excess.” (He thought he dominated Infinity and wanted to pare himself back, reign himself in, for Folir.) They tried to emulate the process and feeling of Grave as much as possible: “first-thought, best-thought.” Joe pushed to be included more in collaboration and felt like he “owned the songs a lot more. It made me really excited about contributing to Fall Out Boy and made me find my role in the band.” Pete made an effort (this is him making an effort, okay) to keep his personal life more sequestered from the writing and use more metaphor and the conceit characters speaking lines, more like a stage musical. And, perhaps true to the feeling of Grave, Pete and Patrick fought painfully and violently over the record. It was personal and artistic for everyone. They felt it was their best work.

Fans tore them apart, of course. Booing anytime they played anything off the new record. The album undersold and public reception did not match the glowing critical reviews. They tried to say something important, to talk about society and convey real messages in their music. They were publicly rebuffed. Joe told Rolling Stone, “Some of us were miserable on stage. Others were just drunk.” The reception, the struggle, cemented what Pete had already decided to do: leave the band.

(Let’s not talk about the last song of what he thought would be their last show ever during which, instead of playing Saturday with his best friends and his me-and-Pat, he had the man who named the band in the first place shave off his signature Pete Wentz hair in a symbolic ritual of fucking morning, let’s not let’s not)

(but in case you want to)

 A little cover art:

I just want you to know that Pete Wentz has the original painting of that cover in his home. IN CASE YOU THINK THAT’S RELEVANT.

This image. With Pete’s furry history. With the costumes and feeling like a zoo animal and playing the role of the heel, with the way he said in the Folie Making Of video that being perceived in media is “like wearing a costume, you’re not who you are.” With his interest especially in bears, the talk of stitches and stuffing and seams, with the Lullabye track and ‘honey is for bees silly bear’ (and Black Cards’ ‘you’re my best friend, honeycomb head’) and the whole Winnie the Pooh vibe. With the devoted companionship and singular love exhibited by Winnie the Pooh and the way he turns back into inert, lifeless stuffing when you grow too old and you forget what he really is and see him as just a toy, empty and pliable, and the way only childhood wonder and innocence can return him to life. How the cover has not just one person on it, but a bear-boy plus one: a madness shared by two. A real bear, and someone who’s just pretending, or just trying to be. What a match, what a catch.

WHAT A PETERICK MASTERPIECE THIS FUCKING ALBUM IS

The liner notes are empty, by the way. For the physical CD. The liner notes are just pictures and names of band members, then production information and thanks to ‘fans, friends, and loves.’ Nothing else. No lyrics. No record. If that’s not foreshadowing—

 And now said masterpiece itself:

1. Disloyal Order of the Water Buffaloes

Okay, so let’s take a step back and imagine for a second the decision-making process that went into writing a magnum fucking opus Peterick anthem to open the album with. Are we all on the same page here? WHAT THE FUCK, were they TRYING to kill me

This album is the fucking Holy Grail of the drug use = Patrick metaphor, and we dive right into it with this one. Boycott love. Detox just to retox. DRAW YOUR OWN HOLD ME TIGHT OR DON’T PARALLELS. #trysttheory

For all that Pete tried to move away from autobiographical lyrics on this album, his view of himself is plain in this song: ‘perfect boys with their perfect lives, no one wants to hear you sing about tragedy.’

The line ‘fell out of bed, butterfly bandage, but don’t worry’ brings up my theories about what dreams mean. Falling out of bed and getting hurt is a clear consequence of dreaming so hard you forgot it was just a dream (or trysting with your best friend and forgetting there could be consequences, real people you can hurt and yourself included). ‘You’ll never remember, your head is far too blurry’ ties into w.a.m.s as well as Cooperstown and the idea of being blurry-headed, impaired because you’re fucked up on love or some other drug, and making choices you’d regret, if you could remember them. Making mistakes you’ll have to live with whether you remember them or not.

(Romantically speaking, water buffaloes are disloyal: Google suggests a single male water buffalo can sire as many as 100 baby buffs in a single mating season. It seems pretty obvious throughout this album that issues of infidelity were large in Pete’s mind while writing these lyrics.)

2. I Don’t Care

This song makes me think of Wilson (Expensive Mistakes) so much. Starting over again in Mexico, friends who don’t care about you, the blues-pop bounce to it and repeating riff? Sonically, they have a lot in common.

Pete may be playing on his previous reference to Closer (‘he tastes like you only sweeter’) with the opening line here—‘say my name and his in the same breath, I dare you to say they taste the same’—which is the saddest and most painful movie about heterosexuals you will ever watch, but writing that line and putting it on Patrick’s tongue? That may be the gayest thing that happens to me all night, guys, and I’m a queer girl with a bottle of wine and a long, long Friday evening ahead of me.

This song is so much a conversation Pete is having with the world about his fame and notoriety, imo. He calls it a narcissist’s anthem but I don’t think that’s it, exactly. I think—and the music video backs me up on this—it’s a coy wink at their own reputation, all the shit people are slinging about them and Pete specifically. We get a drug reference here, too: ‘take a chance, let your body get a tolerance.’

Also, Patrick is a nun in the video. Pete put Patrick in a literal fucking habit. What more do you need to me to say to prove definitely that Pete is desperately in love with him? This. Kid. In. A. Nun’s. Habit.

3. She’s My Winona

IF THIS SONG ISN’T A DISCUSSION OF HOW PETE HAD TO REVISE HIS PETERICK AMBITIONS WHEN HE FOUND OUT ASHLEE WAS PREGNANT

(There are so many suicide references in this song I want to join Pete and the band’s manager in cheering and celebrating all over again that our boy lived to 28. You can physically feel him resigning himself to living a long life in these verses.)

‘Hell or glory, I don’t want anything in between.’ I take this line as pretty directly about him and Patrick: he doesn’t care if they go to hell and it ruins the band, he wants to take the risk, because he thinks together they could be—glory. He wants to roll the dice. (Take a chance—I’m not a chance.) And ‘then came a baby boy with long eyelashes, and daddy said “you gotta show the world the thunder.”’ In other words, he wanted hell or glory, ruination or Patrick, but then along came his son. And his priorities changed. Of course they did. True love is one thing; raising your child is another.

‘We had a good run, even I have to admit.’

(And—here’s the thing—people ask me sometimes, what I think about Pete marrying Ashlee. “Do you think he married her just because it was the right thing to do?” No. I think he believed in love and family and forever. I think Pete believed it would work. I think he wanted it to. I think that’s why the trysting, and eventually the band, stopped: because Pete tried his fucking best. I think he loved her and loved the idea of a future for himself—the first time he’s ever really imagined that. The idea of somewhere to belong, a real family, one that he felt part of. I think he wanted more than anything for it to work precisely because it was so different from what he, or anyone else, ever expected for him. He said ‘I want to marry this girl’ and he meant it. He really did intend to love her forever, as best he could, and not love anyone else if he could help it.

But those aren’t good reasons to build a whole relationship on, a marriage on. And he was a mess, and in love with Patrick too, and hated and famous and fucked. He had no privacy, limited emotional maturity, a burgeoning substance problem and no sense of himself that wasn’t dependent on what the culture and the media and his fans and his friends reflected back to him and said was true. There was no way they could be happy together under those circumstances, and he’d have stayed forever anyway, I think. His interviews about that time—when he stopped shaving, then stopped showering; when he was a drugstore cowboy stay-at-home dad, depressed and giving up—he doesn’t blame Ashlee for wanting to leave. He hated himself enough to be miserable forever, but she didn’t. So of course it fell apart.)

4. America’s Suitehearts

This commercial headfuck of a song. Jerry christ, guys, someone throw me an anchor so I can drown myself. This caricature, the monstrosity and performance of celebrity, the way the band is reduced to wrestling alter egos, painted and pretend. No one’s being subtle with this song, this video. They are showing us exactly what they mean.

‘I must confess, I’m in love with my own sins.’

DO YOU MEAN LIKE BEING IN GAY LOVE WITH YOUR BEST FRIEND

DO YOU MEAN THAT SIN?

And this verse, though ostensibly about the vagaries of fame, sounds so much like him falling in love with Patrick while Patrick is oblivious:

‘You can bow and pretend you don’t know you’re a legend. Time just hasn’t told anyone else yet. I’m sorry, I just let my love loose again.’

For so many years, Pete believed his love was something he had to apologize for. 😭 😭 😭 😭

5. Headfirst Slide Into Cooperstown On A Bad Bet

Okay, fuck this, I’m done

This fucking

This

UGH

Remember the paternity rumors at the time of Ashlee’s pregnancy? Look at this whole complicated, tangled-up song about infidelity and paternity and the idea of Ashlee cheating while Pete’s cheating too. ‘Keep a calendar, this way you will always know’ [who impregnated you]. ‘I will never end up like him. behind my back, I already am.’ I literally cannot

‘Does he know the way I worship our love’

6. The (Shipped) Gold Standard

do I even need to keep writing this or is the album now, itself, independently writing the tryst theory

my notes for this song just say ‘come the fuck on’

This song is about: living in LA and missing Chicago (and what it felt like in Chicago, who you were and who you were with); taking accountability for your own actions even when it does not satisfy your hedonistic urges (e.g., marrying your pregnant girlfriend and breaking off your illicit love affair with Patrick Stump), trying to remake your identity and change yourself like those are the same thing and you can get a new heart as easily as a new name; losing your luck and breaking up (‘tell that boy I’ll leave you alone now, like a stove, I’ll turn my love down); horseshoe crabs; and of course, that good ol’ famous-in-the-closet feel:

‘I wanna scream I love you from the top of my lungs, but I’m afraid that someone else will hear me.’

7. Coffee’s For Closers

I’m just crying by now I can’t type anymore

He’s using this whole album to break up with Patrick, to explain, to say goodbye

‘I want everything to change and stay the same. Time doesn’t care about anyone or anything. Come together, come apart.’

‘We will never believe again’

And: ‘kick drum beating in my chest again’ and that feeling, the one we’ve all felt in the pit at any show, any good one with that golden-vibe in the air, the one that makes your heart feel connected to the hearts of everyone around you, like you could be lifted on light and floating around the room, like the love is pouring out of you and rising like heat and linking up to the network of love flowing into and out of everyone else, when you feel it and know they do too and your whole body vibrates with the impossible imperceptible hum of your very atoms, your constituent fucking molecules lit up and stitched together by this, this, this. The feeling like you don’t need lungs because singing in breath and bellows enough, the feeling like the only reason you ever had a heart was so the drummer could pump it with their sticks. ‘Preach electric to the microphone stand,’ Patrick the conductor, Patrick the evangelist, Patrick the gospel of his fucking love. Pete’s saying goodbye to that feeling. Pete knows, he knows already, what he is planning to do.

Pete’s lying. Pete’s saying ‘I love the mayhem more than the love’ like all he’s really been out to do is make a mess, break hearts, take names. Like he is no more and no less than what all the tabloids say about him. (Never watch the Fresh Only Bakery videos on youtube. They are boring, for one, and also the saddest fucking Pete you will ever see.) Pete’s saying ‘I will never believe in anything again’ and he’s making Patrick say it too, because true-blue love was supposed to last forever, and then Pete got married to someone else.

‘Oh, change will come.’

8. What A Catch, Donnie

NO. NO

how the fuck dare this song even exist

So this is it. This is the goodbye. Pete has talked about how he wrote this song from Patrick’s perspective, and he recruited some of Patrick’s favorite artists and friends of the band to sing different lines in a medley of the band’s hits up to this point. This is like, the FOB song equivalent of a suicide note. (To follow this with a greatest hits album—! G O D)

The reference to Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway—their collaboration, his ultimate suicide, and the way Miss Flack looked on all his destruction and said ‘I still want you back’ is absolutely a testament to the way Patrick, and the rest of the band, forgave him and took him back in after the notorious Best Buy Incident. The gratitude for the whole band and what the band has done for Pete is tied up in this song. ‘You’ll never catch us’ smacks of trysting, and there’s something to the line ‘I’m the one who charmed the one who gave up on you,’ as the speaker in the sentence in meant to be Patrick and the ‘you’ is presumed to be Pete.

‘They say the captain goes down with the ship, so when the world ends, will God go down with it?’ is both Pete’s intention to go down with the band (which he’s planning to sink, or sees unraveling already in the painful writing process—we don’t know at what point he made his decision to destroy yet another thing he loved in penance for some deep, unknowable conviction of sin) and his gesture of setting them free. The Video of Which We Will Not Speak shows this pretty clearly. Pete saves everyone and everything he’s ever loved at the bargain price of drowning himself. He does it without ever even appearing in the aired version of the video. *broken sobbing*

(The links for the full version are not currently on Youtube, but you can read about it here: http://www.mtv.com/news/1618609/fall-out-boy-release-wrong-version-of-what-a-catch-donnie-video/)

What a match, what a catch. If I say anything else about this song, and how basically everyone who heard it knew it meant the band was going to break up, I will absolutely fall apart

9. 27

OH GOOD A SONG I CAN MAKE IT THROUGH WITHOUT CHOKING ON MY OWN TEARS

NOT

So here’s a lovely little ditty about how Pete Wentz did not kill himself and die at age 27 as he always thought he would! Hahahahahaha I’m fine it’s fine I’m so glad this album exists I’m so glad I’m TALKING ABOUT IT

‘If home is where the heart is, then we’re all just fucked.’ All three of them: Pete, Patrick, and Ashlee. And every FOB fan out there. Ahahaha. GUYS I’M NOT OKAY

We’ve got Peterick drug metaphors to rival the punch of Hold Me Tight Or Don’t: ‘I want it so bad, I’d shoot the sunshine into my veins… Doing lines of dust and sweat off of last’s night stage just to feel like you. Milligrams in my head, burning tobacco in my wind, chasing the direction you went.’

We’ve got desperation about growing and changing and losing that which they so valued in their sound and collaboration on Grave: ‘I can’t remember the good old days. Are all the good times getting gone? They come and go and come and go.’

We’ve got the pressure of keeping your love affair with your lead singer a secret lest you risk your fame, label representation, and fortune: ‘My mind is a safe, and if I keep it in we all get rich’ right next to the dirty, hollow feeling of having images of your body stolen and used to drag your name and reputation like you had no more heart than any other empty doll and losing the value of yourself in that process: ‘My body is an orphanage, we take everyone in.’

We’ve got the romantic comparison to cosmic entities, just like in Real Ones: ‘you’re a bottled star, the planets align. You’re just like Mars, you shine in the sky.’ And that tinge of disparagement and lonesomeness: ‘I’ve got a lot of friends who are stars but some are just black holes.’

10. Tiffany Blews

This song plays with a lot of fun moth/flame metaphors that I really enjoy, while also really amplifying the isolation and quick-burning nature of fame. I think that Pete gets a sick satisfaction from having Patrick sing out the worst things he thinks about himself, that he thinks everyone else thinks about him. (Pete, I think, is the little black dress that will be faded soon.)

Interestingly, we have ‘a roman candle heart keeps us far apart,’ which is a pretty direct link to the later Fourth of July. A heart that flares, explodes, and then burns out quickly certainly would be an obstacle to building a lasting relationship, no matter how much you loved someone…

‘Hate me, baby. Maybe I’m a piece of art.’

‘Dear gravity, you held me down in this starless city’ makes me think of the Moonrise Kingdom quote in Wilson (Expensive Mistakes): ‘I hope the roof flies off and we all get sucked into space.’ It’s the opposite, basically. Hoping to fall in love and get thrown up among the glittering cosmos rather than anchored someplace dark and starless. (Aside: I love how susceptible Pete is to grand, cheesy quotes? Like when, a few days after the release of The Last Jedi, he tweeted the heavy-handed noir line ‘I want to put my fist through this whole lousy, beautiful town.’ Like, look for that in a FOB song someday.)

11. w.a.m.s.

For the curious, Andy confirmed on Twitter that the title stands for waitress/actress/model/singer, a reference to the stereotype of people who run away to Hollywood to make it big but end up washing out and struggling as the starving artist/waitstaff type. If this idea of our boys citing bankrupt ambition does not make you emotional, you may not have a heart.

This song is incredibly relevant to the dreams meta linked earlier—‘when all the others were just stirring awake, I’m trying to trick myself to fall asleep again’ is very evocative of being in denial over the jarring reality of the end of the tryst. I think this song is about one of the last times Pete and Patrick slept together before breaking up.

‘My head’s in heaven, my soles are in hell’ again highlights that Pete’s wildest Patrick dreams are very different than where he actually finds himself; ‘let’s meet in the purgatory of my hips and get well’ is a pretty transparent request, isn’t it? Especially since pre-hiatus Pete really loved to use ‘hips’ as a signifier for sexual desire/activity. Let’s just fuck and pretend it’s all okay. Let’s lose ourselves in each other and pretend we can have it. Tell me I’m the only one, even if it’s not true. Let me get high on this memory one last time.

‘Hurry, hurry. You put my head in such a flurry, flurry’ is the urgency and compromised judgment of the tryst. ‘Oh freckle freckle’ can be read as Patrick’s forehead mole. ‘What makes you so special? I’m gonna leave you’ tells us what makes the last time so good: Pete knows it’s the last time. Pete knows he has to end it. But he’s so addicted-sick, ((stray-dog sick,)) he can’t stop. ‘I’m gonna teach you how we’re all alone’ doesn’t really sound like something a newlywed and soon-to-be-dad should be saying, does it? But there it is. How can he let go when he knows ‘how heartwarming it is inside your skin’?

The final nail in my coffin: ‘I’m a sunshine machine. I want to get stuck and be golden in your memory.’

We’ve talked about how Patrick = sunshine = gold, right. r i g h t

12. 20 Dollar Nose Bleed

Fun fact: this song is basically erotica to me ever since I wrote that recording booth smut about it! I can’t even listen to it without blushing and becoming uncomfortable. So there’s something you didn’t need to know about me that you… now know about me.

‘Permanent jet lag, please take me back. I’m stray dog sick, please let me in. The mad key’s tripping, singing vows before we exchange smoke rings.’ It is OBVIOUSLY my prerogative to interpret this as slightly depraved sexual longing, but I especially like the bit about singing vows without ever exchanging anything lasting or visible that implies commitment—this can be heard as a comment on the fickleness of commitment, or it can be heard as a comment about how deeply he is/was committed to Patrick even though they never had anything to show for it. Anything they could show for it. Even to each other.

Benzedrine is, of course, the very first pharmaceutical amphetamine (read about it here!). Many great artists and thinkers were influenced by the impossible energy it gives you, which is obviously relatable to someone who experiences natural mania, peddling his own prescription like a ‘medicine man’ (Wilson lyrics). I think the verse about Benzedrine and not letting the doctor in not-so-obliquely references the issue with medication compliance that Pete experienced and many people diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder also do: the meds for this disorder are really unpleasant. They dull you out, they give you tremors, they have really strong side effects, and they take away that amazing manic spark that so many artists credit with their success. Don’t let the doctor in. They’ll take away the only thing he really likes about being himself.

‘Have you ever wanted to disappear?’ is, I think, a glimpse of the unadorned real.

The spoken word bit at the end of this song really hammers together a lot of the themes of the whole album, the whole band, personal and political both. ‘You said you’re not listening and I said I’m wishing…’, only we don’t ever find out what’s really being said.

13. West Coast Smoker

I love the hell out of this song because there are few things in life that are hotter than Patrick singing the chorus. And fuck. Patrick saying curse words. I die every time. I think this is a kink I share with Pete Wentz. I think one day Pete Wentz and I will share a circle of hell. It will be called the ‘Underage Stump Mouth Rotunda,’ and we will all be very ashamed.

We’ve got a lot of the same themes: the ease of suicide and the conviction to live, the way shows feel and how it was when they were kids, drug use and overmedicated ennui. Pete was once the son, is becoming the father, is resolving not to become the holy ghost.

‘I’m the last of my kind’ and ‘when they made me they broke the mold’ and the finality of it all. (Contrasted with the modern era: ‘you’re the last of a dying breed.’ Pete has grown up and away from his recursive self-obsession, from his own myth. Pete learning to look inside others and stop dismissing himself, and everyone else, as fool’s gold.)

‘Your eyes are blocking my starlight’ to me really speaks to the person who is keeping him from Patrick, or the people—the fans, the Public, with their eyes on his every action.

14. Pavlove

I LOVE THIS SONG

Once again, we have a drug use metaphor: ‘she’s back to the bathroom for one more,’ ‘get addicted to this,’ and of course, the endless seeking for something to make ‘my chest stir/my head blur.’ And: ‘I’m not ready for a handshake with death, I’m just such a happy mess’ shows us, for once, what Pete has to live for—not just that he’s resigned to life, but the reason for it. This song is all tied up with the heady swell of live music and self-medication, and there’s no line more representative of my experience as a bisexual person than ‘I’m the invisible man who can’t stop staring at the mirror.’

‘I want to make you as lonely as me so you can get addicted to this’ seems very directed at Patrick, doesn’t it? Because this is a Pete who needs Patrick too much, thinks Patrick doesn’t need him back, is terrified. Doesn’t know how to solve his problems except to flee them. So: he flees them.

 I MADE IT. I BARELY FUCKING MADE IT BUT I DID.

To sum up: Folie is an incredible, sweeping, beautiful album about the glory of Peterick and the band’s impending end, and it will break your heart. Hit me up with questions and requests, and as always, thank you for reading!

shark-myths out *mic drop*

[itbeatsbookmarks]

(Via: Hacker News)

Act 1: Sunday afternoon

So you know when you’re flopping about at home, minding your own business, drinking from your water bottle in a way that does not possess any intent to subvert the Commonwealth of Australia?

It’s a feeling I know all too well, and in which I was vigorously partaking when I got this message in “the group chat”.

A nice message from my friend, with a photo of a boarding pass 🙂 A good thing about messages from your friends is that they do not have any rippling consequences 🙂🙂🙂

The man in question is Tony Abbott, one of Australia’s many former Prime Ministers.

That’s him, officer

For security reasons, we try to change our Prime Minister every six months, and to never use the same Prime Minister on multiple websites.

The boarding pass photo

This particular former PM had just posted a picture of his boarding pass on Instagram (Instagram, in case you don’t know it, is an app you can open up on your phone any time to look at ads).

The since-deleted Instagram post showing the boarding pass and baggage receipt. The caption reads “coming back home from japan 😍😍 looking forward to seeing everyone! climate change isn’t real 😌 ok byeee”

“Can you hack this man?”

My friend (who we will refer to by their group chat name, 𝖍𝖔𝖌𝖌𝖊 𝖒𝖔𝖆𝖉𝖊) is asking whether I can “hack this man” not because I am the kind of person who regularly commits 𝒄𝒚𝒃𝒆𝒓 𝒕𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒔𝒐𝒏 on a whim, but because we’d recently been talking about boarding passes.

I’d said that people post pictures of their boarding passes all the time, not knowing that it can sometimes be used to get their passport number and stuff. They just post it being like “omg going on holidayyyy 😍😍😍”, unaware that they’re posting cringe.

People post their boarding passes all the time, because it’s not clear that they’re meant to be secret

Meanwhile, some hacker is rubbing their hands together, being all “yumyum identity fraud 👀” in their dark web Discord, because this happens a lot.

So there I was, making intense and meaningful eye contact with this chat bubble, asking me if I could “hack this man”.

Surely you wouldn’t

Of course, my friend wasn’t actually asking me to hack the former Prime Minister.

However.

You gotta.

I mean… what are you gonna do, not click it? Are you gonna let a link that’s like 50% advertising tracking ID tell you what to do? Wouldn’t you be curious?

The former Prime Minister had just posted his boarding pass. Was that bad? Was someone in danger? I didn’t know.

What I did know was: the least I could do for my country would be to have a casual browse 👀

Investigating the boarding pass photo

Step 1: Hubris

So I had a bit of a casual browse, and got the picture of the boarding pass, and then…. I didn’t know what was supposed to happen after that.

Well, I’d heard that it’s bad to post your boarding pass online, because if you do, a bored 17 year-old Russian boy called “Katie-senpai” might somehow use it to commit identity fraud. But I don’t know anyone like that, so I just clumsily googled some stuff.

Googling how 2 hakc boarding pass

Eventually I found a blog post explaining that yes, pictures of boarding passes can indeed be used for Crimes. The part you wanna be looking at for all your criming needs is the barcode, because it’s got the “Booking Reference” (e.g. H8JA2A) in it.

Why do you want the booking reference? It’s one of the two things you need to log in to the airline website to manage your flight.

The second one is your… last name. I was really hoping the second one would be like a password or something. But, no, it’s the booking reference the airline emails you and prints on your boarding pass. And it also lets you log in to the airline website?

That sounds suspiciously like a password to me, but like I’m still fine to pretend it’s not if you are.

Step 2: Scan the barcode

I’ve been practicing every morning at sunrise, but still can’t scan barcodes with my eyes. I had to settle for a barcode scanner app on my phone, but when I tried to scan the picture in the Instagram post, it didn’t work :((

Maybe I shouldn’t have blurred out the barcode first

Step 2: Scan the barcode, but more

Well, maybe it wasn’t scanning because the picture was too blurry.

I spent around 15 minutes in an “enhance, ENHANCE” montage, fiddling around with the image, increasing the contrast, and so on. Despite the montage taking up way too much of the 22 minute episode, I couldn’t even get the barcode to scan.

Step 2: Notice that the Booking Reference is printed right there on the paper

After staring at this image for 15 minutes, I noticed the Booking Reference is just… printed on the baggage receipt.

I graduated university.

But it did not prepare me for this.

askdjhaflajkshdflkh

Step 3: Visit the airline’s website

After recovering from that emotional rollercoaster, I went to qantas.com.au, and clicked “Manage Booking”. In case you don’t know it because you live in a country with fast internet, Qantas is the main airline here in Australia.

(I also very conveniently started recording my screen, which is gonna pay off big time in just a moment.)

Step 4: Type in the Booking Reference

Well, the login form was just… there, and it was asking for a Booking Reference and a last name. I had just flawlessly read the Booking Reference from the boarding pass picture, and, well… I knew the last name.

I did hesitate for a split-second, but… no, I had to know.

Step 5: Crimes(?)

youngman.mp4

The “Manage Booking” page, logged in as some guy called Anthony Abbott

Can I get a YIKES in the chat

Leave a comment if you really felt that.

I guess I was now logged the heck in as Tony Abbott? And for all I know, everyone else who saw his Instagram post was right there with me. It’s kinda wholesome, to imagine us all there together. But also probably suboptimal in a governmental sense.

Was there anything secret in here?

I then just incredibly browsed the page, browsed it so hard.

I saw Tony Abbott’s name, flight times, and Frequent Flyer number, but not really anything super secret-looking. Not gonna be committing any cyber treason with a Frequent Flyer number. The flight was in the past, so I couldn’t change anything, either.

The page said the flight had been booked by a travel agent, so I guessed some information would be missing because of that.

I clicked around and scrolled a considerable length, but still didn’t find any government secrets.

Some people might give up here. But I, the Icarus of computers, was simply too dumb to know when to stop.

We’re not done just because a web page says we’re done

I wanted to see if there were juicy things hidden inside the page. To do it, I had to use the only hacker tool I know.

Right click > Inspect Element, all you need to subvert the Commonwealth of Australia

Listen. This is the only part of the story that might be confused for highly elite computer skill. It’s not, though. Maybe later someone will show you this same thing to try and flex, acting like only they know how to do it. You will not go gently into that good night. You will refuse to acknowledge their flex, killing them instantly.

How does “Inspect Element” work?

“Inspect Element”, as it’s called, is a feature of Google Chrome that lets you see the computer’s internal representation (HTML) of the page you’re looking at. Kinda like opening up a clock and looking at the cool cog party inside.

Yeahhh go little cogs, look at ‘em absolutely going off. Now imagine this but with like, JavaScript

Everything you see when you use “Inspect Element” was already downloaded to your computer, you just hadn’t asked Chrome to show it to you yet. Just like how the cogs were already in the watch, you just hadn’t opened it up to look.

But let us dispense with frivolous cog talk. Cheap tricks such as “Inspect Element” are used by programmers to try and understand how the website works. This is ultimately futile: Nobody can understand how websites work. Unfortunately, it kinda looks like hacking the first time you see it.

If you’d like to know more about it, I’ve prepared a short video.

Browsing the “Manage Booking” page’s HTML

I scrolled around the page’s HTML, not really knowing what it meant, furiously trying to find anything that looked out of place or secret.

I eventually realised that manually reading HTML with my eyes was not an efficient way of defending my country, and Ctrl + F’d the HTML for “passport”.

oh no

Oh yes

It’s just there.

At this point I was fairly sure I was looking at the extremely secret government-issued ID of the 28th Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of Australia, servant to her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and I was kinda worried that I was somehow doing something wrong, but like, not enough to stop.

….anything else in this page?

Well damn, if Tony Abbott’s passport number is in this treasure trove of computer spaghetti, maybe there’s wayyyyy more. Perhaps this HTML contains the lost launch codes to the Sydney Opera House, or Harold Holt.

Maybe there’s a phone number?

Searching for phone and number didn’t get anywhere, so I searched for 614, the first 3 digits of an Australian phone number, using my colossal and highly celestial galaxy brain.

Weird uppercase letters

A weird pile of what I could only describe as extremely uppercase letters came up. It looked like this:

RQST QF HK1 HNDSYD/03EN|FQTV QF HK1|CTCM QF HK1 614[phone number]|CKIN QF HN1 DO NOT SEAT ROW [row number] PLS SEAT LAST ROW OF [row letter] WINDOW

So, there’s a lot going on here. There is indeed a phone number in here. But what the heck is all this other stuff?

I realised this was like… Qantas staff talking to eachother about Tony Abbott, but not to him?

In what is surely the subtweeting of the century, it has a section saying HITOMI CALLED RQSTING FASTTRACK FOR MR. ABBOTT. Hitomi must be requesting a “fasttrack” (I thought that was only a thing in movies???) from another Qantas employee.

This is messed up for many reasons

What is even going on here? Why do Qantas flight staff talk to eachother via this passenger information field? Why do they send these messages, and your passport number to you when you log in to their website? I’ll never know because I suddenly got distracted with

Forbidden airline code

I realised the allcaps museli I saw must be some airline code for something. Furious and intense googling led me to several ancient forbidden PDFs that explained some of the codes.

Apparently, they’re called “SSR codes” (Special Service Request). There are codes for things like “Vegetarian lacto-ovo meal” (VLML), “Vegetarian oriental meal” (VOML), and even “Vegetarian vegan meal” (VGML). Because I was curious about these codes, here’s some for you to be curious about too (tag urself, I’m UMNR):

RFTV Reason for Travel UMNR Unaccompanied minor PDCO Carbon Offset (chargeable) WEAP Weapon DEPA Deportee—accompanied by an escort ESAN Passenger with Emotional Support Animal in Cabin

The phone number I found looked like this: CTCM QF HK1 [phone number]. Googling “SSR CTCM” led me to the developer guide for some kind of airline association, which I assume I am basically a member of now.

CTCM QF HK1 translates as “Contact phone number of passenger 1”

Is the phone number actually his?

I thought maybe the phone number belonged to the travel agency, but I checked and it has to be the passenger’s real phone number. That would be, if my calculations are correct,,,, *steeples fingers* Tony Abbott’s phone number.

what have i done

I’d now found Tony Abbott’s:

Passport details

Phone number

Weird Qantas staff comments.

My friend who messaged me had no idea.

Tony Abbott’s passport is probably a Diplomatic passport, which is used to “represent the Australian Government overseas in an official capacity”.

what have i done

By this point I’d had enough defending my country, and had recently noticed some new thoughts in my brain, which were:

oh jeez oh boy oh jeez

i gotta get someone, somehow, to reset tony abbott’s passport number

can you even reset passport numbers

is it possible that i’ve done a crime

Intermission

Act 2: Do not get arrested challenge 2020

In this act, I, your well-meaning but ultimately incompetent protagonist, attempt to do the following things:

⬜ figure out whether i have done a crime

⬜ notify someone (tony abbott?) that this happened

⬜ get permission to publish this here blog post

⬜ tell qantas about the security issue so they can fix it

Spoilers: This takes almost six months.

Let’s skip the boring bits

I contacted a lot of people about this. If my calculations are correct, I called at least 30 phone numbers, to say nothing of The Emails. If you laid all the people I contacted end to end along the equator, they would die, and you would be arrested. Eventually I started keeping track of who I talked to in a note I now refer to as “the hashtag struggle”.

I’m gonna skip a considerable volume of tedious and ultimately unsatisfying telephony, because it’s been a long day of scrolling already, and you need to save your strength.

Alright strap yourself in and enjoy as I am drop-kicked through the goal posts of life.

Part 1: is it possible that i’ve done a crime

I didn’t think anything I did sounded like a crime, but I knew that sometimes when the other person is rich or famous, things can suddenly become crimes. Like, was there going to be some Monarch Law or something? Was Queen Elizabeth II gonna be mad about this?

My usual defence against being arrested for hacking is making sure the person being hacked is okay with it. You heard me, it’s the power of ✨consent✨. But this time I could uh only get it in retrospect, which is a bit yikes.

So I was wondering like… was logging in with someone else’s booking reference a crime? Was having someone else’s passport number a crime? What if they were, say, the former Prime Minister? Would I get in trouble for publishing a blog post about it? I mean you’re reading the blog post right now so obviousl

Update: I have been arrested.

Just straight up Reading The Law

It turned out I could just google these things, and before I knew it I was reading “the legislation”. It’s the rules of the law, just written down.

Look, reading pages of HTML? No worries. Especially if it’s to defend my country. But whoever wrote the legislation was just making up words.

Eventually, I was able to divine the following wisdoms from the Times New Roman tea leaves:

Defamation is where you get in trouble for publishing something that makes someone look bad.

But, it’s fine for me to blog about it, since it’s not defamation if you can prove it’s true

Having Tony Abbott’s passport number isn’t a crime

But using it to commit identity fraud would be

There are laws about what it’s okay to do on a computer

The things it’s okay to do are: If u EVER even LOOK at a computer the wrong way, the FBI will instantly slam dunk you in a legal fashion dependent on the legislation in your area

I am possibly the furthest thing you can be from a lawyer. So, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you not to take this as legal advice. But, if you are the kind of person who takes legal advice from mango blog posts, who am I to stand in your way? Not a lawyer, that’s who. Don’t do it.

You know what, maybe I needed help. From an adult. Someone whose 3-year old kid has been buying iPad apps for months because their parents can’t figure out how to turn it off.

“Yeah, maybe I should get some of that free government legal advice”, I thought to myself, legally. That seemed like a pretty common thing, so I thought it should be easy to do. I took a big sip of water and googled “free legal advice”.

trying to ask a lawyer if i gone and done a crime

Before I went and told everyone about my HTML frolicking, I spent a week calling legal aid numbers, lawyers, and otherwise trying to figure out if I’d done a crime.

During this time, I didn’t tell anyone what I’d done. I asked if any laws would be broken if “someone” had “logged into a website with someone’s publicly-posted password and found the personal information of a former politician”. Do you see how that’s not even a lie? I’m starting to see how lawyers do it.

Calling Legal Aid places

First I call the state government’s Legal Aid number. They tell me they don’t do that here, and I should call another Legal Aid place named something slightly different.

The second place tells me they don’t do that either, and I should call the First Place and “hopefully you get someone more senior”.

I call the First Place again, and they say “oh you’ve been given the run around!”. You see where this is going.

Let’s skip a lot of phone calls. Take my hand as I whisk you towards the slightly-more-recent past. Based on advice I got from two independent lawyers that was definitely not legal advice: I haven’t done a crime.

Helllllll yeah. But I mean it’s a little late because I forgot to mention that by this point I had already emailed explicit details of my activities to the Australian Government.

☑️ figure out whether i have done a crime

⬜ notify someone (tony abbott?) that this happened

⬜ get permission to publish this here blog post

⬜ tell qantas about the security issue so they can fix it

Part 2: trying to report the problem to someone, anyone, please

I had Tony Abbott’s passport number, phone number, and weird Qantas messages about him. I was the only one who knew I had these.

Anyone who saw that Instagram post could also have them. I felt like I had to like, tell someone about this. Someone with like, responsibilities. Someone with an email signature.

wait but do u see the irony in this, u have his phone number right there so u could just-

Yes I see it thank u for pointing this out, wise, astute, and ultimately self-imposed heading. I knew I could just call the number any time and hear a “G’day” I’d never be able to forget. I knew I had a rare opportunity to call someone and have them ask “how did you get this number!?”.

But you can’t just do that.

You can’t just call someone’s phone number that you got by rummaging around in the HTML ball pit. Tony Abbott didn’t want me to have his phone number, because he didn’t give it to me. Maybe if it was urgent, or I had no other option, sure. But I was pretty sure I should do this the Nice way, and show that I come in peace.

I wanted to show that I come in peace because there’s also this pretty yikes thing that happens where you email someone being all like “henlo ur website let me log in with username admin and password admin, maybe u wanna change that??? could just be me but let me kno what u think xoxo alex” and then they reply being like “oh so you’re a HACKER and a CRIMINAL and you’ve HACKED ME AND MY FAMILY TOO and this is a RANSOM and ur from the DARK WEB i know what that is i’ve seen several episodes of mr robot WELL watch out kiddO bc me and my lawyers are bulk-installing tens of thousands of copies of McAfee® Gamer Security as we speak, so i’d like 2 see u try”

I googled “tony abbott contact”, but there’s only his official website. There’s no phone number on it, only a “contact me” form.

I imagine there have been some passionate opinions typed into this form at 9pm on a Tuesday

Yeah right, have you seen the incredible volume of #content people want to say at politicians? No way anyone’s reading that form.

I later decided to try anyway, using the same Inspect Element ritual from earlier. Looking at the network requests the page makes, I divined that the “Contact me” form just straight up does not work. When you click “submit”, you get an error, and nothing gets sent.

This is an excellent way of using computers to solve the problem of “random people keep sending me angry letters”

Well rip I guess. I eventually realised the people to talk to were probably the government.

The government

It’s a big place.

In the beginning, humans developed the concept of language by banging rocks together and saying “oof, oog, and so on”. Then something went horribly wrong, and now people unironically begin every sentence with “in regards to”. Our story begins here.

The government has like fifty thousand million different departments, and they all know which acronyms to call each other, but you don’t. If you EVER call it DMP&C instead of DPM&C you are gonna be express email forwarded into a nightmare realm the likes of which cannot be expressed in any number of spreadsheet cells, in spite of all the good people they’ve lost trying.

I didn’t even know where to begin with this. Desperately, I called Tony Abbott’s former political party, who were all like

Skip skip skip a few more calls like this.

Maybe I knew someone who knew someone

That’s right, the true government channels were the friends we made along the way.

I asked hacker friends who seemed like they might know government security people. “Where do I report a security issue with like…. a person, not a website?”

They told me to call… 1300 CYBER1?

1300 CYBER1

I don’t really have a good explanation for this so I’m just gonna post the screenshots.

My friend showing me where to report a security issue with the government. I’m gonna need you to not ask any questions about the profile pictures.

Uhhh no wait I don’t wanna click any of these

The planet may be dying, but we live in a truly unparalleled age of content.

You know I smashed that call button on 1300 CYBER1. Did they just make it 1300 CYBER then realise you need one more digit for a phone number? Incredible.

Calling 1300 c y b e r o n e

“Yes yes hello, ring ring, is this 1300 cyber one”? They have to say yes if you ask that. They’re legally obligated.

The person who picked up gave me an email address for ASD (the Australian flavour of America’s NSA), and told me to email them the details.

Emailing the government my crimes

Feeling like the digital equivalent of three kids in a trenchcoat, I broke out my best Government Email dialect and emailed ASD, asking for them to call me if they were the right place to tell about this.

Sorry for the clickbait subject but well that’s what happened???

Fooled by my flawless disguise, they replied instantly (in a relative sense) asking for more details.

“Potential” exposure, yeah okay. At least the subject line had “[SEC=Sensitive]” in it so I _knew_ I’d made it big

I absolutely could provide them with more information, so I did, because I love to cooperate with the Australian government.

I also asked whether they could give me permission to publish this blog post, and they were all like “Seen 2:35pm”. Eventually, after another big day of getting left on read by the government, they replied, being all like “thanks kiddO, we’re doing like, an investigation and stuff, so we’ll take it from here”.

Overall, ASD were really nice to me about it and happy that I’d helped. They encouraged me to report this kind of thing to them if it happened again, but I’m not really in the business of uhhhhhhhh whatever the heck this is.

By the way, at this point in the story (chronologically) I had no idea if what I was emailing the government was actually the confession to a crime, since I hadn’t talked to a lawyer yet. This is widely regarded as a bad move. I do not recommend anyone else use “but I’m being so helpful and earnest!!!” as a legal defence. But also I’m not a lawyer, so idk, maybe it works?

Wholesomely emailing the government

At one point in what was surely an unforgettable email chain, the person I was emailing added a P.S. containing…. the answer to the puzzle hidden on this website. The one you’re reading this blog on right now. Hello. I guess they must have found this website (hi asd) by stalking the email address I was sending from. This is unprecedented and everything, but:

The puzzle says to tweet the answer at me, not email me

The prize for doing the puzzle is me tweeting this gif of a shakas to you

yeahhhhhhhhhh, nice

So I guess I emailed the shakas gif to the government??? Yeah, I guess I did.

Please find attached

Can I write about this?

I asked them if they could give me permission to write this blog post, or who to ask, and they were like “uhhhhhhhhhhh” and gave me two government media email addresses to try. Listen I don’t wanna be an “ummm they didn’t reply to my emAiLs” kinda person buT they simply left me no choice.

Still, defending the Commonwealth was in ASD’s hands now, and that’s a win for me at this point.

☑️ figure out whether i have done a crime

☑️ notify someone (The Government) that this happened

⬜ get permission to publish this here blog post

⬜ tell qantas about the security issue so they can fix it

Part 3: Telling Qantas the bad news

The security issue

Hey remember like fifteen minutes ago when this post was about webpages?

I’m guessing Qantas didn’t want to send the customer their passport number, phone number, and staff comments about them, so I wanted to let them know their website was doing that. Maybe the website was well meaning, but ultimately caused more harm than good, like how that time the bike path railings on the Golden Gate Bridge accidentally turned it into the world’s largest harmonica.

Unblending the smoothie

But why does the website even send you all that stuff in the first place? I don’t know, but to speculate wildly: Maybe the website just sends you all the data it knows about you, and then only shows you your name, flight times, etc, while leaving the passport number etc. still in the page.

If that were true, then Qantas would want to unblend the digital smoothie they’ve sent you, if you will. They’d want to change it so that they only send you your name and flight times and stuff (which are a key ingredient of the smoothie to be sure), not the whole identity fraud smoothie.

Smoothie evangelism

I wanted to tell them the smoothie thing, but how do I contact them?

The first place to check is usually company.com/security, maybe that’ll w-

Okay nevermind

Okay fine maybe I should just email [email protected] surely that’s it? I could only find a phone number to report security problems to, and I wasn’t sure if it was like…. airport security?

So I just… called the number and was like “heyyyy uhhhh I’d like to report a cyber security issue?”, and the person was like “yyyyya just email [email protected]” and i was like “ok sorrY”.

Time to email Qantas I guess

I emailed Qantas, being like “beep boop here is how the computer problem works”.

(Have you been wondering about the little dots in this post? Click this one for the rest of the email .)

A few days later, I got this reply.

And then I never heard from this person again

Airlines were going through kinda a struggle at the time, so I guess that’s what happened?

if ur still out there Shr Security i miss u

Struggles

After filling up my “get left on read” combo meter, I desperately resorted to calling Qantas’ secret media hotline number.

They said the issue was being fixed by Amadeus, the company who makes their booking software, rather than with Qantas itself. I’m not sure if that means other Amadeus customers were also affected, or if it was just the way Qantas was using their software, or what.

It’s common to give companies 90 days to fix the bug, before you publicly disclose it. It’s a tradeoff between giving them enough time to fix it, and people being hacked because of the bug as long as it’s out there.

But, well, this was kinda a special case. Qantas was going through some #struggles, so it was taking longer. Lots of their staff were stood down, and the world was just generally more cooked. At the same time, hardly anybody was flying at the time, due to see above re: #struggles. So, I gave Qantas as much time as they needed.

Five months later

The world is a completely different place, and Qantas replies to me, saying they fixed the bug. It did take five months, which is why it took so long for you and I to be having this weird textual interaction right now.

I don’t have a valid Booking Reference, so I can’t actually check what’s changed. I asked a friend to check (with an expired Booking Reference), and they said they didn’t see a mention of “documentNumber” anymore, which sounds like the passport number is no longer there. But That’s Not Science, so I don’t know for sure.

I originally found the bug in March, which was about 60 years ago. BUT we got there baybee, Qantas emailed me saying the bug had been fixed on August 21. They later told me they actually fixed the bug in July, but the person I was talking too didn’t know about it until August.

Qantas also said this when I asked them to review this post:

Thanks again for letting us have the opportunity to review and again for refraining from posting until the fix was in place for vulnerability.

Our standard advice to customers is not to post pictures of the boarding pass, or to at least obscure the key personal information if they do, because of the detail it contains.

We appreciate you bringing it to our attention in such a responsible way, so we could fix the issue, which we did a few months ago now.

I couldn’t find any advice on their website about not posting pictures of customer boarding passes, only news articles about how Qantas stopped printing the Frequent Flyer number on the boarding pass last year, because… well, you can see why.

I also asked Qantas what they did to fix the bug, and they said:

Unfortunately we’re not able to provide the details of fix as it is part of the protection of personal information.

:((

☑️ figure out whether i have done a crime

☑️ notify someone (The Government) that this happened

⬜ get permission to publish this here blog post

☑️ tell qantas about the security issue so they can fix it

Part 4: Finding Tony Abbott

Like 2003’s Finding Nemo, this section was an emotional rollercoaster.

The government was presumably helping Tony Abbott reset his passport number, and making sure his current one wasn’t being used for any of that yucky identity fraud.

But, much like Shannon Noll’s 2004 What About Me?, what about me? I really wanted to write a blog post about it, you know? So I could warn people about the non-obvious risk of sharing their boarding passes, and also make dumb and inaccessible references to the early 2000s.

The government people I talked to couldn’t give me permission to write this post, so rather than willingly wandering deeper into the procedurally generated labyrinth of government department email addresses (it’s dark in there), I tried to find Tony Abbott or his staff directly.

Calling everybody in Australia one by one

I called Tony Abbott’s former political party again, and asked them how to contact him, or his office, or something I’m really having a moment rn. They said they weren’t associated with him anymore, and suggested I call Parliament House, like I was the Queen or something.

In case you don’t know it, Parliament House is sorta like the White House, I think? The Prime Minister lives there and has a nice little garden out the back with a macadamia tree that never runs out, and everyone works in different colourful sections like “Making it so Everyone Gets a Fair Shake of the Sauce Bottle R&D” and “Mateship” and they all wear matching uniforms with lil kangaroo and emu hats, and they all do a little dance every hour on the hour to celebrate another accident-free day in the Prime Minister’s chocolate factory.

calling parliament house i guess

Not really sure what to expect, I called up and was all like “yeah bloody g’day, day for it ay, hot enough for ya?”. Once the formalities were out of the way, I skipped my usual explanation of why I was calling and just asked point-blank if they had Tony Abbott’s contact details.

The person on the phone was casually like “Oh, no, but I can put you through to the Serjeant-at-arms, who can give you the contact details of former members”. I was like “…..okay?????”. Was I supposed to know who that was? Isn’t a Serjeant like an army thing?

But no, the Serjeant-at-arms was just a nice lady who told me “he’s in a temporary office right now, and so doesn’t have a phone number. I can give you an email address or a P.O. box?”. I was like “ok th-thank you your majesty”.

It felt a bit weird just…. emailing the former PM being like “boy do i have bad news for you”, but I figured he probably wouldn’t read it anyway. If it was that easy to get this email address, everyone had it, and so nobody was likely to be reading the inbox.

Spoilers: It didn’t work.

Finding Tony Abbott’s staff

I roll out of bed and stare bleary-eyed into the morning sun, my ultimate nemesis, as Day 40 of not having found Tony Abbott’s staff begins.

This time for sure.

Retinas burning, in a moment of determination/desperation/hubris, I went and asked even more people that might know how to contact Tony Abbott’s staff.

I asked a journalist friend, who had the kind of ruthlessly efficient ideas that come from, like, being a professional journalist. They suggested I find Tony Abbott’s former staff from when he was PM, and contact their offices and see if they have his contact details.

It was a strange sounding plan to me, which I thought meant it would definitely work.

Wikipedia stalking

Apparently Prime Ministers themselves have “ministers” (not prime), and those are their staff. That’s who I was looking for.

Big “me and the boys” energy

Okay but, the problem was that most of these people are retired now, and the glory days of 2013 are over. Each time I hover over one of their names, I see “so-and-so is a former politician and….” and discard their Wikipedia page like a LeSnak wrapper into the wind.

Eventually though, I saw this minister.

Oh he definitely has an office.

That’s the current Prime Minister of Australia (at the time of writing, that is, for all I know we’re three Prime-Ministers deep into 2020 by the time you read this), you know he’s definitely gonna be easier to find.

Let’s call the Prime Minister’s office I guess?

Easy google of the number, absolutely no emotional journey resulting in my growth as a person this time.

When I call, I hear what sounds like two women laughing in the background? One of them answers the phone, slightly out of breath, and says “Hello, Prime Minister’s office?”. I’m like “….hello? Am I interrupting something???”.

I clumsily explain that I know this is Scott Morrison’s office, but I actually was wondering if they had Tony Abbott’s contact details, because it’s for “a time-sensitive media enquiry”, and I j- She interrupts to explain “so Tony Abbott isn’t Prime Minister anymore, this is Scott Morrison’s office” and I’m like “yA I know please I am desperate for these contact details”.

She says “We wouldn’t have that information but I’ll just check for you” and then pauses for like, a long time? Like 15 seconds? I can only wonder what was happening on the other end. Then she says “Oh actually I can give you Tony Abbott’s personal assistant’s number? Is that good?”.

Ummmm YES thanks that’s what I’ve been looking for this whole time? Anyway brb i gotta go be uh a journalist or something.

Calling Tony Abbott’s personal assistant’s personal assistant

I fumble with my phone, furiously trying to dial the number.

I ask if I’m speaking to Tony Abbott’s personal assistant. The person on the other end says no, but he is one of Tony Abbott’s staff. It has been a long several months of calling people. The cold ice is starting to thaw. One day, with enough therapy, I may be able to gather the emotional resources necessary to call another government phone number.

I explain the security issue I want to report, and midway through he interrupts with “sorry…. who are you and what’s the organisation you’re calling from?” and I’m like “uhhhh I mean my name is Alex and uhh I’m not calling from any organisation I’m just like a person?? I just found this thing and…”.

The person is mercifully forgiving, and says that he’ll have to call me back. I stress once again that I’m calling to help them, happy to wait to publish until they feel comfortable, and definitely do not warrant the bulk-installation of antivirus products.

Calling Tony Abbott’s personal assistant

An hour later, I get a call from a number I don’t recognise.

He explains that the guy I talked to earlier was his assistant, and he’s Tony Abbott’s PA. Folks, we made it. It’s as easy as that.

He says he knows what I’m talking about. He’s got the emails. He’s already in the process of getting Tony Abbott a new passport number. This is the stuff. It’s all coming together.

I ask if I can publish a blog post about it, and we agree I’ll send a draft for him to review.

And then he says

“These things do interest him - he’s quite keen to talk to you”

I was like exCUSE me? Tony Abbott, Leader of the 69th Ministry of Australia, wants to call me on the phone? I suppose I owe this service to my country?

This story was already completely cooked so sure, whatever. I’d already declared emotional bankruptcy, so nothing was coming as a surprise at this point.

I asked what he wanted to talk about. “Just to pick your brain on these things”. We scheduled a call for 3:30 on Monday.

And then Tony Abbott just… calls me on the phone?

Mostly, he wanted to check whether his understanding of how I’d found his passport number was correct (it was). He also wanted to ask me how to learn about “the IT”.

He asked some intelligent questions, like “how much information is in a boarding pass, and what do people like me need to know to be safe?”, and “why can you get a passport number from a boarding pass, but not from a bus ticket?”.

The answer is that boarding passes have your password printed on them, and bus tickets don’t. You can use that password to log in to a website (widely regarded as a bad move), and at that point all bets are off, websites can just do whatever they want.

He was vulnerable, too, about how computers are harder for him to understand.

“It’s a funny old world, today I tried to log in to a [Microsoft] Teams meeting (Teams is one of those apps), and the fire brigade uses a Teams meeting. Anyway I got fairly bamboozled, and I can now log in to a Teams meeting in a way I couldn’t before.

It’s, I suppose, a terrible confession of how people my age feel about this stuff.”

Then the Earth stopped spinning on its axis.

For an instant, time stood still.

Then he said it:

“You could drop me in the bush and I’d feel perfectly confident navigating my way out, looking at the sun and direction of rivers and figuring out where to go, but this! Hah!”

This was possibly the most pure and powerful Australian energy a human can possess, and explains how we elected our strongest as our leader. The raw energy did in fact travel through the phone speaker and directly into my brain, killing me instantly.

When I’d collected myself from various corners of the room, he asked if there was a book about the basics of IT, since he wanted to learn about it. That was kinda humanising, since it made me realise that even famous people are just people too.

Anyway I hadn’t heard of a book that was any good, so I told a story about my mum instead.

A story about my mum instead

I said there probably was a book out there about “the basics of IT”, but it wouldn’t help much. I didn’t learn from a book. 13 year old TikTok influencers don’t learn from a book. They just vibe.

My mum always said when I was growing up that:

There were “too many buttons”

She was afraid to press the buttons, because she didn’t know what they did

I can understand that, since grown ups don’t have the sheer dumb hubris of a child, and that’s what makes them afraid of the buttons.

Like, when a toddler uses a spoon for the first time, they don’t know what a spoon is, where they are, or who the current Prime Minister is. But they see the spoon, and they see the cereal, and their dumb baby brain is just like “yeA” and they have a red hot go. And like, they get it wrong the first few times, but it doesn’t matter, because they don’t know to be afraid of getting it wrong. So eventually, they get it right.

leaked footage of me learning how to hack

Okay so I didn’t tell the spoon thing to Tony Abbott, but I did tell him what I always told my mum, which was: “Mum you just gotta press all the buttons, to find out what they do”.

He was like “Oh, you just learn by trial and error”. Exactly! Now that I think about it, it’s a bit scary. We are dumb babies learning to use a spoon for the first time, except if you do it wrong some clown writes a blog post about you. Anyway good luck out there to all you big babies.

Asking to publish this blog post

When I asked Tony Abbott for permission to publish the post you are reading right now while neglecting your responsibilities, he said “well look Alex, I don’t have a problem with it, you’ve alerted me to something I probably should have known about, so if you wanna do that, go for it”.

At the end of the call, he said “If there’s ever anything you think I need to know, give us a shout”.

Look you gotta hand it to him. That’s exactly the right way to respond when someone tells you about a security problem. Back at the beginning, I was kinda worried that he might misunderstand, and think I was trying to hack him or something, and that I’d be instantly slam dunked into jail. But nope, he was fine with it. And now you, a sweet and honourable blog post browser, get to learn the dangers of posting your boarding pass by the realest of real-world examples.

During the call, I was completely in shock from the lost in the bush thing killing me instantly, and so on. But afterwards, when I looked at the quotes, I realised he just wanted to understand what had happened to him, and more about how technology works. That’s the same kind of curiosity I had, that started this whole surrealist three-act drama. That… wasn’t really what I was expecting from Tony Abbott, but it’s what I found.

The point of this story isn’t to say “wow Tony Abbott got hacked, what a dummy”. The point is that if someone famous can unknowingly post their boarding pass, anyone can.

Anyway that’s why I vote right wing now baybeeeee.

☑️ figure out whether i have done a crime

☑️ notify someone (The Government) that this happened

☑️ get permission to publish this here blog post

☑️ tell qantas about the security issue so they can fix it

Act 3: Closing credits

Wait no what the heck did I just read

Yeah look, reasonable.

tl; dr

Your boarding pass for a flight can sometimes be used to get your passport number. Don’t post your boarding pass or baggage receipt online, keep it as secret as your passport.

How it works

The Booking Reference on the boarding pass can be used to log in to the airline’s “Manage Booking” page, which sometimes contains the passport number, depending on the airline. I saw that Tony Abbott had posted a photo of his boarding pass on Instagram, and used it to get his passport details, phone number, and internal messages between Qantas flight staff about his flight booking.

Why did you do this?

One day, my friend who was also in “the group chat” said “I was thinking…. why didn’t I hack Tony Abbott? And I realised I guess it’s because you have more hubris”.

I was deeply complimented by this, but that’s not the point. The point is that you, too, can have hubris.

You know how they say to commit a crime (which once again I insist did not happen in my case) you need means, motive, and opportunity? Means is the ability to use right click > Inspect Element, motive is hubris, and opportunity is the dumb luck of having my friend message me the Instagram post.

I know, I’ve been saying “hubris” a lot. I mean “the willingness to risk breaking the rules”. Now hold up, don’t go outside and do crimes (unless it’s really funny). I’m not talking about breaking the law, I’m talking about rules we just follow without realising, like social rules and conventions.

Here’s a simple example. You’re at a sufficiently fancy restaurant, like I dunno, with white tablecloths or something? The waiter asks if you’d like “still or sparkling water?”

If you say “still”, it costs Eleven Dollars. If you say “sparkling”, it costs Eleven Dollars and tastes all gross and fizzy. But if you say “tap water, please”, you just get tap water, what you wanted in the first place?

When I first saw someone do this I was like “you can do that? I just thought you had to pay Eleven Dollars extra at fancy restaurants!”.

It’s not written down anywhere that you can ask for tap water. But when I found out you could do that, and like, nothing bad happens, I could suddenly do it too. Miss me with that Eleven Dollars fizzy water.

Basically, until you’ve broken the rules, the idea that the rules can be broken might just not occur to you. That’s how it felt for me, at least.

In conclusion, to be a hacker u ask for tap water.

FAQ

Why is it bad for someone else to have your passport number?

Hey crime gang, welcome back to Identity Fraud tips and tricks with Alex.

A passport is government-issued ID. It’s how you prove you’re you. The fact that you have your passport and I don’t is how you prevent me from convincing the government that I’m you and doing crimes in your name.

Just having the information on the passport is not quite as powerful as a photo of the full physical passport, with your photo and everything.

With your passport number, someone could:

Book an international flight as you.

Apply for anything that requires proof of identity documentation with the government, e.g. Working with children check

Activate a SIM card (and so get an internet connection that’s traceable to you, not them, hiding them from the government)

Create a fake physical passport from a template, with the correct passport number (which they then use to cross a border, open a bank account, or anything)

who knows what else, not me, bc i have never done a crime

Am I a big bozo, a big honking goose, if I post my boarding pass on Instagram?

Nah, it’s an easy mistake to make. How are you supposed to know not to? It’s not obvious that your boarding pass is secret, like a password. I think it’s on the airline to inform you on the risks you’re taking when you use their stuff.

But now that you’ve read this blog post, I regret to inform you that you will in fact be an entire sack of geese if you go and post your boarding pass now.

When did all of this happen?

March 22 - @hontonyabbott posts a picture of a boarding pass and baggage receipt. I log in to the website and get the passport number, phone number, and internal Qantas comments.

March 24 - I contact the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) and let them know what happened.

March 27 - ASD tells me their investigation is complete, I send them a shakas gif, and they thank me for being a good citizen.

March 29 - I learn from lawyers that I have not done a crime 💯

March 30 - I contact Qantas and tell them about the vulnerability.

May 1 - Tony Abbott calls me, we chat about being dropped in the middle of the bush.

July 17 - Paper Mario: The Origami King is released for Nintendo Switch.

August 21 - Qantas emails me saying the security problem has been fixed.

September 13 - Various friends finish reviewing this post <3

September 15 - Tony Abbott and Qantas review this post.

Today - You read this post instead of letting it read you, nice job you.

I’m bored and tired

Let me answer that question,,, with a question.

Maybe try drinking some water you big goose. Honk honk, I’m so dehydrated lol. That’s you.

honk honk honk honl

Yeah, exactly.

I wrote this because I can’t go back to the Catholic church ever since they excommunicated me in 1633 for insisting the Earth revolves around the sun.

You can talk to me about it by sliding into my DMs in the tweet zone or, if you must, email.

[freaoscanlin]

Given Unsought, Part 4

Jemma came back from Maveth with a little something in tow. She and Daisy attempt to deal. Part 1 | 2 | 3

A/N: It’s time for the prenatal appointments to begin, and Daisy’s totally not going to miss that. Just one week and it’s smaller because Week 15 is a beast. Rated PG-13, 2419 words. 

Week Fourteen

The first trimester of pregnancy had raged through Jemma, bestowing bouts of morning sickness at all hours of the day, coloring in sunken circles beneath her eyes, and making her generally testy and out of sorts. Returning to earth, being around people, and dealing with the new gravity after months of harsh survival hadn’t helped, no doubt. She’d grown snappish with Fitz and Daisy above all else, grumbling over the jasmine lotion Daisy used and reminding Fitz to change his razor blade when it had gotten too old. Her sense of smell grew so strong that Daisy made it a policy never to drop by the lab on her way back from working out. The first time she’d tried, Jemma had raced for the bathroom, looking distinctly greener than any human should.

Honestly, Daisy was learning so much about pregnancy, but only from observing Jemma or from reading the books. Her friend never brought up her condition unprompted. When others mentioned it, she changed the subject. Normally Jemma shared everything with her friend, down to the very mundane details, but spending time on the deathworld had made Jemma a complete sphinx.

Which was why Daisy was surprised to stroll into the lab to raid Fitz’s stash of dwarves for a recon op and see Jemma standing in front of the full length mirror in the back. She’d pulled her shirt up to reveal the slightly round slope of her abdomen. Her head tilted, a thoughtful frown in place. It turned to shock as she looked in the mirror and saw Daisy approaching. She whirled.

“Daisy! Hi, I was just—”

“I do that when I’ve had a really big burrito.” Daisy pulled down the pelican case of drones from the shelf.  “Not the same, I know.”

“Not quite.” Jemma eyed her as Daisy began to critically inspect the dwarves. “He hates that you get into his stuff, you know.”

“That’s half the point. So, how’s the bump?”

“Rather bumpy, I’m afraid.” Jemma frowned.

“Looks about average for this far along.” Daisy pulled out a dwarf and inspected it. After leaving behind the Disney naming scheme, Fitz had gone on to one of those nerdy books that Daisy hadn’t read. She wasn’t sure who ‘Thorin’ was, but he looked like a pretty good dwarf.

She looked up to see Jemma gawking at her, and immediately wanted to make sure her hair wasn’t sticking up or something. “What?” she asked.

Jemma’s mouth snapped shut.  “N-nothing. I just hadn’t realized you’d done the research.”

“I Google-image searched baby bumps, Simmons, it’s not a big deal. And,” she eyed Thorin’s line of sight and tested its weight, “all the baby books had, like, these calendars about what happens when. This is week fourteen?”

Jemma nodded.

“Cool. That’s when facial muscles start moving, I think. I bet Simmons Junior’s already learning to frown at whatever Fitz says.”

“You think it’s a boy?”

“I think it’s a blob.” Daisy set Thorin back in its case and tucked that under her arm. She skirted around the table and laid a hand on Jemma’s shoulder since her friend still looked uncertain. “But given that the DNA swimming around in that thing belongs half to you and half to a literal astronaut, it’s a very, very smart blob. And a lucky one.”

“There are actually several studies that link intelligence not to genetics but to—”

Daisy made a blah-blah-blah hand gesture. “You can quote all the studies you like at me, but I highly doubt Simmons Junior’s going to be the kid eating paste in the corner in kindergarten.”

“Eating paste could be a sign of curiosity, I’ll have you know.”

Daisy raised her eyebrows, but Jemma didn’t disclose any further details. “All righty then,” she said, heading for the door. “On that note, I’m going to take my purloined dwarf before Fitz catches me.”

“Hey, Daisy?” Jemma’s hesitant voice stopped her in her tracks and made her swivel in place. Jemma twisted her hands together. “I don’t suppose you’re free tomorrow afternoon?”

“Yes, unless there’s an emergency. Why? Did you need something?”

Jemma took a deep breath. “I have an appointment and I was wondering if you might tag along? Fitz went to the first one with me, but he started arguing with the doctor and it was a bit of a nightmare, actually. It’s off-site, but it’s not far, and it won’t take long, I swear, you can come right back. You’d be doing me such a big favor—”

“Simmons—Jemma.” Daisy smiled. “Of course I’ll go with you. Come get me when you need to leave, okay?”

“Will do. Thanks, Daisy.”

“Anytime,” Daisy said. She glanced over at the unmistakable sound of Fitz’s footsteps approaching the lab. “Crap, that’s my cue. See you tomorrow!”

And ignoring Fitz’s “Wha—hey!” she scampered out of the lab with her stolen tech.

“Fitz is very cross with you,” Jemma said as Daisy adjusted the height on the little wheely stool they’d given her while they waited for the doctor to join them.

Daisy plopped down. “If he stopped being a perfectionist and released the super-useful tech that’s going to teach us all about what nefarious schemes the ATCU is doing, he’d live a much happier life. He holds onto those things forever.”

“He’s a bit fussy, yes, but that’s hardly—”

“We need that stuff, Simmons,” Daisy said.

Jemma held up her hands in an ‘I’m staying out of this’ gesture. “I’ll let you two work it out.”

“He’ll come around.” Daisy poked around the little table behind the ultrasound machine, grinning when Jemma waspishly slapped her hand away. “You never showed the pictures from your first ultrasound. It didn’t look like a squirrel, did it?”

“No, I can assure you, it did not look like a squirrel because there wasn’t a clear shot of the baby then. And I know what you’re doing.” Jemma took a deep breath and scooted back so she was sitting up on the hospital bed. “I appreciate it, but there’s no need to try to misbehave and distract me from my nerves. I’ve accepted my lot in life and that this child is coming.”

Daisy, about to reach out and pick up the wand, abruptly drew her hand back. “Um, yes, that’s exactly what I was doing,” she said, hoping the lie didn’t sound as fake to Jemma as it did to her.

A brief knock on the door made them look over, and Dr. Collins stepped in. Or at least, Daisy assumed that was Dr. Collins. Jemma had rambled on about her OB/GYN all the way over to the clinic, mentioning that she looked like a shield-maiden, and Daisy completely understood. Even though she wore pressed trousers and a crisp shirt under her lab coat, Dr. Collins could have joined Lady Sif in battle and Daisy wouldn’t have even blinked. She stood up when Jemma introduced her and immediately felt dwarfed.

“I’m here as a friend, honorary aunt, that sort of thing,” Daisy said, sitting down as Dr. Collins crossed to the stool on the other side of the hospital bed.

“Dr. Fitz wasn’t able to make it? I did look forward to another lively debate.” Dr. Collins logged into the computer.

“Fitz won’t be back until he promises to be on his best behavior,” Jemma said with a fond eye-roll. “Daisy’s been through a lot with me. You can speak frankly in front of her. She won’t be nearly as grossed out as Fitz.”

“Sure I will be, I’ll just hide it better,” Daisy said. She stayed quiet during the routine parts of the check-up, while Jemma answered questions and had her blood pressure checked. When Dr. Collins drew blood, Daisy merely tilted her head at Jemma. ‘Payback,’ she mouthed at her friend.

Jemma stuck her tongue out at her.

The conversation grew too scientific for Daisy to follow, so she spaced out. Was it always like that when doctors examined other doctors? If she hadn’t been exposed to years of Fitz and Jemma talking about science-y things way over her head, Daisy would’ve been intimidated. Now she studied the seriously outdated computer that ran the ultrasound machine. It’d take her about thirty seconds to hack it, she decided, if she was feeling slow.

She jolted and brought her attention back to the present when Jemma laid back on the bed. “Huh?”

“She’s doing the ultrasound now,” Jemma said. She correctly pegged the source of Daisy’s distraction when she informed the doctor, “Daisy’s the smartest computer person I know. She’s just brilliant at all computers. She was admiring your system, I think.”

More like cringing at it, but she let Jemma have that. She wheeled herself closer. “Time for the money shot? The books said the sex could be determined this week, maybe?”

“It’s possible, but the position of the fetus might make that difficult.” Dr. Collins gave them both a smile. “Some babies are shy about that sort of thing. You might not know until the day of the delivery. In addition, fourteen weeks is a little early to tell. We can confirm better at twenty weeks.”

“Well,” Jemma said with one of those forced smiles, “it’ll be an excellent surprise, whatever we discover.”

“You can paint the nursery gender-neutral colors. What do they put in nurseries? Baby ducks?” Daisy asked.

“Fitz has already insisted on monkeys.”

Daisy conceded to that with a thoughtful tilt of the head, surprised that she’d already discussed it with Fitz. But it made sense: Jemma would have to find a place off-base soon so she could start nesting, or whatever. That sucked. Daisy would miss being two doors down from her best friend. But also with Ward still out there plotting revenge, it wasn’t exactly safe to move off base yet, so maybe she wouldn’t have to worry about it for a while after all.

But Daisy didn’t want to think about Ward, so she said, “Monkeys would be cute.”

“I’m considering my options.” Jemma grimaced as the gel was applied to her abdomen. To Dr. Collins, she said, “Fitz has always wanted a Capuchin monkey.”

“It’s kind of a thing with him,” Daisy agreed, watching the image on the screen shift between blurry black lines and equally blurry gray lines. “How long does it take for—ooh.”

The lines on the screen gave way to a grainy ultrasound of an impossibly tiny fetus in the middle of the screen. Daisy heard Jemma’s gasp and felt something punch through her chest, but in a good way. Unconsciously, she leaned forward to get a better look. Online, the sonograms had looked vaguely like creepy little octopuses. Here she could actually see the line of a face, an upturned nose and chin. The belly was almost comically distended, the little legs curled up. Not so much a blob, but a minuscule and perfect human.

“And there’s your baby,” Dr. Collins said, typing something into the keyboard with her free hand as she continued to move the ultrasound wand over Jemma’s abdomen. Measurements began to list out on the screen. “Little easier to get a clear shot this time, I think. Now let’s see if we can get a heartbeat.”

Daisy’s hand hurt. Looking down, she realized that Jemma had grabbed it at some point, linking their fingers together and squeezing hard. She had a look on her face that was impossible to decipher, her eyes glued to the screen.

“Aha,” Dr. Collins said, and an EKG line began to beep at the bottom of the screen. She hit a button on the keyboard. “Sounds like a good, strong heartbeat to me. At this point in time, Dr. Simmons, we don’t have any reason to believe there’s anything but a very healthy fetus in there. If you look here, you can see the fingers…” She began to point out parts of the sonogram, endlessly patient as she answered Daisy’s questions.

Jemma remained silent, clutching Daisy’s hand. She reached out with her free hand, wonderingly brushing her the tips of her fingers over the moving image of the fetus. Then she blinked and seemed to snap herself out of the spell. “Oh, I’m terribly sorry, I’ve smudged up your screen—”

“Don’t worry about it.” Dr. Collins handed her a tissue, which she used to dab at her eyes. Jemma started and looked down at her hand, as though surprised to find it holding Daisy’s. Daisy merely squeezed reassuringly, not letting go.

Dr. Collins smiled at them, glancing down at the handholding briefly. “I’ll just print you off a copy, if you don’t have any other questions? Do you want a copy, too?”

“Uh, sure,” Daisy said. “I’ll consider it the start of my career as one of those people who carries around wallet photos.” She couldn’t wait to text it to May, actually.

Ten minutes later, she climbed into the driver’s seat of the borrowed vehicle—mercifully one of their SUVs without their logo on it, as that would look super conspicuous at the doctor’s office—and tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. Jemma had been eerily quiet. She sat in the passenger seat, one hand resting on her abdomen and the other holding the folder of papers Dr. Collins had given her, lost in thought.

Daisy nudged her. “Wanna play hooky for a bit? We could go get milkshakes.”

As she’d expected, that drew Jemma from her reverie. “You heard her in there, I’m supposed to be practicing healthy eating habits. Milkshakes are nothing but sugar—”

“And deliciousness. Think of it as a good source of calcium or something. She said you’re healthy, the baby seems healthy. Why not cut loose a little?”

Jemma looked tempted.

Daisy nudged her again. “Do you know how rare it is to get out of the base these days? Let’s go be irresponsible for, like, half an hour before we head back.”

“You’re such a bad influence.” Jemma reached over and brushed some of Daisy’s hair back. Must be a pregnancy thing, Daisy determined. Like nesting, or something. Jemma had never been this hands on with her before. “But yes. Let’s go get milkshakes. But you’ll have to bring one back for Fitz, too, to apologize for stealing Thorin.”

“Fair,” Daisy decided, and started the ignition.

[turkiyeecom]

E3 2019 in photos: Gooigi, crazy arcade machines, and a DOOM museum

"Great work!" — Plus, the National Videogame Museum returns with some of its craziest rarities yet. Sam Machkovech and Kyle Orland - Jun 16, 2019 1:00 pm UTC LOS ANGELES—If you couldn't or didn't make it to E3 2019, you're not the only one. Anecdotal evidence suggests this was the most poorly attended E3 in some time (though its organizers at the ESA insist that this E3 had only 3,000 fewer attendees than 2018's jam-packed affair), owing perhaps to Sony's no-show or the abundance of live-streamed options for enjoying the event at your own home. Luigi and Gooigi attracted hordes of attendees excited to pose for photos. Sam Machkovech Inside the Luigi's Mansion 3 booth, fans could pose with a guy in a Luigi costume. Nintendo went all-out building a haunted house for these kiosks, but my photos of it turned out terribly. It was easier to get photos of the toy dioramas built around the Link's Awakening gameplay kiosks. Nintendo built four of them in all. A closer zoom on the plastic minis Nintendo built just for this occasion. Link delves into a dungeon. "YOU SHALL NOT PASS!" "Wrong series, dude." I'll admit, I kinda lost my mind seeing this adorable Link and Marin meet-cute diorama. Marin in Smash Bros. Ultimate? A guy can dream, right? The EA Play event at the Hollywood Palladium included this impressive cast of paid Apex Legends cosplayers. Yes, the person cosplaying as Octane is a bilateral amputee. You couldn't buy these impressive 10" Apex Legends statues at EA Play. But you could buy a ton of shirts and hoodies. As an Apex Legends fan, Ars's Sam Machkovech nearly bought the "bamboozled" one. For some reason, EA Play hosted an Anthem gameplay session... and for some reason, attendees actually waited for it. FIFA '20 hosted an arena-soccer match. The McLaren Senna features in the new LEGO Speed expansion pack for Forza Horizon 4, so naturally, Microsoft had someone make a life-sized McLaren Serra model out of LEGO bricks. They went to pretty insane trouble to include significant elements from the real deal. Real wheels, real LEGO blocks. This refreshed version of the Xbox Elite Controller (dubbed "version 2") will launch in November for $180 and features such perks as a rechargeable battery, a controller-charging case, increased hair-trigger responsiveness, and more. We couldn't test the new XEC with any games, but its newly texturized grip and significant heft felt good to hold on its own. C'mon, Xbox, you think we're gonna steal this thing? How dare you. Say hello to one of Gears 5's newest, most disgusting monsters. It's not a Gears of War character if it doesn't have chest-high cover nearby. The best thing about Gears 5's new "Escape" mode is that it supports three-player split-screen co-op. More of this kinda thing, please, Xbox Game Studios. The newest LEGO Star Wars release this coming holiday season revolves around the "Skywalker Saga," so naturally, it's time to trot out the old LEGO Han in LEGO carbonite statue again. Coach's Pac-Man line of bags and accessories. For the discerning, fancypants gamer. More Pac-Man and classic-Namco swag. Pretty solid 10" Tekken statues. The entire Bandai Namco fancy-collectible wall was pretty great, honestly. I couldn't take photos of the Final Fantasy VII Remake gameplay kiosks, but I could take photos of the series' Shinra Corporation stuff all around it. For example, this recreation of an iconic FFVII backdrop. Square Enix put up a few Shinra advertisements around the kiosks. See? They have Midgar's best interests at heart! I really hope there's a full cartoon series hidden inside of FFVII Remake starring this cartoon dog. Someone please translate this for us. A small detail of the amazing theater room for Psychonauts 2. TEETH! Arcade1UP had a significant E3 presence with its home-friendly versions of classic arcade machines. The manufacturer used E3 to reveal its newest product: a Star Wars Atari arcade trilogy collection, coming "late 2019." Another look at its handsome side cabinet art. I had to stand on a stool to get a better look at the screen and controller. Because this cabinet was set up on a precarious platform, it was not playable at E3. An Arcade1UP representative said it collaborated with Disney and Lucasfilm in the making of this cabinet, then studied original classic arcade hardware to recreate the controller. Rather than answer my technical questions about how the controller was constructed in this modern version, the Arcade1UP rep insisted that it sought input from arcade cabinet collectors to confirm that its version nailed the original cabinets' feel and mechanical action. Another new Arcade1UP cabinet: the TMNT collection, which includes both of Konami's four-player brawlers in one cabinet. (Most of their cabs include at least two games, if not a few more.) It seems to comfortably support four players, but I liked this group's tweak: letting the middle player simultaneously control two turtles. Then there was this absolutely ridiculous thing that Arcade1UP built for the heckuvit. That's intrepid Ars Technica editor Sam Machkovech up there pretending to play the game. I hope the hand on the joystick makes clear how stupidly massive this whole rig was. But it worked... and Sam won his match. Really, Sam? Be professional. Sega's booth had its own oversized-controller gimmick to celebrate the impending launch of the Sega Genesis Mini this September. It's not really E3 until Ubisoft has a stage full of professional dancers and average fans getting down to Just Dance as one awkward collective. A peek at the poster-covered walls inside of Cyberpunk 2077's behind-closed-doors booth. Capcom had a relatively meager showing at E3, with this new Monster Hunter World expansion taking up most of the company's booth. But, hey, at least they had some nice 10" dragons under glass. Hold me closer, tiny draaaagonnnnns. Sorry, Street Fighter fans. Capcom didn't come to E3 2019 with any news about either SFV or any new fighting games. Just 10" figurines. Chun-Li and Cammy, kicking ass beneath glass. Larger than life. Just like Borderlands should be. Kyle Orland This was by far the best part of the Destroy All Humans revival attempt. Kyle Orland Pixl Cube was one of the more inventive games at the Indiecade booth, a tilt-sensitive box with LED dots that moved through a maze as if pulled by gravity. Kyle Orland In the entryway for Youtube Gaming's creator space, blocks from the show floor, a Google Stadia controller sits behind glass with a mock-up of a retro game store. Kyle Orland The YouTube Gaming space also featured some streamers on old-school CRT TVs, which was a weird look. Kyle Orland Cute. Kyle Orland The YouTube Gaming logo sits on a fake cartridge alongside... Hyper Chroma Ultra? Kyle Orland Nothing says "E3" like a guy in a Yoshi/Mario costume livestreaming himself as he balks loudly at the show floor's $6 pretzels. Kyle Orland New Wave Toys is expanding its Replicade line of authentic miniature cabinets with the likes of these two Capcom classics. Kyle Orland MyArcade is expanding from miniature cabinets to massive portable systems capable of playing actual NES and SNES cartridges. Kyle Orland MyArcade's upcoming Contra cabinet even includes link cable support for two player action. Don't you DARE touch this actual Contra cabinet in the MyArcade booth, though. Kyle Orland That being said, we attended, and Ars Technica came back from Los Angeles with plenty to show for it. In addition to a few more hands-on previews coming (which will build upon the best-of E3 2019 list we already filed), we took our cameras out at both the official E3 halls and nearby events (Xbox Fan Fest, EA Play). I gotta say, in this modern political climate, I have been calling every year "the year of doom." A very nice pencil sketch taken from the original PC game's box art. I'd never seen these minis before, but now I want to play DOOM-opoly. A better zoom on these metal beasts. Collect me plenty. Now for some impressive 3D molds of famed DOOM demons. See? It's like a museum. Funnily enough, this is my "I don't know what to do with my hands" pose when I stand for photos. The secret for awkward photo poses: turn your arms into massive rocket launchers. Way less awkward! As one of DOOM 64's longtime fans, I stood at this specific panel for a while. This might be the least-blurry these N64 sprites have ever looked. (The N64 famously smothered its sprites in a disgusting, smeary blur.) More figurines on display. More figurines on display. More swag on display. More swag on display. The result is a whopping three image galleries here. The first is a catch-all for most of the basic, expected fare, while the second and third focus on retro elements: a DOOM-specific mini-museum, and a curated collection of very rare gaming hardware and collectibles courtesy of the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, Tex. (If you've never been to that physical location before, we strongly encourage you to book a trip.) You know the retro portion of E3 is serious when they put this thing behind a rope. Truly one of a kind. Click the image to get a better look at the information placard. Yep, those are traditional Saturn controller ports. We'd never seen these Vectrex prototypes and variants before. The innards of a prototype color Vectrex system that never saw production. Kyle Orland Anybody think they can repair this thing? Yes, the only scoring cart that remains from this Super Nintendo championship event. Also, a killer Vectrex jacket. How the heck does the NVM keep finding and showing off such incredible game-history rarities? Some cool mementos from the original Mortal Kombat. The placard explains how rare this system is... ... based on this specific message signed by none other than Bill Gates. I don't care how puffy this jacket is. I'd wear it. Every year, the National Video Game Museum trots out at least one previously confidential binder taken from a major gaming company. This year's was Nintendo. I'm always fascinated by internal '80s and '90s documentation about piracy and cartridge backup systems. This section went on for a few more pages and even included grainy photos of various cartridge-copying devices. Video games: the board game! Video games: the, uh, VHS game! Well before the Game Boy revolutionized portable gaming, kids of the '70s and '80s were stuck with these clunkers. One wall was dedicated to particularly rare game consoles that launched solely in Japan. Eat your heart out, Donkey Konga. This is one of Gunpei Yokoi's classic electronic games that he designed for Nintendo in the '70s. This makes me wish Ulala was in an actual '80s cartoon. Kyle Orland In addition to popular and common fare in the coin-op section, the NVM trotted out a few machines we rarely see at classic gaming expos, like this fetching Jungle King cab. True story: we asked Double Fine studio founder and creative director Tim Schafer if he could step back for a second so we could take a photo of this handsome Omega Race cabinet. "I used to play this game all the time as a kid," he remarked before stepping away slowly. (If you're wondering, he signs his name "TIM" in high-score tables.) And we couldn't leave E3 without a walk through the almost carnival-like selection of vendors and inventions in the expo's very back hall. Look below at the show's weird "et cetera" section. Here's a gallery of E3 2019's oddest booths and products. "Wow, how nice and COOL!" we're sure you are saying to yourself. Kyle Orland Thermoreal uses superconductors (?!) to simulate a cold or hot feeling in metal. The company integrated this tech into VR-compatible gloves and a VR headset. As the VR environment changes, so does the sensation of real-life temperature. Trippy! Kyle Orland This 1,000 MaH battery pack for the Switch was heavy, but the harness made it pretty easy to slide on and off to use only when it's needed. Kyle Orland Some extremely generic-looking custom chip boards for use in mini-arcade devices and portable emulation devices. If anybody reading this has the rights to the Atari Jaguar Mini, look them up. Kyle Orland Why stream games to a smartphone with Google Stadia when the Smach Z packs an entire 1080p gaming PC with a 6" screen into a rather bulky portable package? Doom (2016) ran with noticeable judders, and the unit got noticeably hot in our test. But the fact that it works at all was impressive. Kyle Orland The Tactsuit haptic system jolts your body when playing compatible VR games and software. Kyle Orland The Vuvana system has something to do with using a new blockchain cryptocurrency to buy and "own" items in virtual reality, which you can view on a cell phone with this included viewer, apparently. Kyle Orland Oversized controllers were all the rage at E3 2019, but this one went to the trouble of building in a monitor for its game, Street Fighter 2. Kyle Orland Remember the iCade Mini? Someone sure does... Kyle Orland GameBoks is just like it sounds—a wooden box that houses a monitor, power supply, and a space to hold and connect your game console. Between this and the new Atari VCS, wood paneling is apparently the hot new retro-hardware trend. Kyle Orland Proximat is being sold as a "mousepad for your virtual reality feet." It gives VR players a physical indication of their play space's center point, complete with high-grade gel for foot comfort. Kyle Orland If this is a thing you're looking for (for some reason), E3 has you covered. Kyle Orland Amazingly, a product with "360 ONE X" in its name has nothing to do with Xbox (it's a 360 degree camera designed for VR) Kyle Orland Neither vinyl nor fidget spinners are dead at E3 2019. Kyle Orland I need some quick energy after seeing all of these amazing products. It's my lucky day! Kyle Orland How do you make money selling $100 worth of stuff for $40? It's an economic miracle! Kyle Orland This balance board is mainly meant for some easy exercise while at a standing desk, but its producers were marketing it to gamers with a Mortal Kombat 11 display. Kyle Orland And the award for "most dystopian sounding slogan at E3" goes to... Kyle Orland "In the 1989 Future" is a legitimately great tagline, we have to admit. Kyle Orland Listing image by Sam Machkovech Read More Read the full article

[turnsoutnoonewasexaggerating]

Part six of The Sam Diaries Read on Ao3: http://archiveofourown.org/works/10507836/chapters/24084519

‘Sam, Eunoia gave me your number. Could we meet up at the cafe in about ten minutes? It's urgent. Neil.’

Sam had two options. He could ignore the text and potentially abandon Neil in a time of need, therefore be hunted down by an unsmiling Andrew Minyard and get a knife in his gut before he could walk down the aisle. OK, so option one sucks. Option two; he somehow manages to get from work to the cafe in under ten minutes, knowing that the bus will not be on time and he's never had to get that far on foot in such a short time ever. Option two also sucks, and may also result in his death via cardiac arrest. At least I'll look less traumatising in my coffin if it’s cardiac arrest though.

Option two it is.

Sam makes his excuses citing a family emergency, having a minor irrational panic as he jogs out of the company that his word choice will somehow get back to Andrew and he'll get a knife to the gut regardless of the Neil situation.

He really shouldn't be approximating friends with someone who is so likely to kill him at any moment. Ah well, too late now.

Not even his impending death is enough to distract him from how fucking awful running is. To say he's sweating would be a major understatement. Close to collapsing from hyperthermia is a more accurate. He's glad he hasn't eaten lunch yet because he's certain he'd be expelling it on the sidewalk if he had. He takes to swearing aloud each time his right foot hits the floor, uncaring of the other sidewalk occupants' horrified looks. He does tone it down to 'damnit' as he runs past the school, but he's straight back to panting 'fuck me up the ass with a chainsaw shit fuck shit' immediately afterwards. 

Needless to say, he doesn't make the trip in ten minutes, more like twenty, but still notably faster than the bus, a fact he would be proud of if he could get enough oxygen into his lungs to be able feel anything besides intense nausea.

He staggers into the coffee shop and looks wildly around for Neil, hoping to any and all higher powers that Neil has a) a good reason for this and b) that it doesn't require him to do anything.

Unfortunately, Neil is apparently unmoveable by higher powers.

“What happened to you?” Neil asks as Sam throws himself down onto the seat opposite him by the window. Sam waves an indignant but exhausted hand at him, slumping enough in his seat that he can see the underside if the table.

“You, said, it, was, urgent.” Neil has the grace to look slightly sheepish.

“Well. Urgent might have been a bit... Presumptuous.” Sam's generally not very good at glaring, but he thinks he can make an exception as he stares Neil down.

“You made me, an unfit lump of a human being, lie my way out of work and then run halfway across the city for something that was not an emergency?!”

“This is presumably a bad time to admit I need a favour isn't it?” Sam thumps his head against the seat, but he can't be mad for long, especially in the face of Neil's disappointed face.

“What is it?”

“I was wondering if you would draw me something.” Sam blinks. He draws himself up by digging his elbow into the table and looks at Neil properly.

“More stabby stalkers?” Neil shakes his head, to Sam's relief.

“No. It's Dan and Matt's wedding anniversary next week, and I was wondering if you could draw my Foxes line up like this.” From his pocket, Neil produced an image from google entitled 'squad goals'. Crude stick figures were shown posing, and above each of them Neil had written which one of his Foxes he wanted drawn in that pose. Sam smiled as he looked at it, sensing that the choice of each person's pose had been chosen very carefully.

“I'll need reference pictures. But I'm pretty sure I could get this done by next week.”

“Good. How much is it?” Sam frowned at him.

“What?”

“For the drawing.” Neil said impatiently, glancing out of the window as his knee bounced enough to knock into the table.

“Um. I don't know. I've never been commissioned before.” He didn't point out that Neil should probably have commissioned an artist who was actually looking for commissions. He had a feeling he'd earnt a bit of Neil's trust, enough that he'd go to him with this. Alternatively Neil might just not have any idea that there were artists on the Internet looking for commissions. He didn't really strike Sam as an active Tumblr user. Either or.

Before Sam can come to a decision, he’s distracted by the newspaper on the far end of the table that’s blown open from the (blessed) breeze coming through the window. He snags the page and pulls it towards him.

THE REAL REASON BEHIND THE JOSTEN-MINYARD RIVALRY?

The headline is the top story in the sports section. Neil reads it upside down and groans burying his face in his hands.

“Fuck. I didn’t think it would be in the newspaper.” Sam scans the article baffled, only putting it together when he spots the blurry selfie in the centre. In it, other than the clearly excited Exy fan’s face, Neil and Andrew are sat opposite each other at the very same table Sam is now sat at, looking as indifferent as usual apart from their clasped hands. To Sam’s confusion, the media seem to think that it’s Andrew’s twin brother Aaron in the picture, and that- Sam can’t help but snort when he reads it- that Andrew’s homophobic.

“What’s the ‘rivalry’ about?” Neil shrugs, but he’s smirking a little bit.

“On the court I talk to Andrew in Russian a lot. It’s not my fault if the media misconstrued my… Enthused reminders of our grocery list.” Sam giggles and Neil’s smirk widens as he catches his eye. “I caught this,” Neil continues, waving his hand at the article, “On my Twitter this morning before my run. Wanted to meet up with you about this drawing before Andrew sees it.”

“Why?” Sam asks curiously. Neil winces, and nods his head at something behind Sam.

Sam turns to find Andrew Minyard stalking towards him with something lethal in his eyes. All 5 foot nothing of muscle, and probably 90% ice cream if his purchases at Eunoia’s are anything to go by… Well Sam’s not ashamed to admit he scrambles hastily out of his seat and out of Andrew’s way.

Andrew takes no notice of Sam, instead reaching the table and glowering at Neil, who looks completely unrepentant. This, however, traps Sam between the counter and the exit, with Andrew an unmoving roadblock in-between. Andrew says something in scornful Russian, and Neil replies lazily in the same language, looking amused. Sam has no idea what’s going on, other than he is feeling more uncomfortable by the second.

He glances around wildly for a distraction, eyes landing on the tiny TV screen above the counter that’s always on a news channel. From here, he can’t hear anything, but he notices when Andrew’s body double is depicted on screen, looking like someone who should be frazzled considering he’s wearing his pyjamas and his hair is a bird’s nest, but he’s glaring into the camera lens like it has personally offended him. In all honesty, it might have.

“Um, guys?” He hedges. Andrew’s head whips up to follow his line of sight, and before Sam can say anything, Andrew is shoving him out of the way and stalking up to the counter.

“Turn it up.” Andrew commands, emotionless, but the threat in his eyes makes the poor cashier hurry to do what he says even as the man’s eyes flick between Andrew and the screen with dawning amazement.

“-Katelyn, why the,” BEEP, “Would I date someone as idiotic as Neil,” BEEEEP, “Josten and if you had two brain cells to provoke a synaptic response you’d know that’s clearly Andrew in the photo you absolute morons.” The clip finished and it flicked back to the studio where the newsreader was talking through what Aaron had said, as if he hadn’t made himself perfectly clear.

Sam glanced at Andrew’s face cautiously, but he still didn’t know Andrew well enough to read what he was thinking. Neil had wandered over at some point during his speech and was resting the majority of his upper body on the counter, looking back at Andrew.

“He’s right. You are an idiot.” Andrew says eventually.

“I guess we’re out now then.” Neil sighs faux-dramatically. “And here I was hoping to come across as heterosexual. Kevin will be so disappointed.”

“Day’s just too much of a coward to come out himself.” Andrew mused. Neil blinked, and then his eyes opened wide.

“What? Andrew, what?!” The tiniest of smirks curled one corner of Andrew’s mouth as Neil continued to look as if the floor had been ripped out from under his feet while being plunged into a bowl of ice-cold water and a bag of rocks smashed into his head.

Seeing as Sam didn’t particularly care about whatever it was they were talking about now, he decided to carefully edge out of the café, grabbing the paper Neil had given him as he went. Apparently, he had some drawing to do.

[kidsviral-blog]

The Hunter, The Hoaxer, And The Battle Over Bigfoot

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/the-hunter-the-hoaxer-and-the-battle-over-bigfoot/

The Hunter, The Hoaxer, And The Battle Over Bigfoot

Jeffrey Meldrum is a respected anthropologist risking his reputation to prove Sasquatch is real; Rick Dyer is a self-described “entertainer” unapologetically capitalizing off it. Their rivalry represents two sides of the fractious but booming subculture.

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Illustration by Morgan Schweitzer for BuzzFeed

It’s a sweaty July day, and Rick Dyer is in his tank-like Toyota, barreling down a highway just south of Atlanta. It’s a comically oversize SUV, with a rack of roof lights and an exterior wrapped in flat-black vinyl. If Batman drove a Jeep, it would look like this.

Somewhere near the turnoff for a Christmas tree farm, Dyer abruptly turns into a sloping grassy median, then into a field of knee-high weeds beyond the road, then down a narrow dirt trail, where, after rumbling over an impressive heap of felled trees, we arrive at a small clearing just on the other side of a trailer park. Dyer, 37, is wearing a red T-shirt, red gym shorts, and a camouflage hat embroidered with a Bigfoot logo. His neatly trimmed beard frames a mischievous grin. “Let’s go do a Bigfoot investigation,” he says.

Moments later, we’re parked beside a trailer where a couple of boys are milling around a rusty grill. “Are you the one who called about Bigfoot?” Dyer asks. The pair looks confused. Soon, there’s a small gathering and Dyer explains that someone from a nearby trailer said that a Bigfoot attacked his car. “I went up there and checked it out, and his door from his car is ripped off,” Dyer says matter-of-factly. Someone asks what kind of car it was, and Dyer provides a make and model, and says a tow truck is on its way. If they see anything, Dyer tells them, please contact him through his website.

“What are you going to do if you find it?” a man in a basketball jersey and sunglasses asks.

“Well, I’ve already killed one,” Dyer says.

The boys look on in amazement as Dyer offers his bona fides. Look him up on Google, he says. They’ll read the accounts of how he bagged a Bigfoot. They’ll see the photos. Then, the boys scuttle away in search of the car with a missing door.

It’s an odd thing to witness such instinctive slipperiness. But Dyer is untroubled. To him, lying about one of the world’s most enduring wilderness mysteries is no different than a pro wrestler getting in the ring. “I’m an entertainer,” he likes to say. Or: “You can choose to believe my story or not.”

It’s been more than a half-century since a Northern California newspaper printed the headline that made “Bigfoot” a household name. In the decades since, no definitive proof of the large, ape-like creature that people also call Sasquatch (from Canada), Yeti (from the Himalayas), or Skunk Ape (from Florida) has surfaced. But the eyewitness accounts, the indistinct photos, the brief, blurry videos, the footprints — they’re as persistent as ever.

There are news stories about the latest sightings and YouTube clips purporting to show them. There are successful television series like Spike TV’s 10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty, which premiered earlier this year, and Animal Planet’s Finding Bigfoot, now in its fifth season; on the channel’s website, there is a “Bigfoot Cam,” where “the search for Sasquatch goes 24/7.” There are countless groups and clubs and museums with names like North American Wood Ape Conservancy and Bigfoot Discovery Project. There are self-styled, expedition-leading Sasquatch “hunters” and online radio talk shows and origin theory-peddling experts.

Against this backdrop, Dyer’s anything-goes hustle means business. He markets himself as a “master tracker” after all, a label that is prominently attached to the short-sleeve camouflage button-up he wears.

As we get in the Toyota, Dyer delivers a full-throated roar. “They’re going to be talking about that for weeks and weeks and weeks,” he says. And yet, this off-road adventure is nothing compared to Dyer’s big hoaxes.

Over the last 50 years, allegations of devious men using wooden feet and fur suits have cast a long shadow over the Bigfoot phenomenon. But Dyer’s dark talents are rare. He’s an admitted serial hoaxer with a chameleon-like ability to cultivate a new persona for each gambit, from bumbling neophyte to Sasquatch evangelist to P.T. Barnum-like showman. “In the annals of Bigfoot hoaxers, he’s earned himself a place in the hall of fame,” says Benjamin Radford, the deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer and author of Hoaxes, Myths and Mayhem.

As Dyer has become a wily villain in the Sasquatch scene, he has drawn outsize media attention, swarms of paying customers and fans, and loathing from the many people who consider Bigfoot a living creature. After a hoax earlier this year, a petition was posted on Change.org demanding that he be charged criminally (he has not been). Loren Coleman, the cryptozoologist and author of Bigfoot! The True Story of Apes in America, describes Dyer as a “disgusting phenomenon” who just won’t go away.

For this second variety of Bigfooter, the search for Sasquatch is a serious endeavor. They are modern-day explorers, amateur investigators, and even academically credentialed researchers who have sought to not only bring science to Bigfoot, but Bigfoot to science. While no bones, body, or DNA have been discovered, they argue that there is considerable circumstantial evidence that Bigfoot is real.

For these dedicated few, Rick Dyer is more than an entertainer — he’s a danger to a field of study that already has credibility issues. That they all toil under the same big tent is one of the great oddities of a subculture that is as crowded and fractious as ever, one that can seem like an amalgam of a cult and an earnest explorers club, with competing camps of believers and skeptics, hoaxers and hunters, self-appointed experts and serious-minded scientists, all seeking to advance, in their own peculiar way, the mystery of Sasquatch.

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Photograph by Tim Stelloh for BuzzFeed

Jeffrey Meldrum’s office is on the second floor of a plain redbrick building in Pocatello, a college town in southern Idaho. It’s cluttered with books about anatomy and biomechanics, evolution and mammalogy. There are plastic skulls and wooden skulls, framed images of the surreal-looking red-faced uakari, and a silverback gorilla, his arms aimed piercingly straight into the ground.

Then, there is the Bigfoot stuff: hundreds of plaster foot casts believed to be Sasquatch, sitting on the floor, scattered on a work table, crammed into shelves. There are cartoons and tiny statues, books and envelopes labeled “hair.” Meldrum, 56, with a white beard, is wearing a black T-shirt with a pair of green eyes that stare back at me. “Sasquatch as seen through night-vision goggles,” he explains.

Against the far wall is a life-size image of the most well-known Bigfoot of the modern era: “Patty,” a nickname derived from the man who filmed her, an out-of-work cowboy named Roger Patterson. In a few dozen shaky seconds in 1967, Patterson captured her on film in the remote woods of Northern California striding along a creek bank. The footage, which he shot with the help of a rancher named Bob Gimlin, has remained an obsession, endlessly watched, dissected, debated.

An anthropologist at Idaho State University whose work on Bigfoot garnered a rare, significant endorsement from famed primatologist Jane Goodall, Meldrum specializes in the evolution of primate movement — he’s sometimes called “the foot doctor.” His scientific pursuit of Bigfoot began in the late 1990s with a brief question: “Is there a biological species behind the legend?” In the years since, Meldrum has analyzed hundreds of footprints, examined reams of supposed hair, and developed a working hypothesis. He’s trekked across dozens of miles of Western wilderness, where he says he’s had his own Bigfoot encounters, and in 2006, he published Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science. In addition to Goodall’s praise, the book won support from the pioneering field biologist George Schaller, who wrote that Meldrum “disentangles fact from anecdote, supposition, and wishful thinking” and has “done more for this field of investigation than all the past arguments and polemics of contesting experts.”

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Jeffrey Meldrum with a plaster foot cast in his Idaho office. Photograph by Tim Stelloh for BuzzFeed

The year after Meldrum’s book was published, he developed a scientific name and set of characteristics for the creature’s mythically massive footprint; it is, he says, one of the few peer-reviewed papers supporting the existence of Sasquatch to appear in mainstream academic literature. A few years later, he founded a peer-reviewed journal that publishes Bigfoot research. Among his current collaborations is a project that would use a drone to fly over suspected Sasquatch habitat in the United States and possibly Canada.

Meldrum’s research has made him a lonely figure in academia and an unlikely public face on this side of the Sasquatch phenomenon. He’s become The Bigfoot Guy — the level-headed, go-to scientific authority for conference organizers, countless documentary filmmakers, and on-deadline reporters who may not know the first thing about Bigfoot but are calling to ask about someone named Rick Dyer who claims to have killed one. The two know of each other, and they’re not friendly.

When Meldrum was a kid living in Washington State in the 1960s, his father, a grocery store manager at Albertson’s, took him to see the documentary that featured Patty. He was taken with snakes, insects, dinosaurs — anything natural history-related — so it didn’t take much to get him to the Spokane Coliseum, where it was showing. Meldrum sat transfixed as Patty’s slow-motion image meandered across the screen. “The notion that there might be a caveman stomping around out there was fascinating to me,” he recalls. For him, there were no questions of authenticity. “It was like, ‘Here it is. Wow.’ It was a mystery to be explored.”

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“Patty.” Still from Patterson Bigfoot sighting footage

At the time, Bigfoot was just beginning to lurch into the American imagination. Meldrum had no idea about the footprints found a decade before that produced the Bigfoot moniker. Nor did he know that for the Hoopa in California, for the Anasazi in the Southwest, and for many more, stories of wild, hairy men in the woods had been told for generations. The term “Sasquatch,” after all, was derived from the Salish tribes of British Columbia.

In 1993, Meldrum got a call from the prominent cryptozoologist Richard Greenwell. A television production crew in Northern California had been filming b-roll when they picked up what looked like a Sasquatch; when the crew wanted some expert opinion, they called Greenwell, who wondered if Meldrum wanted to tag along. Meldrum didn’t think much of Bigfoot anymore, but he wasn’t a strange choice: For years, theories had been floated that perhaps the Yeti was related to a giant ape that once lived alongside prehistoric humans. The creature was believed to have gone extinct, but perhaps it survived “in refuge areas,” as the primatologist John Napier suggested in 1973. Who better to examine the evidence than a primate expert?

Meldrum was skeptical, but he agreed. “I thought it would be an easy exercise in exposing the zipper,” he says. “Instead, I kept finding these different things that were quite compelling.” It was grainy video, and it was night, but he could see how its foot bent when it walked. He could see how the hair hung down from its arms, like an orangutan. They were able to determine its height too: more than 8 feet tall.

Then, after visiting the late Grover Krantz, the eccentric Washington State University anthropologist who was among the few academics to conclude that Sasquatch existed, Meldrum got out into the field. For the first time, he examined what were purported to be fresh tracks. They were 14 inches; there were a few dozen of them, pressed into the muddy foothills outside Walla Walla in eastern Washington, on the shoulder of a restricted-access farm road. When Meldrum bent down, he was astonished. He could see the telltale traces of a living foot, a foot where dozens of bones and joints appeared to be interacting with the ground beneath it. “I could see tension cracks, push-off ridges,” he recalls. “I could see toe slippage, dragging.”

This was not what happened when a blocky piece of wood was stamped in the mud, Meldrum thought. If it were a hoax, it would have been executed by someone who understood the subtleties of foot anatomy.

“As I sat there kneeling beside these tracks, I said, ‘Is this a path you’re willing to go down? Are you willing to preoccupy a portion of your attention, your career to this question, at the risk of jeopardizing your credibility?’ I’m looking at these tracks and I’m thinking, How could I not?”

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Photo by Tim Stelloh for BuzzFeed

Rick Dyer and I are driving around an affluent black suburb of Atlanta, a neighborhood of large lots, elegant brick homes, and golf course lawns. In a driveway, he sees what he’s looking for: a black luxury SUV with low mileage and a low asking price. Dyer, who’s wearing his camouflage Bigfoot hat and matching “master tracker” button-up, is looking to flip it — this is his day job — and he’s sized up the seller immediately. “The oil is full but he doesn’t know what a jumper cable is,” he says. “What you’re looking at is the perfect person to buy a car from.”

After a quick drive around the block, Dyer tells the seller that the transmission is shot. It needs a rebuild, and thus, the $2,000 price tag just doesn’t make sense. The two men haggle for a moment, and eventually settle on $1,400.

Afterward, I ask Dyer what he’ll make reselling it.

“$5,500,” he replies.

“Does that include what you’ll pay for a new transmission?”

“It doesn’t need one,” Dyer says, chuckling. “But it does need some transmission work.”

It can be difficult to untangle basic details about a man who lies for a living and seems to have no connection to his past. I ask, for instance, if he’ll put me in touch with his sister, and, in a text, he says there’s zero chance she’ll talk to me. I ask who his oldest friend is, and he connects me with a chicken farmer in Virginia named Jackie Pridemore. Pridemore tells me that the two met a couple of years ago, after he wrote a rap song about Dyer’s Bigfoot exploits. Dyer says his mother is a country music songwriter, but he can’t tell me who she is because the “haters” in the Bigfoot scene will go on the attack. His car has been vandalized, he says, and a variety of pranks have been orchestrated against him and his clique of Bigfoot friends.

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Dyer’s peculiar enterprise seems driven in part by money — he claims to have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars — though as Loren Coleman explains, there just isn’t that much to be made from Bigfoot hoaxing. (“It’s not like a stock market scheme,” he says.) Attention seems to be Dyer’s motivating force, and he is relentlessly on-message: The Bigfoot scene is filled with self-serious crybabies, and Rick Dyer might be a hoaxer, but he only hoaxes because, like Santa, Bigfoot brings joy to people. And really, you should listen to Rick Dyer because Rick Dyer is the only person to have ever killed a real live Bigfoot.

Dyer embraces the confusion. “I want people to write that I’m very deceptive, that I dance around stuff,” he says. “I want people to write all kinds of shit. I want people to write that I don’t have a body, so that when that time comes and I do, then it’ll make the people who said I didn’t look like idiots.”

Unlike Meldrum, Dyer was never a Bigfoot-phile. When he was a boy with a stutter growing up in Stockbridge and attending Christian school, he had never seen the Patterson-Gimlin film, as the grainy Patty footage came to be known, or heard of the persistent rumors surrounding it — that the fur suit had been created by the Hollywood makeup artist behind the original Planet of the Apes franchise, for instance. Nor had Dyer heard of Ivan Marx, the alleged hoaxer behind the 1976 film The Legend of Bigfoot, or of one of the other (alleged) classics: that the original “Bigfoot” prints from Humboldt County, California, came from a pair of carved wooden feet owned by a man named Ray Wallace.

Mainly, Dyer says, his interests, after a stint in the Army, were traveling — he went to Thailand, to Mexico, to Japan — and women; with three, he has seven children. But in March 2008, not long after he quit his job as a corrections officer at a state prison, Dyer’s first hoax was born. It happened while he and a friend, a police officer named Matthew Whitton, were hiking in Tennessee. It wasn’t exactly inspired. “I said, ‘Hey man, I saw Bigfoot,’” Dyer says he told Whitton. “He said, ‘Me too.’ We didn’t. I said, ‘Let’s do a Bigfoot hoax.’ He’s like, ‘OK.’”

They built a cheap website and started a YouTube page, where he and Whitton posted videos and advertised expeditions and gear. They were “the best Bigfoot trackers in the world,” they claimed and, as Dyer put it in one video, “they had some very compelling evidence” that would “change everything you knew about Bigfoot.”

“We thought we’d get a couple of hundred views,” Dyer says. “But it took off.”

After appearing on a Bigfoot radio show, Dyer and Whitton were in touch with a man named Tom Biscardi. Biscardi is a brash, self-described “real” Bigfoot hunter who is from Brooklyn, but now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is also an accused hoaxer and the proprietor and “team leader” of the California-based Searching for Bigfoot Inc., which investigates sightings, and, through its website, sells all manner of Bigfoot paraphernalia. In Dyer’s telling, Biscardi told him that he knew they didn’t have a body. “But we can make a lot of money,” Dyer recalls him saying. In Biscardi’s version, Dyer’s the con man. “He’s a motherfucker,” Biscardi says.

“DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO FIND GOAT BALLS?”

Dyer and Whitton set about building a fake body; the plan was to present a staged, video-recorded autopsy in the tradition of the famously hoaxed alien autopsy film of the 1990s, Dyer says. He spent a few hundred dollars on a rubber costume, and filled it with a macabre mix of animal bones and innards: There were pig intestines. There was a cow jaw. For the genitalia, they went to a slaughterhouse. “Do you know how hard it is to find goat balls?” Dyer says. The body was placed in a deep freezer, which was slowly filled with water, then switched on. For an accompanying DNA analysis, Dyer found an opossum on the side of the road. He carved off a sliver and bled on it; the hope, he says, was to have the analysis come back as human.

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Tom Biscardi displays one of the photographs given to reporters during a press conference on August 15, 2008 in Palto Alto, Calif. AFP / Getty Images IAN SHERR

In Dyer’s telling, Biscardi liked what he saw, and agreed to pay $50,000 for the finished product; Biscardi says that he never actually saw the body. “They gave me a piece of intestine,” he recalls. In the parking lot of a redbrick county courthouse in suburban Atlanta, Dyer and Whitton were given $50,000 in cash, and the freezer was loaded into a U-Haul and driven to an out-of-state “safe house.” Then, the pair flew to California, where Biscardi scheduled a news conference for noon on Friday, Aug. 15, 2008, at the Cabaña Hotel in Palo Alto. In a press release, Biscardi offered a few tantalizing details: Dyer and Whitton found the creature in the woods of north Georgia. It weighed more than 500 pounds. DNA tests were being conducted and the results would be presented at the news conference.

This last detail, says the author Benjamin Radford, was key to selling the hoax: No one had ever dangled a promise of that modern scientific marvel, DNA, before an audience desperate for direct evidence. An onslaught of media attention followed. Most was dubious, but there was plenty of it. Stories appeared not just in the local media, but in Scientific American and the New York Times, on CNN and NBC. “It was pretty fucking intense,” Dyer says.

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Illustration by Morgan Schweitzer for BuzzFeed

It’s a cold, damp summer night deep in the Wyoming wilderness, and a night vision scope is pressed to my right eye. In the distance, the flickering black-and-green tree line looks like an ’80s-era computer screen. Beside me, Meldrum’s research partner, the wiry wildlife biologist John Mionczysnki, is sitting on a small canvas stool, accordion in hand, playing a lullaby-like Scottish folk tune, which he swears is a soothing animal lure. Periodically, he trades his squeezebox for a portable floodlight and scans the foliage. In front of us, Meldrum is stretched out on a sleeping bag, peering through binoculars into the inverted darkness.

We’re here in this boggy, bug-infested section of Wyoming because there have been Sasquatch stories dating back more than a century — everything from visual eyewitness accounts to elk hunters reporting what’s been described as Bigfoot behavior: something lobbing rocks in their direction. Earlier in the day, they spent a couple of hours trudging through the area, doing what they often do on these trips. They survey. Meldrum looks for traces of Sasquatch: footprints, hair, scat. He finds turned-over rocks — most likely a bear — and a long line of elk prints. He finds tufts of hair snagged on a branch. “Deer or elk,” he says. Mionczysnki, who’s also a botanist, catalogs the flora. He notes the sorts of things that might satisfy the appetite of a large mammal — the pocket gophers, the carbohydrate-rich sedges, the limber pines and their high-calorie pine nuts, the lily ponds and their fish and insects and frogs, the thistles, a favorite of gorillas.

This is a fairly routine night of research for Meldrum. Fifteen years ago, he had been so impressed with the footprints in Washington State that he ignored his inner pragmatist and decided to seriously pursue the question of whether an ape-like creature could have made them. He was untroubled by the lack of additional evidence: bones of uncommon top predators are rarely found and the fossil record is notoriously patchy. Plus, the discovery of new mammals — some of them large — is not unheard of. In 1994, a rare species of ox was located in Vietnam. The following year, a breed of prehistoric horse was found roaming in Tibet. In 2001, the three-toed pygmy sloth was identified in Panama.

“IT’S SO EASY TO SAY, ‘OH, IT’S JUST A MAN IN A FUR SUIT’ UNTIL THEY SEE IT BESIDE A MAN IN A FUR SUIT.”

So Meldrum’s search began in earnest. One element was a close examination of plaster foot casts and footprints that appeared credible. He thought enough of them that he told me, “It’s the most elegant adaptation of a giant bipedal” — or on two legs — “primate living on the ground in steep mountainous terrain.” Another still-ongoing project has been a collaboration with a costume and robotics designer to reexamine the footage he first saw as a young boy in Spokane. “It’s so easy to say, ‘Oh, it’s just a man in a fur suit,’” he says. “Until they see it beside a man in a fur suit.”

Finally, there was fieldwork, and the hope of acquiring DNA from hair, or perhaps shooting some high-quality photos or video. And that required money. Bigfoot was hardly a burgeoning research subject in academia, though. As University of Florida anthropologist David Daegling observed in Bigfoot Exposed, “Within the Ivory Tower, it is perfectly legitimate for a folklorist to pursue unicorns; for a biologist, it is a foolish commitment of resources.” (A letter circulated at Idaho State signed by more than a dozen colleagues complained that Meldrum’s work was “fringe science.”) So, like many Bigfoot searchers before him, Meldrum secured private funding. With money from a wealthy oil and gas businessman in Texas, a foundation in California, and others, he planned weeks-long expeditions to the remote corners of the West where, often with Mionczysnki, he spent many nights listening, watching, and waiting.

Meldrum has stories of encounters from trips like this. He was weeks into a month-long expedition in Northern California when, late one night, he heard something rummaging through his guide’s pack. The two men jumped out of their tents, but whatever it was disappeared. Not long after, Meldrum heard footsteps. “I could hear the pat-pat-pat coming right towards me,” he recalls. “It brushed against the fly of my tent and hit the pole.” He called out to make sure it wasn’t his guide, then leaped from his tent. As he chased after it, he could hear it splashing through a marsh, and when he pointed his flashlight at the mud, he could see a pattern: right-left-right-left. Each track was about 16 inches. Then, it vanished.

It’s a dramatic story, but it’s among the most compelling pieces of evidence from Meldrum’s expeditions. He’s collected no DNA, and he’s gotten no photos and no video. When I ask if this gives him pause, he tells me that a combination of variables (including bad weather) and the nature of the work — “You’re looking for a moving needle in a haystack,” he says — can make this an all too common experience in wildlife tracking. Based on the evidence he’s seen, he’s concluded Sasquatch is a living thing, a large, upright ape of which there are a couple thousand west of the Mississippi in Canada and the United States.

Sitting in our camp, the three of us look beyond a narrow, shallow creek, toward a large pine tree to which Meldrum has strapped a camouflage digital camera with a built-in motion detector. If a Sasquatch is going to appear tonight, he and Mionczysnki reason, it’s going to come from the area that they surveyed earlier in the day.

So we wait.

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Photograph by Tim Stelloh for BuzzFeed

In the summer of 2008, Meldrum was among the first to weigh in on the hoax from north Georgia. Even before the Palo Alto news conference, during which Biscardi distributed a close-up photo of the teeth — “It’ll prove to you people that this is not a mask,” he said to the crowd — Meldrum told Scientific American that it looked exactly like the thing it was: “a costume with some fake guts thrown on top for effect.”

It took just a couple of days to unravel. In Dyer’s telling, it was over money. Someone at the so-called safe house wanted more, but Biscardi refused to pay, and, lest he be extorted, outed the hoax. In Biscardi’s version, he got a call from a costume maker who claimed that Dyer’s body matched their product. So Biscardi instructed his associate at the safe house to heat the slab of ice. “Seven hours later, they call me back and say it was a rubber suit with body parts,” Biscardi says. So he confronted Dyer and Whitton. “I say, ‘Is there anything you want to tell me?’” he recalls. “They say, ‘Oh no.’”

Biscardi says he contacted Fox News, and a wave of stories about the boys from Georgia followed. Biscardi pursed fraud charges, and though they were unsuccessful, Whitton was fired from the Clayton County Police Department. (He and Dyer are no longer friends, and Whitton couldn’t be reached for this story.) For Dyer, though, the event served as a strange entry point into a new hustle. People kept contacting him, wanting to go on Bigfoot expeditions, he says.

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So Dyer obliged. He created a new storyline, and presented himself as a reformed hoaxer. “He said that he had seen Bigfoot, and that he was on a mission to redeem himself,” a documentary filmmaker named Morgan Matthews told the Canadian Broadcasting Company last year. (Dyer would later appear in one of Matthews’ films.) Dyer made T-shirts and hats, and he took people on what were little more than backcountry fishing trips that ranged from two days to two weeks in Tennessee, Texas, north Georgia, California, and beyond.

Among the people to contact him was Matthews, who was working on a project about Bigfoot hunters. And so began Dyer’s next hoax. It’s a convoluted tale that begins, of course, with the real killing of a real Bigfoot.

During the summer of 2012, Dyer and Matthews embarked on a week-and-a-half-long expedition in a forest on the edge of San Antonio. On the morning of the sixth day, Dyer says he awoke to the sound of bone crunching; he looked out of his tent and saw what he claims was a large creature with reddish-brown hair. It was, Dyer says, his moment of conversion to Bigfoot believer. “I was in shock,” he says. “I didn’t even think Bigfoot exists.”

Matthews didn’t respond to interview requests, but Dyer claims the filmmaker captured the encounter on a high-resolution camera. Dyer, meanwhile, says he got it on his cell phone. But they wanted more. So that day, Dyer says, he and Matthews bought a rack of ribs from Walmart and Dyer nailed it to a tree at their camp. Then, they waited. Around 11:30, Dyer says he heard footsteps and twigs snapping. He jumped out of his tent and, with Matthews chasing him, ran after the creature. Dyer had his .30-06 hunting rifle; Matthews had his camera. In the end, Dyer says, he fired three shots at the thing, killing it.

Within a couple of weeks, Dyer says he uploaded video footage to YouTube, where it vaulted into the pantheon of furiously debated Bigfoot films. Andrew Clacy, a 47-year-old former television news cameraman and longtime Sasquatch enthusiast in Australia, was among the converted. He knew about Dyer’s history as a hoaxer, but he didn’t care. “Everyone overlooked it because we thought he had the real deal now,” Clacy says. “We thought it helped lead him to the real thing.”

When Meldrum got involved, the spectacle turned nasty. Two pro-Dyer amateur researchers visited Pocatello, Meldrum says, hoping to convince him of the body’s authenticity. It had already been autopsied, and DNA and tissue samples had been obtained, Meldrum recalls them saying. Plus, they had seen it. Were Meldrum to examine it, he would receive a $10,000 bank check; were the body to be proved a fake, he could cash it. When Meldrum declined, they upped the offer to $15,000. Meldrum says he laid out his terms: He’d need high-quality photographs posted on a secure website; he’d have to independently verify the credentials of the experts who examined it; and he’d need a no-contest stipulation for a fraud lawsuit in the event that the body was a fake. “I said, ‘This should be a no-brainer,’” Meldrum recalls.

There was no deal, and a video soon appeared on YouTube. In it, Dyer is wearing a cowboy hat and a striped short-sleeve button-up. In one hand, he’s holding a bottle of lighter fluid; in the other, he’s waving Meldrum’s book, Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science. “Dr. Jeffrey Douchebag Meldrum,” Dyer says to the camera. It’s dark, and Dyer is surrounded by a small audience. He looks like a drunk preacher as he reads aloud: “He knew his footprints were fake, but he thought in his mind, ‘Hey, there’s never going to be anything to compare it to.’ Until Rick Dyer. You’re busted, Mr. Douchebag.”

Dyer sprays the book with lighter fluid and drops it on the concrete. One of the men emerges and lights a match. Eventually, Dyer unzips his fly. “Roasted nuts,” someone says. The group laughs.

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Illustration by Morgan Schweitzer for BuzzFeed

Meldrum has done his best to avoid a cage match with Dyer, to keep Bigfoot madness at the margins. But if one of Meldrum’s goals has been to rescue Sasquatch from the ditch of tabloid mania and force high-minded scientists to at least consider the evidence, he doesn’t appear to have made much progress.

There are a couple of exceptions. A decade ago in Bigfoot Exposed, Daegling examined Meldrum’s footprint work and concluded that he hadn’t considered plausible alternatives for the anatomical detail that he saw. With Patty, Daegling was noncommittal, saying that while the “dynamics” of her movement appeared real, it could have also been a very, very good costume.

Then, earlier this year, a molecular biologist from Oxford published the first-ever systematic DNA analysis of 30 hairs collected from around the world that were purported to have been collected from Sasquatch-like creatures. The results were not good for Bigfoot — they came back as horse, cow, raccoon, bear, even human — though the biologist, Bryan Sykes, seemed troubled by the lack of interest in the subject. “Science neither accepts nor rejects anything without examining the evidence,” he wrote.

I wanted to find out if Meldrum had convinced any of his colleagues to take Bigfoot seriously, so I assembled a brief anonymous survey and sent it to 10 anthropologists at 10 universities who specialize in primates. I asked if they were familiar with Meldrum’s work on Bigfoot and what they thought of it. I wondered if they thought Bigfoot could be a real species of primate and if it deserved to be considered by science. I heard back from three.

All of them knew of Meldrum and respected his non-Bigfoot research, but none were convinced that Sasquatch should even be examined; their argument, in essence, was that Bigfoot isn’t possible. “A mammal that large going undetected and undocumented in the Western United States for this long defies all probability and logic,” one said. When I asked what they thought it was, all three said a hoax. Or, as one put it, “a compound of hoaxing, confusion, hallucination, and folklore.” Meldrum is used to this. Once, when he tried to present Bigfoot-related research at a meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, his submission was rejected. The program chairman later related the comments of one reviewer. “This is just not a subject that is of general interest to the anthropological community,” Meldrum recalls him saying.

In Meldrum’s view, the scientific reaction isn’t so much about evidence — though he did publish a scathing review of Bigfoot Exposed and he doesn’t have kind words for the molecular biologist. In his telling, it’s mostly a perception problem. Some academics have encountered little more than the tabloid mythology. Or the hoaxer. Others are overwhelmed by the intensity of the Bigfoot scene. “When a serious scientist shows some interest in the subject, they often become inundated with correspondence and contact requests from the amateur enthusiast community,” he says. “And there are some real strange people out there.”

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Courtesy of Rick Dyer

In Rick Dyer’s telling, he believed that Morgan Matthews’ documentary, Shooting Bigfoot, would prove him a reformed hoaxer. He believed it would contain the high-quality version of that brightly lit, early morning encounter, and on his Facebook page, he began a countdown to last year’s Hot Docs film festival in Toronto, where the movie was to premiere. “I built it up like you wouldn’t believe,” he says. The film, however, contained just one brief scene from that night — Matthews chasing Dyer into the woods, then getting knocked over by something big and mean-looking. Its werewolf-like face and arm flash across the screen. Soon after, the movie ends.

Speculation cascaded: Was the shooting staged? Had Matthews participated in an elaborate hoax? Where was Dyer’s body? Matthews has remained cagey on the matter, telling the CBC, “There was something quite extreme” at the end of his film that “may or may not have been a close encounter.”

Dyer says the corpse was moved to a secure facility, and his investors were unwilling to release it. He was losing patience; he had a fanbase to satisfy, after all, and he wanted to capitalize on the attention. “I saw an opportunity,” he says. “I said, ‘Let’s make money off a fake one and let’s make money off a real one.’” Like the traveling sideshow exhibits that once enthralled 19th- and 20th-century audiences, he would tour the South, spinning fantastic Bigfoot tales. And he would show the evidence.

In the final weeks of 2013, Dyer assembled a small team that included Clacy, the Australian cameraman, and a few other fans. From a Spokane-based toymaker, he says he commissioned a $4,000 latex, Styrofoam, and camel-hair Bigfoot, which he called Hank and placed inside a plywood-and-Plexiglas box. It would be viewed in a trailer, which would be attached to a motor home. The whole enterprise, which Clacy says was underwritten by two investors and an $80,000 loan, would rumble down the highway wrapped in gaudy, impossible-to-miss advertisements that included a massive photograph of Dyer’s cowboy hat-clad head next to the comic book text of his pitch: “See the only dead Bigfoot.”

In Clacy’s telling, he had no idea Hank was fake. He packed up his home in Wodonga and flew to Las Vegas, where Dyer was living at the time, because he believed Hank was the creature shot dead in Texas. “We wanted to be part of history,” he says. (Dyer disputes this, saying Clacy knew that it was a hoax.)

Despite a dismal start in Phoenix in January, Texas proved lucrative. From Amarillo to Houston, San Antonio to Katy, Hank was presented in flea markets and a Home Depot parking lot, at Alamo Drafthouses, and, when passing drivers flagged them down, on the side of the road. Dyer says he usually charged between $5 and $10 a head, but for the roadside stops, he claims $100 wasn’t uncommon. About 10 people could fit in the trailer at a time, and the routine was fairly brief, Clacy says. He would tell the story of how Dyer killed Hank, and he would use the photographs on the wall as supporting evidence. “I think we had a 95% belief rate,” Clacy says, adding that even taxidermists and a medical doctor in Paris, Texas, seemed convinced.

The media was incredulous. In Las Vegas, before the tour even started, a reporter from Esquire wondered why anyone would believe an admitted hoaxer, while Meldrum was again asked to weigh in, this time by a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor. “The thing has clearly been fabricated,” Meldrum said. “It smacks of images of alien autopsy.”

Clacy says his suspicions grew, but they were tempered by the endorsements from the taxidermists and the doctor (who he now thinks may have been a fake too). Finally, in March, in Daytona, Florida, he says Dyer confessed. It was Bike Week, and they were in the parking lot of an event. “He said, ‘I needed you to believe,’” Clacy recalls. “I feel like an idiot,” he adds. “I believed a con man.”

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Hank with Jimmy Smith II and Jimmy Smith at his new home in Denver. Photograph by Tim Stelloh for BuzzFeed

In the days after, Dyer revealed the hoax in a long, blustery video message on Facebook because, he tells me, “I didn’t want no one else to bust it.” Half a year later, he still claims to have the body of the thing he killed with Morgan Matthews, and he’s still sanguine about his Southern tour. “It’s entertainment,” he says. “If you want to believe I would haul around a life-changing specimen in the back of a $10,000 trailer, then you go ahead and believe it.”

Afterward, Dyer sold Hank to a marijuana dispensary in Denver called Mr. Nice Guys. The owner, Jimmy Smith II, says he bought it for $5,000, and that he’s planning to build a terrarium for it. “I look at it as an investment,” he tells me.

When I met with Dyer in July, he told me he was planning a news conference for early next year to unveil the body of a Bigfoot — for real this time — and he was offering full-access viewings for $150,000. By September, though, he was promoting a new project, a Bigfoot hunt in Pennsylvania.

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The body Dyer claims is a recently killed Bigfoot. Courtesy of Rick Dyer

On a Sunday morning a couple of weeks ago, Dyer sent me a text saying that his “team” killed a Bigfoot the night before. He forwarded “exclusive” photos of something wrapped in a blue tarp, of his friends unloading ice bags from a shopping cart, of him in a camo hat and camo shirt attaching something to the roof of his black Toyota. Later, an image of what looked like intestines arrived on my phone. “That’s the inside of the Bigfoot,” he said. The creature, Dyer told me, was found outside Hazelton, and like most Eastern Bigfoot, at least as described by Loren Coleman, it was small: 5-foot-7 and a few hundred pounds. “I got this one in my possession and it can be proven,” he wrote.

When I tell Meldrum about some of Dyer’s plans, he chuckles and offers the “Fool me once, fool me twice” line.

“What about a third time?” I ask.

He laughs. “Double shame on me,” he says.

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correction

A previous version of this story referred to the Patterson-Gimlin footage as having been in black-and-white. BF_STATIC.timequeue.push(function () document.getElementById(“update_article_correction_time_4210166”).innerHTML = UI.dateFormat.get_formatted_date(‘2014-11-08 10:14:49 -0500’, ‘update’); );

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Read more: http://www.buzzfeed.com/timstelloh/the-hunter-the-hoaxer-and-the-battle-over-bigfoot

[decouvrir-le-monde]

(warning: this is a stupidly long post)

Beyond National Borders

Well, it’s official on Facebook, so it must be true. I’m living in Hanoi, Vietnam. I’m going to be here for two months, and some might say that’s too short a time to be called *living somewhere*, but to me it really does feel like it. I’ve been here about three weeks and I’m settling in. It’s astonishing how quickly difference becomes normal.

I’m living beyond the borders of my native country. That much is obvious. But I’ve been thinking a lot about boundaries in other ways as well.

  Beyond Cultural Boundaries

Something I noticed from getting to know a lot of the foreign teachers last weekend, was how much more I am in Vietnam than they are. What I mean is this: they live in an expat community. Despite having lived here since August, a couple of them were remarking that they know very few Vietnamese people. They all live in the same neighborhood–in an area of Hanoi saturated with expats. And when they go out, they do so with their foreign teacher friends. I went to a movie with them on Friday.

two out of three caught unawares

Hearing them talk about that experience made me think of my travels last summer. We often tried to engage in the country–eat foreign food, read about customs, pick up basic survival words in the language, etc–but so much of a place is its people. And we had very little opportunity to communicate or forge friendships with anyone. And as I hinted at in blog posts from that time, it made us feel isolated–like we were drifting above the substance of the place, rather than truly walking on the ground, among the people. Maybe I should only speak for myself, but from talking to him I know Andrew felt something very similar.

I’ve found that there’s an inherent cultural boundary between people: language barrier, different customs, etc. And often when traveling, people build their walls up by following the natural inclination to self-segregate. By engaging in what’s comfortable–only going to restaurants with English menus, hanging out with fellow English speakers, avoiding situations where you might have to interact with people across a language barrier–we avoid the “foreign”.

I don’t fault those who do this. Because when I was without a local host family, I did the same. Even now, if I’m out on my own, I still tend to avoid situations. But immersion is so much more interesting: I get to go to restaurants only locals go to, I get rides on motorcycles often, and I’m constantly learning tidbits of language and culture.

  Learning Outside School Walls

In everyday conversations, I learn things I never would have found out otherwise. While playing with my baby host brother one day, I asked Mr. Hai about the silver anklet he always wears. I learned that in Vietnam, silver is traditionally believed to ward off the flu and other sicknesses. I then noticed that many of the BME staff have little pieces of jewelry that they wear near always–a delicate ring, a necklace. Son has a bracelet chain of silver.

Eating dinner with my host family, and navigating the constant offers of more food, Ms. Yen explained something that made it click: giving food is giving love. She explained that during the war (40/50 years ago) food was scarce. People were starving. There were profound implications of giving food away at that time, and these have endured. And so, I can better appreciate the custom that I was finding increasingly difficult.

family dinner

My first weekend here, Mr. Hai took Son and I to Hoàn Kièm Lake. It’s a huge lake with a small island in the middle and a mythos attached to it–legend has it that the Emperor Lê Lợi, who was given a magic sword to fight off the Chinese in the early 1400s, was called upon by the Golden Turtle God to return the sword in this lake in 1428. Thus, the lake is now called Lake of the Returned Sword. Every weekend, the streets around the lake are closed off, street vendors collect, a tiny amusement park is opened, and locals come to enjoy the weekend with their families. There are street musicians, child-sized cars to play with, art shows, and a temple to visit. All this surrounds a beautiful lake, surrounded by weeping willows grazing the water’s surface.

a little fledgling policeman!

The Red Bridge connecting the Temple to the shore

15 year old Son refuses to smile in photos 😀

Turtle Tower and an onlooker

  Last week, Ms. Thuy’s daughter, Đung, came to visit, and I got to meet her. She’s the first person my age who I’ve met, and (leaning heavily on Google Translate) we made plans to visit the Temple of Literature later that week with a couple of her friends. One of her friends speaks English very well and she acted as a sort of tour guide. I had researched the Temple of Literature–it being one of the major tourist attractions in Hanoi–but I had not been able to get a clear idea of what it is really. A library? A temple? Visiting with locals gave me insight. On the surface, it looks just like a beautiful temple and garden. But I found out that it is really a temple for the students of Hanoi. It was built in the 11th century, as a tribute to Confucius, and has been largely untouched since. Apparently, students flood the Temple during exam season in prayer for good scores. Afterwards, we went to their favorite restaurant for bún chả. So far, my favorite meal here.

the beautiful pathway of the Temple of Literature

One of the many shrines inside

Selfie culture here is a Big Thing

the intricate entrance to the temple

riding on a motorcycle!

eating bún chả with new friends!

this is bún chả: a sweet broth with meatballs and pork, served with glass noodles, vegetables and small citrus fruits

  Just eating dinner with the family, I’ve been introduced to tons of new foods. Many new fruits–pomelos, custard apples, “fat bananas”, and nhans (look it up, it’s very strange-looking, but delicious!). Also I think the fruit that I thought was a lychee nut, is actually a rambutan. Regardless, I’m a fan.

fat bananas!!

a very blurry picture of a custard apply

my rambutan?

I’ve been eating a lot of fruit here, with almost every meal. “Fat bananas” are a special treat: they are about half the length of a normal sized banana, and almost taste like all the banana flavor of a regular banana is condensed to half the size. Sweeter, tangier, and yummier than a normal banana, fat bananas are a new go-to.

But I’ve also been introduced to a bunch of other new cooked foods. I haven’t been trying everything because I’m still struggling to find the omnivore inside me, from being vegetarian at home. But I’ve been eating lots of rice, boiled veggies, eggs, some salmon, and meat broths. I also bought peanut butter today. But the best thing I’ve been introduced to is actually quite simple. It’s my favorite, not necessarily because it tastes the best, but almost exclusively because of its name: it’s called monkey rice. You grab a handful of sticky rice from the rice cooker, and roll it around in your hands until it takes on a shape. Then you eat with with whatever toppings you feel like. That’s it. But I like the image of a monkey eating rice that way. Just because it seems like that’s really how they would do it.

Last week, I made friends with Son’s Vietnamese English tutor. She came to the house and ate dinner with us. She offered to take me to the Ho Chi Minh Museum, so last Wednesday, that’s where we went. We met some of her other students there, they wanted to practice their English and meet an American, and it was fun getting to know more people my age. But the museum was an experience in itself. It was built after Ho Chi Minh’s death in the 60s, and it memorializes all the places where he lived and worked. It sort of took me off guard how mundane his office and living quarters are. I was expecting something similar to when I visited Versailles. But maybe that was the point; that he lived like the people, and thus should be loved by the people. The museum centered around the idea of nationalism. The honor of fighting for your country. The greatness of Ho Chi Minh’s time in power. The kindness of the man himself. There were many quotes–both in English and Vietnamese–from those who fought America in the Vietnam War, and those who met the leader himself. There were POWs talking about being tortured by Americans. There were accounts of Ho Chi Minh’s philanthropy. One quote that stuck with me was from a female soldier who met Uncle Ho. She recounts that he asked where she got her name from. After telling him that her grandmother gave it to her, Uncle Ho (as they refer to him) decides that her name doesn’t suit her. He has a better name for her: a word meaning “flower” to represent her beauty and grace. She writes, ‘I am honored and proud to use this name for the rest of my life’.

Ms. Thu Hang and I by Uncle Ho’s pagoda

A selfie next to a random church that we found

A wax model of Uncle Ho in his study

posing in a lamp store in the Old Quarter

Traveling is education. Traveling changes the way you think. It is learning outside the walls of a school.

Day 15-22: Beyond Borders (warning: this is a stupidly long post) Beyond National Borders Well, it's official on Facebook, so it must be true.