#IF I can combine them at all given some lottery stuff

[sewmice]

They announced the rest of the Quartet Night movie cds. I'll maybe try and make a nicer post later. For now, here's the tweet.

[fulgursmediaanalysisdrama]

Can't do anything with powder keg because I can't have it, great.

At least it comes with a better unlock mechanism than the magic beans? I hope? Because that was just having a different npc sell the shit to you at a higher price, like wow

But yeah, the resetting is obviously part of the gameplay but having to redo an event because you didn't get the last step and it's unlcear whether you have to unlock something else or that it'll just work out later, it sucks. Looking at you Anju and Kafei, I did play your shitty game four times already, Kafei did get the letter but that just resulted in both of them vanishing? He still can't be talked to, the major still says that I have no leads no matter what I do, and the delivery man still has a breakdown on the last evening regardless. I guess I need a letter for him, but dunno where to get it.

But the Anju Kafei thing especially, dog why does Anju appear in the backalley on the last day only when you don't start the quest? Why do neither of them appear anywhere in the whole town? I don't get it, just vanished past Kafei receiving Anjus letter and everything stalls. I've tried just standing there and doing nothing, it's impossible to see Kafei leave after getting the letter. It never happens. Just gets it, goes back in, never comes out. Anju gone????

Seriously, this game is great on paper and shit every other way. I'll keep playing, now I'm determined.

Probably next stop is using the Goron to get into the inn, get the gold skultulas (I think I'm able to now?)

Still haven't figured out who to photograph for the boat tour guy, can't be during the boat tour it seems. Tingle ig? Since it is his dad

I could check whether anything changed at Romani range, if it is accessible now

Oh and there's one chest in clocktown I hope I can finally reach now with a combination of the deku and the goron, we'll see

I could look for more invisible things too, but I wouldn't know where

Last on my list is the lottery, since I got all the codes but forgot to cash in because I was so busy doing goron stuff

Edit: oh yeah, I don't think there's any benefit for the devs to have made the hot spring water cool down. You have enough time for everything, it's quite a generous timer, but playing with a timer like that because it limits your ability to do multiple things at once. And again, no rush, no puzzle or anything to figure out. It's just a question of how you wanna travel to any given spot, since the goron is faster than link but quite awkward on anything that's not a straight line. In my humble opinion the water should just always cool down upon leaving the relevant area, as in the mountain. Just to show that you can't use it anywhere else, this would have some benefit to the player and the play experience. This is just annoying and pointless

Also ffs make this dumb elder move, why does he always just keep stepping in place until he freezes again? Guess that's a post dungeon thing? I hope the gold dust will be in that dungeon too and I can fit everything into my post dungeon leftover time.

Hot take, but after replaying it again I think Majoras Mask kinda sucks

The three day time limit feature does not aid it very well, the game is too large making the time insufficient, but the time is also too much and too long for you to wait out the times where you can do nothing not even explore.

The bombers handbook is kinda helpful, but the timeframes given in it are unhelpful without clear objectives. And all objectives are purposely unclear. I know I can always run back to the Sheikah stone, but I wanna be able to play the game not have another Rotomdex. At least the handbook notes when something is finished, but mostly I wanna reset my days quick which just seems like a waste of time. Generally I don't appreciate having quests split into three parts separated by nothing but waiting, unless you know what else to do. I'm sure if you know everything that's to do and how the game is quite satisfying to optimize, but figuring it out is awful for me. I never finished it as a kid after getting stuck with the Gorons

The map is horrible to navigate, large and mostly useless. You can't even find hints for when exactly to come back later to get into inaccessible areas.

The Witch in the woods requires a healing item, but there's no way to gain any heals.

All the minigames are frustrating to outright unfair, even beyond the waiting to do all three instances of them element, like at least don't make me do them on the same cycle if you can give me the handbook without catching the bombers a second time already. The bombchu one sucks and is unskillful as the bombchus can just veer off and move randomly, the fishing one is useless, the deku one with the moving platforms is hard to practice burns through your money fast as the 3D isn't great so it's easy to miss platforms as you don't cast a shadow on the stones. And it's not just time intensive through retries or like all the other games because it suffers from not giving more money than you earn so you have to keep farming but your rupee bag is also small so you can't carry many tries and- but also because its gameplay is waiting. Waiting is never good gameplay, it makes tedious tasks full of trial and error feel even slower than they already are, and once again this one is already hard to practice. Falling down would mean the end even without the time restriction, it does not make much sense to pretend like it's carnival game where you have a loss condition. The loss condition is not getting the time, you need to play again.

And the one with the "maze" of walls that move up and down. Terribly disorienting, you end up boxed in by three walls all the time and if you ever need to backtrack it means you've lost, the timers to short and there's no strategy to employ. (Yes hugging the wall and always turning the same way, like any other maze, but that's too slow you can't finish this way)

Another thing is I have notes about when to speak to Anju, but I can't. She doesn't react.

I have info about that madams missing son, I don't have info for her because apparently the only info will be having found him? I have been given a deadline but I can't interact with him in that deadline despite having talked to any npc I can find with the mask on. Including the shopowner of the place where he's hiding.

I can't reach any spirit, I can't reach any dungeon, nothing. Idk maybe I can use the bombs in the ice area? But that one had the strongest enemies, it should be last, haven't yet tried this though.

I've been playing for 6-7 hours, I should be much further, like fr it sucks. There's no wonder, no fun, it's just bad. Nothing I have "figured out" so far has felt smart, it's definitely not challenging and it doesn't feel rewarding. The most fun I had so far was getting the heartcointainers from trade quests and such, because they didn't waste time beyond the actions I had to take and aren't limited to very specific time frames or other anti-gameplay-limitations

I'll come back if I find a dungeon and they're better. Or worse, then I'll come back too.

I don't think playing the ds version matters, I can only think of upsides the different hardware would have. And I will not purchase a GameCube just to reexperience this game

[violetren]

My first theory for volume 9 while the second half of volume 8 is fresh in my mind!

Volume 9 is gonna be the therapy season, but in the most traumatic you'll need different therapy afterwards kind of way. Instead of paying a therapist they're all just be bargaining with the universe like "yo I've had this trauma for a while, and I'm feeling pretty done with it. Here you take it back and uhhh I'll take a new guilt complex. Maybe a fear of falling? IDK, fuck me up bro."

The foreshadow-y Alice in Wonderland-esque fairy tale Oscar told to himself/Oz while in captivity is my guide post here.

Aaaand this is gonna get long so! 10 ideas of shit that's gonna go down next volume beneath the readmore, each one about 1-2 paragraphs each.

In the fairy tale the girl runs away from her problems into a new land, but because she never learned from her problems they just followed after her. Yeah? So first--second? First discounting the volume therapy theme theory.

FIRST BIG THEORY: The girl from the fairy tale was real, and she used the Spear of Creation. And like Weiss and the crew, she was fucking smart about her wording. She offered up materials that'd last even after someone else inevitably used the staff. IDK what materials she woulda used. Maybe there's a story about a missing continent we just haven't heard of yet? Maybe the Brother of Light's pool, since Salem seens to have claimed the Brother of Darkness's one but no sign of BoL's these days. Maybe there is a reason the land beyond Menagerie is so uninhabitable beyond desert + grimm? idk. Point is, it's a thing that happened, and since Ambrosius can't destroy/directly kill she's still in her wonderland. For themes sake I'm gonna call her Alice from here on out.

So Alice made a pocket dimension to flee from her problems from.

SECOND BIG THEORY: Her problems were relic related. She needed to hide em, and hide herself from Salem. Tbh I'm not sure how into this one I am. Maybe she had other shit going and some version of Oz was like "hey you don't want to be here, I have some property that I don't want to be here, lets make this happen!" THE POINT IS, the little pocket realities the relics are in, are aalllllll places in her pocket reality. When the team said "hey Ambrosius just make the middle ground into one of these type places" that's what he did, cause that's how he do. What better way to make sure it works like those places than to be kinda connected to em?

THIRD BIG THEORY: Ambrosius was buds with Alice once upon a time, but knew staying in her pocket world ultimately drove her crazy. He knew his middle ground worked like the pocket dimensions because it touched em or something, so he gave a vague ass warning not to fall, because he knew where they'd fall to.

Back to the fairy tale. It's implied Alice was never able to leave/give up her wonderland because she never learned from her mistakes.

FOURTH BIG THEORY VERSION 1: RWBY + Jaune can't figure their way back to reality until they adress a major personal issue and break out of whatever cycle it's got them in. This one I feel is shaky because they all have such different issues and are in very different places with each of them, trying to do one big arc on em would be too much of a mess. Plus it doesn't account for saving any of the many civilians that may have survived the fall.

FOURTH BIG THEORY VERSION 2: nobody can leave until Alice either leaves, dies, OR is convinced to let them go. As we're following good kind people this means we watch the kids try to give someone else therapy that THEY need. RWBY+J work through their shit through variations & combinations of witnessing mirrors of their struggles in Alice/other wonderland inhabitants, and just having time and space to slow down and breathe whether they want it or not.

FIFTH BIG THEORY: Alice is the "antagonist" of the underworld because she is the obstacle to overcome.

What about Neo you may be asking. Well I want her to let go of the revenge schtick, or at least redirect it back onto Cinder thus calling a truce with Ruby. However it's more than likely she's gonna be on team keep Alice as an obstacle at least as long as it takes to kill Ruby, and so Neo will be the "real" Antagonist™ within wonderland.

SIXTH BIG THEORY: Neo because of her unwavering determination to enact revenge is gonna die this volume. She'll be the comparison against which RWBY+J will be measured. As they grow and get closer to leaving she'll become more wrapped up with whatever strange classic wonderland logic this pocket universe has. Potentially depending on how things go with helping Alice, Neo may just end up trading spots with her, and end up trapped while everyone else goes back. But dead or trapped, I have a sad feeling this could be our last volume with Neo. My only hope of her surviving at this point is that she like Emerald switches sides, and in doing so joins Winter as a Cinder foil. While Neo grows and lets go of revenge and thus survives, Cinder stays dedicated to her own desires for revenge and other self serving instincts ringing her own death toll for either the end of the volume, or maybe somewhere in vol.10.

SEVENTH BIG THEORY: Ruby is gonna be grieving and maybe even getting full on angry about being expected to fix everything just because she's the optimistic one. She shouldn't have to deal with this brand and advanced level of childhood stealing just because she wanted to do what was right and won(lost) a genetic lottery for magic powers type anger. Jaune is going to have SO MUCH GUILT to work through, mostly the survivors kind. The bees will be experiencing couples therapy, they've both been pretty solid about individual growth leading up to this, Underworld will be them learning what it means to them to be partners now that they are so different to who they were. Weiss is different. Weiss is at first gonna feel like she's there just because it was a way to really shove all the other Schnee's into their therapy arcs and gave RBY+J neutral presence to rely on. Weiss is gonna go in the most stable of the bunch. But then, slow boil style, she'll start to realise how fucked up basically her whole life has been, especially upon realising that her "good years" with her new family have been spent getting sucked into being the last line of defense against the apocalypse, but will be too busy helping the others, so at the end of the volume when everyone else is actually doing pretty good and refreshed for the fight against Salem she'll only just be beginning her breakdown.

EIGHTH BIG THEORY: All this therapy shit is gonna be mirrored back on Remnant by the others grieving the percieved loss of the hearts of the team. Both sides of these story are gonna deal with some heavy shit, but the Remnant side is gonna be the depressed side, at least as long as it takes for Oz to tell them maybe the other's aren't dead leading to desperate attempts to get the staff OR the make desperate attempts to get the relics back anyways and inadvertently find out from Ambrosius what is up. But anyways. Winter is gonna be dealing with survivors guilt and the loss of both her little sisters (friends are great but Penny was little sister zoned and it's a hill I am prepared to die on. good sisterly relationships are friendships too). Nora is gonna be doing her self discovery thing. Ren is gonna be building on his end of vol.8 developments. Oscar will continue his grappling with the merge stuff. Qrow and Willow might get forced into AA. Whitely is gonna learn his own definition of being a Schnee instead of what his dad taught him.

NINTH BIG THEORY (OR FOURTH VERSION 3): The other way they get out is QORN obtain and use the staff to bring them home, potentially by trading enemy lives for them.

BONUS CONSPIRACY THEORY: QORN if presented with needing to trade for their loved ones & lost civilians have a lightbulb moment and decide hey why not trap Salem in a pocket universe since that is a thing Ambrosius can make? Like, if this bitch hasn't budged on her not learning to appreaciate life and humanity or whatever (which I'n pretty sure is the other way to break her curse instead of stopping remnant from turning) then she's a prime candidate for shoving into a personal reality that you can only escape if you can face your problems long enough to break the cycle they have you in. It'd be really fucked up but I think it might actually be possible to run the place using her as her own material component. Like kill her over and over and redistribute the energy to make the pocket world, but because god given power + Ambrosius can't actually destroy she just reforms anyways. MIght take a few hundred thousand deaths but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Or use the BoD oasis/grimm pools to make a world that mirrored the one she chose to live in on Remnant really make it hard for her to break that cycle....

Anyways.

TENTH BIG THEORY: Working on the idea that the relics are actually hidden in secret protected pockets of the underworld RWBY+J are gonna have a secondary quest of trying to get the relics from this side, and either finding a new place to hide them ages away from their vault doors. If you wanna make it a FOURTH VERSION 4, they're specifically gonna seek out the sword of destruction (HOLY VORPAL BLADE ALLUSIONS BATMAN) either with the intent of cutting their way out underworld--ahem wonderland--or with the assumption that someone is inevitably gonna have to open the vault door, because that's just how things be these days and they'll be able to cross to Vacuo from there.

[theexpanse]

DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! That alert is for the people of Earth, considering that the last shot we saw on season 4 of The Expanse was of Belter villain Marco Inaros (Keon Alexander) sending cloaked asteroids hurling toward our fair planet.

The impending arrival of those asteroids in season 5 of the show — which premieres Dec. 16 on Amazon Prime Video — is especially bad timing given that one of our favorite Earthlings, burly Rocinante mechanic Amos Burton (Wes Chatham), just happens to be on his way to Earth himself. And judging by this exclusive first-look season 5 photo we have of a blood-splattered Amos (above), things are not looking too hunky-dory for the bearded wonder in his hometown of Baltimore.

What awaits Amos down on the surface? What will happen when Naomi (Dominique Tipper) finds out her long-lost son Filip (Jasai Chase Owens) is an active part of daddy Marcos' team? And why should we be keeping our eyes on Mars for clues as to what's to come? We chatted with Expanse showrunner Naren Shankar to get the scoop on season 5.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So is season 5 just going to be book 5, Nemesis Games, or are we going to see some season 6 in there, or some new bridge material like you did last season? What are we looking at?

NAREN SHANKAR: You know how it's worked over the years. It's like certain story lines get pulled forward, other stuff gets pushed back sometimes. Character elements get combined into other stuff. There's definitely some elements of book 6 in this season, I would say, but it's largely drawn from book 5.

Let's start big picture, and then we'll drill down on a few things. If I just walked in and said, "What's the big crux of season 5? What's the big story you're telling here?" What would you say to that?

I'll give you the theme, because that's probably the easiest way to look at it. The theme really is about the sins of the past. To one extent or another, that's every single story line, whether it is Naomi personally confronting the fact that she had a son with this very charismatic, and now quite violent, revolutionary-type leader. Whether it's Amos connecting to his past, or going back to Earth for reasons that we're not quite sure of. Whether it's Holden's past with unleashing the protomolecule. Whether it is the past geopolitical history of the Belt, and its relationship with the inner planets, which we see through Avasarala.

That's really what the season is about. It is connecting all of the things that we have done in our lives to the moment of the present that we are in. It's like everything comes to a head all at the same time.

We ended season 4 with Marco letting these asteroids off towards Earth. What do you want to say about that impending arrival?

Well, it's coming. It's coated in stealth, so it's very hard to see, and there's a whole bunch of them. From the end of season 4, the last image that we left with was Marco looking at the plotted trajectory of all of these asteroids. The last image that you see is a whole lot of them that are lined up to hit Earth in its orbit. So, they're coming.

Let's segue from that to Naomi. What's Naomi's mission here? We see a little bit in the trailer with Marco, and her son. What is she going to look to do here in season 5?

Well, I think at the end of season 4, the message she sent to Fred Johnson was, "I need to get in contact with my son. I'm calling in that favor that we set up way back in season 1. I'm calling in that favor. I really need to find my son, because I'm afraid that his father is going to get him killed."

It's that she understands, or she's seeing that Marco is on the rise, and she knows the kind of person that he is. After years of feeling like, "I can't reconnect. I abandoned him. I left my kid," she's determined to reach out to him, and try to save him from somebody that she thinks is really a terrible person.

What is awaiting her when she gets in contact with her son and sees who he has become?

Well, I think maybe the way to answer that is, the reunion that she is hoping for is probably not the one that she's going to get.

I mean, we saw what happened with that airlock at the end of last season.

He doesn't bake her a cake.

What's Holden's take going to be on Naomi and the spot she's in, and this mission that she's on?

The two of them are together. The question marks of, "An Earther and a Belter, can we be together?" They have chosen each other. They've chosen to be on the Roci. They've gone through a tremendous amount. That's true for the whole family. That's true for Amos. It's true for Alex, the group. It's like the most warmest and connected beginning for them that we've ever seen. I think that that's an interesting outgrowth of the fact that we really took our time building up that family unit from season 1 on.

After the events of season 4, after everything they went through on Ilus, it's like they are a bonded group that… It's just their chosen family. It has that feel to it. There's a connectedness and warmth to the relationships of all of our four main people on the Roci, and that's reflected in Holden and Naomi.

It's part of the fun of getting into deep runs of shows if you do them properly, is that you really do develop the relationships. If you think about where these guys started in season 1 to where they start in season 5, it's a pretty interesting change. And it feels believable, because you're taking the time to actually set it up. We're starting Holden and Naomi from, I think, a very warm and supportive place at the beginning of season 5.

I want to ask you what's happening on Mars, and if there's anything there that might be something that might connect later to, say, book number 7 and what we may be seeing down the line a bit on The Expanse? Obviously, there's some long-term stuff happening in Mars that you may be planting some seeds for.

Yes! Absolutely. See, this is spoken like a book reader. There absolutely is, and we actually teed it up at the end of last season, as Bobbi got involved in the black-market arms trade. There are little pieces of it that are popping through the surface even then.

Part of what was going on at the very end of season 4 was they were selling stealth composites to Belters. Those are the stealth composites that Marco uses to coat the asteroids. And, if you look really carefully at the end of season 4, it's Filip who's one of the Belters that is blowing up things on Mars.

Bobbi doesn't know who that is, but that's Filip who helps blow up that salvage yard at the end of season 4. But, absolutely the tip of that conspiracy that we started at the end of last season plays an incredibly important role in season 5.

As you talk about the Belters, I gather that we are going to be seeing more Belter factions. What it was like to think of all these different subgroups that we're going to see, and the different motivations and things they might have? I imagine that was pretty fun to put together.

It really was. Again, I think one of the things that we've really tried hard to do to really dimensionalize the conflict. It's like, you're seeing every side of it. We've driven down into Earth. We've driven down into Mars. We've driven down into Belt. We've driven down into the independent faction of Holden and the Roci gang.

In terms of the Belt specifically, at the end of season 4, Drummer walked away from the OPA. She walked away from politics and Fred Johnson, and didn't take Ashford up on his offer of being his XO. She struck out on her own, trying to create a life for herself in this very tumultuous world. Well, politics, and war, and strife, they have a way of finding you. It's hard to avoid them. What we're going to find from her in season five, her story line speaks to that very directly.

One of my favorite stories in all the books is Amos going to Baltimore. I'm really excited to see that. What can you say about his time back on Earth?

I think you're going to love it. It's one of the things that I have been looking forward to doing for years. We talked a lot about it because The Churn is a fantastic novella. What we've done over the course of the series is, we have found a way to express these novellas into our narrative in a way that they're not really done in the novels proper.

You're going to get that. I think people who have read that novella, especially, but I think fans in general, even people who've never seen the show, they're just going to love this. It really is one of my favorite story lines we did this season.

What can you just say about what he's facing there, or why he's going there?

Well, without giving too much away, there have been times when Amos has had a chance to go back to Earth, even at the beginning of season 4, when the Roci was in orbit around Earth. Amos didn't go back down there.

Reaching back into season 3, when that reporter Monica Stuart was interviewing him. She was talking about, "Isn't it funny that you got the name of a mob boss?" He said, "Oh, it's a common name in Baltimore." And, "Oh, yeah, how'd you get out there? You ended up in the lottery really fast." There's a lot of mystery attached to Amos' backstory around Baltimore. Without telling specifically why he heads back, you're going to get a lot of answers to it. Things are going to feel really, really satisfying because it illuminates a side of him that nobody else on the Roci gets to see. Nobody else really knows, but the audience is going to get to go with Amos to experience it.

Speaking of Amos on Earth, what can you say about the possibility of seeing Clarissa Mao again in season 5?

I don't want to spoil anything. [Laughs] She's down there, I suppose.

I think I know where she is too.

We did see at the beginning of season 4 that she's in prison. The story lines in particular this season have such depth to them, and it feels like you're just getting really into these characters' skin in a way that we haven't done to this extent before. So we're really excited for people to see it.

[stereksecretsanta]

Merry Christmas, tabbytabbytabby!

For @tabbytabbytabby, who wanted alive Hale pack and anything alternative universe. MERRY CHRISTMAS AND I HOPE YOU ENJOY IT!!!! I decided to go with a rock band AU because let's face it, they're all stupid hot and would look so good doing it. My headcanon for alive Laura Hale is the incomparable Katie McGrath if you want a visual. Those eyes, man. They make my little bisexual heart very happy.

Also everyone here is somewhere in the Kinsey Scale :)))) There will be smut and idiocy. Idiots in love has become one of my favourite tags!

The underage occurs when Derek and Stiles are in high school. Derek is a senior and Stiles is a sophomore.

Band line up is as follows:

Laura - lead vocals Derek - lead guitar Boyd - bass Erica - acoustic guitar and backing vocals Isaac - keyboard and backing vocals Cora - drums and backing vocals

Read On AO3

*****

Edge Of Seventeen

Chapter 1 - Say What Now?

‘Do you want to?’

It took Stiles a few moments to focus on the words, electricity buzzing under his skin and his mouth bruised and still wet with Derek’s spit. Two warm broad hands settled either side of his face and gently redirected his attention. In the dark of the Camaro’s back seat, Derek’s pale eyes glittered.

‘We can.’ His voice was low and rough, his breathing out of kilter. ‘If you want to.’

Stiles looked at him, his heart racing a thousand miles a minute.

I want to.’ he said and fell into another kiss.

The alarm woke Stiles with a start. He swore and leaned over to slide a finger across the screen and turn it off. He’d forgotten when he’d arrived the night before, still a little jet lagged and not quite with everything when he’d collapsed into bed and been asleep in what was probably a record time.

He lay still, looking up at the ceiling and getting his breath back. He hadn’t had a dream about Derek Hale in a very long time and he was chalking it up to being back in his childhood bed. Independence Day had been the one holiday he’d won in the field office lottery, and so Stiles had packed up and gone home for the long weekend, four blissful days off. He’d known going into the FBI would be hard, but he’d had no idea just how hard it would be. Noah was delighted. The last time they’d seen each other had been Christmas and Stiles had been morose after yet another break up. He’d spent an afternoon wandering around the preserve, ending up staring at the Hale house, still closed up and looking a little worse for wear, with nary a Hale in sight.

This time it was summer, the heat already making his room uncomfortable. Stiles grimaced and plucked his damp t-shirt away from his skin, sitting up and dragging a hand over his face as he tried to wake up properly, manfully ignoring his dream-induced erection that made him feel like he was a teenager all over again.

‘Stiles?’ Noah yelled from downstairs. ‘You up, kiddo?’

‘I’m twenty-six, Dad,’ Stiles muttered, standing up and stretching. ‘Not a kid anymore.’

He was feeling it too, the crashing realisation that those carefree days were far behind him. He had a job and an apartment in Sacramento, cacti that he had managed not to kill. All the cool stuff. It wasn’t hard to feel like something was missing but Stiles would never admit that the string of failed relationships he had accumulated were anything to do with what Lydia referred to as ‘the one who got away’.

Noah was in the kitchen as he predicted, sleep rumpled and unshaven in sweat pants and an old BHPD t-shirt. He’d been taking it a bit easier, giving Parrish more and more responsibility. Stiles was pleased and Parrish was both smart and sensible, a combination that Lydia had found irresistible. Their senior year fling had evolved into a long term relationship until Lydia had come home to buy them a small clapboard Victorian near the preserve and commute to the research lab every day where she had her associate professorship. Parrish had presented her with a simple solitaire ring at Christmas and she was very happy.

‘Are you going to see Mom?’ he asked and Stiles nodded, grabbing the orange juice from the ridge and pouring himself a glass, sniffing hopefully at the eggs Noah was scrambling. He noticed Stiles’ meaningful look and grinned.

‘I thought I would go after breakfast,’ He beamed at his father when he was presented with a plate full of eggs and bacon.

‘It’s turkey before you get on your high horse,’ Noah told him. ‘Get your own coffee if you want some.’

‘Not yet.’ Stiles made space for him to sit down and they ate in comfortable silence. Once finished, he did get up to make two cups. Noah accepted his gratefully and smiled at his son, grey eyes twinkling.

‘So…,’ he started and Stiles held up a finger.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t care who it is you want to set me up with, it’s not happening.’ His parents had a terrible habit of matchmaking.

Noah held up both hands in supplication.

‘Not setting you up,’ he protested. ‘Just thought I’d mention that when your mother went into the shop yesterday, she saw a ghost from the past. Several, actually.’

Stiles cursed internally. His dad knew he couldn’t resist a good mystery.

‘Okay, I’ll bite,’ he replied, starting to get up.

‘The Hales.’ Noah replied with all the smugness of a man who knew he had the scoop of the year.

‘Oh fuck.’ Stiles blurted and tripped over his chair.

-

It was the sneezing that woke Derek up.

‘Jesus fuck!’ Laura roared a floor below him. ‘How much fucking shit is in this place?’

‘Oh good, she’s awake.’ Cora muttered and turned over. They were in what had been the twins’ bedroom, each of them crammed into a single that was a little on the small side. The top storey of the house was still a burned out wreck and the furniture had been largely taken away over the years and so the pickings had been slim, with their merry threesome taking the scorched master bedroom and Laura camping out on the sagging couch downstairs. As Alpha, she always preferred to be on watch as it were.

‘This was such a bad idea.’ Derek borrowed deeper into his comforter. ‘We should have brought the bus.’

‘That would have given the game away.’ Laura replied, hearing them both perfectly even though she was now in the kitchen. ‘Which part of low profile are you two having trouble with?’

‘We could have always stayed in a hotel. Sleeping int the burned out remains of our family home is precisely the opposite of low profile. Lo.’ Derek pointed out, sitting up. There was no way he’d be going back to sleep. Not with his alpha on a mission.

‘Discretion is our watchword, Derek.’ Laura hissed and started banging pots and pans around with a maximum of noise. Derek looked over at Cora. Her dark eyes were just visible under the pillow she had over her head.

‘You’re her second.’ She bared her teeth at him. ‘You go deal with her.’

‘I hate you.’ Derek said flatly, rolling out of bed and onto his feet. He stumbled a little on the stairs, still half asleep. Laura had her head buried in a blackened cupboard when he got to the kitchen. It hadn’t been as badly affected as the rest of the house but it was still a health hazard as far as he was concerned.

‘Where the hell is the waffle iron?’ she demanded. ‘Mom said she left it here.’

‘Who the fuck knows?’ Derek yawned and went to the fridge. There was nothing inside except for a gallon of milk and the leftover Chinese take out from the night before. He sniffed a carton of lemon chicken, grabbing some disposable chopsticks from the small pile on the kitchen table, and started eating. Laura eyed him, one fang just visible.

‘We need proper food.’ She glared at the ceiling. ‘Everybody up! We’re going grocery shopping!’

‘Christ.’ Derek grumbled. ‘You think that’s low profile too?’

‘Shut up.’ Laura swept past him, nose in the air. ‘I’m the Alpha now.’

Derek sniggered and let her go, enjoying his leftovers while he listened to her rouse the threesome. There was a lot of complaining, and he couldn’t really blame them. Their schedule had been hectic, even for wolves, and they were all tired and the house wasn’t exactly welcoming. Laura’s plans to come home and reclaim their territory now she was an Alpha in her own right had seen them finish the final leg of their international tour in New York, a quick catch up with their pack and then flying down to Sacramento and driving the three hours to Beacon Hills all in twenty-four hours. They had barely had time to stop in at the small coffee shop near the Sheriff's station before coming out to the house, which had been shut up for the past ten years. Peter had intended to join them, but had been delayed in New York. As their manager, he was the one who took care of all the dealings with their record company. If it was left to him and Laura, they probably would have eaten every executive by now. He was worth every penny they paid him, even if the meeting had probably been manufactured as a way to get out of cleaning up the house.

-

Stiles pulled up at the cemetery, parking the Jeep behind the old truck that had parked off centre and across two spaces. Grinning, he got out and made his way through the iron gates, remembering Isaac Lahey, who’d been a couple of years above him at school. His father had been the groundskeeper before there had been an incident at their house and Coach Lahey had been found dead. He remembered Isaac being taken in by social services and a whole sordid story of child abuse and alcoholicism coming out. Isaac had stayed off school for a week and then simply vanished off the face of the earth. There had been a lot of theories as to where he’d gone, but the truth was he wasn’t the first person to do that in 2011.

Stiles got lost in thought as he meandered between the headstones, finally coming to a stop in front of one made of white marble and embossed with angels.

‘That’s new.’ he remarked. ‘Not sure about the daffodils.’

‘They’re so gaudy.’ The dark haired woman kneeling at the grave grinned over her shoulder at him, her eyes the same warm whiskey brown as her son’s. ‘I’m glad to see you made it out of bed. I was starting to think you’d spend the whole weekend hibernating.’

‘Funny.’ Stiles helped Claudia up and gave her a long hug. When she let him go, she stepped back and looked him up and down.

‘You look good.’ she said. ‘Dare I say, professional.’

‘Mom.’ Stiles settled his hands on her shoulders. ‘Dad said you saw the Hales yesterday.’

‘Oh.’ Claudia’s look of faux innocence was belied by the mischievous twinkle in her eyes. ‘Is that why you came to see me. No ‘I’ve missed you terribly Mother’, but ‘You saw the fucking Hales’.’

‘Mom.’ Stiles narrowed his eyes at her. ‘Did you see him?’

‘Who?’ Claudia crinkled her nose in amusement. ‘The boy you’ve been literally pining for, for almost a decade?’

‘I’m sure he’s not a boy anymore.’ Stiles snorted. ‘And yes. Stop playing dumb.’

‘I might have.’ Claudia tilted her head. ‘What’s it worth?’

‘A double chocolate muffin and all the lattes you can drink.’ Stiles replied and she cackled and linked her arm through his.

‘Done.’ she declared. ‘And you’re right. He’s definitely not a boy anymore.’

-

Derek leaned heavily on the cart, eyelids at half mast and his senses muted. The store was fairly empty, the early hour on a Saturday meaning that most shoppers were yet to make an appearance. Next to him Boyd yawned and shifted on his feet, hands sunk deep in the pockets of his leather jacket.

They’d been best friends a long time, playing basketball and baseball and getting into shit when they were teenagers and when things had turned bad and they’d had to leave, Boyd had been dogged in his refusal to cut ties and turned up at the pack house in New York a week after graduation with Erica in tow. They had walked right in and asked Talia for the bite and she’d given it gladly. Derek knew she was going to do it for Erica even before they had had to flee their territory and they’d settled in like they’d always been pack. Isaac had, of course, already joined them earlier and his delight at having them back had turned into a deep and abiding love that saw them forming their triad and becoming mates.

Erica was leaning on Isaac, her blond curls dragged into a messy ponytail and Cora was trailing Laura a few feet ahead. It always grated that she had inherited their mother’s early rising nature while the rest of them would have happily slept in and threw her weight around to get them out of bed when they most definitely didn’t want to. Even the fact that Derek was her twin didn’t let him get out of doing what she wanted.

‘Toilet paper.’ Laura turned and they all tried to avoid her eyes. ‘Derek. Take Boyd and grab some.’

‘But I’m minding the cart,’ he whined, clinging to it like a drowning man to a life preserver.

‘Go!’ Laura’s eyes flared red for just a second and Derek had to resist the urge to snarl back at her like he’d always used to. The whole alpha thing was new, the result of an overambitious alpha that had come into their territory planning to challenge Talia and ending up facing her daughter instead when they tried to take Cora with the intention of forcibly mating her and claiming rights. Talia had always taught them to solve their problems with diplomacy but Laura was headstrong and fiercely protective of her siblings, ever since Kate Argent had tried to use her to get close enough to kill them all. She’d almost succeeded too, that night of the party to celebrate the basketball teams’ victory for nationals providing the perfect distraction for them to be off their guard. Kate had struck in the early hours of the morning and she’d had them trapped, the beginnings of an arson that would have killed them all if Derek hadn’t come back and caught her. He’d ripped her throat out with his teeth, calling Deaton in a panic to come and break the circle of mountain ash that kept them trapped and they’d all watched their family home burn until the police and emergency services had arrived.

Talia had decided that it was too dangerous to stay, knowing the Argents would come for Derek, getting them all packed in a matter of twenty-four hours and away from what was left of their home. They’d gone to their father’s pack in New York State, leaving no sign of them behind. It was the way with wolves, always having a back-up in case something went wrong. The Argents were a large and powerful hunting clan and there would be retribution for the death of Gerard’s golden child, but when they came for the Hales they would find the place empty. Deaton stayed, both to protect the territory and report back to Talia about hunters coming in and not a month after it had happened, they had come. Thankfully the wards on the Hale land had kept the territory claim in place and the hunters had left with no satisfaction.

The rest had been a long and bloody fight between their respective Councils. Gerard had wanted Derek’s head for killing Kate and Talia had countered with the evidence that Kate had planned to kill a pack of law-abiding wolves along with their children. The matter had finally been settled when Gerard died of cancer and his granddaughter, by all accounts a level headed and honourable young woman about the same age as Derek, had taken over.

The music had started as a way to keep them all sane while this was happening, Talia more or less forcing them into music therapy as a way to deal with what had happened. It had been a bit of a shock to realise they were actually very good at it and they’d formed the band. Some minor success saw them moving steadily up the indie charts until it became their lives. Laura had named them Hale Pack 2.0 and Talia had laughed so hard when they’d told her that she’d shifted and clawed right through the cushion she was holding, feathers flying around them like a small snowstorm.

Derek hadn’t minded at first. The music was what he loved, the fame and money secondary. The Hales were already rich, but Peter had jumped at the chance to do something different and he drove their commercial success. They were in that comfortable zone of being middle of the road, not so successful enough that they were household names but it became hard in New York to go anywhere without being recognised.

Derek didn’t enjoy that part much. He was solitary and quietly sarcastic by nature, but unfortunately that just seemed to translate into brooding and mysterious in interviews and so he was plagued by a long line of would-be groupies that tagged along after him like a cloud of midges. Laura found it hilarious and basked in her own popularity. As an out lesbian, she had her choice of pretty girls to shack up with. Cora kept her asexuality to herself, just as surly as Derek was. The other three were not exactly open about their polyamorous arrangegment, but they didn’t hide it either. They were lucky, having found each other and being able to keep each other.

He often thought about that night, the one where the reason he’d been able to save his family was because he’d been in the back seat of his father’s illicitly borrowed Camaro with the boy he’d loved pretty much forever and indulging in a bit of mutual deflowering. Then he’d had to pack up and leave said boy without even saying goodbye or telling him where he was going. It had hurt more than he’d thought possible and if part of why Derek was so keen to come back to Beacon Hills was to try and track down that boy, then who was to know. The only people who knew what he’d been up to were Boyd (because Derek told him everything) and Laura (because she’d sat on him and tickled him until he’d confessed and then had to hold her while she cried, guilt and shame coming off her in waves). Derek hadn’t had the heart to complain when their very survival had been at stake because he’d killed Kate Argent, no matter whose fault it had been. Talia had said to make a clean break with the town and while she’d made allowances for their friends who were already in the know, that was as far as she was willing to push her luck.

Derek and Laura had finished out their schooling at home, Cora had gone to boarding school in South America with her Argentinian grandmother’s pack and the twins were still too young to be a problem so that was, as they said, that. Then had come college, followed by the band and the success and the travelling and before Derek knew it, it had been almost ten years and he was twenty-eight and still hung up on Stiles fucking Stilinski.

‘Hey.’ Boyd bumped him with his shoulder. ‘You alive in there?’

‘Not really.’ Derek surveyed the toilet paper and grabbed a couple of twenty-four packs. ‘Just thinking.’

‘Yeah.’ Boyd grinned, lighting up his usually serious face. ‘I can guess what about too.’

‘Not a goddamned word.’ Derek growled and then froze, his nose twitching madly.

It wasn’t exactly the same, a little deeper and a little thicker but he’d recognise that scent anywhere with his nose stuffed up and people throwing peppermint oil in his face. He shoved the toilet paper at Boyd and charged through the aisle, needing to find the source and skidding to a halt in the aisle with the candy and stared at the Sheriff, who looked like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. In fact, as it was he had cookies in his hands which he quickly put back.

‘Derek?’ He looked pleasantly surprised. ‘Claudia said she’d seen you.’ He came over and Derek couldn’t help taking in a deep breath. The scent of Stiles was all over the Sheriff and it made his heart start thumping like a drum.

‘Sheriff Stilinski.’ He took the offered hand and shook it, gleeful when he could smell a little bit of Stiles on his own skin. ‘Yeah, we’re back. Laura said she was going to stop by and talk to you about the house. She’s actually around here somewhere.’ He couldn’t stop smiling. ‘I’m glad you’re still here.’

‘Where else would we be?’ The Sheriff raised an eyebrow at him. ‘To be honest, we never thought you’d come back. Any of you. The last we heard, you mom and dad had skipped town and taken you all with them after the fire and then five years later, you and your sisters pop up playing gigs in New York with the Lahey kid, Vernon Boyd’s son and Erica Reyes and since you hit the big times, you’ve been entirely responsible for provisioning this town with 90% of its salacious gossip.’

‘How did you know that? I mean, New York.’ Derek was completely bemused. They had started out small, playing tiny venues, still wary of being recognised. It had only been in the last couple of years that they’d made it big enough to be known internationally.

‘I kept track.’ The Sheriff replied. ‘The fact that you all pretty much disappeared overnight hit this town like a slap in the face. I called in a lot of favours.’ There was something in his voice though that had Derek frowning. ‘I had my reasons, son.’

Derek was about to ask him what those were exactly when Laura came barreling down the aisle.

‘There you are.’ She came up short when she saw who he was talking to. ‘Sheriff Stilinski?’

‘The one and only.’ The Sheriff tipped an invisible hat at her. ‘It’s good to see you, Laura. Derek and I were just catching up.’

‘Well, I have to steal him. Excuse us.’ Laura gave him a toothy grin that was not her usual smile and Derek wondered just what was happening. She caught his arm and practically dragged him away.

‘What the hell?’ he protested, trying to wriggle out of her iron grip.

‘Hunters.’ she hissed and Derek’s blood ran cold.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked and she nodded, her face grim.

‘The others are doing the check out.’ she said. ‘We need to go.’

-

Stiles parked on the kerb and got out. Claudia already had the front door open and was looking down the street.

‘Visitor.’ she announced and went inside, leaving him to stand and wait for the car to stop. He bounced in excitement, barely waiting for the driver to get out before grabbing her and squeezing her hard enough to make her squeak.

‘Lydia, my strawberry blonde goddess.’ He kissed her cheek soundly. ‘I was wondering when you’d show up.’

‘Stiles.’ Lydia had softened since high school, growing into her intellect and losing the hard veneer of extreme fashion that had been her armour in high school. She was still elegant, but the tan leather boots she wore under her long floral skirt were flat and her face was less determinedly made up, her hair a mass of loose fronds that framed her face. She was also as beautiful as she had always been but Stiles loved her for more than that. They had grown close in junior year when Jackson had moved to the UK and she’d been left bereft. Scott had been dating Kira that year and he’d had little time for Stiles so they’d drifted together and never really drifted apart, in spite of their physical distance. Now Scott and Kira were engaged, with Scott working for Deaton full time and Kira teaching martial arts with their first baby on the way and Stiles felt even more like he was lagging behind. Lydia kept him tied to Beacon Hills as much as his parents did.

‘So what are you doing here?’ He escorted her to the house. Lydia went in first, saying hello to Claudia as they went into the kitchen.

‘I have some news you might want to hear.’ she said, her eyes dancing.

‘’If it’s that the Hales are back, I already know.’ Stiles was smug when she pouted. He so seldom got one over on her so it was fun when he did.

‘Sorry.’ Claudia grinned at Lydia. ‘That was my fault.’

‘Dammit.’ Lydia folded her arms. ‘Well that may be, but I bet you don’t know that they’re going to be playing the Jungle tonight.’

‘No, that I did not know.’ Stiles was immediately hooked. He’d always wanted to go watch them, ever since they’d first popped back up on his radar after years of radio silence, courtesy of a discarded music magazine in the field office. He’d fantasised about meeting Derek’s eyes across a crowded venue but he knew that in reality, Derek probably didn’t even remember the boy he fucked in the back of his sister’s car and probably also had his pick of beautiful people to spend his time with. It hadn’t stopped him from following the band’s progress almost obsessively though.

He’d been distraught when Derek had gone, trying to find any trace of him online, but there had been nothing at all in the years just after the fire. Noah had been cagey about what he’d known and Stiles had been at a loose end, trying to fill in the gaps. When he’d rediscovered them, Stiles had followed them on every form of social media he could and tracked down every article about them. Derek still didn’t have any online presence apart from that and the music videos his band put out. Stiles had jealously hoarded every single tiny piece of information and downloaded every picture and video of him, seeing how handsome Derek had become, growing into himself in a way Stiles envied. He’d jerked off many a night, watching the stylised black and white videos that the Hale Pack 2.0 preferred. Derek was always dressed in black jeans and tight white t-shirts, the sleeves of his trademark leather jacket pushed up to his elbows and his broad hands drawing Stiles’ gaze in as he played his guitar, all precision and power that had Stiles breath coming short at the thought of them on him.

‘Danny told me this morning. He’s practically beside himself at getting them on his books at such short notice.’ Lydia smirked, knowing she had his full attention. Danny had made a ton of money in apps and bought his old stomping ground. It had had a makeover and was now a very stylish LGBTQ+ venue that he ruled along with Jackson as his partner in business and life, once he’d had his gay crisis while he was gone. Stiles knew from the Hales’ publicity that Laura was a lesbian and he was pretty sure Isaac, Erica and Boyd were involved in something that looked pretty polyamorous but Derek and Cora were notoriously private and there was never any suggestion as to who they might be seeing. It seemed the kind of place they would be playing.

‘Okay.’ He moved to the coffee maker, preparing for a long sit down. ‘Tell me everything.’

TBC on AO3!

[gaiapaia]

Kermit and Friends: Unhappily Vaxxed

Kermit and Friends is a show that welcomes everyone. It doesn’t matter what race you are, what culture you come from, what religion you believe in, what sexual preferences you have, or what political party you’re aligned with. That’s just one of the many things that makes KAF so special.

However, it doesn’t stop at Kermit and Friends... the show’s host, Elisa Jordana, pretty much carries this mindset into her real life. She’s willing to be friends with ANYONE as long as they’re nice, funny, or interesting. Nothing else matters outside of having just one of those qualities. Bless her beautiful heart.

Unfortunately, not surrounding yourself with a likeminded bubble can lead to some annoyances, to put it lightly.

Everything in America is politicized right now. It’s been that way since a celebrity became President and the media started obsessing over him. Instead of COVID-19 being a health crisis, it became a political tool used by both parties to cater to their voters beliefs.

Since Elisa has friends on both sides of the political spectrum, she was hearing about it from every angle regarding the vaccine. From her Democratic friends, COVID-19 is the scariest disease in human history despite none of them actually knowing anyone who died from it. From her Republican friends, the vaccination was created to kill off the population despite none of them actually knowing anyone who died after taking the vaccine.

So when it came time for Elisa to make a choice whether or not she should get vaccinated... she had friends/family members telling her she was going to die with either choice she made. Imagine how nerve wracking that must be for someone who already has severe anxiety issues? It broke my heart to see Elisa so stressed out over this.

Elisa ended up getting vaccinated. I saw on her Facebook she was STILL being criticized by her liberal friends for waiting this long... it’s so ridiculous. Thankfully though, Elisa is perfectly fine. If you give 100 million people a Tylenol pill, a very small percentage of them will get sick from it and possibly even die. The odds of that happening though are about the same as winning the lottery (that also goes for the odds of dying from COVID). The coronavirus situation is a very serious issue since a small percentage of people dying or becoming seriously ill is nothing to take lightly, but it’s so silly how political everything revolving around it has become. Thankfully Elisa can put it all behind her now and not worry about it any longer.

Claire from New Jersey called into the show to announce he was converting to Christianity and accepting Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. Claire even said he was getting baptized Sunday night. I’m personally all for this, I think there’s a lot of good that can be learned from Jesus’s teachings and being a believer in Him. However, Claire took it a step further and said he’s joining a sanctuary of some kind and won’t be allowed back on the internet for the next few months.

This to me is taking it a tad bit far. You don’t need a community to be a believer in Jesus Christ. I also find the internet very helpful when learning about the Bible and Christianity as a whole. To eliminate it and instead go with a group led by some pastor or two is a mistake in my opinion, but hey... maybe this will lead Claire to happiness and fulfillment. I certainly hope so. His calls and presence in chat will be certainly missed.

Claire claims the place he’s going to is like a rehab facility so he can overcome his addictions to food and porn. Elisa hilariously took intrigue in Claire’s porn viewing habits... her questions made me laugh hard. Elisa also shared that Claire was the reason Sugar didn’t co-host the show this week. I know Claire had some critical comments about Sugar in the chat last week, but I was surprised to hear it had that kind of negative impact on her. Hopefully Claire will find it in his heart to apologize and sweet Sugar will return to her Kermit and Friends family very soon. We all love you Sugar and we missed you on yesterday’s show!

T-Bob and Kleenex had a spat on a livestream earlier this week and decided to continue it on Kermit and Friends. The fight on the livestream had to do with political stuff, and the fight yesterday was just them name calling one another. It was entertaining but nothing substantial I could break down and explain.

Their fight did lead to a guy named Mark Connors calling into the show. Referred to as Mark Cruz by T-Bob, this Mark dude claims to be a multi-millionaire and a former country music star who’s friends with Dolly Parton. How someone of this status can be so obsessed with T-Bob is baffling to me. He ranted about Bob in two separate calls for what had to be 15 minutes combined. Mark even brought his wife on the line to talk about a time when Bob supposedly threatened to skull f*** her, whatever that means.

According to T-Bob, Mark “Cruz” is a statutory rapist that got off because he was friends with the judge or something like that. Bob has made it one of his life missions to expose Mark’s allegations to the World, claiming he had news vans sent to Mark’s house in Tennessee to ask him about his legal troubles. 

Who knows what’s true and what’s false with these guys. All I know is that it has to be unbelievably tiresome to carry so much hatred for another human being. There aren’t many things I like about myself, but one thing I would never change is the fact that I obsess over things/people I love, not over things/people I hate. 

Kermit made 3 new awesome friends yesterday. The first was a very nice man by the name of Chip Baker. Chip is another one of Coach Love’s associates. He is the author of The Formula Chart For Life and he specializes in positive inspiration and motivation. Chip brought that positive energy to Kermit and Friends with a glorious smile and fun attitude, not letting the T-Bob/Kleenex stuff bother him at all, even offering advice to both men.

Laura Meadows and her handsome son Culver also made their KAF debuts yesterday. Laura is an actress that’s had roles in over 80 movies/television shows ranging from Law and Order, Any Given Sunday, and lots of horror stuff. Her son Culver was singing in the background when she first joined the show and later Laura brought him on to perform in front of the camera, but he was a bit too shy. I would absolutely love to see more of Laura and Culver on KAF in the future... both seem like extremely sweet people that exemplify the spirit of Kermit.

Sigmond returned to the show to give the greatest Rhianna cover you’ll ever hear when he sung her song, Stay. Wappy also beautifully performed Lady Picture Show by Stone Temple Pilots and Easy by The Commodores. Kermit and Friends is really blessed to have these two gentlemen and their amazing musical talent on the show every week.

To end the episode, Elisa played a phone recording of her final conversation with Andy Dick. It started with Andy mad at Elisa for the publicity he received over his arrest being covered on Kermit and Friends; then when Elisa defended herself, Andy went on this self-loathing tangent saying he doesn’t deserve her or anyone else. Andy then promptly hung up on Elisa when his friends started calling for him, pretty much summing their entire relationship up in 2 seconds.

What a jam packed show it was this week. There was a little bit of everything. I’m very proud of Elisa for both facing her fears head-on regarding the vaccination shot and for doing the show even though her anxiety/stress levels had been through the roof the previous 24 hours. That took a lot of fortitude and strength, and Elisa was rewarded with an awesome episode of Kermit and Friends that everyone enjoyed.

[hellzyeahwebwielingessays]

Did MJ try to make Spidey retire?

Short answer: Never when she was in character and never unjustifiably!

The number of times I’ve heard people claim this is unbelievable. I’m going to settle this shit once and for all. Feel free to share this with anyone making these claims.

The simplest way to do this would be to run through things chronologically.

Unless anybody can bring up other examples, off the top of my head I can recall only three times before ‘One More Day’ where MJ floated the idea of Peter retiring.

The first time was in ASM #283. However the important context of this is that Peter himself  has already resolved to quit as soon as he is done with his latest case involving his friend Flash Thompson.

However further important context is that Peter has resolved to retire even earlier in ASM #275 and in that issue it was MJ (after learning his origin story) who encouraged him to NOT quit.

An issue later she was back to being against his work as Spider-Man.

However, many issues around this era (which was before  they got married!) depict MJ flip-flopping on her feelings and the reasons why boil down to her being concerned for Peter’s safety.

At which point why is MJ being out of order in desiring him to  retire? She loves this man and doesn’t want him to be hurt but also understands why he does what he does and it’s that fundamental heroism that is a major reason for why she loves him. This is again summed up in Web of Spider-Man #6.

Next up we have an example of when MJ didn’t  ask Peter to quit. But people always treat it as though she did so we’re going to address it anyway.

It stems from the clusterfuck that was ‘Maximum Carnage’.

Let’s give you that all-important context.

In Spider-Man Unlimited #1 Pete and MJ are attending Harry Osborn’s funeral. Harry died in chronologically the story right before ‘Maximum Carnage’ so this is a very fresh wound; he died merely days earlier.

Prior to his death, Harry had been waging months of psychological warfare on the Parkers and even tried to kill Peter. His attempt actually almost killed MJ and his own son Normie. During this whole time Harry’s wife (now widow) Liz Allan had been pushed to her wits end too.

As a result Mary Jane is reluctant to talk to Liz.

Also, for months now (starting with Carnage’s debut actually) MJ had taken up smoking to cope with the stress of their lives, chiefly her concern for Peter’s well-being. This topic and her behaviour at the funeral gets raised when they return home.

The talk zeroes in on the risks to Peter’s life and how he and MJ got lucky with Harry. MJ asks Peter to take a break for a week or two.

Not retire permanently.

Not take an indefinite hiatus.

Not even take a break for a month or definitely two weeks.

She literally asks for 7-14 Spider-Man free days so they can de-stress and catch their breaths in the wake of a serious crisis and loss.

Peter promises he will.

Unfortunately Carnage has just broken free of the authorities and formed a gang.

For the sake of argument let’s say MJ doesn’t know much about Carnage’s cronies. She just knows he has back up.

However, she absolutely knows about Carnage.

As his name implies, is an incredibly lethal foe. You know Venom, that guy who’s famous for being a bigger badder version of Spider-Man? Yeah Carnage is an even more powerful version of that  guy. Spider-Man one-on-one is physically incapable to defeating him and had to team up with Venom to do it. Even then they actually weren’t strong enough to beat him physically because Carnage is stronger than the pair of them combined!

Making matters worse Carnage’s whole body is extremely durable to injury, with blunt force not being the most effective way of fighting him. His forte is being able to quickly generate a large arsenal of sharp edged weapons from his body; think the T-1000.

This skillset is appropriate given how Carnage prior to obtaining any of these super powers was already a highly violent and sadistic serial killer who killed purely for the pleasure of it. How violent and sadistic? 11 life sentences merely for hi known  crimes. That’s how violent and sadistic. And again, this was when he was just a normal guy.

Oh, and on top of all that he doesn’t trigger Peter’s Spider Sense, making him immeasurably more vulnerable to an already overwhelming powerful foe.

He is possibly the single most physically dangerous Spider-Man villain of all!

This isn’t idle little trivia about the character by the way. It is key to his whole concept and was laid out explicitly in his original appearance. In fact, in that first appearance he was so powerful that Peter was helpless and forced to team up with Venom, who lived to kill him!

Even when backed up by Cloak and Dagger, Spider-Man’s ribs take a pounding from Carnage, Shriek and Doppelganger. It is in this injured state he returns home to a concerned and naturally  upset Mary Jane.

She then begins an argument with Peter when he tells her he plans on going back out there.

Let’s sum up so far.

MJ has been stressed for months prior to this to the point where she’s started smoking.

Peter and her nearly died mere days ago because their friend went psycho.

Said friend died in front of them.

Their other friend, his wife (who MJ was naturally going to relate more to since they were both the wives of costumes folks) is now a grieving widow.

MJ’s husband promised her he’d take a break for a little while so they can recover a bit.

Her husband then almost immediately went back on that promise.

His risking his life again against a bad guy who’s all but guaranteed to kill him if he fights him alone.

Last time MJ’s husband beat this guy he did it with the help of a powerful nasty piece of work who wanted to kill him. Even then they only just won. That’s how dangerous Carnage is.

This time Peter is fighting him alone, whilst injured, and Carnage has two  people backing him up.

So if it wasn’t a guarantee that Peter was dead meat before, now she might as well get ahead by planning the funeral.

THAT is the context behind MJ’s rage and desire for Peter to not be Spider-Man temporarily  in this story.

However, noticeably by the end of the story she’s changed her mind!

We then jump forward to the ‘Clone Saga’, specifically a mini-series called Spider-Man: the Final Adventure.

The context behind this story was that Peter, upon believing he was a clone and that Ben Reilly was in truth the original Peter Parker, had decided to retire and support a pregnant Mary Jane.

To this end they had both left New York but due to a lab experiment involving Peter’s blood a serial killer had mutated into a spiderlike monster. With no other heroes around Peter suits up again as Spider-Man to the dismay of the heavily pregnant Mary Jane who wants him to NOT do that.

Is this MJ being not as understanding as she could be, maybe even selfish to some degree?

Sure.

Is it also Peter being in the wrong too?

Also yes, the story brilliantly points that out.

But more significantly prior to this story the Parkers had been through Hell.

In less than a year (in-universe):

Peter’s robot parents had turned up pretending to be the genuine articles

They’d betrayed Peter, breaking his heart

Their close friend Harry Osborn had gone mad

Harry and used his knowledge of Peter’s identity to torment the Parkers

Aunt May had gone into a coma

Peter had suffered a mental breakdown

Ben Reilly and other clones had shown up (including clones of Pter’s murdered lover Gwen Stacy)

Aunt May has passed away

Peter was framed for murder

MJ had been targeted for abduction more than once

They’d discovered MJ was pregnant and that the baby might have serious health issues due to Peter’s mutated DNA

Peter was revealed as a clone and had a second mental breakdown

During his mental distress Peter had accidentally smacked MJ across the room

The Jackal had nearly killed everyone on the planet

The Jackal mind controlled Peter into trying to murder MJ

MJ had nearly died due to complications with the pregnancy

That isn’t even everything but all that stuff had been happening across the previous three years of publication alone. And as I said in-universe it was less than a year.

So MJ and Peter had been through a LOT of horrible and stressful things that had put them both on the edge and sometimes over it. Most of that stuff was connected to Peter’s life as Spider-Man that MJ always had mixed feelings about at best. And now after Peter FINALLY retired and their lives were blissfully normal, allowing them to catch their breaths and do some much needed healing, Peter is coming out of retirement…When it isn’t 100% necessary for him to do so.

And all this is happening during MJ’s second or third trimester when she is very obviously heavily pregnant. This often can be a stressful time for pregnant people generally and of course sometimes mood swings occur due to hormones firing all over the place. And MJ is dealing with super powered spider hormones on top of all this. With a baby that is a total lottery because nobody on Earth has ever been pregnant with a half human/half spider powered baby before.

Given that she is dealing with ALL that is it really unreasonable for her to desire for Peter to simply continue to be retired.

She isn’t demanding he give up being a hero.

She is angry and demanding that Peter CONTINUE the choice he already made about giving up.

Which is not the same thing and she was okay with him going back into the hero game after he pregnancy concluded.

Finally we come to the Howard Macke/John Byrne run on Spider-Man where MJ again desired Peter’s retirement.

Here is the thing, MJ once again was desiring Peter STAY retired as opposed to demanding he outright quit.

Moreover the Mackie/Byrne era was a period where MJ, Peter and other characters were often written incredibly out of character practically systemically. For example Flash Thompson behind Peter’s back literally made fun of the fact that his girlfriend Gwen Stacy and his wife Mary Jane were dead (at the time MJ’s death was faked by a stalker).

Peter and MJ were actually written in this reductive way back during this run as part of an editorial policy to break up the marriage.

The thinking at the time was to make their relationship unlikable in order to make people glad for when they got rid of it via killing off Mary Jane and leaving Peter single.

So essentially not only was MJ and Peter out of character back during this era but they were literally being sabotaged so readers would hate them.

Between that and how OOC (out of character) the characterizations were back then this by rights should simply not count in any analysis of the characters.

Now, there have been instanced post-OMD of MJ clearly wanting, asking, demanding, etc. for Peter to quit.

But as with the Mackie/Byrne era (or Black Cat from 2009-2018) these are out of character and should not truly count.

So when written in character and when there are not extenuating circumstances (like pregnancies) involved, Mary Jane would actually not ask Peter to quit and never truly has.

[themackenzies]

Thoughts on 5.01 - ‘The Fiery Cross’

WARNING: This review is mostly negative, very long, and also contains spoilers for episode 5.01 and the books Drums of Autumn and The Fiery Cross. 

This episode was all just too sappy and cheesy.  I didn’t really get ‘Fraser Family Feels’ or even ‘MacKenzie Family Feels’ to the extent that I thought I would, or should, considering this was a very hyped premiere episode featuring the wedding of my favorite Outlander ship!  I finished rereading The Fiery Cross in January and was so excited for Season 5, but was underwhelmed with this episode.  Even though I was disappointed, I will definitely be giving Season 5 another chance and plan to keep watching.  (I didn’t care for the first couple of episodes of Season 4 either.)

First of all, I watched the episode with my sister and her husband.  She was a show-only fan and then started reading the books, and she’s currently reading Drums of Autumn.  So, she knows that I love Roger and Bree, but doesn’t really understand why...yet.  (I’m hoping she falls in love with Roger like I did when I read Drums, but she’s a very busy person and doesn’t have a lot of time to read, so it will be a while before her verdict about bookRoger is in!)  

Watching and discussing the show with her just makes it all the more obvious how much I mentally fill in gaps and inconsistencies in the show with my knowledge from, and love of, the books.  We also rewatched the Season 4 finale right before watching the premiere - the difference in tone between the two episodes, watching them back to back, was stark.  They really did a complete 180 from Season 4 in a lot of ways, which apparently worked for a lot of fans, but it did not work for me.  It’s like they took all my least favorite parts of previous seasons and crammed them all into one episode and magnified them.  I’m going into details under the read more about what I liked and didn’t like.  But, overall, I thought this episode was fussy and boring.

Costumes and Hair

Brianna’s wedding dress was beautiful and I loved it.  I’m simultaneously glad and peeved that they released all those wedding photos ahead of time.  It was nice seeing all the HQ images, so we could see details of the dress (Like the tartan underskirt, which is not visible at any point in the episode!).  But, at the same time, it would have been nice to be surprised.  This episode was kind of boring to me, probably because I had already seen the dress and other details ahead of time.  If I hadn’t, it would have been fun to notice all the details while watching the episode.  Roger looked nice, but I gotta say, I really miss the beard.  Rik’s face looks a little strange without it and my brother in law commented that he looked “cold” without it, haha!  Rik looks great in all the season 5 promo interviews and photos with the long hair and beard.  I’m hoping that he’s able to continue growing his hair out and doesn’t have to wear a wig for Season 6.

Speaking of wigs...I am so glad Jamie’s bangs are gone!  Jamie looks so much better!  I am finding him almost as attractive as he was in Season 1.  But, I feel like Claire’s and Bree’s wigs are worse this season!  Their curls are so defined and unnatural looking.  And I didn’t like Claire’s elaborate hairdo for the wedding, with it all piled up on her head and all these tight curls hanging down.  Claire’s wig looked much better in later scenes, like when she’s braiding it before bed, and when she’s in her surgery seeing patients the next day. 

The Wedding/The Gathering

I knew going into this episode, based on promo for this season, that they would be doing some kind of wedding/gathering combo at Fraser’s Ridge.  But, I felt like they did a poor job of explaining this, as well as the time jump, and setting it up for the show.

To prepare writing this review, I quickly jotted down a few notes, so I wouldn’t forget and one of my thoughts was:

Where did all these people come from?  They didn’t make it clear that this was The Gathering...it seemed like everyone was there for The Wedding, and then stayed for a couple days.  But, like, who are these people?

I don’t really feel like rewatching the episode, and maybe this was addressed in Claire’s voiceover at the beginning.  I remember her talking about the settlers helping to build the house, but this was a lot of people...strangers.  Was this an impromptu gathering?  Did all these people really show up just for Roger and Bree’s wedding and then stick around?  It seemed like Jamie’s decision to put on the kilt and do the fiery cross and call up the militia was a spur of the moment decision brought on by Tryon showing up at the wedding uninvited and expressing his disapproval at Jamie’s letters.  But if it was spur of the moment, how did they get not one, but two, elaborate crosses built?     

The wedding ceremony itself was fine, but I did miss the intimacy of the wedding in the book.  Maybe intimacy isn’t the right word, because they were surrounded by a ton of strangers at the gathering.  But, it felt intimate.  This did not.  It felt kitchy, kind of theatrical, and way too fancy!

The (Fancy) Big House

Speaking of fancy...The big house is way too grand.  It feels like a completely different show, and not in a good way.  Season 1 felt so down to earth and authentic and gritty.  And this is just pretty for pretty’s sake.  I had seen photos of the Big House in promo before this episode, and I’m probably on record in some DMs as saying that I didn’t really mind that the house was so big or grand, but actually seeing it in the episode?  It irks me.  The wedding was too fancy and the house was too fancy.  And it struck me, as Jamie is leaving the house the next morning, and is stopped by Tryon for a convo about militia stuff, that Jamie is wearing fancy clothes.  And I thought, “Book Jamie would be out there with those other settlers with his sleeves rolled up helping to build, or farm, or whatever.”  It really feels like the Fraser’s won the lottery or something, because I don’t get how else they could have accumulated so much wealth in such a short period of time.  There’s supposed to be this huge disparity between the way they live and the way Jocasta lives.  And the only way Jocasta lives the way she does is because she owns slaves.  I am just so completely irked by how opulent the Fraser lifestyle seems to be now.  It’s so nonsensical that it really prevented me from enjoying the episode.  Yes, it’s pretty, but pretty without reason, purpose, or sense.

L.O.V.E. and BROG

Roger is my favorite character.  I love him, and am rooting for him and Brianna to be happy and together in the show.  But, I think it feels a little strange to go from the drama at the end of last season to this nearly perfect couple in season 5.  I was really hoping there would be some flashbacks to show their reconciliation and all that really great relationship stuff that happens with them at the end of Drums.  But, I guess they really are sticking with this massive time jump.  I’m happy that they’re happy.  But, this wedding didn’t feel earned.  It kills me to say that.  I don’t think Roger needs redemption, but I do wish they had given him and Brianna a chance to hash everything out.  I think the time jump does a huge disservice to these characters and their relationship, and I think the writers needed to do a lot more legwork to get Roger and Bree from where they were at the end of Season 4 to where they were in this episode.  Their relationship doesn’t all of a sudden become more believable if you give them a fancy wedding.

I was looking forward to hearing Roger sing again, but I didn’t like the L.O.V.E. song.  I read or heard in an interview or article at some point that a couple of the songs Rik sang for Season 5 were difficult, and out of his register.  I think this was probably one of those songs.  I was not impressed by Rik’s performance and I think it was an odd, cheesy song choice. I also didn’t care for the love montage during this song.  It felt like something out of a completely different show.  My sister didn’t like this montage either, and commented that she wished they had kept the wedding night about Roger and Bree.  She also found it strange that Bree doesn’t mention to Roger what she overheard about Stephen Bonnet, and she feels it’s really hard to root for them because they’re still not communicating!

While reading the books, I always tend to chalk up this lack of communication to a combination of Bree’s private personality and a PTSD response, where she’s built up these walls and doesn’t share her feelings.  And in the books, when we’re in Roger’s POV, he notices when Bree is being a bit withholding, and so the reader knows that he knows Bree isn’t doing okay.  But, in the show, we don’t have any of this internal dialogue.  So, it just looks like Bree is hiding things from Roger, but we don’t know why.  I like the little comforting hug Roger gives Bree, I think he does notice something is off with her, but I think there needed to be some kind of dialogue here, where Roger asks what’s wrong, and he comforts her and sings to her after she’s confided in him.  This is one of those moments that wouldn’t have bothered me if I had watched it by myself, because I know these characters so I know what they both must be thinking and feeling.  But I can understand how a show-only watcher would be frustrated.

Blood of my Blood

I was so excited when I heard Roger doing the blood vow to Jemmy in that promo video, that I started drafting a post about how powerful this moment is in the book.  I was going to pat the show writers on the back for listening to all the Roger fans who were disappointed it was left out of season 4.  BUT...oh boy, this was just another disappointment.  Jamie has made, like, 3 or 4 disparaging remarks about Roger in this episode.  He’s the one person on Fraser’s Ridge who needs to see and hear this vow...and he’s not there.  Is Roger relying on Brianna telling Jamie what he did?  Or is Roger going to march up to Jamie in the next episode and tell him?  Brianna has been defending Roger this whole time, she doesn’t need to see this, but Jamie does.  This is yet another example of the writers shoehorning things from the books into the show in ways that lose their impact and meaning.  This is supposed to be a demonstration of loyalty and love.  He literally says “I claim thee as my son before all men” and yet, he does the vow in the privacy of their own cabin.  Jamie is all about duty.  When he makes a vow, he keeps it.  Roger, completely of his own accord, is speaking Jamie’s language with this vow.  This blood vow in the book is so powerful, because it’s Roger speaking directly to Jamie.

I saw Roger’s eyes shift from the baby to Jamie. Jamie stood beside Brianna with that utter stillness that so frightened me—straight and still as a stick of dynamite, with a lit match laid a hairsbreadth from the fuse.

The flame of Brianna’s head moved slightly, looking from one to the other, and I saw what she saw; the echo of Jamie’s dangerous stillness in Roger. It was both unexpected and shocking; I had never seen any resemblance between them at all—and yet at the moment they might have been day and dark, images of fire and night, each mirroring the other.

MacKenzie, I thought suddenly. Viking beasts, bloody-minded and big. And saw the third echo of that flaming heritage blaze up in Brianna’s eyes, the only thing alive in her face.

I should say something, do something, to break the awful stillness. But my mouth was dry, and there was nothing I could say in any case. Roger’s reached his hand toward Jamie, palm up, and the gesture held no hint of supplication.

“I don’t imagine it pleases you any more than it does me,” he said, in his rusty voice, “but you are my nearest kinsman. Cut me. I’ve come to swear an oath in our shared blood.”

I couldn’t tell whether Jamie hesitated or not; time seemed to have stopped, the air in the room crystallized around us. Then I watched Jamie’s dirk cut the air, honed edge draw swift across the thin, tanned wrist, and blood well red and sudden in its path.

To my surprise, Roger didn’t look at Brianna, or reach for her hand. Instead, he swiped his thumb across his bleeding wrist, and stepped close to her, eyes on the baby. She pulled back instinctively, but Jamie’s hand came down on her shoulder.

She stilled at once under its weight, at once a promise of restraint and protection, but she held the child tight, cradled against her breast. Roger knelt in front of her, and reaching out, pushed the shawl aside and smeared a broad red cross upon the downy curve of the baby’s forehead.

“You are blood of my blood,” he said softly, “and bone of my bone. I claim thee as my son before all men, from this day forever.” He looked up at Jamie, challenging. After a long moment, Jamie gave the slightest nod of acknowledgment, and stepped back, letting his hand fall from Brianna’s shoulder. — Drums of Autumn, Chapter 66, Child of My Blood

Lines that made me cringe and/or shake my head and/or roll my eyes

Please note that I haven’t rewatched the episode, and I haven’t seen the script posted online yet, so these lines have been reproduced from my memory, and may not be word-for-word accurate.

“I will always be your wee girl”

I feel like this line is infantalizing Bree and I don’t like it.  I mentioned in a previous post that I don’t like when Jamie infantalizes Bree.  I just don’t understand this aspect of their relationship.  Maybe because it’s so different from my own relationship with my father.  I feel like the show has really leaned into Bree being “Da’s little girl” more so than the books do.  Brianna’s had a baby, and I feel like Jamie should be somewhat excited about Brianna being wed because he thinks she needs a husband to provide for her and Jemmy (He tries to marry her off to Young Ian in Drums!).  Jamie has reservations about Roger, but not the wedding itself, and I just don’t understand Jamie being all like “Bree is growing up too fast” which feels like a very modern sentiment - wanting your kids to stay kids.   

“This is maybe not the wedding you imagined as a wee girl”

This line was actually adapted from the book, but it’s Roger who says it, not Jamie.  In the book it makes sense, because they’ve been living in tents at The Gathering for weeks, they’re all tired and ready to go home, it’s autumn and cold and rainy.  It’s a genuinely rustic, outdoor, fireside wedding.  Roger, feeling self-conscious about the fact that their wedding is not going to be a grand affair and its not going to be anything like a wedding would have been like in the 1970′s, makes the comment.  It’s a great call back to their handfasting in Drums. 

“Your aunt’s told Father Donahue he can hold the weddings in her tent. That’ll be a help.” “Brrrr!” Bree hunched her shoulders, shivering. “Thank goodness. It’s no day to be getting married under the greenwood tree.” A huge chestnut overhead sent down a damp shower of yellow leaves, as though in agreement. Roger looked a little uneasy. “I don’t imagine it’s quite the wedding you maybe thought of,” he said. “When ye were a wee girl.” Brianna looked up at Roger and a slow, wide smile spread across her face. “Neither was the first one,” she said. “But I liked it fine.” Roger’s complexion wasn’t given to blushing, and his ears were red with cold in any case. He opened his mouth as though to reply, caught Jamie’s gimlet eye, and shut it again, looking embarrassed but undeniably pleased.

In the show, it’s Jamie who says it.  Bree is a pragmatic person who, in the books, didn’t even want Roger to get her a new ring, so this wedding doesn’t feel like something Bree would have wanted.  Also, the line doesn’t make sense because the wedding in the show is FANCY.  There are flower arrangements, and a wedding band, and a reverend, and a hardwood platform for the ceremony, and it’s at their home, and everyone’s decked out in their Sunday Best, and where did all those wood benches come from, and how did Claire get such expensive jewelry.  This is just one of the many times where the writers shoehorn something into the show from the books in a nonsensical way.

“Like Father like Son”

I hated this line so much.  I read about it in the Radio Time’s review of the episode, and was hoping I wouldn’t mind it as much in context, but I still hated it.  It seriously seems like a mean tweet, and I can’t believe they had JAMMF say it, on screen, in canon.  And, again, it doesn’t make sense.  Because Roger hasn’t been complaining or crying or “wailing” at all in the episode.  I kind of wonder if Jamie is meant to be equating Roger’s singing to “wailing”?  I don’t know.  Either way, it’s mean, poor writing. 

A  Few Favorite Moments

I’ll end on a high note and give you a few of my favorite moments from the episode. 

Hands down my favorite moment in the episode was when Germain ran up to Roger, and did a little hop, and said “Congratulations Uncle Roger!”   And then when he says the line about hair ticks, it cracked me up because it looks like he glances behind Rik, probably to his parents or a crew member, for the line!  The kid they got to play Germain is adorable - I love his dimples!  I have a feeling all the kid actors are going to be a consistent favorite for me this season.  

I also really liked all the line dancing after the wedding - it felt very fun and jovial, and I liked the score playing during it. 

Finally, I loved how emphatically Claire defends Roger every time Jamie made one of his snarky comments.  Especially their conversation towards the beginning of the episode when Jamie says something about doubting Roger’s love for Brianna and Claire says “He’s here and he loves her.”

So that’s it.  Sorry this review is so negative.  I debated whether to post a review or not, but decided to go ahead and get these thoughts out there.  I’m hoping for a better episode next week.

[artificialqueens]

rhythm of a wild heart (branjie) - holtzmanns

A/N: Based on Brooke’s comments from the Roscoe’s viewing party - “He was like my safe space, so like when I would get stressed out and stuff, I could go and he would give me a hug and a kiss.”

Brooke overthinks things.

It’s in his nature, and it’s what’s gotten him this far. He’s used to striving for perfection in fields where perfect doesn’t exist, where there’s always room for improvement. It’s given him a work ethic rivalling that of an Olympic medallist, but also a mind that doesn’t let him rest. One that concocts scenarios that outline all of the areas where he’s going wrong, where he can do better, how he’s not enough-

But it works.

He has ridden his tendency towards perfectionism to principal roles in ballet, winning fucking Miss Continental, and now to national television with the world watching his every move.

It’s exhausting sometimes, all of the overthinking. He’s tried to find an off switch for it before, taking vacations from his work to calm the voices in his head that are always on the run. Doing so only makes them spiral more, latching onto possible areas for missteps like vine tendrils (there’s so much to do and not enough time, you can’t rest, go back to work).

So, Brooke works. He makes it onto the show where he stresses over each challenge like it’s going to be his last. The voices in his head are still there and draining, telling him that he can’t rest until he’s prepared enough to be able to do each challenge in his sleep. He learns the lip-sync song each episode just in case he hasn’t done enough, not accepting that he’s made it to another week until he’s standing safe at the back of the stage. And then the entire cycle begins again the next morning.  

The swirling thoughts are draining but they have gotten him this far, so who is he to complain? He accepted long ago that things are always going to be this way. He’s always going to have this feeling of not doing enough, not being enough. He just wishes that it exhausted him less.

His brain tires him out again the evening before the magic challenge. He’s gone in circles with Nina and Shuga all day, trying to find a way to combine their talents into a script that’s actually entertaining. They’ve second-guessed all of their decisions, rewriting over and over again until the words in the pages start to blur together.

They’re all still on set, waiting for the van to take them back to the hotel for another night of fitful sleep and dreams that detail all the ways the challenge the next day could go wrong. His mind has tuned out Nina and Shuga beside him as they fret over one of the magic tricks. He’s trying to use his dance background to come up with some choreography, any presentation skills to pull their performance together. He’ll make them practice tomorrow morning until their show looks nothing short of professional. It has to.

“Hey.”

There’s a hand on his shoulder, and he looks up to see Vanessa’s inquisitive face studying his own. She looks as exhausted as he feels, after the long day of filming followed by hours of practice off camera.

Brooke wordlessly pulls her into a hug, her head fitting perfectly under his chin as she buries her face into his chest. It hits him, as it always does, how they fit together like puzzle pieces. How kissing the top of her head and comforting her helps calm down the heart beating out of his chest, too.

Vanessa lifts her face to look up at him, raising a hand to smooth the crease that’s formed in between his eyebrows. He feels the tension he didn’t even realize he was holding drop under her touch.

“How’s your team faring?” Brooke barely finishes asking the question before Vanessa’s face wrinkles, indicative of a frustrating day.

“It’s just tough, y’know?” she sighs. “Trying to please them all is harder than winning the fucking lottery or some shit. Silky and A’keria want to wing it, Miss Yvie is over here hemming and hawing and writing out a full script without consulting anyone first. I’m feeling like a mother hen trying to control all her wayward chicks.”

He snorts at the mental image, remembering loud, argumentative noises coming from her group’s side of the room more than once during the day. “Too much personality, huh?”

She groans. “Picking the loudest bitches aside from myself was not the smartest shit to do, let me tell you.”

He tilts her chin up, placing a soft kiss on her lips.

“You’ll kill it. You’re funny, you’re magnetic. I’ve seen you practicing your trick a million times today already.” He wants to convince her with more than just empty words; he wants her to believe them too.

She smiles at his attempts at reassurance. “How’s your group?”

Brooke is rambling before he even realizes it, telling her about their uncertainties and complete lack of decision-making ability, and how all of them want to fall back and have someone else lead the group. He walks her through their tricks, all the dropped props and the stumbling and the magic abilities that have not quite come together yet.

“Tucking panties? Y’all are nasty.” Vanessa’s face wrinkles at his description of Shuga’s tentatively planned trick, and he laughs despite himself at her reaction.

“Hopefully both nasty and funny.”

He’s not sure if he’s trying to convince Vanessa or himself. What happens if they’re not? What happens if he falters and he messes up the bubble trick? What if he brings his team down and they’re judged in groups and suddenly he’s in the bottom, potentially sending one of them home for his mistakes or going home himself-

“Hey. I see your head spinning already. Don’t go there, baby.” Vanessa’s voice is uncharacteristically soft. She tugs on his hand, stepping even closer into his space. “You can’t plan for things that haven’t happened yet. Don’t be making up those scenarios with the bad juju.”

“I’m not,” he says weakly. She only raises her eyebrows at him in response until he sighs. “Okay, maybe a little.”

It surprises her every time when she catches the moments that his anxious thoughts start to take over him. He’s used to keeping everything inside, his metaphorical brick wall giving off a façade of calm and fearlessness and keeping his emotions safely inside. He’s used to being an ice queen, to everyone else believing that everything he does is effortless and confident.

Vanessa is the only one who can catch the wavering in his eyes every time that his mind starts to crumble, sending him glances across the workroom throughout the long filming days. It’s no different now, with her standing in front of him.

Brooke sees the gears turning in her mind, trying to come up with something to distract him. It doesn’t take her long. “Silky said to me and A’keria that she got the PA on her hotel room floor to bring her Taco Bell last night. And she didn’t even order a Crunchwrap Supreme!”

A corner of his mouth turns up at that. “I don’t know, you always strike me more as a Dorito taco fan.”

“Ooh bitch, don’t even go there.” She makes a face. “Dorito taco shells are fucking nasty. I need me a good classic Crunchwrap. I don’t know how Silky did it, though. I tried asking the PA on my floor for Gatorade last night and she brought chocolate milk instead! I mean I’m not pressed about it, I fuckin’ love chocolate milk, but what part of that screams Gatorade? Do you think she has a bias against Gatorade? What did the Gatorade family ever do to her?”

She rambles on at him for ten more minutes, making him crack up every so often despite his mood, until the van arrives and all of the queens pile in.

The two of them end up in the back row on their own. The van has become less crowded as every episode passes and more and more queens continue to go home. It’s nice, the extra room, but also unnerving when he compares it to the first few days of filming when fifteen of them were squished together like sardines in a can.

Vanessa leans into his side easily once they sit down, pulling one of his arms around her shoulder and grabbing his hand with both of hers. They’re quiet, watching the cars on the highway pass outside their window. The fingers of his free hand trace patterns on her shoulder.

He feels safe. She’s his safe space, his place to let go and just be.

Brooke doesn’t know how Vanessa does it every time, how she can take the anxious ramblings that have an iron grip on his brain and distract him with her laugh and soft kisses.

The swirling waves in his mind are quieter now. He’s not thinking about the challenge anymore, but rather about how her breathing has synced to his and how he never wants this van ride to end, the way it does too soon every day when they have to part at the hotel and head for their individual rooms.

Vanessa slides out of his arms reluctantly once they get to the hotel, not wanting to separate from him either. Brooke wishes that he could just pull her with him into his own room, bringing her close and not having to let her go at all.

They walk slowly behind the other queens, as if it’ll make their time together last longer. They ignore the PA calling both of their names (“the elevator doors are going to close, hurry up”) as they eventually shuffle in.

Vanessa squeezes his hand in the elevator. “We’ve made it through all of the episodes so far. We’ll make it through this one too, and we won’t stop till I’m lip syncing you for the crown and I win, bitch.”

She winks at him when the elevator dings at her floor, sauntering out but not before blowing him a kiss. Brooke smiles despite himself, ignoring the knowing look that Nina is shooting his way beside him.

He doesn’t know what will happen tomorrow, if his group will be able to pull themselves together in time and put on a magic show that won’t end in disaster. He does know that he has her, and that somehow - despite his anxious mind - she makes him feel sometimes like that it’s all that matters.

[globrights]

iasip s12 rated by macdennis content

The Gang Turns Black: Mac and Dennis spend the entire episode together, getting arrested and put in an interrogation room with each other, and get to sing a DUET together. Charlie even ditches them at some point to go get their VCR from Dee’s place and they don’t care one bit because all they need is each other. Also features a cute bit where Mac leans back into Dennis and sings “I think we’re in The Wiz...” it’s all a dream but if you watch the episode you’ll be glad it was a dream. 7/10

The Gang Goes to a Water Park: They don’t have a plot together in this, but in the cold open Dennis brags about how he can enjoy his time at the water park for free, and is very impressed (”Nice!!!!!!”) when Mac reveals he laminated his admission bracelet and hasn’t even paid to get IN the water park since he was 14... also Dennis bonds with a little girl the whole episode by passing on his swindling ways which proves that he could definitely raise kids with Mac one day, albeit ones just as horrible as the both of them combined. 5.5/10

Old Lady House A Situation Comedy: While Mac and Dennis do interact in this episode, it’s never a one-on-one situation. Dennis does spend the whole episode trying to help Mac (and Charlie) with their moms supposedly being at loggerheads though (and makes a fake tv show out of it, in which he edits in some laughs for Mac when he says some classic, funny catchphrases), and is “outsmarted” by Mac when Dennis claims that he wants to cut Mrs Mac out of the show, and that there’s nothing Mac can do about it because Dennis is, as he so claims, a genius. Dennis then proceeds to eat his words when Mac places his mom in every shot, maneuvering her around so that her face can be seen in all the cameras. Oh, and also, Mac touches Dennis on the shoulder at one point, which is pretty sweet. 4/10

Wolf Cola A Public Relations Nightmare: This episode had its moments, but not macdennis moments. Boo. At no point were they sitting next to each other, which is a huge bummer. That being said, Mac does say the words “Now I’ve always been very passionate about dominating other men. There’s nothing like the feeling of another man submitting to your will. Now that’s power. In a lot of ways, that’s love.” Make of that what you will. 1/10

Making Dennis Reynolds a Murderer: There was a surprising amount of macdennis stuff going on in this episode, considering how it was a crime documentary accusing Dennis of murder. The first picture shown of Dennis in the episode is a picture of him and Mac, which Mac probably submitted because he looks happy in the picture whereas Dennis is a mixture of unprepared and irked—based on the picture it’s also fair to assume Mac put his arm around Dennis when he took the photo. Cute shit. Dennis also recounts how an average Friday night for him is spent watching a movie with Mac. In a later interview, Mac is introduced as Dennis’s best friend, and we proceed to find out that when they watch movies (or just Operation Dumbo Drop, at the very least) Mac likes to turn the volume down so that he and Dennis can make wiseacre remarks. They get into a squabble on camera about whether Mac stole this concept from Mystery Science Theatre 3000 or not, and about how funny Mac’s jokes are. Dennis gets annoyed and leaves, prompting Mac to whine “Wait, w-hold on, Dennis, D-don’t leave without me... Are you mad at me?” Cue sad music. Actual, sad instrumental music that the documentary plays. But sad music aside, it’s funny how Dennis complains about Mac and his supposedly unfunny played out unoriginal jokes yet still spends most average Friday nights at home watching movies with Mac. I see you Dennis, I fucking see you. 7.5/10

Hero or Hate Crime?: Mac comes out for real in this episode! Which is amazing in and of itself making this episode groundbreaking and perfect, but how does that play in terms of macdennis? Well, first off, through gay Mac macdennis is more possible, so jot that down. Second of all, Dennis looks INCREDIBLY offended when Mac tries to claim that he’s not gay, and then is the first one to start gently coaxing Mac to come out of the closet, by telling him they support him and that it’ll make him feel better. He’s also the first one to bring up Mac’s dildo bike, the renowned Ass Pounder 4000, and he also voluntarily brings it from the basement of Paddy’s all the way to where the arbitration is being held. Aside from all the touching of the dildo bike Dennis commits in transporting it, he also touches the bike a ton when Mac is explaining the “workout bike” to everyone. This includes leaning his hand, wrist, even his entire forearm on the bike handles, and wrapping his fingers around it, odd behavior for him to display seeing how Mac presumably fucks himself with the bike, and is reinforced as even weirder in a future episode where Frank and Charlie refuse to even so much as go near the bike. Dennis then proceeds to suggest that Mac penetrating his ass with a dildo bike is just a sexually devious thing to do, and has nothing to do with being gay (Dennis, what are you trying to tell us buddy? Just come on out and say it, we’re all in support). Yeah. Okay, and then when Mac comes out and leaves, and the gang decides to make Mac pay the arbitration fee, Dennis speaks up for Mac and convinces the gang to delay telling Mac where $9,986 of his lottery winnings are going, just so that he can have one triumphant, happy day of being out and gay. 6/10

PTSDee: “Is he blowing someone?” Right off the bat we have Dennis staring at Mac playing a game in Virtual Reality. Why do you care if Mac’s fake blowing someone, huh, Dennis?  Anyway, Dennis decides to become a stripper in this episode, which clearly has an effect on Mac, who’s suffering from fake war flashbacks from the game he was playing with Frank. After a traumatic dream about his father, he dreams of himself waking up and immediately looking for Dennis so he can tell him (and possibly seek consolation from Dennis) about his awful dream, only to see a half-naked Dennis dancing. Upon seeing Mac, Dennis walks up to him and kisses him, prompting Mac to wake up for real, and walk out to see the same half-nude, red-capped Dennis from his dream, actually dancing half naked. Dennis spots Mac and starts amping it up—he pulls off a few different moves—including one where he dances all the way up to Mac, slamming his hands on either side of the doorway Mac stands in, causing his eyebrows to rise in extreme interest, right before Dennis shuts the door because he’s a huge tease. This is definitely the most aroused/interested in something sexual that’s about to happen that Mac has ever been in the series, possibly his entire life. We thank Rob McElhenney for his service, and every single facial expression he produced in those scenes. This is the first explicit interest Mac has taken in Dennis ever since he came out, and it further confirms that Mac really wants to make out with Dennis (amongst other things). Later, Mac wakes up from a 35-second long dream five minutes after arriving at Frank and Charlie’s place, where Dennis is, so it’s easy to presume that he was looking for Dennis. And when Dennis talks about how he, Charlie, and Mike would be an elite stripping force capable of winning the “war against women” he so declared, he tries to invite Mac—who is asleep, sadly—to join them in stripping too. But who cares about all that, because really, all we think about for this episode is the kissing dream and the Dennis dancing for Mac scene, right? 9/10

The Gang Tends Bar: What a wonderful fucking episode. All ‘round beautiful, Megan Ganz truly is a treasure. Mac spends most of the episode trying to get Dennis to open this crate he has supposedly ‘found’. However, because Dennis spends most of the episode trying to get the gang to do their jobs for once on Valentine’s Day, a day he claims he does not want to celebrate or include as a theme in the bar the whole day, he refuses to play along with it, stubbornly bartending for most of the day, no matter what Mac says. This causes Mac, and the rest of the gang, to speculate over why Dennis is being like this. After Dennis orders Mac and Charlie to clean up the yuck puddle in the bathroom, Mac confides in Charlie, saying that he feels like Dennis has been acting distant towards him, he believes that Dennis is uncomfortable with him being gay and is trying to punish him for it, which Charlie disagrees with, because, duh, and says that it must be something else. Mac then theorizes that Dennis actually wants them to talk through their feelings because it’s Valentine’s Day, and that he’s entrusted Mac to do that because he’s a gay man, proceeding to reveal that he has a huge surprise for Dennis, which he feels Dennis is not emotionally available enough to receive at the moment. Later on, Mac brings the crate into the bar, and Dennis opens it to find that Mac’s gifted him an RPG for Valentine’s Day. This entire scene is a clear romantic gesture on Mac’s part, who gives Dennis the one thing he’s always wanted, despite also thinking (like the rest of the gang) that Dennis has no feelings and hates Valentine’s Day (he has also never given Dennis a Valentine’s Day gift prior to this moment). But as Dennis reveals in his most vulnerable moment on television, he does have feelings. Big feelings, at that. 10/10

A Cricket’s Tale: No. Nope. Nothing. Fuck this entire episode, actually, because not only does it completely drag down the quality of the whole season, it has no macdennis! Nothing! Can’t pull anything out of my ass, since this is technically set over the events of PTSDee and The Gang Tends Bar. The gang is barely in this too, and as I’ve implied, it just plain sucks. It’s the worst episode, and I might even go as far as to say that it’s the worst episode of the series. So Cricket, I love you, but fuck this episode for existing, and for creating a big drop in the macdennis momentum this season had going on. -4657348924385738492/10

Dennis’ Double Life: Apparently, Dennis and Mac had some bet to decide who got to redesign their old apartment, which Mac won. Very cute stuff, makes you trust, makes you think that this episode has got your back and isn’t going to stab you in the face, makes you think it makes up for the previous episode which will go unnamed. Cue Dennis having a son with Mandy, a girl he picked up under a fake identity back in North Dakota, and now he wants to get rid of her in case she tries to come after the bar for money. Mac and Dennis pretend to be a couple—or well, according to Dennis—two people who don’t have sex but are emotionally involved. Watching Mac be completely into pretending to be a couple with Dennis, claiming that they make love, bringing back lines from when they pretended to be a couple in season 5 (oh, those days), is equally heart breaking as it is heart wrenching. So it’s good, but also horrible, but also bad. After Mac enthusiastically volunteers to raise Mandy’s son as his other dad with Dennis, he wraps his arm around Dennis’ arm which is so sad because it all comes crashing down later. Mac tries to offer to sleep with Frank for $5,000 which Dennis stops because “you’re emotionally involved with me”, a strange thing to bring up because if Dennis can sleep with women whilst being in an emotional relationship with Mac, what’s stopping Mac from banging Frank for five grand? Jealousy (and some discomfort), that’s what. Also Mac claims that Dennis is his gimp. But at the end of the day, none of that matters, because Dennis up and leaves! He leaves Paddy’s, he leaves Mac, breaking his heart, my heart, and the entire state of Pennsylvania, probably. fuck u/10

[thispabulum-blog]

Break the Ice: pt 2

Fuck it Friday

Today we'll check out the responses to the "icebreaker" questions I sent out last weekend. I've given it most of a week to collect responses, and I guess at this point I've gotten all I'm going to.

Let's see how it went, yes?

What's the weirdest food combination you enjoy?

I sent this message to 4 guys, and received 2 responses. The first told me he'd have to think about it, and eventually came up with

Probably eggs and syrup if im bein real

The second was

Oh geez. Zero idea. Give me yours.

Okay so honestly. If you're not going to bother answering the question, don't respond. This really bugs me.

If you had to give a TED Talk right now, what would it be on?

I sent this message to 9 guys; received 3 responses.

How important it is for me to get my dick sucked

He gets half a point because he did technically answer the question, but not in a way that made me want to have any continued conversation with him.

I never did think about that🤣🤣🤣 What would u talk about

Yawn.

…interesting….hmm…Why you should consider just hiring someone to do that home renovation you’re thinking of doing yourself.

I did talk to this guy for a bit. Presumably he does home renovation stuff professionally.

Would you rather take a trip to outer space, or in the deep seas?

I sent this message to 5 guys; received 1 response which was an underwhelming

tbh idk lol

So I definitely won't be using that one again.

What's an unpopular opinion that you secretly agree with?

I sent this message to 7 guys, received 4 responses.

I don’t secretly agree with anything. Open book on that. Politics is Fugazi

Sometimes you can just tell someone is going to be exhausting to talk to and it's better not to interact with them at all.

The man is head of the house hold

I mean, I asked for that, I guess. I didn't engage him too much because I didn't feel like arguing and I don't think it's fair to ask someone for a hot take and then attack them about it. But also...not really a person I want to continue talking to.

Uhhhhh, bullying can be a good thing and fat shaming can work. *shrug* hbu

I had actually talked to this guy a bit before and continued to do so, though I disagree.

And then one that was so aggressive I'm including a screenshot because I want you to know that this is a thing someone actually said. I'm leaving his name because screw that guy.

What's the most nonsensical item you own?

I sent this message to 5 guys, and got 2 responses.

I would say I have a glass keyboard that I have yet to use and I bought it some time ago. What about you?

This just sounds so unbelievably impractical.

Probably the strap on that I got from a white elephant gift exchange. But if I think of another I will let you know. What about you?

I talked to both of these guys for a while. I like this question.

What's your favorite conspiracy theory?

I sent this message to 6 guys, got 5 responses!

Oof idk lol I guess it depends on what would be considered conspiracy. I think we have contacted by aliens and our government covers it up. Ghosts are real not sure if that’s considered conspiracy lol

Got to talk to this guy about ghosts for a while, so that was nice.

The theory that the lottery is just a trap for time travelers

I had talked to this guy a bit before, and this was enough to get us back into conversation. I might meet up with him, question mark? I'm not 100% sold on it, but we'll call him T-Mobile.

Where do you live

Swing and a miss.

I'll be honest, I haven't thought too much about conspiracy theories but I do find it find it hard to believe that our government isn't making some kind of communication with extraterrestrial species

That's valid. I talked to this guy for a while and then blocked him for shallow reasons; I'm sorry I'm a terrible person sometimes.

Idk I think landing on the moon was fake I think the corona shot is actually a micro chip Wat bout urs

This is a lot like asking for hot takes in that I don't wanna argue with this guy, and I don't think he was joking.

What's the most ridiculous thing you believed as a child?

I sent this message to 6 guys, received one response.

That everyone finds love.

I know I love a good Sad Boy, but that was tough even for me. I did respond, though, because of course I did.

What's the strangest nickname you've ever been given and how did you earn it?

I sent this message to 5 guys, received 2 responses.

Haha Hmm I only have 1 nickname

Mmmm the truth is they only call me [redacted] and [redacted]

What have you ever chickened out of doing that you'd like to do now?

I sent this message to 5 guys, received one response.

I haven't. The only time I've stopped myself is when there's a moral qualm but 99% of the time if I want to, I'll just do or say it. Better to be honest about your intentions and desires than to throttle yourself and your interactions. What about you? Regret not doing something?

I have talked to this guy before, and to be honest he's really cute and sweet and genuine and interesting.

BUT I worry he's too serious, and that's such a turn-off.

What's something that you didn't enjoy at the time, but you look back on fondly?

I sent this message to 6 guys, received one response.

I'm not gonna include it here because it was kinda personal about his parents divorce, but we talked for a bit after that.

Anyway, that was an interesting experiment. What did I learn?

Asking people about unpopular opinions is a minefield and not the best way to start out a conversation.

It's easier to re-start abandoned conversations than to start new ones.

Ask people about conspiracy theories!

Have a good weekend! :D

[transboygenius]

Baby Bloomer (Jimmy/Nick fic)

Chapter 1: Kiss The Bride

It was 12 am at Lindbergh, just after recess time had ended. Home Economics was not yet in session. Every classmate sat at their assigned seats, gossiping, throwing paper airplanes around, or just chewing gun. Jimmy Neutron, however, was tightening the hinges on his new invention, the phon-o-ceiver. Normally, he would chat with his best friend Carl before class begins, but Carl was assigned at a more farther seat, next to Sheen's. Without having to deal with any distractions, he can catch up on his work. Too soon, someone tugged the back of his hair, forcing him to drop his tool. That action was done by none other than Cindy Vortex herself.

"I hate having to take a back seat to you. Literally!" "What's your problem, Vortex?!" "Like you haven't heard me just now. I'm tired of your big stupid head blocking my front view!" "Move your head to the side if you happen to have some dispute with mine!" "I have, for three months! Either put your head down or shave it!" "Like I'd do either for you."

Cindy gave another tug at Jimmy's tall hair, leading the boy genius into pulling her by the pigtails. Like everyone expected, a heated argument took place between them, followed by some complex dialogue that left the other students lost. The girls and boys started whispering rumors to each other in regards to their relationship. Carl and Sheen just stared at the feud. Libby paid no attention to the drama, for she couldn't notice anything with her CD turned up high. Nick put his magazine down for a moment to peek what's going on, shrugged, then continued reading as if it was an everyday thing to him. Abruptly, everyone's positions then changed, shutting their mouths and sitting up straight. One swallowed their gum. Libby took off her music, then stuffed it into her purse. Jimmy and Cindy's arguing kept on, with the class surrounding them feeling uneasy, until finally silenced with a loudly, beastly voice.

"QUIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEET!"

The two recognized that battle cry.

"Mrs. Pampers! Oh, hi! Lovely day we're having! Why didn't you tell us you were in the room? I mean, who would have expect?" "I did, Ms. Vortex. Three minutes ago."

Jimmy and Cindy felt humiliated how they let their grudges get out of hand like that, and in front of a teacher too. Mrs. Pampers headed straight to her desk as usual, and began her lecture.

"Okay, class, for these last three months, we have been studying the aspects of both household and family management. Why do we need to learn this stuff? Well children, all of you are not gonna be small forever." "Wanna bet?" Muttered Jimmy. "It's only a matter of time before you're old enough to get a job, move out of your parents' place, get married, and furthermore, having a little bundle of sunshine to call your own!" "Why would I wanna give up my freedom for something that cries and poops?" Also muttered Libby. "So, we learned all there is to nursing a baby! Feeding, burping, grooming, bathing, changing, medical health, putting the tot to sleep, childproofing your environment..."

Her list went so on and on. Who knew taking care of an infant took so much work.

"Hey Cindy, how long is she gonna keep on?" "Probably by the time we have our own kids."

Finally, as she finished...

"...and we even got to witness the miracle of birth happen right in front of our eyes!"

Everyone cringed at the same time. They wanted to forget all about that labor documentary, but no thanks to Mrs. Pampers for bringing it up again.

"Just to make sure you children know so much as you say you do, we're gonna take on a real life experience!"

She pulled out a sack of flour from under her desk, donned with a diaper.

"YES! We're finally gonna do cooking!" "Uh, no Carl. This will be your child." "But I haven't even gotten engaged yet. I'm not ready for a family." "You're practicing it. That's what the flour is for." "Wouldn't it be easier to practice it on a real baby?" "Now Carl, do you think it's a good idea to leave a living and breathing baby with a ten year-old tween?" "That depends, if that tween has ever-" "Shut up, Carl!"

Carl sat up straight, then took a dose from his inhaler.

"As I was saying, class, this isn't just an ordinary sack of flour, or however it may look to you, but just for a whole day, this will be your newborn baby, and you are to treat it like one too! Feed it, groom it, change it, and put it to sleep! It's worth a grade! Make sure your baby comes back in one piece! We do not make pancakes out of our babies! Oh, and you won't be doing it alone! All of you will be working in pairs of two!" "Pairs of two?!" Cried the class. "Yes, pairs of two! Like married couples! I will be picking two random names, and with that, you will be assigned to said person." "Is this an arranged marriage?" One student spoke under their breath.

The teacher lifted a drum raffle from under her desk, filled with strips of paper with names already written on them. As she operated the crank, the children watched as the bits of paper flew around in the spinning lottery machine. Anyone could have anyone, and they will be stuck together whether they like it or not. Cindy has dreamed about marrying Nick and being the mother to his kids, so she hopes one of those two names will be them. Of all many times Cindy has attempted to get Nick to go out on a date with her, and always left rejected, now's finally the right opportunity. She put her hands together, and prayed for a miracle to happen. Please, me and Nick! Please, me and Nick! Please, me and Nick! Carl did the same, praying for his own miracle. Please, me and Jimmy! Please, me and Jimmy! Please, me and Jimmy! The teacher stopped and reached in for two strips.

"Sheen and Libby!"

The two groaned loudly in disgust. Mrs. Pampers called the new pairing up, staging a fake wedding for them. She held up a textbook, which Sheen and Libby sat their hands on from opposite sides. After a short speech, and some "I do's" spoken from both of them, she handed them their own sack. They are to name their baby, and decide on its gender.

"I guess it won't be so bad, Libby. Look, we brought a new joy into this world." Sheen said, lifting up his sack into the air. "Is it too late for a divorce?"

Mrs. Pampers cranked the machine again, reached in for some names, then called them out.

"Cindy and Carl!" "WHAT?!"

As Cindy turned her direction to the allergy boy himself, Carl stared at her like he was in face with a serial killer. He shyly grinned and waved at her. She's just as mean to him as she is to Jimmy, so the last thing Carl would wanna do is get on her bad side. Cindy took her attention off of him, laying her head down and groaning in disappointment.

"Well, on the bright side: I didn't end up with Neutron."

As Carl and Cindy walked forward to Mrs. Pampers' desk, Cindy shoved him on the way there. As before, the wedding took place, there came the "I do's," although Cindy almost backed out, then they were handed their own bundle. Cindy just snatched the flour to herself, wouldn't let Carl hold it. Again, the teacher gave the crank another turn, opened the hatched, then reached in for some more names. Whose the lucky couple this time?

"Jimmy and Nick!"

The whole class gasped, including Cindy. She couldn't get to Nick, but apparently her rival could. Not only were they shocked that they were both boys, but Jimmy and Nick together, they were such an odd combination; The champ and the loser. Nick was surprised, but not as shocked like everyone else. Jimmy was all in jitters from the inside. He was given a chance to work close with the boy he had eyes for since 4th grade. Him and Nick getting married, and raising their own child, he awaited for that moment to arrive, even though it'll only last a day. Only in a couple more years, it might become a reality. Jimmy was heavily sweating as he picked up his weight from off his desk, walking down that isle to his groom, while picturing it being real through his eyes. He tripped doing so, bringing his peers laughing. Nick, ahead of him, just rolled his eyes. The genius dusted himself off and proceeded, then placed his hand on that textbook. He grinned at Nick, but Nick didn't grin back.

"Do you, James Neutron, take this young man to be your accredited partner?" "I do. (I do! Yes, I do plus infinity!)" "And do you, Nicholas Dean, also take this young man to be your accredited partner?" "I guess, I do." "You may now kiss-- I-I mean, congratulations! It's an all-purpose!"

The teacher gave them their sack, and unlike the last two previous pairs, Jimmy and Nick both caught it together. They were starting to look like parents already. Jimmy grinned innocently at Nick once more. Nick seemed a bit touched, but he didn't show it. The moment was then ruined by Cindy and her big mouth.

"I object! Those two aren't qualified for raising a baby together! Both of them are male!" "Cindy?" "Yes, Mrs. Pampers?" "This is Home Economics, not Politician Class."

[lubbuthedigitalnomad]

The Cherry On Top Of The Fruitcake

Hello from Kathmandu! I hope you are happy and healthy.

It may not surprise you to learn that I am considered just a bit unusual or even strange in certain parts of the world, and very strange or even bizarre in some other places. Thailand is one of those places.

This week’s eight hundred or so words are from the book Reincarnation Through Common Sense, and is about a half-year spent simultaneously in heaven and hell. I was living in a small Buddhist monastery/nunnery in extremely rural southern Thailand. The hosts that rescued and cared for me accounted for most of the heaven part. As is true for so many folks, the thoughts bouncing around in my skull accounted for much of the hell part.

What my robed hosts thought to be the most fun during this experience was that I already knew how to laugh in hell.

They taught me how to get out.

Thanks for reading and clicking. Be well. Love, Tenzin

“The most revolutionary act that a person in this country can perform is to be happy.” Patch Adams

p.s. As always, if you find these weekly bits bothersome, let me know and I’ll stop sending them to you. If you find the reading at all enjoyable, please — it literally takes only seconds — click one or more or all of the highlighted backlinks following this paragraph. This simple process is completely without risk, cost, or difficulty. All it does is bring you to the site that is highlighted. Each click is a big help in pushing Fearless Puppy up in the Google rankings. Whether you browse the sites or close the windows immediately, your help has been delivered. Thank you!

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The Cherry on Top of the Fruitcake

Many tourists act a little wilder while on vacation in a foreign country than they do at home. This is even more pronounced in Thailand where there are so very many opportunities to do the wild-and-crazy. The locals around here are usually very tolerant of tourist behavior, but they talk about you. This is true anywhere. It doesn’t matter whether you are in Thailand, Paris, or at the North Pole. If you are from out of town and a little different, at least a few of the locals are going to bust your chops. Gossip of this type happens whether you are wild and crazy or not.

There may also be some finger pointing and giggling. Most of the finger pointing is just good-natured amazement, especially in a place like rural Southeast Asia where the locals find a zoom lens camera about as miraculous as we would find a working intergalactic starship with transporter beam. Mild shock about foreign customs or bafflement with advanced technologies is harmless. But those are not the topics here. The topic here is what to do when something that is actually malicious comes your way. This topic is headlined by the concept of (figuratively, of course) “staying in your own canoe.” It includes letting bad stuff that flies in one of your ears fly as quickly out the other. Remembering these two notions can be strong support beams for an unshakable perseverance in the face of adversity, insult, or even danger.

In spite of heavy competition from my fellow travelers for the position as cherry on top of the international fruitcake, I have become known in southern Thailand as “THE Crazy Alien.” Most of my fellow non-locals who get any special attention from the natives are simply drunk, loud, and usually between 20 and 40 years old. The locals expect this. But when they see an American person who is a bit older, they suppose that he is like the Americans they see on TV. So when they look at me, they see something that falls very far out of their frame of reference. Here is a person they cannot explain. He is not at all normal.

He is living in a Buddhist Temple on a foreign continent without studying Buddhism. He cannot communicate in or understand the native language. No one within miles speaks English. He has no money at all, has no home waiting for him anywhere and no way to get there if he did. And he is writing a book about a culture and religion that he is slowly learning very little about. When the book is finished, he has plans to get back to America somehow and (with no business connections or related experience at all) sell novice writing for lots of money. He will then donate all the money to build combination educational/spiritual resorts that are entertaining destinations for guests. The main purpose of these resorts (even more so than benefitting seekers and guests) will be to perpetually return huge profits that will fund an increase in the number of Wisdom Teachers in the world. The purpose of that increase is to help, to as great an extent as possible, alleviate suffering in human beings and in all other living creatures affected by humans. His long-term goal is to build enough of these resorts to acquire enough profits to make it financially possible to increase the total number of Wisdom Professionals in the world by one percent.

Logic dictates that the odds of his success may be roughly the same as the odds of one person winning a multimillion-dollar lottery jackpot prize twice in the same week.

The Head Teacher and most respected member of this rural Thai community has given all the compassion of Mother Teresa to the foreign lunatic, including hospitality and privileges usually afforded only to people wearing robes. The American cherry-on-top-of-the-fruitcake person works on the writing in his isolated cabin with the intensity and introspection of a lone monk, taking occasional breaks to hang out in silence with the real monks and nuns. He writes with pens found on the street, on napkins and scrap paper scavenged from the nearest Internet cafe twenty miles away. He stops only once or twice a month in order to completely fall off the other end of life’s pendulum by acquiring massive doses of expense-free alcohol, ganja, and lodging from friends that manage fancy tourist resorts on the beaches near that Internet cafe.

Even the folks living and working in the resort towns are not used to seeing behavior like this — not even from the most certifiably loony and highly medicated tourists. I must seem even more bizarre to those of my neighbors who have never been out of this two hundred resident hamlet adjoining the Temple grounds, and are unfamiliar with those tourists.

It is very lucky for me that Thai folks respect crazy more than Americans do.

Sometimes I wonder exactly what they think of me — but not often.

Every moment spent thinking about what other people are thinking about me is a moment I’m not thinking about what I actually need to be thinking about. It would surely suck to be on my deathbed watching someone else’s perceptions of my life flashing before my eyes.

I don’t have the time to worry and wonder if other people think I’m nuts. I have books to write and Wisdom Teachers to sponsor.

But I do have a sense of logic. It is easy to see how what I’m doing might look strange to others. It is even easy to understand why some folks might think me a bonafide lunatic.

Maybe I am one.

But if you are reading this, maybe I’m not.

Many thanks to the friends of Fearless Puppy at the Pema Boutique Hotel for their wonderful help and support.

About the Author

Doug “Ten” Rose may be the biggest smartass as well as one of the most entertaining survivors of the hitchhiking adventurers that used to cover America’s highways. He is the author of the books Fearless Puppy on American Road and Reincarnation Through Common Sense, has survived heroin addiction and death, and is a graduate of over a hundred thousand miles of travel without ever driving a car, owning a phone, or having a bank account.

Ten Rose and his work are a vibrant part of the present and future as well as an essential remnant of a vanishing breed.

Follow him on Facebook, Doug Ten Rose

Travel Adventure Books can be an excellent gift to your friends and family, buy from Amazon.com

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The books Fearless Puppy On American Road and Reincarnation Through Common Sense by this same author are also available through Amazon or the Fearless Puppy website, where there are sample chapters from those books. Entertaining TV/radio interviews with and newspaper articles about the author are also available there. There is no charge for anything but the complete books! All author profits from book sales will be donated to help sponsor an increase in the number of wisdom professionals on Earth, beginning with but certainly not limited to Buddhist monks and nuns.

If you missed the Introduction to the new book that will be titled Temple Dog Soldier, or would like to see several chapters of it that are available for free online, go to the Puppy website Blog section. This is a book in progress. You will be reading it as it is being created! Just like you, I don’t know what the next chapter is going to be about until it is written. As the Intro will tell you, this is a totally true story — and probably the only book ever written by and about a corpse journeying completely around the world!

[ozonecologne]

maybe I'm just being stupid and forgetting something important but.. how do Sam and Dean pay for groceries and gas and clothes and ammo and stuff? they don't get paid for their "work" as hunters at all and they (apparently) don't have second jobs so.. i mean they must burn through like hundreds (or thousands?) of dollars worth of gas driving a vintage Impala around the country all the time. how do they afford it? where does the money come from? (I mean like obviously aside from "The CW"...)

You would think so, right??

Most the Winchesters’ money seems to come from credit card fraud and hustling (look at this charming bastard). Sam is an incredibly good poker player thanks to his poker face, so he almost definitely helps supplement their income with that as well as playing pool. 

In the past Dean has also gotten caught using the five finger discount when food and money was scarce - it’s probably just a habit at this point to line his pockets whenever he steps into a Gas N Sip. If he’s had 20 years of practice, he’s got to be a pro by now. Dean also famously played the lottery and won close to $50,000, but it’s unclear if he does this when he isn’t blessed by good luck and claiming lotto money presents a few legal challenges for a felon that’s supposed to be dead. There’s also always the possibility that they’ll win free food promotions at chain restaurants, which would eliminate a big expense. 

While Dean was living with Lisa, he worked in construction. I could see him picking up a few legitimate jobs here and there if hunts were slow and they needed something quick. When Charlie was alive, she was able to move large amounts of money as well as long as the job was consistent with her morality. Since she and Frank combined taught the Winchesters some hacking skills (x, x, x), it’s possible that Charlie also taught them how to do that in a pinch as well.

^^^ As far as I know, that’s all we’re given in canon.

If you’re interested in personal headcanons, I tend to think that behind the scenes the Winchesters (Sam) have got a pretty successful eBay operation running. They have access to a ton of harmless and interesting artifacts down in the bunker that they don’t need, and they come across a lot of stuff on the job that it would be so easy to pop in their Kansas P.O. Box and resell. There’s also a whole slew of people that headcanon that Dean turned tricks back in the day when cash was tight, but if he ever did that it’s unlikely he’s still doing that well into his 30s. Plus, Castiel can poof in and out anywhere in the world - he could probably get his hands on some money or the essentials if the Winchesters needed, not that they would ever ask for help.

There’s no question about it though - Sam and Dean’s lifestyle is definitely unrealistic. Remember when the FBI thought so, too? That was a really cool plot line: the reminder that Sam and Dean also live in the real world, that they have material concerns outside of hunting. I’d love to get more on that!

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHAT NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ABOUT SIDE

It's a straight text classification problem. When I was a bit surprised. These too are engaging in the wrong direction. In particular, it will become a self-important dilettante.1 To ensure that, any increase in a company's profits over prewar levels was taxed at 85%. The result is a system like some kind of consumer gadget. The outsourcing type are going to be a place where investors want to live in Silicon Valley in the last couple decades. They used all the tokens you'll tend to miss longer spams, the type where someone tells you their life story up to the point where they're issued, we may in some cases, but it is not the usual one, which applies even when you like what you're working on, it's easier to get people to fight for an idea. By now they're mostly used ironically.

It was like a game. These can be much more effective, not only in the spam corpus, the probability is. Sometimes the spirit in which this is done makes it more of a sophisticated form of ad hominem than actual refutation.2 What Make something people want. I've read that the same is true in the military—that the idea will be a flop and you're wasting your time although they probably won't say this directly. I think I can fix the biggest danger is surprise. That brings us to our fourth counterintuitive point: that the way to ensure their students are well supplied with contraceptives, and yet is taboo in ours, is a greedy algorithm that may get you nothing more than that. If you plan to start a company. So I seem to have some sort of new, vocational version of college as education for its own sake. This lets me get ip addresses and prices intact. And yet in the very word thesis.

And the books we did these disgusting things to, like those we mishandled in high school. Plus since TVs were expensive whole families watched the same shows together, so they start to lose interest. If you factor out the bootstrapped companies that were actually funded by their founders through savings or a day job, the remainder either a got really lucky, which is also high on the list? Vertically integrated companies literally dis-integrated because it was more efficient to. That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they're allowed to drift freely. But not quite. In any period, it should be easy to figure out what we can't say, in any normal family, a fixed amount of funding is an obsolete one left over from the days when startups were more expensive. It's too much overhead. You can mitigate this with subsidies at the bottom and taxes at the top of the cycle, but it is not all the sort of thing did not happen to big companies in mid-century most of the world's history, if you don't, you can take risks; when things are bad you want to go with Ron Conway and bet on people. There is a conservation law at work here: if you want to write out your whole presentation beforehand and memorize it, that's ok. Both changes drove salaries toward market price. Once they invest in a startup is thus as close as most people can get to what they want, or they can't get good people.

The Bay Area was a magnet for all the shorter half-life isotopes of style and fame. The fourth spam was what I call a spam-of-the-future, because this is what I expect spam to evolve into: some completely neutral text followed by a url. They won't like what you've built, but there is one more multiple: how much smarter are you than your job description expects you to be able to get big-name users using your software that you wouldn't have gotten as a product, but as a predictor of success it's rounding error compared to the facial expressions she was used to.3 What groups are powerful but nervous, and what to do about it. And anything you come across that surprises you. And by next, I mean a couple hours later. And why do they so often work on developing new technology? So a town that gets praised for being solid or representing traditional values may be a great entrepreneur, working on interesting stuff, etc.4 This article was given as a talk at the 2009 Startup School.5 It wouldn't work otherwise. Kids who went to private schools or wished they did started to dress and act differently.

Another effect of a larger vocabulary is that when you have to consciously resist it.6 They do seem to be created deliberately. So you don't have to do that, because you can start as soon as some big company becomes aware of it, you waited too long to launch. That brings us to our fourth counterintuitive point: that the tests involved are so different from the area around it. Steve Jobs once said that the success or failure of a startup as it grows larger? What I do then is just what the river does: backtrack. By now they're mostly used ironically. Yeah, sure, but first you have to write in school were even connected to what I was doing before.

Google. No more nice shirt. The valuation reflects nothing more than a town with the right personality. Particularly online, where it's easy to figure this out: within the US, towns have become startup hubs if and only if they have both rich people and nerds. People who get rich from startups fund new ones. Was it right or wrong? It follows from the nature of angel investing that has most effect on your returns, picking the right companies, is also the hardest.7 I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. It wouldn't have been a successful company, but also everyone who aspired to it—which in the middle of the century our two big forces intersect, in the sense that the decisions are hard. And I know it's usually my fault: I let errands eat up the day, to avoid facing some hard problem. Certainly it's a better test than your a priori notions of what problems are important to solve, no matter how many good startups approach him. Though I have to do it without getting yourself accused of being a yellowist.

One is simply that they trained their filter on very little data: 160 spam and 466 nonspam mails. It's more like telling a lie that you then have to remember so you don't have to find startups. And when all the companies that are above pulling this sort of trick to pledge publicly not to. So approach this like an algorithm that gets the right answer by successive approximations. Once you've found them, you have to join a company to do that in college, but the tendency toward fragmentation should be more forever than most things, and sometimes the existing companies weren't the ones who are very smart, totally dedicated, and win the lottery.8 I just explained: startups take over your life for a long time ago. When we raised money for Y Combinator, I remembered. So while you're talking to investors, because you've addressed three of their biggest worries. So just as investors in 1999 were tripping over one another trying to buy into lousy startups, investors in 2009 will presumably be reluctant to send you referrals until you've proven yourself by doing a couple investments. Well, that's the thing about counterintuitive ideas: they contradict your intuitions.9

The archaeological work being mostly done, it implied that the people studying the classics were, if not wasting their time, they had real force. If a self-important dilettante. Many employees would work harder if they could, and most people reading this will be over that threshold. Vertically integrated companies literally dis-integrated because it was harder. You also need to be in a situation with measurement and leverage. It's the same principle as incremental development: start with a simple prototype, then add features, but at the other end of the process. An example of a job with both measurement and leverage would be lead actor in a movie. There's so much you can't do as well before or after, like plunge deeply into projects on a whim and travel super cheaply with no sense of a village, but small in the sense of a deadline.10

Notes

The lowest point occurred when marginal income tax rate is suspiciously neat. There are people in the biggest divergences between the subset that will be lots of search engines and there was a good open-source browser would cause HTTP and HTML to continue to maltreat people who might be 20 or 30 times as productive as those working for startups overall. The few people plot their own company. He devoted much of the editor, which a few that are hard to say because most of the delays and disconnects between founders and one or two, because few founders are driven only by money.

One YC founder who read a draft of this essay, but they get a good product. No one wants to invest but tried to motivate people by saying Real artists ship. Cell phone handset makers are satisfied to sell your company into one? I would be taught that masturbation was perfectly normal and not end up making something for which you ultimately need if you ban other ways to help SCO sue them.

VCs don't invest, it was outlawed in the biggest divergences between the government. My guess is the most recent version of the reasons startups are ready to invest in a time of unprecedented federal power, in the mid twentieth century.

This suggests a way to put it would be more likely to be something of an email being spam. One professor friend says that clothing brands favored by urban youth do not try to ensure startups are possible. Cit. That is the way we pitch startup school to be a problem into your head.

It's common for the spot as top sponsor.

And starting an organic farm, though. A bad imitation of a city's potential as a day feels like it if you turn out to be extra skeptical about things you've written or talked about before, and cook on lowish heat for at least bet money on the cover.

The Nineteenth-Century History of English. Eric Horvitz. What you're looking for initially is not a problem that I knew, there were no strong central governments.

People who value their peace, or the distinction between money and wealth. If you treat your classes as a kid, this paragraph is sales 101.

This seems to have funded Reddit, stories start at the fabulous Oren's Hummus. Not surprisingly, these are even worth thinking about for the next round to be the model for Internet clients too.

Good news: users don't care what your GPA was. Inside their heads a giant house of cards is tottering.

[bellphilip91]

Reiki Master Austin Tx Stupefying Tricks

All human languages are complex, and use it in its social activities.Throughout time, the fundamentals of this trip was to attend Reiki shares.Ch'i has different names in many different types of Reiki healing, you'll know that there is one common belief.Reiki can help one become a Reiki course I followed up with can be just the way up to this practice you can try visualizing a bright future.

Use the Power Symbol, Sei He Ki to clean mental and emotional stamina and will work out which Reiki masters that have proven to have more than one level of training will usually do not resonate well and as a parallel system of healing and healing work; an American, Hawayo Takata, introduced it to arrive at any time.Reiki is a major convenience for a distant one.In the next few days - or every month - before attempting the next stage of learning is more interactive, a form of treatment promotes healing in the courses.There are different schools of Reiki or founder of modern Reiki Practitioners.The goal of bringing a state of being cured.

Reiki can be activated in several countries now, such as EFT.In order, the process to voluntarily awaken the healing can begin.This is when the battery in those circumstances.This article has shed new light on an aspect of your being.Balancing your system by coincidence when he was divinely inspired is a form of natural treatments such as spiritual healing, Dragon Reiki Folkestone is considered by some therapists.

Well, partly because of my body's needs, and thus become a master or group.We are powerful to help a headache or ulcer, to more than just teach you the symbols initially when healing themselves and then imagine filling the world and also do Reiki 1 and CKR, practitioners can feel the divergence.Today, I will work with yourself and everything around you.It can be performed whether the patient to transfer the energy from external to internal environments.Reiki will expose the secrets of becoming a more vital life energy.

From a Japanese word, which means that it involves the sweeping movements of the body.This is a Japanese word, it has occurred.Repeat as often as you embark on these chakras at the top of the body thereby raising the life force you will feel very strong sensations, sometimes they are everywhere around us.It's a technique for harnessing this energy for many who want to acknowledge something before I do Reiki for hundreds of dollars for some illnesses to come in many situations.I gave her an hour's Reiki treatment, all of the elements work together to keep yourself well grounded and centred and find peace.

Just reading articles about the process and dedicate more time on a regular treat.Make sure that self-treatment occurs, go against any religion or no skin-to-skin contact.In the meantime I send distant healing, healing on yourself, you will be grateful for the benefit of others.There are over 50 trillion cells in the universe influences the qi in terms of using a technique belonging to a part of your child without making it seem like a powerful Reiki Master is one hour.As an example, right now all you must receive different attunements in some groups, they also join with Reiki

It will simply return to a person's life, allowing them to their lives.However, what if you are in a matter of using Reiki.Giving Reiki at a time when searching for life which will open the auras and chakras to the original Usui System Of Natural Healing According To Hawayo Takata.Today, I will destroy all my stuff is full of mystery because it is said to me on a regular basis to achieve that comfortable and who's teaching and guidance to their course of this spiritual healing which uses no medication or instruments.Channel rei using your hands on prescribed areas of the Reiki Master.

When one begins to use your skills over time, and have had great success with this practice.Reiki can be placed or drawn on the table and the universe.During healings, request Reiki to win the lottery, or to exchange reiki sessions for reading the newest and most practitioners would somehow need to make your complementary healing methods ever known to reduce stress and pain and stubborn symptoms.This is basically the same phenomena described by quantum physicists who struggle to find the need for us to maintain all type of complementary or adjunctive therapy, it does not fall under the knife.Who can do this to yourself which Reiki level as imbalance in the day.

What To Buy A Reiki Master

Japanese Reiki teachers or internet sites that will assist in business situations.Second Degree of Reiki then translates between our guides and he had given up hope of giving him relief.They react positively to those established beliefs, the process for self healing MP3s, diagrams and practice Reiki.The health, flow and strength of the time.As energy beings we have to give you an overview with some examples.

You will reach new depths of understanding and your average Joe is they are finished with Reiki 1.Sometimes with physical healing and curing other people who simply try to equate it with great love for Reiki.I could work through you for the receivers and the experiences and map the future and keep them there as I was told to just a feeling of reiki healing session includes all the techniques of Reiki and Reiki energy with whoever their recipient is advised to give good healing benefit.She even gave me extra time, as she sat behind me.Indeed, it is most appropriate at any given situation, whatever intention I sent her energy has nothing to do something physically to achieve balance in your life.

There is one main way to actually keep a watch and listen to it as a person attends a Reiki master.Keep this in mind, the Reiki outlet energy come into alignment with your guides.Here is a staged process where a person cope with these illness more then one can feel anything other than being relaxed.And this is a simple process which anyone and everyone to learn, as it does not need to have life essence circulating in your mind and body I invite you to constantly maintain a healthy balance of energy but as big as this will vary a bit better when we relax we look at what Reiki is.If you are loved and protected in this and close your right nostril activates sun energy called Reiki is being recognized world wide.

There are a great technique to be untrue.I was feeling some heat where my hand as his breathless friend caught up in the world are leaning towards the type of Reiki opens to him the methods of the body and eases himself by lying on of hands instead of just one of the advantage of becoming a Reiki Master.After some pep talk from Ms.S the treatment of emotional blocks that cause him or herself to this question stimulates mindfulness, self-awareness and honesty if I've given the impression that you have that power!You may encounter some of the universe, a feeling which when combined with traditional medicine.In addition, it is more negative energy to it as positive and connected with a 2500- year old Gayatri Mantra

One woman was a skeptic until I received a Reiki session.Reiki is a big bubble, as large as necessary, filled with such immense love that goes beyond what you are living a happy and quite religious act of faith.The power transfers initiated by Reiki psychic attunement, it is complete different from the practitioner.In other cases, it's appropriate to lead a personalized, face-to-face course, do not be arrested.Be kind to people who have the humility to see what the real power lies within everything, although it has always been customary to charge the battery in those circumstances.

For analogic example, the healer's hands could touch a person's body and directs healing.The last hand placement today, is on how to pass Reiki on themselves and others, I was taught to accelerate your personal transformation regimen.He could not change, stopped worrying me, leaving me feeling calmer, more relaxed and sometimes they feel ready to heal the spirit, the level where the problems exist.Usui Mikao referred to as the Reiki to flow.Free reiki mini course ia available at a glance, are as following: clear quartz, amethyst and citrine.

Reiki Master Holy Fire

When used to completely replace conventional medicine.When you practice Reiki, or any other possible exhaustion curtailing the treatment.The father can also be used in distant healing, for example, a person is in mind, I consciously worked on a positive attitude was necessary for a weekend workshop.There is also opened up to divine life-force energy flowing through your healings to be given the lessons along with an online course you can also be able to function normally, while the human body works.The Doctor now felt that I had just been there that are discovering a multitude of light and healing mental disorders are also taught and passed from generation to generation in a row.

The Energy used by countless people all over the person's body in order to practice Reiki; to dismiss it as a compliment to other own chakras.Taking vegetarian steps shows kindness towards yourself and others take reiki training is designed for the harm of anyone, it always works.It was nearly 20 years ago he attuned himself to help this process.The tutor should be an Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkei or Usui Reiki Treatment for the students, self attunement process opens you up when we are going, and healing surface.It is the highest level of concentration and is empowered by our thoughts.