#I just spent the last hour running this through at least half a dozen applications to get around the damn paywall

[charliethomascoxuniverse]

Charlie Cox: ‘I love being a superhero — I thought that ship had sailed’

Charlie Cox on the return of Daredevil, the joys of sea swimming in Dalkey and his rewarding character-driven work in RTÉ’s Kin

Kirsty Blake Knox   April 27, 2023 (X)

Charlie Cox is a busy man; he smiles widely from the back of a car as it ferries him from a physical therapy session to the set of Disney’s Daredevil.

“We’ve just kind of started, it’s really great. Pretty intense, hence the physical therapy,” he says.

Cox has returned to play Matt Murdock, the blind lawyer-slash-superhero.

The show started life on Netflix and ran for three seasons before it was cancelled in 2018.This resulted in an online #SaveDaredevil campaign which resulted in 400,000 signatures begging Marvel to bring him back.

It took a little time; a contractual clause prevented any characters from the Marvel-Netflix shows from appearing in any non-Netflix projects for two years after cancellation.

And now Cox is suiting up again in his Spandex costume, running around punching people in the face and fighting for justice. It’s a demanding shoot — the series is 18 episodes long. And he is a fan of doing as many of his stunts as possible.

“I kind of get involved as much as I’m allowed to and is appropriate. Obviously, the stunt team are professionals and there are things they can do that I can’t even get close to,” he says. “I feel like the name of the game is to get as involved as you can… it makes the scenes more realistic.”

Cox took on the role, which had once been played by Ben Affleck in 2015. At the time, landing the role came as a shock.

“I never thought of myself as being appropriate casting for an American superhero. That never really occurred to me,” he says. “And in my 20s, a lot of my friends, and a lot of British actors, had gone and done that already. So when I got to 30 I was pretty confident that ship had sailed. I was very fortunate to get a character that I’ve now been playing for almost 10 years. It’s unbelievable.”

Cox is a father to two young children (seven and three) but they are a little young to fully grasp the role their dad plays in the Marvel Universe.

“I’m not sure they quite understand… One of the books we read him (his three-year-old) is called Superbat. A bat who is a superhero. But that’s his only real understanding. And so he thinks that I’m Superbat,” he laughs.

Cox realised he wanted to be an actor while in school and studied at Bristol Old Vic drama school. His first big break came in 2007 when he starred in Stardust alongside Robert De Niro and Michele Pfeiffer.

He has performed on the West End and Donmar Warehouse, in dramas like Treason and took on the role of Owen Sleater in Martin Scorsese’s Boardwalk Empire. For Irish viewers, we can see Cox on our screens every Sunday night, as Michael Kinsella in gangland drama Kin.

It’s pretty unusual for Marvel Universe actors to appear in a homegrown Irish drama. But Cox’s wife is executive producing the series. When another project he was attached to fell through, he read the scripts and felt compelled to be part of it.

“I’ve been working probably 20-plus years, and there’s a handful of times where I’ve read a script and felt like I’m reading something written by a truly brilliant writer,” he says. “And that quality of scripts never ceased. Sometimes you can get a really good pilot episode. But then as you get deeper into the season, some of the writing starts to disintegrate a little bit, but with Peter (McKenna) that was never the case.”

Obviously, the scale of production is a lot smaller on Kin than other productions, but he says these productions can be just as, if not more, rewarding to work on.

“If you have a limited budget, the way you handle that is you write long character-driven scenes… So weirdly, the lower budget stuff often is more appealing. Because you get to really get deep into the character and the relationships and the dynamics… it’s sort of like theatre. So, from my point of view, sometimes that stuff is more appealing.”

He continues; “I’ve learned I’m not precious about my character’s involvement. I don’t care much if my character does cool stuff … what I care about is, ‘are they moving?’”

He says this is some of the appeal of playing Michael.

“This life that he’d come from…and now he’s trying to rekindle a relationship with his daughter. [The] vulnerability, and the desire, and the need to fundamentally change his nature. That was really exciting to me.”

Cox perfected his Irish accent by listening to the voice of former Dublin goalkeeper, Shane Supple. He got up to speed with Ireland’s gangland scene by listening to podcasts featuring award winning crime journalist Nicola Tallant.

“I was kind of blissfully ignorant of the whole thing,” he says. “When I actually read the first two scripts, I just thought it was all fiction and then I agreed to do the part and I started doing my research. I was like, ‘oh, shit, this stuff is happening. It’s current and it’s happening right now.’”

Despite the violent nature of the series, he found filming and living in Ireland to be idyllic.

He and his family were based in the seaside village of Dalkey — where Matt Damon was holed up during lockdown. Cox became a sea swimming fanatic while residing there.

“I absolutely loved being there… I had conversations with my wife about moving to Dublin because I loved it so much. It’s not really viable with my job… Season one, we’re in lockdown. We lived in Hanover Quay, which was delightful…

“Season two, we moved to Dalkey. I felt like it was one of the best kept secrets in Europe… I was swimming in Vico every day… I found it to be like a haven. And I would love an opportunity to go back at any stage.”

Cox is extremely polite and amenable. And modest — despite his success, Cox says he still suffers professional insecurities.

“I never think I’m going to be hired,” he laughs. “I read years ago that Christopher Walken always thinks his job he’s doing is going to be the last time he is hired. I don’t quite have that, but I certainly identify with it. I’ve never felt like ‘Oh, I’m always going to be hired.’”

He says this comes with some advantages, as it makes him more present.

“I’m filming in New York and I’m lucky enough that I’m still able to play a kind of a lead in a TV show,” he says. “You know, the time is ticking on that in a big way. And so I certainly don’t want to wish that away.

“It would be easy to kind of bemoan the amount of hours you have to work, and missing the family, but there’ll come a time where I would kill to be able to be the lead in the TV show. I think the trick is to really enjoy it while it lasts.”

As he makes his way out of his car and towards his makeup chair, I ask if he has any projects outside of Daredevil coming down the tracks.

“I’m going to be doing this until the end of the year. And then I’ll be back on the panic station wondering if I am ever going to work again,” he laughs.

~*~

[psychopersonified]

Tale of the second drawer...

Part of the prequel series to "Are we ever going to talk about this?".

I'll post little snippets of their 'not dating' days in this series. Little events that draw them together and the intimacy they share in plain sight.

--------

Q pokes at the plaster with his undamaged hand, tracing the outlines of what must be an impressive blister underneath. “Owww... With luck, I might end up with a wicked scar. Makes for an interesting conversation starter.” 

Bond smiles indulgently at his exaggeration then lobs a half-hearted line at him, “Would you like me to kiss it better?” His calloused thumbs running back and forth lightly over the open palm. 

Q can’t help but laugh at that,......

----------------------------------------------------

Agent 006

“Yes I know, our appointment was 2 hours ago. Sorry Q, M had me in his office for 2 more hours than expected,” Trevelyan apologises when he reports to Q.

Q looks up from the textbook he is consulting with and peers over his glasses at him. The text is a mass of hexagonal scribbles and lines that 006 recognises as chemistry symbols. There are handwritten notes in the margins and liberal application of highlighter all over the page.

“Ah 006, no worries. Your kit is waiting for you on the table,” Q gestures to the workbench behind 006 where a brushed aluminium case sits. Inside are what looks like a dozen silver pens.

“Deposit them around the areas of interest and it will detect any wireless enabled equipment within its radius. This will allow us to find the weakest link and likeliest backdoor where we can tunnel in with. As you can imagine, it only has a limited battery life, so you’ll need to be strategic about using them and coordinate with us for the timing—...”

Alec tries to listen carefully to the instructions, but his stomach objects to being ignored any longer and makes its displeasure known - loudly. The meeting with M ate (pun intended) into his lunch hour.

Q pauses going over the instructions. Trevelyan gives him a thin lipped smile hiding his embarrassment.

“...Hungry? There are some snacks in the second drawer.” Q motions to his desk with a tilt of his head.

“Ta!..” 006 all but skips to the desk. There is a selection of protein snacks and Alec rummages through the drawer to find a variety he likes. As he shuffles through the drawer, the other contents piques his interest. He peeks at Q who is still preoccupied with repacking his kit.

006 takes the opportunity to investigate:

a pair of solid gold cufflinks - judging by the weight

aviator sunglasses - non prescription, not Q’s

an Aston Martin car key fob with a separate key attached to it - the key does not correspond to the car, its for a door or a lock.

a neatly folded tie, heavy silk, designer label - not Q’s usual style

Curiouser and curiouser. Finally, an employee ID badge - he flips it over, a very familiar face is printed on the ID. James Bond.

Alec smiles -confirmation-. 006 sees it for what it is. But it is odd that the Quartermaster tolerates such territorial behaviour - unless a) the feeling is mutual or b) he’s not aware of it, which is more likely. He wouldn’t have let Alec rummage through his drawer otherwise. Oh James, you poor smitten sod.  

“Anything to your liking 006?” Q catches him smiling.

Alec grabs a random protein snack, rips it open and takes a huge bite of the bar. “Oh…mmm….” he chews around his words, “—thank you.” He holds up the bar in thanks.

When Q turns back around, 006 thinks this is the perfect opportunity to screw with 007... but how? How do you piss off a possessive territorial lion? ...By planting blatant evidence of intrusion of course!

Alec checks himself, his tie-pin - gold and crusted with small diamonds. Much too gaudy for 007’s tastes. It’s the perfect juxtaposition. He unclips it and drops it into the drawer.

When he leaves Q-Branch, he’s feeling particularly wicked. Its ingrained in him, to look for and act on opportunities when it presents itself. The others would expect no less of him. He pulls out his phone to text 003 with his discovery.

Agent 003

Two weeks later, 003 returns from her mission seducing the son of a manufacturing tycoon in South East Asia, with links to human traffickers luring workers into modern slavery that span the region from Philippines to India.

She stops by Q’s desk to  return her kit consisting mostly of trackers and hidden video cameras. They all served their purpose but one of them had an issue with the sound quality. She recalls the text 006 sent her weeks earlier so before leaving, she contrives feeling hungry.  

“Q, you don’t happen to have something to munch on do you? I’m feeling… peckish.”

Q is pre-occupied, checking over the piece of equipment with a macroscope to understand what went wrong. “Oh, second drawer. Help yourself to whatever.”

Perfect. She goes to his desk to retrieve a snack. She only needs to remove the first packet and she has to stifle a laugh.

She spots 006’s panther shaped Cartier tie pin, next to it is 005’s Tiffany tanzanite and platinum drop earrings along with 002’s Bvlgari gold and onyx signet ring. Finally under all of it is 008’s Hermes silk pocket square.

Shoved further into the back of the drawer are the items that Alec told her about, those that belong to 007. The ID badge pushed right to the back facing down - you’d be hard pressed to notice it if you didn’t know it was there.

She had heard that 007 won’t back from Venezuela till Friday, so she’s just in time to add her calling card. She shifts around the snack packets to burry 007’s things and then drops in a stick of Chanel No5 lipstick in its signature flaming red tube - 007 will not be able to miss that.

----—

Quartermaster

Last 36 hours had been exhausting. Q had altogether probably 3 hours of sleep in that period. And he needs a shower. The cats are alright, he just checked the cameras - Q has an automated feeder set up for emergencies like this.

Q had spent the better part of the time hacking into system after system covering tracks, laying traps, planning infiltration and escape routes; all culminating in last night’s tense Ops trying to save 009 from premature death when his cover was blown by a double crossing informant. It was over now, with 009 safely extracted by their allies and on his way back to England with miraculously minor injuries all things considered.

So yes, his hand eye coordination is shot. His fingers slip on his mug handle and liquid sloshes over the top, splashing over his shirt and onto his desk. Q uses his tie to quickly mop up the spilled tea before it  spreads onto the paper schematic open on his desk.

He takes the mess to the pantry sink to cleanup. The wet spot on his shirt sticking uncomfortably to his skin. Its a good thing he’d removed his cardigan earlier. He can hide the stain on his shirt under it.

As he’s attempting to remove the stain and dry his shirt as much as possible he feels his phone vibrating in his pocket. He pulls it out - its a text from Eve:

:: Where are you?? Meeting’s started ::

What meeting? Q tries to recall. He checks his calendar app. Shit! 2:00 pm Joint Executive Oversight meeting. He checks the time. 2:15pm!

He abandons the mug and tie next to the sink. No time to wash it now.

Q rushes back to his office to put on his cardigan. The cardigan doesn’t hide the topmost stain - a tie would do the trick. Also god forbid he walks into the meeting dressed so causally. They would think the young Quartermaster was starting a mutiny.

There must be a spare tie in his desk somewhere - Q thinks as he rummages through his drawers. He’s about to ask Nish to borrow his tie when his hand brushes fabric under the stash of snacks and protein bars. He fishes it out - a tie! Yes! He loops it around his neck and starts to tie it - the knot is uneven, but he has no time to worry about it now.

He grabs his laptop and rushes out the door - informing Nish about the meeting and the mess he left next to the pantry sink. He’ll clean it up later.

In the lift on the way up, as he adjusts the hastily knotted tie - he tries to remember when was it that he purchased an accessory this fancy.

——

After meeting. He tries to get back to being productive to make himself feel better. What an ordeal; he had to face-off with Timothy Hayden (IT-Branch HOD) in the meeting - no surprise there. Normally he’d be fine to hold his own. But today, suffering from sleep depravation and a wardrobe mishap meant that he was uncharacteristically flustered, which Hayden took advantage of.

His stained and slightly damp shirt front was passably hidden behind the cardigan and tie, but it still made him self-conscious. What was more, Tanner and Eve kept looking at him oddly. The navy replacement tie looked dark enough in warm light, but when it caught the harsher fluorescent light, it had a slight iridescence to it that clashed with his mustard cardigan - it clearly wasn’t his style nor his tie.

Q fires up the soldering iron. He plans to finish the circuit board for the prototype controller that will be used in a portable drone. Once he confirms it works, he’ll have the schematics sent to a manufacturer to have it miniaturised. He could at least get this bit done today.

Twenty minutes into the ‘zone’ and he has finished a round of soldering. He pauses to check his work against the overall drawing. It doesn’t look quite right.

What? He flips the drawing around. Argh! He grabs a fistful of his hair in frustration. It’s upside down!

He slams his hands down on the work table. The vibration causes the soldering iron resting on its holder to tip over. The weight of its power cord starts to pull it off the table.

Reflex makes him shoot out his hand to grab the iron. But instead of grabbing the handle he misjudges and grabs the tip instead. The 400’C tip burns his palm instantly.  

“Ah!!” Q yelps and jolts back in pain. The pain makes him drop the iron - right into his lap.

He stands hastily to avoid the heated tip - and bangs the back of his head against the top baffle of the fume cabinet as well as upending the stool he was sitting on.

“Fuck!!” The escaped curse is something between a hiss and a yell.

His pained curses and bangs draws his minions to investigate. Nish pokes his head around the corner and asks “You alright sir?”

Nish takes in the toppled chair, the disheveled hair, and the way Q is holding on to his hand and makes the correct deduction. Who hasn’t burned themselves soldering?

“Go to medical boss. I’ll tidy this up for you.”

Q hangs his head in utter defeat and sighs heavily. “I’m done for the day I think. Thanks Nish.”

--—-

Agent 007

Bond is back at HQ. Ops had made it clear that he must hand them the USB stick with the time sensitive info he stole as soon as he gets back. They need to link together the web of supply chain involving the cocaine shipment from Venezuela-France-England before the people involved go back into hiding.

So here he is, direct delivery from Heathrow. He had handed the USB stick to R since Q wasn’t around. Then he had gone to the Quartermaster’s desk and the second drawer to retrieve a snack while he waits for Q to return. As jet-lagged as he is, he hasn’t seen the quartermaster for nearly a month and well... he wants more than just the voice to sustain him.  

Something on top of the packet grabs his attention. A bright red tube of lipstick. What the...? He shifts the contents around, a gaudy diamond and gold panther tie pin?? And whose bloody pocket square is that???

He checks the lipstick label - Chanel No5… Bloody 003!

He takes stock of the other items again, they -all- look familiar. How do they even know about this drawer? Did Q just let anyone rummage though his desk? Worse, are those snacks not just for him?

And what about his things? A first he can’t find them, then he pulls the drawer all the way out, until the wheels catch on the stoppers. They’re buried under a pile of snacks and shoved all the way to the back. Everything is there, no wait - except the tie.

He slams the drawer shut with enough force to move the desk a few centimetres. Those bastards!

Bond storms out of Q-Branch. None of them better be in the building, especially Trevelyan. This whole thing reeks of his idea.

——

Quartermaster

Medical patched him up and sent him away with a box of hydrogel burn plasters. Dr Chen tells him that they stock it specially for Q-Branch. But that also means she is obligated to report the incident as a work place accident. Great, more paperwork and the irony of having the HOD become a statistic.

Q shuffles morosely back to Q-Branch - will this day end already. He figures he should have a nap before going home. At this rate he is likely to accidentally walk right into the path of a moving bus on the way home.

There is a set of old brown leather Chesterfield sofas, deliberately semi-hidden behind a rack of storage shelves on this floor of Q-Branch. A relic of the 1950s in perfect condition that they found in storage during one of their inventory audits. Q had it brought out to serve as a makeshift lounge, usually used by those working late nights or during pizza parties after CyberWar nights.

He removes his cardigan to use as a blanket and flops onto the sofa.

Hours later, he wakes up and the place is mostly dark except for the safety lighting. Most of his minions have gone home. It’s not uncommon to leave Q here alone when he’s pulling all nighters, but the last person would usually check in on him before they left. Not tonight.

Q indulges in a good stretch and sits up. His head feels better. It doesn’t feel like its swimming or floating anymore. But he is hungry.

He makes way to his desk to collect his things but stops short - startled by the sight of 007 lounging in his chair, feet propped up on the desk, a textbook on Advanced Biofuels open in his hands. He’s not wearing a suit, just a button down shirt and khakis which probably means he just got back from Caracas and hasn’t gone home yet.

“You’re back. What are you doing here?” Q asks softly. Genuine question, what is he doing sitting in a darkened Q-Branch.

“Came to drop off the usb drive. I’ve given it to R since the Quartermaster was temporarily out of commission.”

“Ah. Sorry about that — “ checks his watch and yawns. “That must have been hours ago. What are you still doing here then?”

Bond doesn’t answer. Instead he asks, “Is that my tie?” gestures to the loosened tie around his neck.

“Is it yours? I was wondering about it. I found it in my desk.” Q undos the tie and folds it back neatly before handing it over to Bond. As he does, he notices his own tie now hanging on the shade of his desk worklamp. He reaches for it.

“Leave it. It should dry by Monday.” Bond tells him.

Q opens his mouth to tell him that it needs a wash, but pauses when he catches sight of his Scrabble mug on the table under the light of the worklamp, the white porcelain gleaming pristine - he peeks inside, even the stubborn tea stains are gone. Q blinks in confusion.

Something about the way the two items are arranged prominently on his desk and the feigned nonchalance hiding a pleased look on Bond’s face that makes him wonder.

“Did you.. wash my tie and mug?” Q is having trouble putting together the image of 007 fresh from an infiltration job in Venezuela that involved drug trafficking and a traitorous national guard, then returning to England to do something so mundanely domestic in the pantry sink - by hand no less.

Bond doesn’t answer, then again Q doesn’t expect him to admit it even if he did. He just opens the second desk drawer purposefully and deposits the borrowed tie back in there.

“Are you hungry Q?” Bond asks instead. “Can I tempt you with supper?”

There it is. That odd way that Bond sometimes says ‘Q’ when they are alone. That slight change in tone - softer, less clipped and almost affectionate. He’s beginning to be able to tell Bond’s ‘Qs’ apart.

At the mention of food, Q’s stomach responds with an embarrassing gurgle. “Famished. Something hot with fast service please. I don’t know how much longer I can survive without solid food.”

Bond smiles, pivoting in the chair to put his feet down. He picks up and hands Q his messenger bag - laptop and charger already packed inside, keys and phone in their usual compartments.

Then he switches off the worklamp and picks up an unsealed brown envelope from the desk before ushering Q out of his own office. The package rustles-jingles with the sound of loose items sliding about inside.

“Advanced Biofuels.... How did you like the book?”

“The scribbles in the margins were enlightening,” Bond smiles wryly, “Was it even written in English?”

In the brighter lights of the lift lobby, Q can see his own refection in the lift doors - the washed out tea stains still visible on his shirt and his frightfully mussed hair from the nap. He thinks he should be embarrassed, but can’t bring himself to care. When he looks up, he sees Bond staring him through the reflection.

“Don’t ask—“

“I figured… the mug and tie in the pantry, and the splotch on your desk.”

“Bloody spies.” Q accuses fondly as they step into the lift. He tries to adjust his cardigan so that it hides most of the stains.

“How’s the hand?” Bond asks concerned, his warm fingers reaching out and curling around Q’s that were fussing with his cardigan. He pulls them away from their fussing and spreads them palm up so he can see for himself.

Q pokes at the plaster with his undamaged hand, tracing the outlines of what must be an impressive blister underneath. “Owww... With luck, I might end up with a wicked scar. Makes for an interesting conversation starter.”

Bond smiles indulgently at his exaggeration then lobs a half-hearted line at him, “Would you like me to kiss it better?” His calloused thumb running back and forth lightly over the open palm.

Q can’t help but laugh at that, the flirting is so ingrained into their banter now that both of them recognise the ridiculousness of it. With the others, it is still a competition, a display of one up-manship - but with 007, it has shifted. Like they’ve called a truce, or simply didn’t care about the outcome anymore. Between them, the rules have changed. The fun was no longer in deciding a winner with a knockout blow, but in the simple joy of engaging in comfortable playfulness for as long as possible.

“I don’t know about the science of that; but I will give you the honour of hand feeding an invalid,” Q counters with a line of his own.

At the mention of hand feeding, Bond’s eyes go darker, pupils dilating. He doesn’t say anything, but doesn’t release Q’s hand until the lift dings on their floor which was (un)fortunately just a moment after.

On their way out to Bond’s car they stop at a security desk. Bond tips out the contents of the envelope onto her desk and leaves the empty envelope next to the items. The night guard’s eyes grow wide at the collection of expensive trinkets.

“Would you mind putting these in the Lost and Found please? Their owners are probably anxious to have them back. Thank you.” He walks back to a waiting Q with a smug smile.

—————-----------------

Note: If you liked this fic, there’s more like it on the blog. Including my take on a kidnapped Q. Enjoy!

[snow-slayer]

A Bunch of Good Things from 2019

*I don’t do things consistently, so there’s chunks of time I just forgot to write. So the blank spaces are days where I could not recall the exact good things that happened.*

January 1: Started the year off right by hanging out with @nah-young, eating some delicious leftovers from New Year’s Eve and working on a puzzle. Also caught a shiny Delibird in Pokemon Go as the first catch of the year.  2: Had a headache at work, but went home to take care of myself. Dad and I talked for a long time about money and taxes without arguing. I have also discovered a future hobby I want to get into: 3D printing. 3: I cranked out four solid hours of studying. I’m going to ace the Auditing section of the CPA exam. I feel it in my bones (especially when I finally stood up and stretched). 4: My ‘other mom’ (one of my best friend’s mom) took me out for a belated Birthday lunch to our favorite Thai food place, and I enjoyed more mango sticky rice. It’s one of my new favorite desserts. 5: Did some epic New Year cleaning. Caught up on laundry, filed away my 2018 paperwork, and did some 2019 taxes. Finally on top of things! 6: A puzzle day! I connected a big piece of the sky to the side on the Lion King puzzle. I’ve still got a lot to go, but progress is being made. 7: As usual, I both surprised and pleased the teller at the bank when I moved some money from savings into my IRA. They wanted to know if it was for tax year 2018, but I could tell them last year was maxed out and it was for 2019. 8: Got to practice my training and supervising skills with @arrowhearts.  9: Spent the night at Lucy’s (she’s a cat). She’s the sweetest cat though, and was cuddling in my lap for so long! She even held my finger with her paw for like ten minutes. I love her. 10: It’s been forever, but I finally sat down and played some video games. I’m replaying Arkham Asylum again and really just exploring every nook and cranny I can find. 11: Might have started a new Francis story line ... Whoops :) 12: Helped Jane clear an apartment and acquired many new tools and art supplies to use. 13: Snow! It was snowing before bed, but I still woke up at 5 am to about 4 - 5 inches. Activated my dad gene and started shoveling at 5:30 am (sorry neighbors to the house I was dog sitting at). It’s so pretty out! 14: A quiet day, but I did some work for Jane and gamed some more. Can’t wait to start Arkham City when I get 100% on Arkham Asylum! 15: I took my coworker a basket of fun snacks from Lotte for her Birthday. She’s so excited to try them all! 16: Donated blood today and when I went to get dinner on the way home, I got a free salad! The entree was already free and I ordered a side salad. I pulled out my wallet to pay, but the coupon covered it, too!  17: Treated myself to breakfast on the way into preschool (my new volunteer place since the teacher I followed to several elementary schools is now at). Also ate some amazing home cooked food for lunch with @nah-young before going out for ice cream. 18: Did some very early spring cleaning to prep for my next yard sale and straighten up a bit. 19: Beat the storyline and finished gathering all of Riddler’s trophies in Arkham Asylum. I do still need to finish up the additional content for 100% completion. 20: Working with Jane to help clean out an apartment again and got stencils to use for my art (the ones with shapes of different sizes). I had wanted to get me a set, so I really lucked out. 21: Started reading a book for fun. Lol, I forgot that I can still read non-accounting things for fun. 22: Sent out 1099s at work. It’s always a dreaded part of the year, but it’s taken care of! 23: I started uploading my old Franmouche stories to AO3. I forgot that I’d written 185 pages of them. At least if someone else likes my rarepair, they have lots to read. No guarantees on the quality, but there is quantity. 24: Made fun penguin cutouts for the preschool class I volunteer at. Then studied for nine hours on campus. A busy, yet productive day. 25:  Finished watching all my lectures for the next portion of the CPA exam! So much auditing knowledge!!! 26: Panic alleviated. My check engine light had been on for a few days. Usually it’s just a gas cap issue so I was worried, but after readjusting the cap again (which usually fixes it) and an oil change, the light went out! 27: Played some Pokemon Go for four hours with @arrowhearts and Lyla. No Kyogre, but at least we each got a Groudon. Plus, the weather was beautiful for this time of year. 28: I found a dollar today while sweeping the parking lots with my dad! I’m gonna be riding this wave for a week. (Fun fact: my dad and I used to go bike riding on Sunday afternoons/evenings in the local parking garages and look for pennies. We’d always get bragging rights when we found a quarter or more. We still get excited and tell each other of the day’s finds when we find a few coins while we’re sweeping). 29: Had a bit of a headache, but managed to get through it so I could finish the workday. Then I get some well deserved rest. 30: Met up with @nah-young for some fries and ice cream! 31: My annual physical went well! Took care of a couple test we’ve been putting off, too, and they weren’t quite as bad as I thought they’d be.

February

1: I had such a productive day in the office, even for a Friday. Special thanks to @arrowhearts for helping me move all (24  years worth) of our files. 2: Started off the day a little rough and feeling low, but I decided to go up to campus, and I’m so glad I did. I was able to help a bunch of people get to their destination. Also hung out with @nah-young and @arrowhearts in a sketchy room. 3: Technically today (starting at 1 am). Had a great talk with @nah-young about a lot of things including our friendship. Successfully avoided the Super Bowl (which I heard sucked, so that was a good use of my time). 4: Had a really good conversation with my dad for almost an hour. We had some fights earlier in the year, but it was nice to be able to connect some. 5: It’ll be silly to look back on, but I thought I lost a reference letter for a scholarship applicant, but realized I could find it on our shared drive. Such a relief! 6: I tried Duck Donuts for the first time today. One of our board members brought me and a coworker a half dozen each. 7: Caught a Miltank in Pokemon Go! I thought I missed my chance, but there was a special running, so I got it. 8: Just heard we got a new boss at work, so it’ll be nice to be full staffed again. 9: Started working on a painting for @arrowhearts. It might be my first completed artwork of the year. 10: A lazy day, but I flipped through a book on home decorating. You know, to plan for my future house. 11: Officially started working for Jane’s business. We’ll see how it goes, but at least it’s an extra couple of hours per week. 12: Finished a dog sitting job, and I’m super thankful to be sleeping in my own bed again. 13: I gave Lucy, the sweetest cat ever, a piggyback ride and it was the cutest thing ever. I was on my knees and forearms trying to get Lucy to boop my nose when she just climbed on my back and sat down. I rose up on my knees and hands and she did the “i’m not so sure but I’m going to stay here” stand and let me crawl across the floor a while before finally jumping off. I love this cat. 14: Took the auditing section of the CPA exam. I feel much better about this one than I have about the other two. We’ll see on the 26th. 15: Such a busy day at the office! It was productive, but just a lot of work. 16: Even though I just too the other exam, I managed to get a lot of studying done. 17: Mamaw and I got to chat and work on the puzzle for a while. It was nice to hang out with her since I haven’t done son in quite a while. 18: We had some really good food at our investment club meeting today. Sheppard’s pie (like meat and mashed potatoes), salad, this great cracker dip (I have no other details other than feels like sharp cheddar finally shredded with a hint of spice in some sort of sauce). 19: Our new executive director started today. I think I made a pretty good first impression! 20: Started playing Arkham City again. We had a snow day and even my office closed, so I made the most of my day. 21: Lol and today I finished the main storyline of Arkham City. Accidentally, because I was doing side quests, but Batman got mad when I tried to go finish some before the last mission. 24: I am obsessed with Excel, but I figured out a formula so that it would total certain categories even if they weren’t in order. Plus I learned how to make a drop down menu (on two versions of Excel). Guess who’s budget looks beautiful! 25: I caught a Latias in Pokemon Go. Not having much luck with the water legendaries. I wonder if they don’t like me because we picked the grass starter. 26: I passed the Auditing section! (and instead of keeping it quiet, I made a point to tell some people). Then @nah-young and I went to dinner to celebrate our successes of the day and just have a nice chat. 27: Good news: I starved off a migraine that was starting on Feb 26. Maybe this new method will help them from getting bad. Just took an Aleve with some hot tea. 28: Went on a Pokemon run, and I found $20 blowing across the yard when I got home! A nice find for the year.

March 1: I’ve been really getting into “Ghost Story” by Peter Straub and had so much time to just sit and read while it rained. 2: I watched “Spiderman: Enter the Spiderverse” today. An epic movie and I highly recommend it! I also have several new costume ideas... 3: Officially started working on my Library Comic Con cosplay. There’s not much to show, but it was nice to start costuming again. 4: Hiked up to the nearby bubble tea. It was good! I got a mango green tea creama. Next time I know I have to mix it up before I start drinking it. 5: 6:   7: 8: 9: 10: Started replaying Castlevania IV. It’s been a while since I beat it, so hopefully I can still finish it! 11: I have proven myself an Excel deity. Well, at least Jane thinks though. She needed a spreadsheet for something and had some ideas so I whipped it out in five minutes flat with a bunch of formulas she didn’t even know were possible. I’m quite proud of it. 12: Lol, speaking of excel, I was geeking out over my budget with one of our board members. She was showing me how she built her itinerary in excel for her next trip and I got to show off my budget. 13: 14: 15: It was fake St. Patrick’s day at work, so I got to show off my green Riddler suit. Apart from being mistaken as dressing like a leprechaun a few times, I received a bunch of compliments on it. I’ve gotten a lot of use out of that suit jacket. 16: Tagged along with @nah-young to her grandfather’s birthday party and watched Bohemian Rhapsody. Apart from the timeline inaccuracies, I really enjoyed it! Look at that: two new movies in one month. 17: First big leaf job of the season. I guess the first major landscaping job. Dad helped out, so it made life easier. 18: Investment club meeting went well, and I ended up staying late to chat and help clean up, but it was enjoyable. Also had some great tiramisu from Trader Joe’s. 19: 20: 21: It was a downpour today, but I also made a 20 minute Costco run. Parking was great, the lines were short, and I managed to balance everything without a cart. Success! 22: Finally got around to doing invoices. It’s such a weight off my chest to take care of them. 23: I had the house to myself, so got ample studying done, played some pokemon, and treated myself to some bubble tea. Got myself a bunch of good pokes from Community day. 24: Another lovely day to sit and hang out with @nah-young. I always enjoy our hour long conversations just sitting in my car in her driveway. I also finished the lectures for the BEC portion of the CPA exam. 25: I found a gift card loaded with $30 today. It had been thrown into the dumpster, so a little gross, but it washed off nicely. 26: Ran up to the local library to turn in my books (look @arrowhearts, I did it the day before they were due and didn’t have to make a midnight run). I wasn’t going to check out more books since I already had some checked out from another library visit (I go to many branches due to my job and often check out a book or two, resulting in cycles of books due at different times), but I did anyway. I started reading Area X, too, and so far, I’m really enjoying it. 27: Our family’s accountants think I’m a bit weird because I was so excited to get my tax papers back even though I owed money. I was just like “cool!” to all the facts and things on my sheets, which is apparently not what they’re used to, but one of the new tax laws works in my favor as small business income is taxed at a lower rate or something. 28:  29: 30: I love Annihilation in the Area X series! I haven’t plowed through a book that fast in years. 31: I was catching up on my business spreadsheets and it turns out I had the most profitable March since I started my business :)

April 1: No April Fools jokes, which is always a huge plus. 2: 3: 4: Took the BEC section of the exam and then clocked in a bunch of hours for the Foundation. Jubilee is almost here!!! 5: 6: The Jubilee is over!!! What a relief! A lot of things went well, and I heard it was a lot of people’s favorite. Not sure what actually happened because I was stationed at check in/out all night, but hopefully the silent auction results are good. Huge shout out to @arrowhearts and @nah-young for getting me through the night! 7:A quiet morning of returning the Jubilee to the Foundation. Plus some other landscaping. 8: I know everyone at work is saying I should take time off, and I didn’t, but I’m actually feeling blessed that I have the physical and mental stamina to keep working on things. Plus, I need to catch up with post Jubilee stuff. 9: 10: 11: 12: 13: 14: 15: 16: 17: 18: 19:  Got to talking with my art dealer for a long while and we exchanged headcannons and ideas. 20: Had a nice Pokemon run with @arrowhearts‘ dog. Plus, enough work to keep me out of trouble X) 21: A very busy Easter. I moved a huge mound of mulch. It was half the size of my car. Hopefully the home owner will like it. 22: 23: 24: 25: 26: 27: 28: 29: 30: 31: I’ve been feeling behind, but I finally knocked out a really important thing at work today. Got our annual applications in!

May 1: 2: 3: My gauntlets for my comic con costume look so cool! They’re a little stabby (there’s staples on the inside, although I should be able to tape it down for safety), but overall look cool for a first draft. 4: A long day, but I feel like I was really able to help my friend and her family, which is nice considering how much they do for me. 5: The event that happened wasn’t good, but I’ve been humbled as to how well our house was kept and motivated to try and become more organized. 6:  Dad and I were chatting today, and we could even touch on topics in a civil manner. It was quite nice!  7: Just found out I passed the BEC section of the CPA exam! I’m 75% CPA!!! And no cavities were found after my dentist appointment :) 8: Frantically working on my costume, but my head piece looks really good! 9: Mom even chipped in to help. We rigged up a steampunk mask I have (which doesn’t fit on my head right) so that I can actually wear it. 10: I’ve been fasting for Ramadan and I think my body and I are finally on the same page. It was a rough start this year, but I’m looking forward to focusing on being thankful for what I have and working on self discipline. 11: Library Comic Con! My costume is a bit rough, so no final pictures, but I have plans to make it better! 12: It was a busy Sunday. Lots of lawns, but thankfully the weather was cool. 13: 14: 15: 16: 17: Had a nice meeting with my boss. I keep feeling like I’m not on top of things or she’s disappointed, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Plus, she said I did great at the finance committee meeting, so that was nice. 18: Although I scared everyone I worked with all day, I was able to donate blood even though I had been fasting.  19: I saw the tiniest inch worm while I was pulling weeds today. It was more like a quarter inch worm and it was just trying so hard to climb up my arm when I found it. I also saw the first lightening bugs of the year. As a bug type Pokemon trainer, I’m quite pleased with all of this (less so with the mosquitoes though, as I got my first bite of the season). 20: I have found a nice way to keep cool at the property Dad and I work at. I’m allowed to douse my head, neck, and hat with the hose, and man does it feel good! 21: I received many compliments at the executive committee meeting for all my hard work on the budget, the Jubilee, and finance committee. 22: Caught up on reconciliations at work (finally). It’s been just a nightmare, but I’m happy they’re done. 23: Another me day. I’ve been taking Thursdays off and got to game for a bit but also accomplish a lot of laundry and studying. 24: Had a good meeting at work to discuss the future of the nonprofit I work at. Plus I finally made a phone call I didn’t want to make. 25: Went to a foam helmet making class with a coworker. I’m super excited to start trying out this style, and I think the sample we made in class can easily be used to make a helmet for Vile. Might have purchased a few things to go with it :) 26: Found a new drink that I love from Kung Fu Tea! Also got to rewatch Coco, which is always good. 27: Part of my afternoon spent working with Jane was changing her screen saver. It was set up for one photo of pictures, but some were so fuzzy, so we set up new pictures and I got to add my fuzzball to the reel. 28: I visited one of Jane’s friends to discuss dog sitting and we had such a nice conversation afterwards. 29: I found a four leave clover today while mowing lawns. It’s been years since I’ve found one, so that was exciting. 30: I plowed through about 6 hours of studying for the FAR portion of the CPA exam. Only two more lectures and then onto multiple choice! 31: Filled out a form at work (finally). Now I just have to hope my boss will sign it and have it notarized.

June 1: 2: 3: 4: 5: 6: Took the (hopefully) last CPA exam. It was nice as I spoke to an elevator engineer before the exam and it helped to calm my nerves a bit.   7: 8: 9: 10: 11: 12: 13: 14: Wasn’t sure what day to put this on, but @nah-young and I hung out for hours just sitting and chatting on the cats’ back porch. 15: Successfully navigated into DC with the help of @arrowhearts (and had an interesting laugh about her being my son...? Oh well, at least we got to give the people sitting outside a show as we left the building with two rollie office chairs each). 16: Started working on my Halloween costume. I’ve abandoned the idea I originally had and will be switching to a different Mega Man X character (fun fact: it was a costume I originally intended to make before being introduced to Scaramouche back in 2017) 17: It was a scorcher, but had a slurpee for the first time in almost a year. I’m so thankful for the 7-11 within walking distance of where my dad and I work on Mondays. 18: I’ve officially passed the CPA exam! Now onto the next steps... 19: I have been struggling with telling people good news, but I did make an effort to inform some people about me passing the exam. 20: Told some more people about the CPA exam and just trying not to stress. I got celebratory milkshakes for my family after dinner. 21: My coworkers are so sweet. They brought me in a cake and we had a mini celebration. 22: 23: 24: 25: 26:Found a praying mantis while mowing. She kept standing where I wanted to mow, so I got to pick her up and put her somewhere safe (with lots of snacks for her!) 27: 28: 29: So glad I went to see Detective Pikachu with @nah-young and @arrowhearts! I really enjoyed it! 30: 31:

July 1: A new fiscal year! I did manage to get a good bit done on my latch hook. 2: A sudden thunderstorm took me off the weed pulling job early (i.e. a perfect opportunity to read). 3: It was quiet in the office. Too quiet ... yet super productive! I processed so many gifts and letters. 4: I don’t really celebrate, and spent a lot of it working, but played some pokemon in the rain. It was a warm day, so the cool rain felt so refreshing! 5: A jammed packed day with trashrooms, a bank run, and more pokemon quests! I completed another 15 and hatched a new pokemon. Plus I finished another book: Dr. Death. 6: A busy day, but I was able to finish everything so I can take the next day off completely (for once). Again, apologies to @arrowhearts  for dragging you out and getting caught in a downpour so I could get some bubble tea! 7: 8: 9: 10: Unboxed my unicycle! Not sure when I’ll ride, but it’s ready when I am. 11: 12: 13: 14: The vanity is back in my bathroom! Dad’s renovating it, and it’s been a slow process, but I finally have a sink! 15: 16: 17: 18: 19: 20: Spent a few hours working on cleaning the basement, and I’m finally seeing some of the fruits of my labor. 21: 22: 23: 24: Officially finished the Vile helmet! 25: Just started a new dog sitting job, and the house is right on top of a pokestop. Guess I’m going to have a full item bag again! 26: Finally got myself a memory stick for my PSP. I’m replaying the Maverick Hunter X game ... because I can! 27: Got three team rocket grunts in one day at the one stop. 28: Plowed through the Vile portion of Maverick Hunter X. Lol, I probably make it harder on myself since I only use my favorites, regardless of if they’re good against the boss. 29: Had a huge crab and shrimp dinner at Jane’s house. 30: Hung out and ate delicious homemade butter chicken with my best friend’s mom (she’s basically like my other mother). We laughed and chatted, showed off our latest projects, probably kept the neighbors up, and just had a good time until like 2 in the morning.  31: Welp, it wasn’t a raid day for armored Mewtwo, but @arrowhearts and I did defeat more Team Rocket Go grunts in the rain.

August 1: Chatted with @nah-young for a few hours and I’ve got a new place to eat on my radar! 2: I kept feeling like I was letting my boss down because I couldn’t answer her questions/didn’t understand, but she insisted I was handling myself well, and found the information she needed later. Plus, she’s very complimentary of my work and appreciates my transparency and work ethic, both of which I work hard on and value. 3: 4: 5: 6:   7: 8: 9: 10: 11: 12: 13: 14: 15: 16: 17: 18: 19: 20: 21: 22: 23: 24: 25: 26: 27: 28: 29: 30: 31:

September 1: 2: 3: It’s official! We’re having a Halloween party at work. If my new schedule turns out, I’ll be at work on that day and will show off a costume. Not sure if it will be the one I’m working on, but I can always recycle an old one. 4: 5: 6:   7: 8: 9: 10: 11: 12: 13: 14: 15: I had such a good ripstik run. @nah-young and I practiced for a good while yesterday (and she did her first trick, too!). I guess it’s nice to see the fruits of our practice since we’ve been working off and on for about a month. 16: Had the investment club meeting at my house. I didn’t get to cook everything, but I picked the recipe and it turned out well! 17: I finished “Every Tool’s a Hammer” by Adam Savage (from Mythbusters) and I really recommend it. It’s such a great book for anyone who makes or creates. It’s a fun read and chocked full of helpful hints. 18: I decided to start reading the Naruto series. I’m enjoying it so far! Now I just have to wait for the next to volumes to be available from the library. 19: I started replaying Scooby Doo and the Cyber Chase. It’s amusing, although I’m a little rough. 20: 21: 22: 23: I’d been on the fence about taking a vacation early next year because I want to save up for a down payment, but after talking to my dad, I decided I’d do a little something. I still need to work out the plans (and make sure the people I want to visit are free), but I’m looking forward to it! 24: 25: 26: There’s a chance I might be going full time at my office job, so dad encouraged me to take the day off from trash rooms. I still got up early, but knocked out a bunch of chores, finished Scooby Doo and the Cyber Chase, finished a drawing, and cleaned in the basement a bit. 27: Lol, I just realized I have three cycles of books checked out again. I started reading The Wicked Years series. I’m trying to set aside time each night so I can read a chapter or two before bed. 28: I made the pattern for my gauntlets! I’m actually trying to do it the right way and making measurements, creating an accurate template, and just generally taking my time. 29: Part 2 of the gauntlets: They’re made! My template worked and I spent a couple of hours slowly forming and shaping them. I still need some practice on the gluing component, but at least they feel sturdy. 30: Started replaying DK 64 again. I really love this game. Besides Gauntlet Legends, it’s probably my favorite N64 game we own. 31: Got rained out at work, but managed to take it easy in the afternoon and just generally keep ahead with laundry.

October 1: Today officially marks the first day of working full time at my office job. They added ten hours a week, so now I’m working 4 days at 10 hours each. It’ll take a little adjusting. I’m happy for the extra hours! 2: I sent out invoices on time for once! 3: It was my fuzzball’s 16th Birthday today! Someone also brought in some really yummy snacks to work that were leftover from a meeting. I also managed to create templates for the leg gauntlets and cut them out of  foam. I’m just rolling with the motivation now, and would like to have Vile finished by Halloween (keep reading to find out if it was finished). 4: Really just having a good time playing DK 64. Knocked out Gloomy Galleon, so all that’s left are my favorite levels! 5: 6:   7: I have leg gauntlets formed. Lol, I guess I should look up the name... All that’s left is the chest plate and cape! 8: I lucked out! My coworker can’t go to a book signing even this weekend and asked me to get her book signed since I’m going. It was the perfect opportunity to get my hands on a copy of “Where the Crawdads Sing” which I wanted to read before this weekend. 9: Making some headway on the costume again! Arm and leg gauntlets have the plating and base coat of plastidip. 10: I finished “Where the Crawdads Sing” within 48 hours of having it my possession. That’s such a huge accomplishment to read something so quickly and eagerly! 11: I was plowing through my to do list at work. I knocked out 11 items. Woo! 12: 13: 14: 15: 16: 17: 18: 19: 20: 21: 22: 23: 24: 25: 26: 27: 28: 29: 30: My Halloween costume is finished *gasp* before Halloween! Barely, but it counts. 31: I won the most creative costume at work! Well, tied for first, but that’s cool.

November (whoops, I really forgot to write this month) 1: 2: 3: 4: 5: 6:   7: 8: 9: 10: 11: 12: 13: 14: 15: 16: 17: 18: 19: 20: 21: 22: 23: 24: 25: 26: 27: 28: 29: 30: 31:

December 1: 2: 3: 4: 5: 6:   7: 8: 9: 10: 11: 12: My coworker is back! She had been on extended leave for a while, but now she’s back. She bring such a positive and fun attitude to the workplace. 13: 14: I’m officially 25! I worked a few hours in the rain, but got a lot done (and saw Lucy, my favorite cat I cat sit). Instead of going to a steakhouse for dinner, which I’m not a fan of, we ended up going to somewhere I did enjoy. Overall, it was a nice and quiet celebration. 15: 16: 17: I finished the Naruto series today! It was a good series, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Going to take a manga break to work on a few novels I have checked out and then  decide which series to start. 18:  19: A busy day again. Knocked out two leaf clients for the year and went to see three bands perform at a local music club. I stayed out way too late, but had a great time hanging with a friend, one of the performers, and the performer’s friend. 20: 21: 22: 23: 24: Hung out with my brother and grandmother. I crushed them in several games! 25: Went to my coworkers in the afternoon and dueled for the first time in quiet a while. They wiped the floor with me, but I had fun with my deck destruction deck. 26: 27: Ended up hanging out with Jane for a while and just chatting about everything. We’re seeing eye to eye on a lot of things, so it was nice.  28: Finished my leaf jobs for the year! Time to relax. 29: 30: 31: Welp, ended up being sick and missing out on the intended New Year plans. I guess I did start the year with a migraine, so here I am ending it with one. After I rested up, I did start playing my favorite video game. Plus, I frantically read “Hey, Kiddo!” before the end of the year

Notable stuff

Highlights: Passed the CPA exam Officially hired full time

Books read: “Ghost Stories” “Every Tool’s a Hammer” “Where the Crawdads Sing” “Wicked” Naruto series “Hey, Kiddo!”

Movies watched: Spiderman: Enter the Spiderverse Mary Poppins 2 The Princess and the Frog Pokemon Lucario

[goldendream-s]

a little too much

a/n: might take this down later but i’ve seriously missed writing and the plot of this is extremely fitting, as i’ve been juggling between so much school and stress. i hate using the same excuse over and over again for my in-activeness, but hopefully this makes up for it :-))

MASTERLIST || REQUEST

“Babe, you’ve been glued to this desk ever since you’ve come home, are you sure you don’t want a tiny break?” Your boyfriend came behind you, bringing his soft hands to your shoulders. The gesture immediately brought you to an ease, but that didn’t stop your nose from staying buried in the three AP textbooks sprawled across your desk. Not a single inch of the table could be seen between the numerous papers you had and the dozens of snacks you had brought in efforts to keep you planted in your seat. 

Here you were on a Friday night – pencil clutched in your right hand, a now cold coffee held in the other. Your tongue was slightly poking out of your mouth in concentration. You had been home from class since the afternoon, but the weekend and your plans were far from what was on your mind. Instead, you were dreading the report due the following Monday and the computer science test you were far too unprepared for.

“Hey, are you listening to me?” Shawn pressed again. His voice was still calm, but you knew he was becoming slightly aggravated. You had invited your boyfriend promising him that the two to you would hang out, but you had lost track of time between all of the reading and studying. The pad of his thumbs brushed along your shoulder with just the perfect pressure as a sigh of relief escaped your tense your body. 

“Ye-Yea, just let me get through at least another seven pages and I swear I’ll take a break.” You tried bargaining, but the two of you fully knew that it was a lie. The competitiveness in you didn’t want to see yourself slacking, but the other sleep deprived half of you was begging for some time away from the stack of tasks. You had hours more of reading, note taking, and reports to do, and you didn’t see slumber in your list of things-to-do anytime soon. Your concentration was promptly brought back to your homework before you could waste anymore time dazing off.

“Babygi-” Shawn started, but you cut him off before he could lecture you like he always did when you spent your Friday nights consumed in school work. Even with your boyfriend’s presence, tests and due dates were still circling your head.

“I know, I know, it’s not healthy to be so stressed out,” you mimicked Shawn’s exact words he told you just a couple of hours ago. “But I just really wanna get all of this out of the way. This is the most important year for my academics and I just want everything to be perfect, y’know?” You reassured your concerned boyfriend all while finishing the last sentence of your biology notes.

Upon your words, Shawn removed his hands from the comfortable spot on your shoulders, catching you off guard for a second. Reaching over you, his long and quick arm reached for your pencil before you had any time to react. If it weren’t for the lack of energy within you, you would’ve jumped out of your seat for the pencil.

“Shawn I swea-” You whined, but it was his turn to talk. 

“Hun, please don’t do this to yourself. I know it doesn’t seem like it right now, but your grades aren’t everything. Sure, it’d be great to have straight A’s for your college application, but you can’t let all of the work eat you up like this,” he calmly explained, your pencil still in his hands, being held right over your head.

“I-You don’t understand,” you tried to protest, but you knew you weren’t going to win this. 

Shawn chuckled before he retorted. “Did you forget that I was once a student too? Sure, I might not be in school anymore, but that doesn’t change how I look at things,” He pulled out the chair to the right of yours, taking a seat before elaborating. “You can’t dive into things thinking that your result will be perfect. I used to beat myself over a song not having the perfect chorus or instrumentals, and trust me, I still do sometimes. You just gotta realize that your mental and physical health is more important than getting that A will ever be,” Shawn pulled your hands over to his lap, his thumb grazing yours.

You nodded your head, a silent agreement to his words. You were always amazed by how wise beyond his years Shawn was, and this conversation was no different. It almost made you forget about all of your unfinished homework for a little, but one glance back at the makeshift work space you’ve made in the kitchen brought you back to the harsh reality of things. 

If you were being completely honest with yourself, you could barely keep up with his words, too tired to comprehend the advice your boyfriend had just told you. He seemed to catch it too and quickly added. 

“And if this happens to be going through one ear and out the other, at least know that I’ll always be there for you babe, you just have to let me in,” His hand stroked your cheek. 

“Trust me, I want to be spending time with you Shawn, but I just don’t know how to manage all of my time yet,” You searched for an excuse, throwing out the first one that came to mind.

Without a doubt, you had overworked yourself. You couldn’t even remember the last time you had left your seat to even just stretch, and that’s when all of the stress fell back on you in tenfold. The overhearing feeling soon became to hard to contain, and that’s when you let all of your trapped thoughts out.

Your head fell into the crook of Shawn’s neck, as his arms found their way to wrap around your quivering body. It wasn’t new for you and Shawn to have this conversation before, but something in you finally snapped. His words found a way to hit home, and it all became a little too much to keep inside. You didn’t have to utter a single word for Shawn to understand what was happening.

“Shh, it’s okay baby, I got you,” Shawn hushed you has his right hand found a way to your hair. He pulled you even closer to you as you were pulled out of your seat over to his.

Your tears were coming in waves, but Shawn didn’t seem to mind that you were soaking his shirt. You weren’t even sure why you were crying, but you would be lying if you didn’t feel a huge weight being lifted off your shoulders. All of the pent up frustration, all of the all-nighters you had attempted since school started a month ago, it was being let go through your tears. You inhaled Shawn’s scent and it only made you realize more how much you’ve distanced yourself from everyone since the school year had started.

“I-I’m sorry Sh-Shawn,” You tried to collect your words into one fluid sentence, but it was no use.

He waited a second before replying, probably finding the right words to say.

“Don’t apologize, darling. It’s okay, just let it all out,” His hand stroked your hair, something that always brought peace to you. His other hand was running up and down your back at a steady rhythm, steadying your breathing. 

“I love you so much, Shawn. I d-don’t deserve you,” You mumbled into his shirt.

“You deserve my love more than anything, baby. I love you too,” He whispered into your ear without skipping a beat, his breath setting goosebumps along your back. Your arms found their way around his neck as you moved your small fingers from the nape of Shawn’s neck to his thick head of tousled curls.

The next few moments were still. It was a soothing silence; something you hadn’t felt in a while. You were wrapped in Shawn’s embrace, his fingers tracing shapes on your back as your cries found a stop. You weren’t sure how long the two of you stayed like this, but you finally felt at rest. Your mind wasn’t throwing you assignments that you needed to do, your hands eased from the stiffness they had gotten from all of the writing. A melody filled your ears, and you instantly recognized it as Shawn’s humming. Further burying your face into his neck, you felt your eyelids becoming heavier and heavier, the temptation of sleep becoming too strong to fight. Your body had relaxed into Shawn’s as his soft tunes became a lullaby to your ears.

Before you could fight off the urge to sleep, your mind already slipped away into a darker and quieter place. 

“Go to sleep, honey. I’ll be right here.”

Those words were all you needed before you let the drowsiness overcome you.

[visitationrpg]

Congratulations, BEL! You have been accepted for the role of Teddy Holt. You have 24 HOURS to send in your account, and don’t forget to look over the CHECKLIST!

Note from Admin Sidney: Your headcanons are really what sold me on this application, Bel! They highlight Teddy in such a way that I can practically see him standing before me in a Hawaiian shirt with a smile plastered on his face. He’s sweet and genuine, loved and damn-near worshipped, but you’ve given him such depth and I cannot wait to see him on the dash!

Welcome to Visitation!

OUT OF CHARACTER:

NAME/ALIAS: Bel

PRONOUNS: She/Her

AGE: 19

TIMEZONE: PST

ANYTHING ELSE? Nope! :)

IN CHARACTER:

WANTED SKELETON: Teddy Holt

GENDER & PRONOUNS: Cis Male, He/him/his

BIOGRAPHY:

It was Teddy’s first game. He was in fifth grade, and he had scored the final touchdown. The small crowd cheered. His father ran down the bleachers and Teddy felt himself become engulfed in his father’s strong arms. He laughed as his father spun him around, set him back on the ground and ruffled his head. Teddy’s father knelt in front of him and put his hands on his shoulders. Teddy swore he saw tears in his dad’s eyes as he said: “You’re gonna do great things, Teddy! Just you wait!”

That wasn’t the first time Teddy had heard that he was special…and it sure wasn’t the last either. In fact, he heard it his entire athletic career. Whether it was on the field or off, Teddy was praised by teachers and peers, adults and kids alike for his skills, his looks, his personality, his power to see the dead—

Okay, so maybe he’s only heard that last one from his grandfather – his deadgrandfather, to be exact, who stood quietly at the end of the bed watching him one night.

“It’s only a nightmare. Nothing to worry about,” his parents comforted.

But it felt real.

“Maybe you ate an old slice of pizza,” his friends joked.

But it felt real.

“You’re probably stressed,” his school counselor said.

But it felt real…

Nonetheless, a nightmare is what he brushed it off as. Even when his grandfather visited him afterwards, Teddy told himself it was a recurring dream. Something that happened whenever he started to get too stressed with school and a social life. He chose to keep quiet about it from anyone else, wanting to avoid any kind of ridicule from his peers.

But he started to believe he was “gifted” after a terrifying meeting with Kyle, a young boy Teddy described with having a “blue face and black eyes.” While exploring an abandoned trailer park with his friends, the boy told Teddy he was a “rare one” and that he should relish his gift. Teddy denied it, but Kyle said they’d meet again sometime when Teddy least expected it and disappeared.

Teddy hasn’t slept soundly since then.

It sounds crazy, but hear him out! Or don’t. He doesn’t talk about it much anyway. Teddy works hard to look as if nothing’s wrong. At first, sleepless nights were difficult to conceal, but as he got older he found he could chalk it up to late night partying and studying.

Yeah…if only.

Teddy’s “gift” continued to haunt him throughout high school and to his dismay, now has followed him to Reed College, where he more than occasionally runs into unwanted spirits who love to interact with him. The stress from the constant popularity from both the spirit world and the real world has made him desperate to become invisible. Hidden from the limelight. To, dear god, be ignored for once.

But of course, not everybody gets what they wish for. So now, Teddy is forced to put on a fake smile for the rest of the world as he’s worried that if someone were to find out about this “gift” of his, he’d never be left alone.

And right now, that’s the last thing he could ever want.

ANYTHING ELSE?

-       Teddy’s a Cancer, born on July 7.

-       Regardless of what’s going on in his personal life, Teddy strives to be the sweetest guy he can be. His love of making people happy isn’t motivated just by his desire to keep his gift a secret. He genuinely likes seeing people in good spirit. Probably because he knows what it’s like to be tortured and doesn’t want anyone else to feel that way.

-       Teddy doesn’t drink or smoke. For one thing, he truly believes it’ll screw him up in the future. But he’s also terrified of telling people how he really feels, what he’s really going through. He can’t let his guard down. So, for now, NO DRUGS.

-       He likes Hawaiian shirts a lot. He has a dozen in his closet that he saves for what he calls “Hawaiian Shirt Saturdays.”

-       Teddy loves dancing. That doesn’t mean he’s a good dancer, but he enjoys it. He personally feels that disco is the best genre to dance to!

-       He takes strong sleeping medication just so he can get a decent amount of sleep every night.

-       Teddy has the biggest crush on Amna. He just thinks she’s so smart and nice and pretty and he’ll go in the most haunted of houses if it makes her happy. (I just really love the idea of Teddy being a hopeless romantic.)

-       While most of his time is spent working on Visitation and marketing homework, Teddy still loves to play football. He often plays in his spare time or to blow off steam.

QUESTIONNAIRE:

DO YOU BELIEVE IN THE PARANORMAL?

Teddy’s eyes flick to the floor. He stares at his shoes, shuffles his folded hands closer to his body. His instinct is to answer, ‘Yes! Yes, I’ve seen them right in front of me!’

But he doesn’t.

“I…I guess, so?” he laughs nervously. “I mean, I’ve heard a few ghost stories, and to be honest, I’ll never say Bloody Mary’s name near a mirror. Ooh, that’d be a good idea for an episode. Someone should write that down.” He smiles and runs a hand through his hair.

“But yeah. I don’t see why I wouldn’t believe in the paranormal.”

HAVE YOU EVER HAD A PARANORMAL ENCOUNTER?

Teddy’s smile fades faintly as Kyle flickers in his memory.

“I’ve heard like, doors close without seeing anyone there,” He shrugs. “And I’ve had a recurring dream about my grandfather which is admittedly a little spooky, but nothing noteworthy.”

Kyle’s words play again in his brain. “We’ll meet again.”

“Yeah…” Teddy says with a half-smile. “Nothing noteworthy.”

IF YES, DID SAID ENCOUNTER CHANGE YOUR VIEWS ON THE PARANORMAL?

IF NO, WHY NOT?

Teddy thinks for a moment. Has he really thought that ghosts existed his entire life? There wasn’t anything that convinced him otherwise (apart from the multitudes of ghosts he’s seen around Reed).

“There isn’t anything to prove they don’t exist. We shouldn’t say that just because we haven’t seen something that it can’t be real. I’ve never seen a blue whale, but that doesn’t mean they’re not real, you know?”

Something moves in the corner of his eye. Teddy wants to look, but hesitates.

“I just think that people should be more open minded,” he continues. He notices a shape move behind the cameraperson. It seems to be mocking him. Teddy’s eyes flick back and forth from the camera and the spectre.

“I hope the type of viewers we attract to the channel can be open minded about things they might not understand,” Teddy nervously finishes, his eyes now stuck on the apparition. “I think the world will be a better place if we do that.”

EXTRAS:

HERE’S A PINTEREST BOARD! :D

AND HERE’S A PLAYLIST!! :D

[holisticpanda]

she kills with her guitar

Title: she kills with her guitar 

Summary: She plays the guitar as though she was born with it in her hands—like it was a part of her own body.

Kurlish Week Day 2: AU

Notes: The first time I saw Bart I thought ‘huh, she vaguely reminds of Tash Sultana.’ So if you want to look up some of her vids to get an idea of Bart’s appearance and musical style, That’s sort of who I’m challenging here.

A surprising amount of people have absolutely no idea how hacking works. Most just picture a guy sitting in the dark in front of multiple screens, typing furiously for hours at a loud, mechanical keyboard while techno music blasts in the background.

And they’re not completely wrong. He is currently listening to disco, techno’s long dead ancestor, but that’s where the similarities end. What usually happens is that he types a few commands into the command line to run a program that either he or one of his fellow hacker buddies wrote and spends the next few hours fucking off while the application does its work. If it weren’t for the movies making hacking look like something only a genius could do, he’d for sure be out of a job.

A job he doesn’t particularly like if he’s being honest. Besides the moral greyness of what he does, jobs that pay well don’t come along all that often. He can usually scrape together just enough in a month to eat, pay the rent on his shoebox of an apartment, and also indulge in his more extravagant hobbies—if visiting the local strip clubs can be considered a hobby, anyway. He doesn’t lead a particularly happy or exciting life, but at least it’s a relatively free one.

He’s currently running a brute force hack into some rich girl named Lydia Spring’s Facebook account—her dad was convinced she was dating older men—when the doors to the Waffle House he’s relaxing in slam open, loud enough to scare the shit out of him even through his earpods. A woman who looks to be a little older than him, somewhere in her mid to late twenties if he had to guess, stomps into the diner.

She’s wearing a large black t-shirt that looks two sizes too big for her and a pair of rippled, baggy black pants stuffed into scuffed, oversized boots. Her wild brown hair is tamed only by a backwards blue cap while her wrists are adorned with a few beaded and woven bracelets. A variety of tattoos litter the rest of her arms that he can see, creeping up from her forearms to her biceps, and he spots the glint of a stud in her nose in the bright lighting. In short, combined with the wild expression in her piercing blue eyes, she looks like a completely deranged hippie.

Her gaze flickers about the restaurant before eventually settling on him, her face morphing from annoyance into furious rage, and she stomps her way over to his table to grab him by the front of his shirt.

“Dirk Gently, you are a dead man!”

It takes him a minute to find his voice because it isn’t everyday that a random hippie chick mistakes him for someone else and tries to kick his ass, but he manages to squeak out a reply. “Who’s...who’s Dirk Gently?”

She pauses, blinks, and looks around the restaurant again in confusion. Besides an older couple sitting at the bar and the wait staff, he’s currently the only one in the diner. Her eyes shift back to his, eyebrows furrowing. “...You’re not Dirk Gently?”

“No!” He wrenches himself from her surprisingly strong grip to put as much distance between them as possible—which isn’t much since she’s blocking his way out of the diner and his booth only goes back so far.

“What, are you kidding me right now? Why didn’t you just say ‘I’m not Dirk Gently’?!”

He can only stare back at her, incredulous. “Because I don’t know who that is!”

Frowning, she huffs and plops down in the booth across from him, looking less like a crazy, murderous flower child and more like a little girl who’d just been told she couldn’t ever eat ice cream again. Judging by the way she’s slumped down in her seat, whatever’s bothering her has her pretty bummed.

Once he’s (reasonably) sure that she’s probably not going to kill him, he considers hearing her out to see if there’s something he can do to help. Plus there’s also the fact that the faster he can fix her problem the faster he can get her to go away. He has a rich girl’s account to sift through for evidence of possible child abuse, after all. “So...why are you looking for this Dirk Gently guy? You know, beyond wanting to kill him.”

The woman scoffs but grudgingly leans forward to rest her forearms on the table, swiping a few of his fries to stuff down her throat in the process. “My last drummer quit on me so I went to that Craigslist place to find a new one. This Dirk Gently guy on there said he’d help me out, but every time we’re supposed to meet up and practice, he bails on me!”

He nods gravely, doing his best to appear interested. “I’m guessing he was supposed to meet you here?”

“Yeah, and of course the dickhead didn’t show. Again. It was the last chance we had to practice, but now I’m gonna have to cancel my gig tonight. This all fucking blows.”

After hearing her reasons for accosting him he finds that he actually feels a little bad for her. He knows firsthand what it’s like to be constantly let down when you needed help the most, and it’s no wonder she was steaming mad when she came in. Maybe she’s not so crazy after all.

He taps his fingers on his keyboard, trying to figure out a possible solution to her problem (maybe she should try Reddit?) when she snaps her head up to stare wide eyed at him. “Can you make songs on that thing?” she asks, pointing to his laptop.

He glances down at it, confused. “I mean, I guess in theory? I do have a program on here that you can make music on. It simulates the sound of nearly every musical instrument ever invented, and—”

“Blah, blah, blah, whatever. Can you make that thing sound like drums ?”

“Um, yeah?”

A sudden grin breaks out on her face. Before he can react she jumps up and drags him to his feet with a strength belying her small stature. “You’re my new drummer. C’mon, let’s go.”

She ignores his protests and pulls him from the restaurant to a yellow, beat up old car that looks like it used to be a taxi cab in another life. All he can do is hug his laptop to his chest as she books it down the street until they get to a run down storage unit in the middle of nowhere. She then unlocks and pulls up one of the garage-like doors to reveal her studio space. It looks like she also lives there if the futon, empty pizza boxes, and cases of water are anything to go by.

“Sit there, where I can see you,” she says, pointing at the futon covered in snack wrappers while she goes back to her car to get something. He clears a space on it to sit, and when she comes back, she has a guitar case slung over her shoulder. She then plops down on the empty seat next to him.

After spending half an hour turning his computer keyboard into an improvised beat machine under her impatient gaze, they spend the next two and a half going over some of her songs. Their practice session mostly consists of her terrorizing him for missing cues or having a complete lack of rhythm, and by the end, it feels like they haven’t gotten anywhere. He doesn’t even have the slightest idea what type of music she plays let alone how any of her songs go.

Yeah, they’re for sure going to bomb.

He tries to say as much but the woman rushes him back into her car so that they’re headed to where he assumes her gig is. She turns to look at him, taking her eyes off the road in front of her for an alarmingly long time.

“It’s really good you decided to help me.”

“I didn’t decide anything . You said you’d smash my laptop if I didn’t help you.”

“Well, you decided it was better to help me than lose your laptop. It was nice.”

He can only gape back at her incredulously. He takes it back. She’s insane. She’s literally insane.

It doesn’t take much longer for them to pull into a surprisingly full lot next to a derelict looking dive bar. “We’re here,” she says, shutting off the dangerously rattling car. She suddenly reaches across his body—causing him to reflexively flinch—and opens his door for him. ”Get out.”

He scrambles out of the passenger side while she takes her time pulling her gear out of the trunk, and it’s at that moment that he strongly considers making a run for it. She can’t see him with the trunk open, and he could be a full block away before she even notices that he’s gone.

But then he remembers the dozens of times he’d been let down in life; by friends, by family—hell, by the fucking world. He can’t do that to her, even if she hadbasically kidnapped him and forced him to join her band. It was only a few more hours, and it wasn’t like he had anything better to do that night.

They walk through the front doors of the rundown venue and it’s pretty much exactly what he expects. It’s dark, the air is thick with cigarette smoke, and most of the clientele already looks half drunk. He’s not exactly uncomfortable in the bar since he’d spent more than his fair share of time in places just like these ever since he’d moved out of his parent’s house at seventeen, but it’s not a place that he particularly likes to hang out in if he can help it.

She leads them over to the back corner of the building where a small stage has been built. An older woman is busy setting up the equipment and she looks up as they approach. “You two the Holistic Assassins?”

The hippie chick pulls her guitar off of her shoulder and sets it down on one of the stools resting against the wall. “That’s us.”

The older woman nods and stands, stretching out her back as she finishes setting up the last amp. “I’m Barb, the owner here. You go on in five.”

“What’s a...holistic assassin?” he asks as the owner disappears into the darkness of the bar.

After plugging her guitar into one of the amps, she turns to look at him with a pleased grin. "’Holistic’ is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I don't do your whole deal with structure, or finding inspiration, or writing drafts. I just...I play whatever I feel like playing all day, and if it works, then it becomes a new song.

Her eyes are nearly shining as she explains it to him, though for his part all he can do is stare dumbfounded back at her. “The connection between cause and effect is much more, you know, subtle than you would otherwise think. I mean...you wouldn't believe it. Things, they double up. They parallel . Everything is chaos, but it’s, like, synchronized? It's like, there's always something ready to mirror itself. Life endlessly turning inward.”

Yup. Crazy. “Don’t get me wrong, but it seemed like you were just playing a bunch of random notes when we were practicing.”

“I never played a bad song,” she says, somewhat defensively. She picks up her guitar and slings the strap over her shoulder. “Come on, time to play.”

He follows her onto the stage and plugs his laptop into the other amp—then tries to find the darkest shadow to hide in. They were going to bomb spectacularly, and the less people who saw him, the better.

“I’m Bart Curlish, and we’re the Holistic Assassins,” she grumbles into her mic, sounding like she’d rather be anywhere else. Which was odd since this was her gig.

He then belatedly realizes that it’s the first time he’s heard her name. What the hell kind of a name is Bart for a girl? She looks back at him and nods, giving him his cue to start, so taking a deep breath, he begins to tap out the first rhythm she’d shown him a couple of hours before on his keyboard. She bobs her head with the beat for a few seconds, eyes closed, and then begins to play. He feels his jaw drop when the smoothest sound he’d ever heard comes from the amp next to him, and then he feels his jaw scrape the ground when she begins to sing.

She’s a completely different person. Her voice is husky and gravely, just like her speaking voice, and it’s surprisingly more pleasant than he expected it to be. And it’s still only secondary to how well she plays the guitar. She plays as though she was born with it in her hands—like it was a part of her own body.

Thankfully it’s easy enough for him to keep up with her. Her music is slower than he expects, and more mellow. If he had to compare it to anything it sounds sort of like a mix of folk and reggae, but even that’s inaccurate—it’s completely and totally hers.

He makes a couple of mistakes during her short forty-five minute set, but overall, he thinks he did a pretty good job for his first time. Sure, he’s absolutely exhausted and is sweating buckets from being under the hot lights of the stage, but he’d survived.

“We’ve been the Holistic Assassins. Thanks,” she all but spits at the audience. Unsurprisingly she’d reverted back into her old grumpy self once her fingers left her guitar.

The crowd isn’t that big—only around fifty or so people—but everyone’s on their feet and clapping, even the tough looking bikers who seemed more likely to eat them than cheer her on. A few people are even bold enough to approach her as she leaves the stage but she only gives them the barest amount of attention, nodding courteously as they compliment her and shrugging off any questions they have. Eventually they all give up on getting anything more than a couple of words out of her and the owner of the bar approaches them with an excited smile.

“I had my doubts about you when you first asked if you could play here, but you know what? You put on a hell of a show.” She hands Bart a stack of dirty bills. “I know it ain’t much, but come back soon and I’ll double it.”

Bart takes the money with a grunt, gives him half, and grabs him by his arm, pulling him towards the door leading to the parking lot. It’s not until they make it back outside to her car that she relaxes and gives him a small, meek smile. “You did good.”

A little surprised by the praise—she didn’t seem the type to dish it out all that often—he shakes his head. “It was a lot more fun than I thought it would be, and you’re really good. Amazing, actually.”

They lean silently against the hood of her car together for a few minutes, both still coming down from the high of performing live. He’s just about to make his exit when Bart suddenly stands and turns to look at him.

“So...you did the thing up there on stage, And now that you did it maybe you’re gonna leave, and...You can do whatever you want, you know, because I forced you to help me, and...and like, it must’ve been really bad for you, you know I didn’t think about your feelings and all that, and…

She takes a deep breath and lets it out again, looking distinctly uncomfortable with everything she was saying to him. It was obvious this wasn’t something she was used to. “I don’t want you to go. I think.” Her eyes are misty as she speaks, surprising him since they’ve only known each other for at most six hours and yet she already seems to care so much for him. It pains him to admit it, but he can’t remember the last time anyone had been so sad to see him go.

He considers her request, and after a little thought, realizes that he was truly, genuinely happy up there making music on stage with her. He had been doing nothing everyday of his life and thinking it was just that—nothing. It was nothing. Even if he’s just providing a backing beat for her amazing songs, he’s found some semblance of a purpose and hell, maybe a little happiness too.

“Hey,” he says, nudging her to get her attention. “I’m not going anywhere.”

A wide grin breaks out on her face, and laughing with unconcealed relief, she throws her arms around his neck. She’s still sweaty from their show but so is he, so rather than try to squirm away from her touch like he usually would with any other person, he awkwardly returns it. She smells like musk, dirt, and sweat, and though the smell isn’t exactly pleasant, it isn’t altogether unpleasant either.

Still smiling, Bart pops the trunk to put her guitar inside. “Our next gig’s tomorrow night. Come on, we gotta practice.”

He slides into the passenger seat with his laptop and leans his head out of the window to talk to her. “You ever think about selling some merch? Maybe putting out a CD or at least uploading your music to BandCamp for people to download? I’m pretty good with a camera, so I could help you get your face out there a little more.” He’s vaguely aware that he’s being a little overeager, but he’s inspired by her. He believes in her. She has something special, and with his help, maybe she could become one of the biggest indie artists of all time. “I’ll bet I can sync my computer up to the stage lights. You know, add a little pizzazz to the show.”

She slams the trunk closed and laughs as she slides into the driver’s seat. “Pizzazz? Ken, you’re a riot.”

He rolls his eyes and shrugs. Well, whatever. He’d get her to see the appeal of his ideas eventually. He’s about to suggest they get a bite to eat before they spend the next who knows how long practicing when something she’d said stops him cold.

“...Wait, how do you know my name?”

[componentplanet]

Deep Space Nine Upscale Project (DS9UP): Technical Goals and FAQ

I’ve been needing to write a sort of “mission statement” and FAQ for this project, and this seems as good a time as any.

The goal of the Deep Space Nine Upscale Project (DS9UP) is to create a version of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine worth watching in the modern era of 4K and HD televisions and monitors. Topaz Video Enhance AI has been a critical part of those efforts to date, but I’ve spent the last month testing AviSynth, StaxRip, Handbrake, and at least a dozen other applications in the process of creating this encode.

Because image quality is intrinsically suggestive, I’m not going to claim I can somehow create the “best” version of Deep Space Nine, but I intend to map out multiple paths and settings tweaks that lead to different outcomes. I’ve gone back and specifically focused on the DVD encodes for two reasons:

1). We need every single scrap of data for upscaling (our results bear out the importance of this in several spots)

2). I’m creating a legal route for individuals to upscale a TV show they already own. I will not be creating or distributing any torrents based on my own work. I will be publishing a full tutorial on how to create what I’ve created, once we’ve reached that point.

To date, I’ve used two workstations simultaneously for DS9UP testing: An AMD Threadripper 3990X and an Intel Core i9-10980XE, both equipped with 64GB of RAM and an RTX 2080. I’ve occasionally tapped additional processing power in the form of eight-core Intel and AMD systems. Both systems have been excellent, but the 3990X is particularly good at running many encodes in parallel.

The current encoder preset I’m working with and wrote about earlier this week is codenamed “Rubicon,” after the runabout.

An interesting example of why source quality matters. While the ‘Artemis’ AI upscale algorithm is malfunctioning in both clips, it’s malfunctioning much less when given more source material to work with. Upscaled MKV on left, Rubicon on right.

I have far more compute power available than is typical for a project like this, and I’m using it accordingly.

Before we go further, here’s some surprise Season 7 footage I created.

Goals and Principles

The final upscaling and filter application process must be as simple as possible, to increase the likelihood people can follow it. No individual scene edits unless absolutely unavoidable.

Upscaling should require as little re-encoding as possible, to reduce source degradation.

When encoding cannot be avoided, re-encode in maximum detail. Storage is cheap and Topaz Video Enhance AI offers no control whatsoever over final output settings. Err on the side of caution.

Create a minimum of two workflows balanced around maximum quality versus sane processing time requirements.

Another example of how the Artemis-LQ preset struggles. It struggles with Rubicon and upscaled MKVs both, but it struggles more with the MKV.

The upscale should rely on the largest amount of free-to-use software possible. Topaz isn’t free to use, but it does include a 30-day free trial.

The non-upscaled video should still improve the underlying source image quality before upscaling is applied.

When in doubt, encode it, and compare it.

Render all results at near-maximum quality. When there are questions about what maximum quality settings are, encode all of the likely options simultaneously. When combinatorics makes this impossible, choose likely targets based on a close reading of the various filter settings.

Be willing to laugh at some of the ridiculously bad quality encodes you will occasionally create, especially if it takes 1-2 days to create them.

Address slow rendering times by leveraging greater parallelism. If you’re finishing 15-20 encodes per day, it won’t matter if it takes 12-36 hours to finish them.

Encode the entire episode at once, for easier spot comparison of any area.

Rubicon is not a perfect example of its own goals and principles. Like a lot of first season efforts, it needs further refinement. Currently, it relies on multiple pieces of paid software and the source is encoded more than I like. I’ve also been forced to use Handbrake as an initial ripper rather than MakeMKV due to persistent problems with audio/video muxing. Handbrake has no such issue and I’ve noticed no meaningful quality loss from a Handbrake rip on “Very Slow” with an RF of 2.

There are some nasty dependencies to contend with across applications. AviSynth doesn’t always like manipulating a video after it has been through DaVinci Resolve Studio and Topaz. DaVinci won’t ingest MKV files and doesn’t support MPEG-2 at all.

Creating Rubicon

Currently, Rubicon uses Handbrake for the initial rip, followed by StaxRip 2.0.8.0 as an AviSynth front-end GUI. After processing via AviSynth, I upscale the application in Topaz VEAI. This creates an intermediate step I personally call 5Sharp, mostly because “That one encode I like” was wordy.

Odd as it might seem, I’m very pleased with the result of this cloud. Upscaled MKV on left, Rubicon on right.

5Sharp is rather nice, IMO, but it struggles to resolve the judder issues caused by DS9’s party trick of flipping back and forth between 23.976 fps and 29.97 fps. I’ve come up with two methods of resolving this issue — the one currently deployed in Rubicon uses DaVinci Resolve Studio, while another option I’m considering relies solely on AviSynth.

The reason I’ve been a little vague about my workflows isn’t that I’m trying to be coy. It’s because it’s virtually impossible to describe them all without sounding like a lunatic. In the past week, I’ve experimented with the following:

Encoding from VOB files created by DVDDecrypter Encoding from MKV files created by Handbrake Encoding from MP4 files created by Handbrake Encoding from MKV files created by MakeMKV

I’ve encoded the VOB files at 23.976 and 29.97 fps to see the differences, experimented with various ways of extracting MKV timecodes in the hopes of fixing my A/V sync issue when ingesting via MakeMKV (no luck), attempted to use VapourSynth and StaxRip to invoke the VFRtoCFR script (no luck and I don’t speak Python), and experimented with multiple methods of adjusting frame rates in multiple applications. In video editing, doing A before B often produces different results than B before A, so I’ve also experimented with reversing the order of my own tests.

I’ve run various methods of adjusting frame rates on all of the sources above, to gauge the impact and evaluate how it impacts different source rips differently. I’m not “settled” on using Handbrake for initial ripping in any meaningful way, except that starting with Handbrake gets me aligned audio and video without locking me into either 23.976fps or 29.97fps the way ripping the VOB files currently does.

Are there solutions to these problems? I’m certain there are solutions to these problems. What I don’t want to do is leave stories littered with half-explained workflow questions that represent discarded branches of research.

Now that I’ve finished my most recent massive report, I plan to hook up with some of the other grassroots work being done on this project.

FAQ

Why are you using Handbrake instead of MakeMKV?

I’d love to be using MakeMKV. In fact, I’ve rendered MakeMKV-based source hundreds of times. There are two problems with MakeMKV that I have yet to solve.

1). Misaligned audio/video at the beginning of a stream. 2). How Deep Space Nine‘s variable frame rate is handled by many applications.

StaxRip, for example, will attempt to rip a MakeMKV stream into a hybrid constant frame rate (CFR) of 24.66fps, having apparently averaged the 29.97fps content frame rate with the 23.976fps content frame rate. Ripping the VOBs directly is possible — and this solves the audio sync problem — but this also forces the show into all one frame rate or the other.

Also, Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve doesn’t support MPEG-2 or MKV files, which is rather frustrating.

Tool recommendations are welcome.

How Long Does it Take to Encode an Entire Episode?

Honest answer: I’m not sure. It takes between 8.5 – 11 hours just to upscale a DVD source file by 4x. This is sometimes referred to as “4K,” but the final resolution on Rubicon is 2560×1920. It’s roughly a 5MP image. The reason I’m not sure how long it actually takes is that I typically run between 4 – 10 source encodes simultaneously with an upscale in the background.

Right now, I’d say it takes anywhere from 13 – 20 hours to upscale an episode, start to finish. 8-11 hours of that is out of my control. Topaz VEAI takes as long as it takes.

Do You Actually Know What You’re Doing?

I’m still a beginner at this sort of thing. In retrospect, there are easier shows to cut one’s teeth on than Deep Space Nine. My strategy for conquering this problem has been spunk, gumption, and overwhelming amounts of processing power.

Are You Aware You’re Doing It Wrong?

I am exquisitely aware that I am doing it wrong. I’ve been attempting to learn how to upscale and effectively remaster video from scratch, with some help from online and real-life friends. I take to video like a duck to vacuum. If you think you know something that might help, there’s a pretty good chance you do.

I’m not tackling this project because I think I’m somehow immune to the Dunning-Kruger effect. I’m taking it on because DS9 is 27 years old and nobody has done it yet. Paramount has made it clear they aren’t going to. We’ve started to lose the actors who starred on the show.

For the first time in my entire career, the tools to fix problems like this have become available to ordinary people. I and some other groups of people are availing ourselves of them.

You’ll Never Make It as Good as Paramount Could:

This one really isn’t a question, but I hear it regularly enough to make it worth addressing. It is not news to me that Paramount is capable of creating a remastered version of Deep Space Nine that would blow mine out of the water. Here’s a shot they created for the documentary “What We Left Behind” last year:

And, for comparison, here’s my own version of that clip, rendered in Rubicon — the best footage I’ve assembled to-date:

I know which one you probably prefer. I know which one I prefer. But since Paramount isn’t doing the work, I’ve got to work with what I’ve got.

The goal of the DS9UP isn’t to create a better version of DS9 than Paramount could produce — it’s to create the best version of Deep Space Nine that it’s possible to build (with allowance for individual taste).

Now Read:

Deep Space Nine Upscale Project Season Finale: What We’ve Brought Ahead

Deep Space Nine Upscale Project Update: ‘Sacrifice of Angels’

Upscaling Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Using Topaz Video Enhance AI

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/310224-deep-space-nine-upscale-project-ds9up-technical-goals-and-faq from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/05/deep-space-nine-upscale-project-ds9up.html

[starcitizenprivateer]

DISCOVERED: Scraping By

Scraping By

In anticipation of the release of the Vulture, Drake Interplanetary has coordinated with Discovered to provide a number of experienced scavengers early models to test in the field. Chosen from a pool of hundreds of applicants, archaeologist Lorenzo Chernov proposed the exploration of a secluded debris field he discovered in the Idris system.

Here are excerpts from his logs.

BEGIN RECORDS:

2948.02.17_05:48 SET

Ok, here we go. Day one of exploring. Wonder what I should call this place. If this was an official UEE Archaeological Society expedition, it’d probably get something generic, like ‘Debris Field 8514J-Idris system’. At least I’ve landed on a name for this new salvage ship. I think they’re officially calling it the Vulture, but this one feels like Amaira to me. I’d like to give a big shout out to the folks at Drake for letting me try it out. Of course, they did have a bunch of stipulations, including that I record this audio log to track my adventures and what I like about the ship, what could be improved, and so on.

Plus, if this debris field is truly more than just a bunch of modern scrap, like I believe it is, then they’ll also get credit for making this mission happen. Definitely couldn’t run this op without Amaira’s help. No way I could afford to outfit the expedition with a Reclaimer, let alone the cost of crewing one.

I finished a general set of scans yesterday, so there’s a clear picture of how all the pieces were found. Analyzing them last night, I noticed a few larger pieces of detritus near the middle. They look like parts of a fuselage, maybe even a cockpit. They might be my best bet to determine what ships were involved, and more importantly, what era this wreckage is from. The debris is really dense around those pieces, so EVAing to them could be problematic. The last thing I want to do is upset the balance of materials and create a collision cascade. As Professor Haley used to say, “better to take your time than ruin the find.”

First thing this morning, I charted a path through the wreckage, but it’s going to take some work to get there. My initial estimate is that there are probably ten to fifteen ships here. Plus, there’s most likely additional material from vessels that were involved, but made it to safety.

Even though the picture isn’t clear yet, I get a gnawing feeling that this isn’t just the fallout of some racer kids gone stupid. Or a deal gone bad.

Then again, I’ve said that before…

All right, Amaira let’s get to work.

2948.02.28_20:34 SET

Amaira and I just returned from another run to Tanys. Sold the latest round of scrap and resupplied. Gotta remember to take the next load to a different shop. The desk jockey at Dumper’s remembered me and made conversation. Hopefully I didn’t say too much. Hate to have half the scrappers in the system turn up looking to score. I will say it was nice to talk to someone instead of just rambling into this thing all day long.

I probably didn’t need to leave Tanys heading in the wrong direction before making a series of random jumps back here. Mom always said I was overly cautious.

That applies here too. I’m doing everything by the book. EVAing over to every piece of debris, carefully scanning and cataloging it, and then determining if it’s worth saving or salvaging. So far, there’s been a lot less worth holding onto than I hoped. Nothing I’ve kept is actually important, just material sample for later analysis.

Oh wait, I almost forget, the Dumper’s clerk did mention something interesting. I guess the composition of the alloys I brought in last time was a bit unusual. I tried to play it cool and not press her for too many details, but that’s gotta be a good sign, right? I know ship manufacturers have adjusted their specs over the centuries thanks to technological advances, changes to their supply chain, or a whole bunch of other factors. A part of me wants to send a piece of debris for further analysis, but it’ll have to wait. I’m already cutting my budget pretty thin. The stuff I’m scrapping has been just enough to stay stocked on essentials and keep Amaira functional.

Honestly, I really couldn’t have done any of this without Amaira. So far I’ve got nothing but positive feedback on the Vulture. The tractor beam is super sticky, and the industrial-grade scraper chews through materials like a charm. Living quarters are even comfortable enough to make me forget I’m floating in some long-forgotten part of Idris, surrounded by a dozen or so ships that dueled to the death.

There is the smell, though. Not that it’s terrible, but if you folks at Drake do listen to this, couldn’t hurt to think about upgrading the O2 scrubbers a bit. Then again, maybe I’m just a little bit riper than average.

Time to grab a few hours of shut-eye, and get back to it.

2948.03.03_13:23 SET

Damn it, that did not go as planned.

Well, the good news is I was right. That big piece was definitely from a cockpit, looked like it was from an early Aegis ship too. Some of the control panel was still intact. Haven’t seen many like it, so I EVAed over for a better look.

That’s when I saw a piece of debris unlike any other, distinctly designed to look like a big feather. At that moment, I forgot all about the cockpit. That distinctive piece meant a Prowler was part of the wreckage.

Think I went woozy for a second before my rational brain began wondering about the cost to get the feather piece analyzed. There’s always a chance it’s a replica, since Esperia makes theirs so damn close to the real deal.

In my excitement, I redirected around the cockpit, completely forgetting that I hadn’t cleared the other side. For a second, I took my eyes off where I was going to change my suit’s scanner settings. Suddenly, I felt this dark presence above me. I looked up and slammed face first into a giant piece of metal debris.

It scared the hell out of me. I even thought I was partially blinded, only to later realize I’d cracked my faceplate. Luckily, the seal held. Needless to say, I overreacted. Course corrected back the way I came way too hard and way too fast. That slammed me into the cockpit piece, sending it spinning swiftly away, down the path I’d conveniently spent clearing these past weeks.

Everything inside of me wanted to take off after it. But that second collision really messed up my helmet. Guess I should’ve splurged for a better one, because this one started beeping about a ‘critical failure’, forcing me back here to patch it before it was too late.

I really messed up that last walk. That chunk of the cockpit is lost to the void and I didn’t even get a good scan of it. Still, I can’t stop smiling.

I think I’ve found a lost battle site from the First Tevarin War.

2948.03.03_22:09 SET

It took some work, but I got that piece of the Prowler into the hold. I don’t want to lose it, but it’s also taking up more space than I’d like. Keeping it back there will definitely cut into my bottom line when Amaira and I make runs to Tanys. Might have to find a place around here to leave it when heading back to civilization. It’s not an ideal solution, but I don’t want anyone to see it and start wondering why it’s not being scrapped. If I can swing the credits, it’d be worth setting up a mooring drone as a temporary fix. Then I could safely float any other large finds until I’m ready to hire a transport.

Despite the cockpit debacle earlier, I’d say today was a success. Tomorrow, I’ll start clearing a path to the piece that looks like it’s from a fuselage. Maybe I’ll find a few more pieces of the Prowler, if I’m lucky.

2948.03.08_01:36 SET

Well, I finally made it to that large piece of debris. It was definitely part of a fuselage. Spent hours inspecting it, but couldn’t find any maker’s marks. A part of me wanted to save it for further analysis, but to be honest, I really need the creds from the scrap. My trips to Tanys are becoming less and less frequent as I spend more time inspecting the stuff I’ve found. It’s becoming harder and harder to decide what’s worth saving and what’s safe to feed to the Vulture. Hell, it would’ve been nice if Drake had thrown in some supplies to save me the trouble, but I guess they wanted to see how she handled on the day-to-day.

Anyway, I felt bad having Amaira cut it into pieces, though I made sure it was properly scanned and cataloged before doing so. Despite the heartache, gotta say the scraping laser’s been a joy. Gonna take the scrap to Tanys tomorrow then come back here and keep searching.

2948.03.15_18:47 SET

Another day with nothing to report. Everything I came across was scrap. I figured by now I would have part of a component or something, anything, that could tell me more about what happened here. This is getting pretty darn frustrating.

Every day I stare at the Prowler piece and wonder when I’m going to find more. My working theory is that the rest of it was blown into unidentifiably small bits. Either way, based on the accumulated amount of wreckage I’ve found, if this is a lost battle site, then it’s pretty clear who came out on top.

To be honest, the lack of debris from Tevarin ships worries me. There’s a lingering fear that maybe this was just a random skirmish between gangs and one of them happened to have a new Prowler. I hope that’s not the case, but every day I don’t find something significant, I grow a little more worried that I’ve been wasting my time picking through random debris from a week ago.

I’m understanding why so many of my colleagues prefer digging planetside. The dating is so much easier.

2948.03.19_05:22 SET

Today was… well, technically yesterday, was the day I’ve been waiting for. After weeks of slowly shifting through random debris, I finally found something undeniably significant – a black box.

I rushed it back to Amaira and immediately started my examination. When the date of the last log popped up, I… ok, I’ll admit it, I freaked out. I screamed. I jumped around until I was out of breath. The last recorded date on it was October 1, 2544.

That’s right, not only is this wreckage from the First Tevarin War, it’s actually from the Battle of Idris IV. The infamous Operation Nemesis that was almost a complete disaster until a young Ivan Messer turned the tides of the battle and arguably the entire war.

Once I calmed down, I dug through the logs to figure out why these ships ended up all the way out here. From what I can tell, this spot became a rallying point. These ships fell back here to regroup after surviving the surprise attack by the Tevarin’s planetary defense system. I’m not exactly sure what happened once they were all here, but it obviously didn’t turn out well for them.

I really should get to sleep, but there are still so many things to figure out. Like, should I report the discovery right away, or wait until I’m done examining the entire debris field? Feels weird to walk away in the middle of exploring it, but I could probably land some grants to hire a proper crew. That would make examining the rest of the debris so much easier, but probably take months to organize. Not sure if I can handle waiting that long before finding out what else is out here…

I should really send my Mom a comm too. She’s gonna lose it when she finds out I was right. Maybe I should take Amaira back to Tanys tomorrow and send it via a secure comm to ensure it doesn’t get hacked. What… a… day!!

Lorenzo Chernov’s discovery brought further clarity to the fog of war surrounding the Battle of Idris IV. Careful examination of the discovered black box revealed that the wreckage was mainly members of the 12th Squadron. Their fate was previously unknown, though many historians assumed they had been destroyed by Tevarin planetary defenses. This site proved they had survived the initial assault and were in the midst of planning a counterstrike when they came under attack from Tevarin forces.

Though the Prowler debris proved to be authentic, no other Tevarin ship pieces were found. While the site clarified the fate of the 12th Squadron, it is hoped that further research may reveal how they were so handily wiped out in this small corner of space. The recovered ship remains have been transferred to the Naval Museum on MacArthur, where plans are in progress for them to be placed on display.

[sad-ch1ld]

via RSI Comm-Link

Scraping By

In anticipation of the release of the Vulture, Drake Interplanetary has coordinated with Discovered to provide a number of experienced scavengers early models to test in the field. Chosen from a pool of hundreds of applicants, archaeologist Lorenzo Chernov proposed the exploration of a secluded debris field he discovered in the Idris system.

Here are excerpts from his logs.

BEGIN RECORDS:

2948.02.17_05:48 SET

Ok, here we go. Day one of exploring. Wonder what I should call this place. If this was an official UEE Archaeological Society expedition, it’d probably get something generic, like ‘Debris Field 8514J-Idris system’. At least I’ve landed on a name for this new salvage ship. I think they’re officially calling it the Vulture, but this one feels like Amaira to me. I’d like to give a big shout out to the folks at Drake for letting me try it out. Of course, they did have a bunch of stipulations, including that I record this audio log to track my adventures and what I like about the ship, what could be improved, and so on.

Plus, if this debris field is truly more than just a bunch of modern scrap, like I believe it is, then they’ll also get credit for making this mission happen. Definitely couldn’t run this op without Amaira’s help. No way I could afford to outfit the expedition with a Reclaimer, let alone the cost of crewing one.

I finished a general set of scans yesterday, so there’s a clear picture of how all the pieces were found. Analyzing them last night, I noticed a few larger pieces of detritus near the middle. They look like parts of a fuselage, maybe even a cockpit. They might be my best bet to determine what ships were involved, and more importantly, what era this wreckage is from. The debris is really dense around those pieces, so EVAing to them could be problematic. The last thing I want to do is upset the balance of materials and create a collision cascade. As Professor Haley used to say, “better to take your time than ruin the find.”

First thing this morning, I charted a path through the wreckage, but it’s going to take some work to get there. My initial estimate is that there are probably ten to fifteen ships here. Plus, there’s most likely additional material from vessels that were involved, but made it to safety.

Even though the picture isn’t clear yet, I get a gnawing feeling that this isn’t just the fallout of some racer kids gone stupid. Or a deal gone bad.

Then again, I’ve said that before…

All right, Amaira let’s get to work.

2948.02.28_20:34 SET

Amaira and I just returned from another run to Tanys. Sold the latest round of scrap and resupplied. Gotta remember to take the next load to a different shop. The desk jockey at Dumper’s remembered me and made conversation. Hopefully I didn’t say too much. Hate to have half the scrappers in the system turn up looking to score. I will say it was nice to talk to someone instead of just rambling into this thing all day long.

I probably didn’t need to leave Tanys heading in the wrong direction before making a series of random jumps back here. Mom always said I was overly cautious.

That applies here too. I’m doing everything by the book. EVAing over to every piece of debris, carefully scanning and cataloging it, and then determining if it’s worth saving or salvaging. So far, there’s been a lot less worth holding onto than I hoped. Nothing I’ve kept is actually important, just material sample for later analysis.

Oh wait, I almost forget, the Dumper’s clerk did mention something interesting. I guess the composition of the alloys I brought in last time was a bit unusual. I tried to play it cool and not press her for too many details, but that’s gotta be a good sign, right? I know ship manufacturers have adjusted their specs over the centuries thanks to technological advances, changes to their supply chain, or a whole bunch of other factors. A part of me wants to send a piece of debris for further analysis, but it’ll have to wait. I’m already cutting my budget pretty thin. The stuff I’m scrapping has been just enough to stay stocked on essentials and keep Amaira functional.

Honestly, I really couldn’t have done any of this without Amaira. So far I’ve got nothing but positive feedback on the Vulture. The tractor beam is super sticky, and the industrial-grade scraper chews through materials like a charm. Living quarters are even comfortable enough to make me forget I’m floating in some long-forgotten part of Idris, surrounded by a dozen or so ships that dueled to the death.

There is the smell, though. Not that it’s terrible, but if you folks at Drake do listen to this, couldn’t hurt to think about upgrading the O2 scrubbers a bit. Then again, maybe I’m just a little bit riper than average.

Time to grab a few hours of shut-eye, and get back to it.

2948.03.03_13:23 SET

Damn it, that did not go as planned.

Well, the good news is I was right. That big piece was definitely from a cockpit, looked like it was from an early Aegis ship too. Some of the control panel was still intact. Haven’t seen many like it, so I EVAed over for a better look.

That’s when I saw a piece of debris unlike any other, distinctly designed to look like a big feather. At that moment, I forgot all about the cockpit. That distinctive piece meant a Prowler was part of the wreckage.

Think I went woozy for a second before my rational brain began wondering about the cost to get the feather piece analyzed. There’s always a chance it’s a replica, since Esperia makes theirs so damn close to the real deal.

In my excitement, I redirected around the cockpit, completely forgetting that I hadn’t cleared the other side. For a second, I took my eyes off where I was going to change my suit’s scanner settings. Suddenly, I felt this dark presence above me. I looked up and slammed face first into a giant piece of metal debris.

It scared the hell out of me. I even thought I was partially blinded, only to later realize I’d cracked my faceplate. Luckily, the seal held. Needless to say, I overreacted. Course corrected back the way I came way too hard and way too fast. That slammed me into the cockpit piece, sending it spinning swiftly away, down the path I’d conveniently spent clearing these past weeks.

Everything inside of me wanted to take off after it. But that second collision really messed up my helmet. Guess I should’ve splurged for a better one, because this one started beeping about a ‘critical failure’, forcing me back here to patch it before it was too late.

I really messed up that last walk. That chunk of the cockpit is lost to the void and I didn’t even get a good scan of it. Still, I can’t stop smiling.

I think I’ve found a lost battle site from the First Tevarin War.

2948.03.03_22:09 SET

It took some work, but I got that piece of the Prowler into the hold. I don’t want to lose it, but it’s also taking up more space than I’d like. Keeping it back there will definitely cut into my bottom line when Amaira and I make runs to Tanys. Might have to find a place around here to leave it when heading back to civilization. It’s not an ideal solution, but I don’t want anyone to see it and start wondering why it’s not being scrapped. If I can swing the credits, it’d be worth setting up a mooring drone as a temporary fix. Then I could safely float any other large finds until I’m ready to hire a transport.

Despite the cockpit debacle earlier, I’d say today was a success. Tomorrow, I’ll start clearing a path to the piece that looks like it’s from a fuselage. Maybe I’ll find a few more pieces of the Prowler, if I’m lucky.

2948.03.08_01:36 SET

Well, I finally made it to that large piece of debris. It was definitely part of a fuselage. Spent hours inspecting it, but couldn’t find any maker’s marks. A part of me wanted to save it for further analysis, but to be honest, I really need the creds from the scrap. My trips to Tanys are becoming less and less frequent as I spend more time inspecting the stuff I’ve found. It’s becoming harder and harder to decide what’s worth saving and what’s safe to feed to the Vulture. Hell, it would’ve been nice if Drake had thrown in some supplies to save me the trouble, but I guess they wanted to see how she handled on the day-to-day.

Anyway, I felt bad having Amaira cut it into pieces, though I made sure it was properly scanned and cataloged before doing so. Despite the heartache, gotta say the scraping laser’s been a joy. Gonna take the scrap to Tanys tomorrow then come back here and keep searching.

2948.03.15_18:47 SET

Another day with nothing to report. Everything I came across was scrap. I figured by now I would have part of a component or something, anything, that could tell me more about what happened here. This is getting pretty darn frustrating.

Every day I stare at the Prowler piece and wonder when I’m going to find more. My working theory is that the rest of it was blown into unidentifiably small bits. Either way, based on the accumulated amount of wreckage I’ve found, if this is a lost battle site, then it’s pretty clear who came out on top.

To be honest, the lack of debris from Tevarin ships worries me. There’s a lingering fear that maybe this was just a random skirmish between gangs and one of them happened to have a new Prowler. I hope that’s not the case, but every day I don’t find something significant, I grow a little more worried that I’ve been wasting my time picking through random debris from a week ago.

I’m understanding why so many of my colleagues prefer digging planetside. The dating is so much easier.

2948.03.19_05:22 SET

Today was… well, technically yesterday, was the day I’ve been waiting for. After weeks of slowly shifting through random debris, I finally found something undeniably significant – a black box.

I rushed it back to Amaira and immediately started my examination. When the date of the last log popped up, I… ok, I’ll admit it, I freaked out. I screamed. I jumped around until I was out of breath. The last recorded date on it was October 1, 2544.

That’s right, not only is this wreckage from the First Tevarin War, it’s actually from the Battle of Idris IV. The infamous Operation Nemesis that was almost a complete disaster until a young Ivan Messer turned the tides of the battle and arguably the entire war.

Once I calmed down, I dug through the logs to figure out why these ships ended up all the way out here. From what I can tell, this spot became a rallying point. These ships fell back here to regroup after surviving the surprise attack by the Tevarin’s planetary defense system. I’m not exactly sure what happened once they were all here, but it obviously didn’t turn out well for them.

I really should get to sleep, but there are still so many things to figure out. Like, should I report the discovery right away, or wait until I’m done examining the entire debris field? Feels weird to walk away in the middle of exploring it, but I could probably land some grants to hire a proper crew. That would make examining the rest of the debris so much easier, but probably take months to organize. Not sure if I can handle waiting that long before finding out what else is out here…

I should really send my Mom a comm too. She’s gonna lose it when she finds out I was right. Maybe I should take Amaira back to Tanys tomorrow and send it via a secure comm to ensure it doesn’t get hacked. What… a… day!!

Lorenzo Chernov’s discovery brought further clarity to the fog of war surrounding the Battle of Idris IV. Careful examination of the discovered black box revealed that the wreckage was mainly members of the 12th Squadron. Their fate was previously unknown, though many historians assumed they had been destroyed by Tevarin planetary defenses. This site proved they had survived the initial assault and were in the midst of planning a counterstrike when they came under attack from Tevarin forces.

Though the Prowler debris proved to be authentic, no other Tevarin ship pieces were found. While the site clarified the fate of the 12th Squadron, it is hoped that further research may reveal how they were so handily wiped out in this small corner of space. The recovered ship remains have been transferred to the Naval Museum on MacArthur, where plans are in progress for them to be placed on display.

[trendingnewsb]

The Inside Story of Reddit’s Redesign

On a rainy day in San Francisco, a dozen or so designers sat crammed around a conference table inside Reddit's headquarters, in a space they had nicknamed The War Room. A few soggy rain jackets dripped onto the floor, and someone mumbled a maxim normally reserved for weddings about rain bringing good luck.

It was neither the first nor the last time this group would gather here to share the details of the project they'd been working on for over a year. But today was special. The designers had prepared an update for Reddit's website, which serves 330 million users from around the world. The irony of a dozen designers doing anything at Reddit was not lost on them—the text-heavy website is about as visually appealing as an overflowing email inbox. The designers engaged in some last-minute jockeying over the language of their update, and then they posted it using Reddit's signature droll tone: TIL Reddit has a design team.

For the past year and a half, Reddit and its new team of 20 designers have been refashioning the so-called 'front page of the internet.'

The team's efforts mark the first visual refresh of Reddit in over a decade. Steve Huffman, Reddit's cofounder and CEO, signaled the need for a tidying-up in a post last year. "Many of us evangelize Reddit and tell people how awesome it is, what an impact it's made in their life, how much it makes them laugh, etc, and then when those new people decide to check out Reddit for the first time they're greeted with dystopian Craigslist," Huffman wrote. "We'd like to fix that."

And so, for the past year and a half, Reddit and its new team of 20 designers have been refashioning the so-called "front page of the internet." They've taken great pains to build on top of Reddit's long legacy, rather than replacing it with something unfamiliar. They've argued about everything from the placement of the logo to the way moderators should style their communities to the dominant color on the site (red-orange, as it turns out). It's been a slow, careful process that everyone takes extremely seriously. "If you redesign Reddit," says Diego Perez, the company's head of design, "you're inherently changing the internet."

The new design’s "classic" look is similar to Reddit’s old appearance, but it has been updated with bigger fonts, a more modern appearance, and a navigation bar that—when opened—appears along the page’s left side.

Reddit

Today, about one percent of Redditors will see the new design. The refreshed layout will be introduced to more users gradually over the coming months and, at least for now, users can switch back to the old layout at any time. On the "new" Reddit, you'll find the navigation bar replaced by a hamburger menu in the left corner that surfaces feeds, subscriptions, and profiles. Next to it, a trio of buttons allow Redditors to view the site in three new ways: There's "card view," which looks a little like Facebook; "classic view," which borrows the design language from current Reddit; and "compact view," for users who want to scroll through tons of content quickly. Posts now open in a "lightbox," without taking users out of their page. New fonts make it easier to tell when you're clicking on a post or clicking on an outbound link. Beneath the description for r/all ("The most active posts from all of Reddit. Come here to see new posts rising and be a part of the conversation") there's a prominent, blue button to create a new post. And throughout the site, there are new illustrations of Snoo, Reddit's alien mascot, exploring the vast planets of the Reddit universe.

From far away, it still looks unmistakably like Reddit. But up close, the changes have turned Reddit from an esoteric maze into a website anyone can use—like a junk drawer that's been gutted, cleaned, and reorganized.

The story behind Reddit's redesign isn't just the odyssey to make Reddit look a little nicer. It's an internet Bildungsroman. When Huffman and cofounder Alexis Ohanian launched the site in 2005, Reddit represented the anarchist web, a place where you could do and say whatever you wanted so long as you could figure out how to get in. More than a decade later, Reddit has grown into something else. It's the place to talk about gaming, and Game of Thrones. It's a place not just for sharing information, but for sharing ideas. Reddit has said for years that the site is for everyone. Now, for the first time, it's starting to actually look like it.

Welcome to Reddit, all grown up.

On Perez's first week at Reddit, Ohanian sent him a folder full of screenshots. Strung together, the images created an ad-hoc time-lapse of Reddit's design history. There was a view of the site just before launch, when it had only two users; u/kn0thing for Ohanian, u/spez for Huffman. (Already, u/kn0thing had negative karma, the result of u/spez downvoting his first post.) There was Reddit after it added comments in 2005, and after it added subreddits in 2008. There was Reddit during its most dramatic desktop redesign, also in 2008, which included new "momentum arrows" to show if a post was rising or falling, and new ways to sort posts. And then, abruptly, the screenshots stopped.

Redesigning any major website is stressful. But redesigning one like Reddit, which hadn't been touched in over a decade, was something else.

It wasn't that Ohanian had failed to capture the last decade of Reddit's design history—though he did leave Reddit in 2009, along with Huffman. The problem was that there was no last decade of Reddit's design history.

In the intervening years, Reddit had changed drastically both as a company and as a website. After Ohanian and Huffman had left, the company cycled through new CEOs—one of whom quit because the job was too "stressful and draining," one of whom quit after suffering what she calls "one of the largest trolling attacks in history" by Reddit users. The website had swollen from just over 2 million users in 2008 to over 330 million. Those users brought with them a tide of new communities—some of which challenged Reddit's reputation for free speech in disturbing ways. The design, however, had been preserved in amber.

Ohanian sent the screenshots to Perez in a Zip file. "He was like, 'Well, I'm sorry. But this is your job now.'"

User’s can switch to a "Card view," which emphasizes photos and videos and is reminiscent of Facebook’s design.

Reddit

Redesigning any major website is stressful. But redesigning one like Reddit, which hadn't been touched in over a decade, was something else. Never mind the fact that, besides Perez, the company didn't even have a design team. At Microsoft, where Perez had worked previously, he led a team of 60 designers. "I came here, there were four of us," he says. In those early days, Reddit's makeshift design team worked out of an empty room on the fourth floor of the company's headquarters. They dragged up a TV, a couple of chairs, a little Wi-Fi station, a bunch of paper, and started to hash out how to bring Reddit into the future.

Brainstorming was easy. Everyone wanted to change the font, the navigation, the use of space in the sidebars. They talked about making Reddit more visual, making better use of the unique personality of each community. "When you ask a designer, 'What would be your dream thing to change on the internet?' the answer is always: 'That Reddit thing needs a lot of love,'" says Perez.

Perez wasn't just a designer, though. He was also a Redditor—a longtime lurker, as he puts it. So he knew that Redditors are resourceful creatures. "By virtue of not having any significant product evolution in years, users end up doing a lot of things and figure out how to subsist on their own," he says. Ask any of Reddit's most active users how they browse the site, and they'll likely mention at least one third-party application. Reddit Enhancement Suite, one of the most popular tools, launched in 2010 to provide some the necessary features that Reddit's web client didn't. It's commonly used by Reddit's moderators, some of whom spend hours every day refereeing their online communities. The most engaged of the tribe, who moderate several communities, have dedicated hours to custom styling their subreddits in CSS, or coding bots to help "automod" their communities.

The design team took inspiration from these workarounds. Perez and his team spent hours every day, for weeks at a time, talking to moderators about the elaborate hacks they'd strung together to make Reddit work better. They asked some users to create diaries of how they'd used the site. They looked at Reddit's top 2,000 communities, and tracked the things their moderators had done to customize the style. "We had a massive spreadsheet of all the customizable things that all communities do," says Ben Rush, the UX design lead on the redesign. They distilled all of this data into a new set of tools like "post validation," which lets moderators easily create a filter for what can or can't be posted in a community, and a custom styling toolbox, which lets mods change the colors and banners on their subreddits with just a few clicks.

For most of the people Perez's team interviewed, these changes might feel redundant, or even tedious. Moderators running highly stylized subreddits, like r/GameOfThrones, already know how to make their communities feel unique. In fact, they've devoted hours to doing it. But for Redditors who've shied away from creating their own communities in the past, the new toolset democratizes the process. You don't need coding chops, or even a third-party add-on, to make something that looks and feels cool. That, for Reddit, represents the most important part of the redesign. It's not just bringing the site into 2018. It's preparing the site for the next generation of Redditors.

The first version of Reddit worked more or less like a link aggregator. It was a place for skimming the news, sharing memes, passing around lulz. Shortly after it first launched, the site introduced comments to encourage discussion on those links. The first comment? It was about how comments would ruin Reddit. In 2008, when the site launched subreddits, Redditors objected again, complaining that the new feature reflected Reddit's "schizophrenic approach" to displaying content. More changes followed: a bigger "comment" button, new ways to sort posts, those momentum arrows. You can guess how well those went over.

People on Reddit, like people everywhere on the internet, resist even the slightest changes. Redesigns almost always elicit atavistic rage—take it from Facebook, or Snapchat, or Digg. But on a site like Reddit, with 13 years of history baked into its current design, the resistance to change is higher than usual. As one user, u/vusys, put it in a comment to the design team: "The biggest misstep is taking a revolutionary approach instead of evolutionary. I agree that current reddit is kind of ugly, but it works."

For people who have been on Reddit for years, the obtuseness is part of the appeal. It engenders a sense of belonging. If you can figure it out, you get to be part of the club.

'It's difficult to figure out for a lot of folks where exactly they can fit in on Reddit.'

Amulya Aradhyula, Reddit

But there's little charm for new users. Even making your first post can be bewildering. There are two buttons—"submit a new link" and "submit a new text post"—that blend in with the advertisements on the site's right rail. When you try to submit something, it's not immediately obvious where you're posting it or what the rules of that community might be. And if you want to make your own community? Well, good luck with that.

So while the design team worked to bring the redesign up to parity with Reddit's current features, another team started to look at what it would take to ease a new user's first encounter. While the site's users have always been extremely vocal about what they like (or really hate) about the design, Reddit had never actively polled anyone outside its own user community about the site's usability. A two-person UX research team was formed to figure out why people joined but never posted, or never joined at all.

Those researchers, Ajit Krishna and Amulya Aradhyula, started surveying people late last year. They sent online questionnaires and conducted interviews with Redditors, alongside the designers on Perez's team, but then they went further out. For a few hours each week, Krishna and Aradhyula carried their laptops into San Francisco's Union Square, where Krishna says they found a "nice distribution of people from all over the world just sitting around doing nothing." They'd walk up to someone on a park bench, show them a page on Reddit, and ask, "Does this make sense to you? Do you understand how to get from Point A to Point B?" They found that most people understood the concept of Reddit. They just didn't understand how to use it, or what they'd use it for.

"It's difficult to figure out for a lot of folks where exactly they can fit in on Reddit," says Aradhyula. "There's so many places that they could go, but they're not aware that they exist."

The new design features an easier interface for posting text, images, video, and links.

Reddit

The research from Krishna and Aradhyula helped inform a new set of design choices aimed at breaking down that perception: Now, there's a bigger button to signal where you can create a post. Before, formatting text posts required the use of Markdown; now, there's a WYSIWYG toolbar too. Before, you couldn't combine text, images, and links in the same posts; now, you can roll them all into one, along with embedded movies. The new posting flow also surfaces the community guidelines of the subreddit you're posting to, which helps new users understand the rules so they don't accidentally get their post nuked. It's hard to imagine a Reddit veteran caring about any of this. But for someone brand new to the site, it's the difference between finding the confidence to make that first post or closing the tab, walking away, and never coming back.

Reddit is not a one-size-fits-all experience. "Lurkers" come to the site regularly to read content, but never post. Others post every day in the communities they know and love; others go on to create and moderate communities on the site. "Reddit is a very personal thing," says Perez. "We don't take any of that for granted. People should be able to customize it around themselves and the communities and the content they care about."

To make that possible, the redesign introduces three ways to browse the site: "Classic view" looks the most like Reddit did before. "Compact view" helps moderators scroll through bulk content quickly. "Card view" pre-expands content like photos and posts, which makes it easier to scroll through a feed like r/pics without having to click each individual post. (It looks a lot more like Facebook or Twitter, which Perez says is intentional. "For a lot of our new users, they like it. They come from those places.") Users can toggle between these three views at any time, offering a more customizable way to consume the content on the site. Now, there's no single way to use Reddit. There's no single redesign either.

The redesign aims to reintroduce Reddit as a modern destination on the internet. The company's branding, however, was stuck in 2005. "One of the things I did early on was do an audit of what Reddit had at the time," says Tavish MacLellan, Reddit's creative director for the brand. The "official" brand guidelines included a palette of colors, a logo, and Reddit's alien mascot Snoo. Those materials had Ohanian's personal email scrawled at the bottom, along with a note: "Have fun with this! If you use it somewhere online, email me."

This wasn't so much a brand "refresh" as it was building official branding from scratch. But a few things jumped out to MacLellan as iconic to Reddit: the orange-red color, and the alien, Snoo.

Snoo started as a doodle in one of Ohanian's notebooks, and later became the site's unofficial mascot. It has a football-shaped head, crooked antenna, a wide smile, and a pair of orange-red eyes. "The backstory on Snoo was that Snoo was this time-traveling alien," says Ohanian. In the early days of Reddit, that backstory provided a guarantee that the site would stay afloat. "If we failed, Snoo wouldn't be able to travel back to the present."

Early on, Redditors took Snoo and made it their own. Moderators uploaded user drawings of Snoo in various contexts to fit into individual communities. It came to symbolize Reddit, and Reddit's users—a figure that could become anyone, or anything. Reddit needed a better branding strategy, and Snoo seemed like the obvious anchor. "Alexis’s idea for Snoo was an alien that has arrived on Earth to discover humanity," says MacLellan. The question was: "How do we take Snoo the character and turn that into an actual icon that we can apply to Reddit?"

The team commissioned artists to illustrate a new Snoo. They matched Ohanian's original proportions, keeping the hand-drawn aesthetic but adding a more three-dimensional look. Snoo shows up across the redesigned website, as an icon in corners and in a new set of "Snoomoji" that users can use as flair and in chats on the site.

When you sign into Reddit chat, you're now assigned one of the Snoos as your avatar. And when you make a new community, the default banner image now shows one of several new illustrations of Snoo exploring a new planet. For legacy Redditors, Snoo is the familiar friend that's been with them all these years. For new users, Snoo is more of a guide to the Reddit universe. You may feel like an alien at first, but these planets can start to feel like home over time.

"Snoo is already entrenched within the existing Reddit userbase, and I think they'll be pleased to find Snoo is [still] a big part of it. But it's also an opportunity for the broader internet to have now an ambassador to the platform," says Ohanian. "I'm excited to see the new Snoo welcome a whole new generation of Redditors."

There's a room in Reddit's headquarters where the walls are filled with the design team's early mockups, an homage to the journey they've been on for the past year. The hypothetical versions of Reddit start off hyper-visual, then shrink back to hyper-minimal, with a range of wild design ideas in between. Many of the mockups borrow design language from other popular sites; you can see echoes of Twitter, Twitch, and Facebook bouncing around the room. From far away, very few of the mockups look recognizably like Reddit.

In one corner of the room, Perez pinned up some of the screenshots that Ohanian gave to him on his first week. And on the opposite wall, there's a printout of r/all in the design that Reddit will introduce today. If you stand in the middle of the room and look at the two walls from a distance, it's hard to tell the designs apart. Perez has led the biggest and most ambitious design overhaul in Reddit's history. And unless you squint, you can't really tell.

Rush, the UX designer, says the website they've built is the same Reddit—just a little more grown up. "[We're] making it simpler and more efficient, making it more accessible, but not altering the scaffolding," he says. "Our goal is, of course, not to dip in any type of action. You want the same, if not more, amount of comments; same, if not more, amount of posts."

But another goal goes much deeper: changing the constitution of the site, making it more welcoming to people who never thought they could find a home there before. On the new Reddit, we are all just aliens, exploring the vast community of foreign planets, trying to find our place in the universe.

Correction appended at 3 PM ET on 4/2/2018: An earlier version of this article misstated the size of the design team Diego Perez previously led at Microsoft. The team included 60 designers, not 160.

Related Video

Science

Learn to Fold Five Insanely Cool Paper Planes

John Collins, the Paper Airplane Guy, shows how to fold five amazing paper planes: the Boomerang, the Boomerang 2, the Bat Plane, the Tumbling Wing, and the World Record Plane (a.k.a. "Suzanne"). Read more about the Paper Airplane Guy at WIRED.com: https://ift.tt/2J7ifiI You can also visit his website for more information: https://ift.tt/2k3a3Yd

Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-redesign/

from Viral News HQ https://ift.tt/2qSRRkp via Viral News HQ

[clusterassets]

New world news from Time: These Dreamers Were Deported to Mexico. Now, They’re Helping Others Start Again

On a recent Wednesday morning in Mexico City’s International Airport, family members gathered anxiously for the latest slew of arrivals. The cordon can be a place for joyful reunions, but on three days each week a more somber drama unfolds: Here, every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, about 130 deported Mexican citizens arrive home.

The minutes ticked by slowly until finally the deportees stumbled in, clutching their meagre belongings and their crumpled deportation documents. Each had a plastic bag containing a sandwich and a bottle of juice. For many of the younger arrivals, this was their first experience of Mexico.

Walking wearily into the hall was Fernando Alvarez, 25, who was detained on Dec. 19, and had spent Christmas and New Year’s Eve in detention. Taken to the U.S. by his Mexican parents when he was just two years old, Alvarez grew up in California before moving to Chicago five years ago. “It’s a new place,” he said in perfect California English as he looked blearily around the terminal. “I’m the new kid. But I still feel like I’m an American, bro. A Mexican American.”

Waiting to greet Alvarez and other young deportees was Israel Concha, 38, who knows the feeling all too well. Broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, Concha wore a fluorescent green t-shirt emblazoned with ‘New Comienzos’ or ‘New Beginnings,’ the name of the organization he founded in 2015 to support young undocumented Mexicans or ‘Dreamers’ returning to Mexico.

A former Dreamer himself, Concha was deported after thirty years living in the U.S. “I felt like zero, like garbage, like scum,” says Concha, describing himself as being marched back into Mexico in 2014. “That’s when I thought about the pledge of allegiance I’d taken every morning in elementary school. I thought, where’s the liberty? Where’s the justice for all?”

The fate of Dreamers like Alvarez has been at the whim of a heated congressional debate in recent weeks, as Congress pondered whether or not to extend the Obama-era program known as DACA, or Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals, which offered temporary legal status to some 700,000 young people. The vast majority are from Mexico, with some 600,000 young Mexicans at risk of deportation if the program is not renewed.

President Donald Trump said last year he would phase out the DACA program by March 5, calling on Congress to create a replacement. Although the deadline has come and gone, the courts have ordered the administration to continue renewing applications, for now. But with the future of hundreds of thousands of young people hanging in the balance, activists like Concha are taking no chances. “If tomorrow they start deporting thousands of people, our government isn’t ready,” says Concha. “So we’re creating these opportunities in case the worst happens, so Dreamers can have a light at the end of the tunnel.”

On the streets in Little L.A.

In front of Mexico City’s towering monument to the Mexican Revolution sits a sleek coworking space where Concha runs New Comienzos. Offering Spanish language classes, psychological support and assistance finding work and a place to live, Concha says his organization, which is largely funded by donations from undocumented migrants living in the U.S., has helped over 5,000 young Dreamers call Mexico home. “To help others, this is therapy for me,” he says.

The Mexican government does offer help to the deported, and has promised to support returning Dreamers. The National Institute of Migration offers basic services like food, shelter, and documentation, while in Mexico City, the government provides unemployment allowance and training programs to help people find work. “Mexico City has an age-old tradition of hospitality,” says Amalia Dolores García Medina, Secretary of Labor and Employment Promotion in Mexico City. “Our constitution guarantees the human rights of migrants.”

But few, if any, of these initiatives have been set up specifically with Dreamers in mind, and in any case, such limited programs may not have the capacity to support a sudden influx of deportees, at least outside the capital: Last year, then-Finance Secretary Jose Antonio Meade admitted that, if the country faced a large increase in the number of Dreamers wanting to enroll in university, the government would “not have the budgetary capacity to accommodate it.”

So non-profits like New Comienzos are stepping in to help out. The location for its offices is strategic; a nearby call centre employs dozens of young Dreamers because of their fluency in English, a language which for most is more familiar than Spanish. The call centre is something of a hub, and a number of businesses, from barber shops to burger joints, have sprung up in the area to cater to this new Americanized population — so much so that the neighborhood is known as ‘Little L.A.’

Among the call center workers is Fernando Aragon, who was deported in 2016 after living in the U.S. since he was six months old. “I had the potential to become something great over there,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t be great here.”

Aragon, who had been an honors student in high school and was protected by DACA, was sent to Mexico after being caught driving under the influence. It was tough, at first, being alone — but then his mom recommended he call Concha, having seen New Comienzos on Facebook. “When I sat down and talked with him, he overwhelmed me,” says Aragon of Concha, who helped him get on his feet. “Just with the way he is.”

The other Dreamers

Yet for many young people, finding work and a place to live is just the beginning of the struggle to adapt to country that, for many, is just a distant memory. “It doesn’t feel like going home,” says Beth Caldwell, a professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles and author of the forthcoming book Deported Americans in Mexico. “It feels more like they’re being banished from their country of origin, they’re forced to give up everything that’s given their life meaning.” As a result, says Caldwell, many young deportees battle with depression and anxiety.

For Lalo Aguilar, 29, who grew up in a small town in Utah, being deported six years ago threw him into a downward spiral. “It was four and a half years of being in this cold depression, in this shell,” he says. “I didn’t want to do anything, I didn’t want to deal with anything.”

But in the middle of his depression, Aguilar came across Los Otros Dreamers, or ‘The Other Dreamers’, an anthology of stories by other Dreamers who had returned to Mexico, and he realized there were others all over the country going through the same experience. Edited by Jill Anderson, an American academic living in Mexico at the time, Los Otros Dreamers soon grew into a movement. “Jill was the first one to look at not just deportation, but our generation, our bicultural community,” says Aguilar.

One of the young people featured in Los Otros Dreamers was Maggie Laredo, 27. Laredo, who went to the U.S. with her parents when she was two, had no idea she was undocumented until she got to high school and her friends started getting jobs and drivers licenses, things she had no access to. “That’s when I bumped into the reality of my situation,” says Laredo.

Wanting to go to college, but realizing it would be impossible in the U.S., Laredo decided to leave her family behind and voluntarily return to Mexico. “It was the only option I had,” she says. Laredo moved back to the city of San Luis Potosi, but found the country unprepared for her: It took her five years to have her American education validated in Mexico. “There were no government programs,” she says.

So in 2015, Laredo helped found a collective called Otros Dreamers en Acción or Other Dreamers in Action (ODA), to campaign on migrant rights, particularly education, so that others wouldn’t have to go through the same experience. Working with Mexican authorities, universities and other organizations, ODA helped push the government to streamline the validation process. “Something that took me five years now should take 15 days,” says Laredo.

Aguilar, the deportee from Utah, now works at the organization. “For the first four years after deportation, I hadn’t been doing anything,” he says. “I was just locked in my room, in depression, drinking, doing drugs. Now I feel useful, like I’m doing something for the community.”

A new era

The election of U.S. President Donald Trump in 2016 on the promise of a radical crackdown on immigration changed everything for these charities and activist groups. “After the elections,” says Laredo, “we knew we needed to have a stronger voice, to tell the world this is not something new.” So last year, ODA became a certified non-profit organization to advocate for Dreamers’ rights on both sides of the border, and support returned young people in their transition home. “Everybody has family in the U.S., so we’re living it first-hand,” says Laredo, whose brother is still in the US, under the protection of the DACA program. “It’s a period of stress for the community.”

Back in Little L.A., Aragon recalls the weeks after Trump’s election with sadness. “It opened up everybody’s eyes to what’s going on behind closed doors,” he says. “I had friends that used to take me to football practice who started posting ‘go back to where you came from’ and deleting me from Facebook.”

Aragon now splits his time volunteering at New Comienzos and working at the call center, commuting four hours a day to get to work. He says he’s excited by the opportunity to help others like himself to make Mexico home. “Being able to give someone the comfort, the silver lining, to show them that there’s something more than being afraid,” he says. “I think I found the reason I was meant to be here.”

March 10, 2018 at 12:37AM ClusterAssets Inc., https://ClusterAssets.wordpress.com

[furynewsnetwork]

Quoting old movies is fun, particularly when they involve surreality.  Government functions are almost entirely surreal, but quoting them is rarely fun … unless Trump is somehow involved.  Love him or loathe him or something in between, he’s brought fun quotes back to self-governance.  And with them come the witch hunts.

There are ways to tell if someone is a witch.  What do you do with witches?

Burn them!

And what do you burn apart from witches?

Republican officiocrats who work for a loathably abrasive New York democrat twitter freak holding the White House as a republican that the Deep State Swamp is desperate to delegitimize because he’s declared war on it.  In other words: more witches.

Never mind that Medusa sold foreign policy futures to foreign government agents in the guise of contributions to her and Cuckold Bill’s charitable foundation.  The real issue is that members of the Trump campaign met with Russian government provocateurs who − wink wink nudge nudge, your wife’s a goer − had “information” on Medusa that would “bring down” her campaign.

Therefore, he’s made of wood.

And this contact wasn’t disclosed on the security questionnaire, which means he lied.  The only reason you lie about something this substantial is to hide the truth.

Therefore, he weighs as much as a duck.

The officiocrat’s security questionnaire was amended four times, and now contains hundreds more foreign contacts.

Therefore …?  A WITCH!! BURN HIM!!

Time the fuck out.  Has anyone ever completed one of those security clearance questionnaires?  I have.  Multiple times.  I’ve held a clearance for most of the time since 1980 when I joined the Air Force.  It is form SF86, in case anyone wants to follow along.  It can be found online.  Giving answers that can be construed as lies by those wishing to do so is trivially easy, for the form was devised by bureaucrats and their legion of loyyers.

The current version [as of 2014] is 157 pages long in its raw form on paper, including instructions and multiple release of liability and signature pages.  Paper applications are no longer accepted; it is now completed online requiring a government login ID and irrationally long gibberish password that cannot be remembered and must never be written down.  You will be calling the toll free help desk repeatedly to have your password reset.

You may not advance to the next section of the form until the current section is completely answered.  Unless you are fresh from the womb, you will have scores of addenda and explanation pages to add information.  These addenda are needed for families larger than you and two parents and one sibling, for any travel farther afield than the local Walmart, and for anything you’ve done more complex than buying a stick of gum.  God forbid you have a relative − to include in-laws − born in a foreign country.  I have such an in-law.

But still, I’m an incredibly boring individual with a relatively small family and no social or civic affiliations to speak of.  I’m a libertarian and thus have no meaningful political affiliation, either.  One investigator in the 90s looked at me and my paperwork and said, “Ah … N J.”  I quizzed, “N J?”  He replied, “Non-joiner.”

My most recent clearance application ended up being 380+ pages long.  …Not including instructions and signature pages.  It took me over five weeks to complete.

The online form has pull-down menus for standard fill-in-the-blanks.  But just try explaining where your father-in-law came from.  He’s been living in the US since the age of 9, but was born in a village in Yugoslavia to German parents.  He spent the first 7 years of his life in Nazi, and then Soviet, prison camps.  The online form no longer lists Yugoslavia as a legitimate nation [I used Angola, since it was listed first and I was not about to dignify their inept system], nor does it accept his home town.  The village itself was obliterated de facto by the Wehrmacht and de jure by the follow-on Tito government.  After the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the specific location may be in Serbia, or Bosnia, or Slovakia, no one is quite sure.  Not that it matters anyway; it’s gone.  His naturalization document lists a naturalization center in the US no longer in existence and therefore not in the pull down list.  His naturalization is identified by a certificate number using a layout no longer recognized as valid − not enough digits.  My father-in-law is just generally suspicious, I suppose.

Explaining this one fairly trivial matter that I covered in one paragraph took − I recall − 15 additional pages on the SF86.  Maybe more.  One’s eyes tend to glaze over after a certain amount of useless necessity.  In any event, it took 15 pages too many.

But then comes the sections of the questionnaire that has caused Trump teammates so much trouble, and which would cause me the same trouble were I a republican party officiocrat instead of a mere libertarian DoD data analyst: section 19, about halfway through form SF86, “foreign contacts”.

I have been on eleven cruises, and I’ve met literally thousands of foreigners.  Most were wearing name tags, and many of those who weren’t told me their names.  I wrote down none of them.  With the exception of maybe a half dozen, I couldn’t tell you much more about them than their first name, sometimes not even that.  There is Pedro [last name unknown], the effusively friendly manager-slash-head waiter of a little cantina [forgot the name] on the second floor over a souvenir shop [forgot the name] on the main tourist drag [forgot the name] of San Miguel on the island of Cozumel.  We visit the place for lunch every time we’re there.  Pedro’s head is shaped like a bowling ball, if that helps the investigators any.

There is Major Tom [last name unknown], the unofficial greeter for the nation of Belize, and head of the Belize City Chamber of Commerce.  He runs several tourist excursion operations, including one we took our first time there.  He used to be in the Belizi army − hence his title of Major.  He looks like a young Ricardo Montalban, or did the last time I saw him.

There is Ngede [last name unknown], our Indonesian head waiter on not one but two cruises, on two different ships … and what are the odds?  Highly suspicious if I were a republican officiocrat.  He has his First Night patter down: the nearest any English-speaker can ever come to pronouncing his name is “g’day”, so just say G’day.  He has an advanced degree in engineering, but works as a waiter on US cruises because at $10 a day plus tips he makes more than an engineer in Indonesia. …where you have to be politically connected [i.e., the correct race, the correct tribe and the correct religion, none of which includes him] in order to get a job that pays more than twenty-five cents an hour.  He is now considered extremely wealthy among his countrymen … at least on his time off when he goes back home.  He showed us how to make a rat out of a linen napkin.

There’s the guy on Cayman who runs Moby Dick’s − the stingray encounter excursion.  His name is Richard something, and he’s from England.  He charges almost $100 American for a thirty minute boat ride and a bucket of squid to twenty folks at a time to feed the stingrays tamed by generations of hand-feeding on a sandbar in the sound.  Wouldn’t know him on sight.  He was thoroughly unremarkable, apart from being well-tanned.

On the ship, I try to find one of the bars with a particularly attractive bartender and get my glass of before-dinner wine or after-dinner drambuie from her.  The last two cruises these bartenders were in the form of a cutey from Ukraine, and a hotsy from Brazil.  I impressed the Ukrainian by knowing how to say please [pazhalsta], thank you [spaseeba], goodbye [da svedanya] and I’m bored [mnya skuchnya] in Russian.  I made my bartender from Ipanema laugh by butchering the words to Mas Que Nada.  I have long forgotten their names.

But by far, the most memorable foreign contact I had was a little boy, maybe four years old. He was paying close attention to the cracks in the sidewalk while walking with his mother, an attractive twenty-something, and older brother, maybe seven years old.  This was down one of the back streets of San Miguel on Cozumel.  I was searching for a cheap cantina serving actual Mexican tacos.  The older brother was in navy blue shorts, starched white shirt, and a solid black tie.  His shoes were polished black.  He was going to school, and mom was walking him there.  I was approaching them on the sidewalk, and as we neared I smiled and said, “Hola.”  Mom smiled back, and the older brother looked puzzled.  Both said “Hola.”  The four year old boy, though, looked up from the cracks under his feet, directly at me.  He pointed and announced, in surprise, “Mama!  Gringo!”

His mother was mortified, and stammered a Spanish apology interlaced with scolds directed to her child.  I laughed and told her “De nada.”  I still laugh when I replay it.  But that was it; that was the entire foreign contact.  I never quizzed them for their names.  Were I a republican officiocrat I’d be required to.

Section 19 of form SF86 requires full names, addresses, dates and places of birth, employer[s], all nicknames, not to mention affiliations, and purposes, and outcomes of all foreign contacts.  Per instructions, it limits the contacts required to be disclosed to those of “close and continuing” nature, but one’s definitions of “close” and “continuing” are extremely subjective, and might well rely on political partisanship.  Very few of the items under foreign contacts allow for the option of declaring “I don’t know”.  “I don’t remember” is not permitted at all.

As someone who’s had a clearance for over thirty years and a Top Secret clearance for all but my four years in the Air Force, I know exactly what they’re trying to get at here.  They want to know if a clearance candidate has ever encountered any foreigner who went out of his way to indicate that he was trying to dig for information about things he shouldn’t be digging for.  “Has any foreigner you’ve ever encountered asked you nosy questions about what you do, who you do it for, or otherwise acted like a spy?  If yes, list as many details as possible.”

That’s what they’re trying to ask, but they don’t.  Instead, they require that anyone wanting a security clearance from the US government act like a spy themselves every time they encounter a foreigner, by getting full names, addresses, dates of birth, employers, the foreigners’ affiliations and purposes for existing … none of which anyone ever does.  You don’t go on a cruise with a notebook and stubby pencil demanding the names of every vendor hawking his souvenirs upon every passer-by.

“Come in! Come in! We have condition air.  Feel all cool and cold while buy your pretty wife a necklace, eh?”

Not until I know your full name, date of birth, nationality, who you work for, and what civic groups you participate in.

… yeah, not gonna happen.  As a result, almost everyone filling out this form leaves these things out.  And no one cares that you leave these things out.  …unless you’re a republican officiocrat working for an outsider president that everyone loathes because he’s harsh, abrasive and an outsider who’s declared war on the Deep State Swamp which creates − among other things − obscenely obstreperous national security clearance questionnaires.

Section 20 of form SF86 inquires after “foreign activities”; subsection A deals with foreign holdings, of which I have zippo.  Oh, drat.  I have a self-directed IRA which has mutual funds which hold foreign stocks and bonds.  Subsection A is trying to find out if I have meaningful holdings.  Never mind that “meaningful” is arbitrarily and subjectively determinable itself.  Ah, the hell with it; “No”.

“Do I own, or plan to own, property in a foreign country.”  Yes, I plan to retire to Mexico.  I like Mexico.

“Give the date of purchase, or planned purchase.  Where do you plan to purchase property, and what price are you paying for it?”  What? The hell?  I veered off onto one of the “explanation” pages with the following:  Listen, guys, if you think I can give you the speculative date and speculative location and speculative price of a speculative purchase of a retirement home for a speculative retirement and have this information mean a single god damn, then you must think I have a crystal ball.  If I had a crystal ball I’d be using it for personal enrichment and wouldn’t need a job which requires a clearance.  I plan to retire in Mexico, at some point, don’t know where, when, or how, but a guy can dream.  That’s all I’m saying about it.

I’m not going to describe the other 5 pages of this subsection.  Needless to say, it’s more of the same useless necessity.  Each item must be answered; “I don’t know” is not usually accepted.

Subsection B: foreign business, professional or government contacts.  Uh oh.  I’ve had literally hundreds of contacts with foreign government agents. … that I know about.  Knowing the nature of government, I’ve probably had dozens more government contacts that I don’t know about.  Eleven cruises, multiple port calls each cruise, encountering customs agents, port security wonks, police − in Limon Costa Rica, we were trying to find an outlet for the local coffee so I could bring home a few pounds of whole beans.  Had a conversation with dos policia who knew bupkus English.  With my formal Spanish lessons ending in 7th grade forty years prior, and my informal Spanish picked up in bits and pieces [Dos cervezas, por favor.  Muy Frijo.  Donde es el baño?] … my wife reports it was an amusing conversation to watch, and it would undoubtedly have been fun to participate in had I not been hung over.

Do I have to list these government contacts, to include full name, nationality, government agency and rank or title, date[s] and purpose of contact and all “offers” made?  I do if I’m a republican offiocrat working for the aforementioned outsider president loathed by the Deep State Swamp.  Does el policia pointing me at a bodega which sells coffee beans constitute an “offer”?  If I’m a republican officiocrat, yes.

Additionally, I’ve undoubtedly run across government agents burrowed into excursion outfits watching for illicit activities − you know what those Americans are like when they get closer to the source of their recreational drugs.  Many Americans attempt to score their own while visiting drug exporting nations, and their arrogant self-absorption is a direct contributor to the unsolved murders of dozens of us a year.  But do I know they are undercover government agents?  No I do not.  Does it matter?  Do I have to list them as well, even though I don’t know who they are?  Only if I’m that republican officiocrat.

There are another 7 pages of this subsection that I won’t go into.  All items must be answered; almost none apply.  “I don’t know” is only acceptable for a small portion of the items.

Subsection C: foreign travel.  Once again: eleven cruises.

Specific dates [which I no longer know] for each nation visited.  And for each nation describe once again the information previously inquired after in section 19.  This was the section that was trying to, but did not, ask, “did any foreigner get too nosy about things that are none of his business?”

It had taken me three weeks to get to this part of form SF86.  I’d long ago exceeded my tolerance for bureaucratic impertinence, and used one of the many “explanation” pages to freeform the following paraphrased blowback: Lookit, my wife and I have taken one cruise a year between 2004 and 2012, and one year we took two when we had both our parents along.  You have much more access to the dates of our cruises than we do at this point; all I can tell you is that they were usually in May.  We’ve met thousands of foreigners, and over a hundred foreign government weenies, and not one of them was any more forward than to pester us about emptying our wallets in their particular store.  No one asked what I do, or who I do it for, and no one especially asked if I had any government secrets to give out.  The only thing any of them wanted was my business.

I bawled out the apparatchik in the Deep State Swamp with irreverent, impetuous scold.  And once again, does this matter?  The answer is, once again: only if I am a republican officiocrat working for the well-loathed outsider New York democrat holding the White House as a republican and who declared war on the Deep State Swamp.

The nature of government bureaucracy is to evolve into an endless stream of gotchas.  It is these gotchas that are levied against anyone chosen to be the witch du jour.  You would have to be blind or a partisan shill to fail or refuse to see who is being gotchaed at the moment.  The republican officiocrat was doing opposition research during the presidential campaign, and was contacted about gaining opposition candidate spice.  He showed up to get the spice and met two Russians, neither of whom said, “Hey!  I’m with Moscow and work for Putin!” thus cluing him into it being a government contact.  The meeting was short, and the subject was not juicy gossip about Medusa; it was about US sanctions that resulted in Moscow curtailing Russian adoptions to the US.  The meeting was abandoned and none of the players ever met again.

Section 19 of SF86 requires − per instructions − “close and continuing” contact with foreign nationals to be disclosed.  A single meeting with a female Russian loyyer and her [from all accounts] silent partner is neither “close” nor “continuing”.  Unless, of course, you have it in for the republican officiocrat and the well-loathed guy he works for.  Therefore … a witch.

In contrast, the encounters with my bartender from Ipanema, occurring each day of the cruise before dinner for a glass of wine, and after dinner for a glass of drambuie was, in comparison, intimate and perpetual.  Even though I no longer remember her name − it was five years ago now − I learned much more about her than any republican officiocrat ever knew about the two Russians.

But it doesn’t matter because I’m not a republican officiocrat working for a New York democrat playing a republican president on twitter, and who declared war on all the jealously self-important bureaucrats who spend their days constructing 157 page long gotchas with which they can play king for a day.

King?  Pffft.  We didn’t vote for them.

You don’t vote for kings.

How’d they get to be kings then?

The Deep State of the Swamp, arm clad in the purest shimmering samite held aloft Regulation, signifying by authoritarian providence that they, the bureaucrats, should rule this land.

Listen, mysterious functionaries lying in ambush distributing arbitrary rules is no basis for a system of government.  Supreme executive power derives from broad support of the masses, not from some farcical procedural ceremony.

I fart in your general direction.

Ni.

You’ll be dead in a minute.

BU-U-U-URN him!!

The post He Turned Me Into a Newt! appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

via Headline News – The Libertarian Republic

[erinjdoyle]

Notes on biologists

This isn’t about science, this about the scientists.

 Marine biologists are ten a penny

A lot of people go into marine biology because they have this idea that as a marine biologist they will get to sit on the beach all day or frolic with dolphins, but no. Sure, some people do in fact work with whales, dolphins, or sharks, but a marine biologist is more likely to work in fisheries management or study nudibranchs. (This, of course, is true on a wider scale- some people work with gorillas, elephants, and pandas, but more work with cows and sheep.)

The large numbers of people specialising in marine biology means that a lot of them never actually work in marine biology, and many re-train as high school biology teachers.

So, if you’re writing a biologist, this sort of thing could add a little depth to their background. They might have worked with seals or something equally as exciting while at university, but now work doing something totally different.

Beer + Biologist = More Beer

At a staff Christmas party, I once saw a senior geneticist decide he really liked one of the dozen or so beers that were being served. He ran into the lab with the last few mouthfuls still in the bottle, to spin it down and sample the yeast at the bottom so he could brew his own version of it later.

During a job interview, I was once asked if I brewed my own beer. This was not an interview for a job working with yeast or fermentation. They showed me around the lab, and pointed out the cupboard ‘for jackets’ then started laughing- inside was a full-size fridge half dedicated to beer and cider.

If the field trip requires staying overnight there will probably be beer. Even in Antarctica.

  Hunters, Gathers, and Vegans

A lot of biologists I know go hunting. I don’t know if this is a relevant factor, but nearly all hunted species in New Zealand are also introduced pests that are harming our ecosystem, so hunting them is good for our native wildlife. But, I doubt it- there is a story (I can’t remember where it was anymore, but it wasn’t in NZ), where the rangers at a park had a secret policy. If one of them saw an animal die of non-natural causes (like, hit by a car right in front of them), they would bring it back to the station and everyone would eat it. One day, a certain animal was killed and, because of its conservation status, they had to report the death to some authority or other. Nothing more was said on the matter. A week later, someone from the authority randomly showed up to collect the body. Everyone was very surprised to learn that they were meant to hand over the body and no one knew where it was, and so the animal was listed as simply ‘missing’ but, yeah, they had eaten it.

It’s also super, super common for biologists to grow vegetables or to keep chickens in their back yard. Some keep bees.

 Every biologist I know who is a vegan or vegetarian is a botanist. One botanist switched from animal to plant biology after an unpleasant experience doing field work with prairie dogs. They were catching them, doing science to them, then releasing them. One day, she came across one that had chewed its leg off to escape the trap. It freaked her out, so she switched to plants.

 Field biologists are cowboys who do math

Biologists are strong and physically capable. If you can’t carry 10+ kilos (22+ pounds) of equipment, can’t wade through thigh-high mud for an hour or hike upstream in fast-moving water while carry said equipment, then you probably don’t do much field work.

I know several biologists who have had to jump out of helicopters to get to their field sites. Others have had to kayak out to an island in the harbour, and then spend a few days camping out there before paddling back. Sometimes fieldwork means isolation, no power, no facilities to speak of. So, it’s not a surprise that a lot of biologists hit the gym every day, or ran marathons. I know one who is an MMA fighter, another who regularly runs a local mountain summit track which includes 1349 steps. Personally, endurance training is my thing. People who do field work also tend to have outdoorsy hobbies, like scuba diving and hiking. I know a handful who are pilots.

They also tend to be on the handy side because they may have to build their own equipment or be able to fix equipment in the field. I have spent an afternoon with my supervisor going through dusty farm sheds in order to find something we could use to make into equipment for one of our experiments. I have also modified items from a pet store.

It may vary between organisations, but the safety rules will usually require that staff have certificates to show that they can do some tasks safely, even if the task isn’t really that big of a deal e.g. using a chainsaw. And, this may annoy the hell out of a scientist who sees a task that needs to be done and knows that they can do it, but then gets told they aren’t allowed to because they don’t have a piece of paper saying they can do it safely.

 A list of non-science skills required for biology jobs currently being advertised:

1.      Scuba diving

2.      Snorkelling

3.      Boat skipper

4.      First aid certification

5.      Experience with all-terrain vehicles

6.      Experience with Chainsaws

7.      Wielding

8.      Forklift licence

9.      Strong swimmer / Ability to pass a swim test as part of the screening process.

10.  Preparedness to be outdoors for long periods of time

11.  Experience working with large animals

12.  Ability to liaise with local community groups, landowners, and stakeholders. (That means you have to be a good communicator with strong interpersonal skills and can handle the odd arsehole getting in your face.)

13.  Fluency in English, French, and German. “Applicant must be fluent in at least two and prepared to learn the third.” (This relates to work in European Patent office. These 3 languages are the major languages in academia. I once had a colleague who absolutely had to use a specific paper, and it was only available in French, fortunately, we had a French intern who was able to translate the sections she needed.)

Also these phrases:

14.  “This position will be extremely physically and mentally demanding”

15.  “This position requires a high level of fitness with the successful applicant being required to spend four week periods on the island” (The island being an offshore preserve with only a small hut as a base of operations, and often camping alone in the forest)

16.  “You must be willing to meet our vaccination requirements.” (This happens with jobs working with pathogens or infectious materials. These employers will pay for you to get vaccinated for certain things if you are not already.)

 Logical Quirks

I have noticed that my colleagues tend to have the same little quirks or pet peeves. I assume these same things keep coming up because they make sense to the mind of a person who has studied enough biology.

1.      Hatred of heated towel rails. You want to take a moist cloth, filled with skin cells and other filth, and you want to drape it over a slightly warm surface? So, you want to grow bacteria in the towel that you’re going to dry your hands on after washing them? Hell no!

 2.      Refusal to use fly spray. The concern is that overuse of fly spray will lead to insects which are resistant to fly spray, so you have to use more fly spray or a stronger fly spray, and it just keeps going. The automatic sprays that continually ‘circulate’ insect spray throughout your home? Even worse! Not only are you over using fly spray, you are covering your household surfaces in a fine layer of toxins.

 3.      Depending on the type of work, avoiding using lab coats. A lab coat protects your clothes from contamination, but unless your coat is being washed daily (which it is not), then it is also a source of contamination which may get into your samples. Also, while lab coats can be made out of different materials, they are usually on the heavy side and are uncomfortably hot during summers. So, some people won’t wear a lab coat if they can get away with it, like if they are not working with anything dirty or dangerous.

 4.      Carrying an oven timer in their pocket. A lot of work done in a genetics lab requires samples to be incubated at different temperatures for specific periods of time, with nothing to do in between. So, you start something (a gel electrophoresis for example), which has to run for X minutes but will be ruined if left any longer. So, you head off on your coffee break with a timer in your pocket, to make sure you make it back to the lab in time.

 5.      A biology student taking micro will, somewhere around their second year, realise how filthy the world is and become more concerned about general cleanliness. Then, after their third year, they realise that everything is even more filthy than that and that if they haven’t died by now then they’re probably not going to, and will go back to eating things they’ve dropped on the floor.

 PCR Superstitions

The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a pretty standard thing for a geneticist to be doing- it lets you dramatically increase the amount of DNA in a sample so that you have more to work with. The problem is, it is also a fickle bitch. The process is so sensitive that it can go wrong for, seemingly, no reason whatsoever. Because it will go wrong even when it has worked the previous fifty times, and because this is both time-consuming and expensive, people start to develop little superstitions about it.

 The most common superstition is about the placement of tubes in the thermocycler. Once you have prepared your samples, you place them in a thermocycler (a machine which subjects your samples to very tightly controlled changes in temperature). The machine has a metal plate filled with little holes that hold your tubes nice and snug throughout the process. In theory, every hole should be the same but you see people avoiding holes along the edges or in the corners, convinced they are somehow unlucky or less effective. It’s also common for people to place the tubes in every second hole (I do this, but mostly because a PCR tube is tiny, and it’s easier to lift them back out afterwards if you have a little space in between them.

If a lab has multiple thermocyclers, some people will have one that they refuse to use, because it failed them once too often. Or, they have one machine that they will use, and no other. I have had a favourite machine, which I used over and over just in case there was some tiny variation between the machines, but I would use the others if my favourite in was in use. Others are less yielding; I have had a colleague who had one machine that he preferred. He came into the lab once, saw that someone else was using his favourite machine, and went home for the day.

 Some people have a PCR idol. This is a random object that they place on top of the thermocycler while it’s running, for good luck. I have seen researchers using a little Eiffel Tower keychain, a Whine the Pooh, a Budha, a toy sheep, a rugby player bobble head, and a statue of Apu. A PCR idol can really only exist in a relaxed lab, however. If the lab is working under highly controlled conditions, has strict rules, is run by a jerk etc, then they won’t be there.

There may superstitions surrounding the idols themselves. A piece came off mine once, and I took it into the office to glue it back together, my supervisor saw it and said,

“You’ve taken it out of the lab! What if you killed its luck?”

A lab with a view

This is a story about a chemist, but I’m throwing it in any way.

I once worked at a research facility with extensive grounds, which included a swimming pool and a sports field. The regional rugby team was based on our campus and used these facilities during the week. At the time, one of the men on the team was also on the national team, and he was the major rugby-heart-throb of the month. Personally, I could not have cared less, but every time someone found out where I worked, they asked if I had seen him running around with his shirt off.

Right before I started the job, I was introduced to the chemist I was going to be working with from time to time. Right of the bat, she advised me that I should try to organise the chemical analysis aspect of my work so that I was in her lab on Wednesday afternoons, because that was when the rugby team used the pool, and her lab had a good view.

[trendingnewsb]

The Inside Story of Reddit’s Redesign

On a rainy day in San Francisco, a dozen or so designers sat crammed around a conference table inside Reddit's headquarters, in a space they had nicknamed The War Room. A few soggy rain jackets dripped onto the floor, and someone mumbled a maxim normally reserved for weddings about rain bringing good luck.

It was neither the first nor the last time this group would gather here to share the details of the project they'd been working on for over a year. But today was special. The designers had prepared an update for Reddit's website, which serves 330 million users from around the world. The irony of a dozen designers doing anything at Reddit was not lost on them—the text-heavy website is about as visually appealing as an overflowing email inbox. The designers engaged in some last-minute jockeying over the language of their update, and then they posted it using Reddit's signature droll tone: TIL Reddit has a design team.

For the past year and a half, Reddit and its new team of 20 designers have been refashioning the so-called 'front page of the internet.'

The team's efforts mark the first visual refresh of Reddit in over a decade. Steve Huffman, Reddit's cofounder and CEO, signaled the need for a tidying-up in a post last year. "Many of us evangelize Reddit and tell people how awesome it is, what an impact it's made in their life, how much it makes them laugh, etc, and then when those new people decide to check out Reddit for the first time they're greeted with dystopian Craigslist," Huffman wrote. "We'd like to fix that."

And so, for the past year and a half, Reddit and its new team of 20 designers have been refashioning the so-called "front page of the internet." They've taken great pains to build on top of Reddit's long legacy, rather than replacing it with something unfamiliar. They've argued about everything from the placement of the logo to the way moderators should style their communities to the dominant color on the site (red-orange, as it turns out). It's been a slow, careful process that everyone takes extremely seriously. "If you redesign Reddit," says Diego Perez, the company's head of design, "you're inherently changing the internet."

The new design’s "classic" look is similar to Reddit’s old appearance, but it has been updated with bigger fonts, a more modern appearance, and a navigation bar that—when opened—appears along the page’s left side.

Reddit

Today, about one percent of Redditors will see the new design. The refreshed layout will be introduced to more users gradually over the coming months and, at least for now, users can switch back to the old layout at any time. On the "new" Reddit, you'll find the navigation bar replaced by a hamburger menu in the left corner that surfaces feeds, subscriptions, and profiles. Next to it, a trio of buttons allow Redditors to view the site in three new ways: There's "card view," which looks a little like Facebook; "classic view," which borrows the design language from current Reddit; and "compact view," for users who want to scroll through tons of content quickly. Posts now open in a "lightbox," without taking users out of their page. New fonts make it easier to tell when you're clicking on a post or clicking on an outbound link. Beneath the description for r/all ("The most active posts from all of Reddit. Come here to see new posts rising and be a part of the conversation") there's a prominent, blue button to create a new post. And throughout the site, there are new illustrations of Snoo, Reddit's alien mascot, exploring the vast planets of the Reddit universe.

From far away, it still looks unmistakably like Reddit. But up close, the changes have turned Reddit from an esoteric maze into a website anyone can use—like a junk drawer that's been gutted, cleaned, and reorganized.

The story behind Reddit's redesign isn't just the odyssey to make Reddit look a little nicer. It's an internet Bildungsroman. When Huffman and cofounder Alexis Ohanian launched the site in 2005, Reddit represented the anarchist web, a place where you could do and say whatever you wanted so long as you could figure out how to get in. More than a decade later, Reddit has grown into something else. It's the place to talk about gaming, and Game of Thrones. It's a place not just for sharing information, but for sharing ideas. Reddit has said for years that the site is for everyone. Now, for the first time, it's starting to actually look like it.

Welcome to Reddit, all grown up.

On Perez's first week at Reddit, Ohanian sent him a folder full of screenshots. Strung together, the images created an ad-hoc time-lapse of Reddit's design history. There was a view of the site just before launch, when it had only two users; u/kn0thing for Ohanian, u/spez for Huffman. (Already, u/kn0thing had negative karma, the result of u/spez downvoting his first post.) There was Reddit after it added comments in 2005, and after it added subreddits in 2008. There was Reddit during its most dramatic desktop redesign, also in 2008, which included new "momentum arrows" to show if a post was rising or falling, and new ways to sort posts. And then, abruptly, the screenshots stopped.

Redesigning any major website is stressful. But redesigning one like Reddit, which hadn't been touched in over a decade, was something else.

It wasn't that Ohanian had failed to capture the last decade of Reddit's design history—though he did leave Reddit in 2009, along with Huffman. The problem was that there was no last decade of Reddit's design history.

In the intervening years, Reddit had changed drastically both as a company and as a website. After Ohanian and Huffman had left, the company cycled through new CEOs—one of whom quit because the job was too "stressful and draining," one of whom quit after suffering what she calls "one of the largest trolling attacks in history" by Reddit users. The website had swollen from just over 2 million users in 2008 to over 330 million. Those users brought with them a tide of new communities—some of which challenged Reddit's reputation for free speech in disturbing ways. The design, however, had been preserved in amber.

Ohanian sent the screenshots to Perez in a Zip file. "He was like, 'Well, I'm sorry. But this is your job now.'"

User’s can switch to a "Card view," which emphasizes photos and videos and is reminiscent of Facebook’s design.

Reddit

Redesigning any major website is stressful. But redesigning one like Reddit, which hadn't been touched in over a decade, was something else. Never mind the fact that, besides Perez, the company didn't even have a design team. At Microsoft, where Perez had worked previously, he led a team of 60 designers. "I came here, there were four of us," he says. In those early days, Reddit's makeshift design team worked out of an empty room on the fourth floor of the company's headquarters. They dragged up a TV, a couple of chairs, a little Wi-Fi station, a bunch of paper, and started to hash out how to bring Reddit into the future.

Brainstorming was easy. Everyone wanted to change the font, the navigation, the use of space in the sidebars. They talked about making Reddit more visual, making better use of the unique personality of each community. "When you ask a designer, 'What would be your dream thing to change on the internet?' the answer is always: 'That Reddit thing needs a lot of love,'" says Perez.

Perez wasn't just a designer, though. He was also a Redditor—a longtime lurker, as he puts it. So he knew that Redditors are resourceful creatures. "By virtue of not having any significant product evolution in years, users end up doing a lot of things and figure out how to subsist on their own," he says. Ask any of Reddit's most active users how they browse the site, and they'll likely mention at least one third-party application. Reddit Enhancement Suite, one of the most popular tools, launched in 2010 to provide some the necessary features that Reddit's web client didn't. It's commonly used by Reddit's moderators, some of whom spend hours every day refereeing their online communities. The most engaged of the tribe, who moderate several communities, have dedicated hours to custom styling their subreddits in CSS, or coding bots to help "automod" their communities.

The design team took inspiration from these workarounds. Perez and his team spent hours every day, for weeks at a time, talking to moderators about the elaborate hacks they'd strung together to make Reddit work better. They asked some users to create diaries of how they'd used the site. They looked at Reddit's top 2,000 communities, and tracked the things their moderators had done to customize the style. "We had a massive spreadsheet of all the customizable things that all communities do," says Ben Rush, the UX design lead on the redesign. They distilled all of this data into a new set of tools like "post validation," which lets moderators easily create a filter for what can or can't be posted in a community, and a custom styling toolbox, which lets mods change the colors and banners on their subreddits with just a few clicks.

For most of the people Perez's team interviewed, these changes might feel redundant, or even tedious. Moderators running highly stylized subreddits, like r/GameOfThrones, already know how to make their communities feel unique. In fact, they've devoted hours to doing it. But for Redditors who've shied away from creating their own communities in the past, the new toolset democratizes the process. You don't need coding chops, or even a third-party add-on, to make something that looks and feels cool. That, for Reddit, represents the most important part of the redesign. It's not just bringing the site into 2018. It's preparing the site for the next generation of Redditors.

The first version of Reddit worked more or less like a link aggregator. It was a place for skimming the news, sharing memes, passing around lulz. Shortly after it first launched, the site introduced comments to encourage discussion on those links. The first comment? It was about how comments would ruin Reddit. In 2008, when the site launched subreddits, Redditors objected again, complaining that the new feature reflected Reddit's "schizophrenic approach" to displaying content. More changes followed: a bigger "comment" button, new ways to sort posts, those momentum arrows. You can guess how well those went over.

People on Reddit, like people everywhere on the internet, resist even the slightest changes. Redesigns almost always elicit atavistic rage—take it from Facebook, or Snapchat, or Digg. But on a site like Reddit, with 13 years of history baked into its current design, the resistance to change is higher than usual. As one user, u/vusys, put it in a comment to the design team: "The biggest misstep is taking a revolutionary approach instead of evolutionary. I agree that current reddit is kind of ugly, but it works."

For people who have been on Reddit for years, the obtuseness is part of the appeal. It engenders a sense of belonging. If you can figure it out, you get to be part of the club.

'It's difficult to figure out for a lot of folks where exactly they can fit in on Reddit.'

Amulya Aradhyula, Reddit

But there's little charm for new users. Even making your first post can be bewildering. There are two buttons—"submit a new link" and "submit a new text post"—that blend in with the advertisements on the site's right rail. When you try to submit something, it's not immediately obvious where you're posting it or what the rules of that community might be. And if you want to make your own community? Well, good luck with that.

So while the design team worked to bring the redesign up to parity with Reddit's current features, another team started to look at what it would take to ease a new user's first encounter. While the site's users have always been extremely vocal about what they like (or really hate) about the design, Reddit had never actively polled anyone outside its own user community about the site's usability. A two-person UX research team was formed to figure out why people joined but never posted, or never joined at all.

Those researchers, Ajit Krishna and Amulya Aradhyula, started surveying people late last year. They sent online questionnaires and conducted interviews with Redditors, alongside the designers on Perez's team, but then they went further out. For a few hours each week, Krishna and Aradhyula carried their laptops into San Francisco's Union Square, where Krishna says they found a "nice distribution of people from all over the world just sitting around doing nothing." They'd walk up to someone on a park bench, show them a page on Reddit, and ask, "Does this make sense to you? Do you understand how to get from Point A to Point B?" They found that most people understood the concept of Reddit. They just didn't understand how to use it, or what they'd use it for.

"It's difficult to figure out for a lot of folks where exactly they can fit in on Reddit," says Aradhyula. "There's so many places that they could go, but they're not aware that they exist."

The new design features an easier interface for posting text, images, video, and links.

Reddit

The research from Krishna and Aradhyula helped inform a new set of design choices aimed at breaking down that perception: Now, there's a bigger button to signal where you can create a post. Before, formatting text posts required the use of Markdown; now, there's a WYSIWYG toolbar too. Before, you couldn't combine text, images, and links in the same posts; now, you can roll them all into one, along with embedded movies. The new posting flow also surfaces the community guidelines of the subreddit you're posting to, which helps new users understand the rules so they don't accidentally get their post nuked. It's hard to imagine a Reddit veteran caring about any of this. But for someone brand new to the site, it's the difference between finding the confidence to make that first post or closing the tab, walking away, and never coming back.

Reddit is not a one-size-fits-all experience. "Lurkers" come to the site regularly to read content, but never post. Others post every day in the communities they know and love; others go on to create and moderate communities on the site. "Reddit is a very personal thing," says Perez. "We don't take any of that for granted. People should be able to customize it around themselves and the communities and the content they care about."

To make that possible, the redesign introduces three ways to browse the site: "Classic view" looks the most like Reddit did before. "Compact view" helps moderators scroll through bulk content quickly. "Card view" pre-expands content like photos and posts, which makes it easier to scroll through a feed like r/pics without having to click each individual post. (It looks a lot more like Facebook or Twitter, which Perez says is intentional. "For a lot of our new users, they like it. They come from those places.") Users can toggle between these three views at any time, offering a more customizable way to consume the content on the site. Now, there's no single way to use Reddit. There's no single redesign either.

The redesign aims to reintroduce Reddit as a modern destination on the internet. The company's branding, however, was stuck in 2005. "One of the things I did early on was do an audit of what Reddit had at the time," says Tavish MacLellan, Reddit's creative director for the brand. The "official" brand guidelines included a palette of colors, a logo, and Reddit's alien mascot Snoo. Those materials had Ohanian's personal email scrawled at the bottom, along with a note: "Have fun with this! If you use it somewhere online, email me."

This wasn't so much a brand "refresh" as it was building official branding from scratch. But a few things jumped out to MacLellan as iconic to Reddit: the orange-red color, and the alien, Snoo.

Snoo started as a doodle in one of Ohanian's notebooks, and later became the site's unofficial mascot. It has a football-shaped head, crooked antenna, a wide smile, and a pair of orange-red eyes. "The backstory on Snoo was that Snoo was this time-traveling alien," says Ohanian. In the early days of Reddit, that backstory provided a guarantee that the site would stay afloat. "If we failed, Snoo wouldn't be able to travel back to the present."

Early on, Redditors took Snoo and made it their own. Moderators uploaded user drawings of Snoo in various contexts to fit into individual communities. It came to symbolize Reddit, and Reddit's users—a figure that could become anyone, or anything. Reddit needed a better branding strategy, and Snoo seemed like the obvious anchor. "Alexis’s idea for Snoo was an alien that has arrived on Earth to discover humanity," says MacLellan. The question was: "How do we take Snoo the character and turn that into an actual icon that we can apply to Reddit?"

The team commissioned artists to illustrate a new Snoo. They matched Ohanian's original proportions, keeping the hand-drawn aesthetic but adding a more three-dimensional look. Snoo shows up across the redesigned website, as an icon in corners and in a new set of "Snoomoji" that users can use as flair and in chats on the site.

When you sign into Reddit chat, you're now assigned one of the Snoos as your avatar. And when you make a new community, the default banner image now shows one of several new illustrations of Snoo exploring a new planet. For legacy Redditors, Snoo is the familiar friend that's been with them all these years. For new users, Snoo is more of a guide to the Reddit universe. You may feel like an alien at first, but these planets can start to feel like home over time.

"Snoo is already entrenched within the existing Reddit userbase, and I think they'll be pleased to find Snoo is [still] a big part of it. But it's also an opportunity for the broader internet to have now an ambassador to the platform," says Ohanian. "I'm excited to see the new Snoo welcome a whole new generation of Redditors."

There's a room in Reddit's headquarters where the walls are filled with the design team's early mockups, an homage to the journey they've been on for the past year. The hypothetical versions of Reddit start off hyper-visual, then shrink back to hyper-minimal, with a range of wild design ideas in between. Many of the mockups borrow design language from other popular sites; you can see echoes of Twitter, Twitch, and Facebook bouncing around the room. From far away, very few of the mockups look recognizably like Reddit.

In one corner of the room, Perez pinned up some of the screenshots that Ohanian gave to him on his first week. And on the opposite wall, there's a printout of r/all in the design that Reddit will introduce today. If you stand in the middle of the room and look at the two walls from a distance, it's hard to tell the designs apart. Perez has led the biggest and most ambitious design overhaul in Reddit's history. And unless you squint, you can't really tell.

Rush, the UX designer, says the website they've built is the same Reddit—just a little more grown up. "[We're] making it simpler and more efficient, making it more accessible, but not altering the scaffolding," he says. "Our goal is, of course, not to dip in any type of action. You want the same, if not more, amount of comments; same, if not more, amount of posts."

But another goal goes much deeper: changing the constitution of the site, making it more welcoming to people who never thought they could find a home there before. On the new Reddit, we are all just aliens, exploring the vast community of foreign planets, trying to find our place in the universe.

Correction appended at 3 PM ET on 4/2/2018: An earlier version of this article misstated the size of the design team Diego Perez previously led at Microsoft. The team included 60 designers, not 160.

Related Video

Science

Learn to Fold Five Insanely Cool Paper Planes

John Collins, the Paper Airplane Guy, shows how to fold five amazing paper planes: the Boomerang, the Boomerang 2, the Bat Plane, the Tumbling Wing, and the World Record Plane (a.k.a. "Suzanne"). Read more about the Paper Airplane Guy at WIRED.com: https://ift.tt/2J7ifiI You can also visit his website for more information: https://ift.tt/2k3a3Yd

Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-redesign/

from Viral News HQ https://ift.tt/2qSRRkp via Viral News HQ