#It’s for my blog structure

[courtingchaos]

Tryouts

Bully Masterlist

Summary: Lucas and Max have a conversation without having one; end of summer signups begin.

Word Count: 1.7K

Warnings: None

A/N: I was gonna be corny here and talk about the long lead up but like, no one else has been anticipating me posting this the way I have. I’ve been on the edge of my own seat waiting and the muse finally came back from the corner store, surprisingly with the cigarettes she promised. This is a prelude of sorts, a small snippet of life outside of the main story. Expect more of these as it progresses, everyone is up to something.

No Explicit Content but 18+ No Minors

“Wait so you’re gonna actually try out for soccer?��� Lucas stops walking out of shock while Max just keeps across the parking lot towards the arcade.

“It isn’t so much a ‘try out’ as it is ‘show up and be interested’.” She stops to wait for a car and shoots her boyfriend a look over her shoulder. “So don’t get too excited, they’ll take literally anyone.”

“Hey! I’ll be excited anyways!” He catches up to her at the door, shooting his arm around her to cut her off from grabbing it for herself. Lucas sees the eye roll and chooses to ignore it. “We can be like, an athlete couple.”

“Oh my god.”

“We could trade Lettermans.”

She tries to hide it but he can see her grin that she pulls off to the side of her face. “Sick. You’re sick Sinclair.”

“Oh come on, you know you want to.”

Max stops at the token machine to dig out her wad of dollar bills. “I don’t even know if I want to play! I’m just…looking for something to get me out of the house.”

Lucas leans on the top of the machine to singsong at her. “There’s always a seat at the table.” He wiggles his eyebrows and she hates that she laughs.

“In Wheeler’s fart infested basement? I don’t think so.” She scoops the tokens out to hand them to Lucas, her own personal coin purse while she keeps her high score for the afternoon. “He doesn’t make El do it so why should I be forced to play?”

“He doesn’t force her and plus, they aren’t talking right now.”

“What?” She whips her head to look at him. “She didn’t tell me anything!”

Lucas gives her a side eye before walking away towards the Dig Dug machine and Max follows him close, hands pulling at his shoulders to get him to stop moving, and when he doesn’t, fingers dig into his side to try and tickle it out of him.

“Tell me! What happened!” If this was anyone else she might consider this bullying with the way she pulls at the hem of his shirt and shakes his whole body when all he gives her for an answer is a laugh at her pretend annoyance. It isn’t until she manages to get a leg up off the stool and onto his back that he threatens to drop her tokens.

“If I get off you, you’ll tell me?” She asks him directly in his ear so he winces away with a chuckle.

“If you get off me I won’t drop your coins.”

Lucas hands her two tokens when she puts both feet on the ground and nods his head at the arcade. A silent standoff for a moment before Max gives up with a heavy sigh, sitting down when the tune jingles behind the screen.

“Okay, this morning Mike called to hang out and I told him we were gonna be busy but he could tag along if he wanted to.”

“Why do you do that?”

Lucas ignores her. “But he said he didn’t want to be around you because you were probably gonna make fun of him all day and if he wanted that, he’d just go over to El’s.”

“So they had another fight?”

“I guess? It sounds like she was teasing him about being in the basement all summer with his Nintendo and he blew up.”

Max frowns at the screen. “Did he say that? I don’t think I’ve ever heard him own up to a damn thing.”

“Surprisingly, yeah. He said that Hopper came in and told him to get the hell out if he was gonna yell like that.”

“He got yelled at by dad? No thank you.” She shakes her head a little to stop the memory of last night from resurfacing and of course Lucas catches it. Try as she might to keep her family stuff firmly behind the front door of their home, it’s been sneaking out lately and waving at anyone who pays attention, Lucas in particular.

“You okay?”

Her eyebrows knit before she can stop it but she’s focused on the game, fingers tapping on the thick buttons. If she doesn’t respond then maybe Lucas will shrug it off and keep telling her about Mike having a tantrum. Maybe he’ll tell her about the Fighter he built for her and try for the hundredth time this summer to get her to play the dumb dice game. Or maybe he’ll double down and bring up her brother’s black eye.

“I saw Billy peeling out earlier.”

There it is, she thinks to herself and holds back the eye roll. “So did half the neighbors. He likes the attention.”

“He stopped long enough to flip me the bird.” He laughs like it’s normal.

“Yeah?” The game means nothing now. Her fingers slap at the cabinet and Lucas just keeps looking at her with pity. “Well don’t feel bad for him, he should know when to shut up.” She acknowledges it but won’t name it, especially when she was there for its christening. Voices that raised over her headphones, the splintering of a mistreated door being kicked in for the twentieth time and a loud smack of knuckles before it’d gone silent. “He pushes Neil for fun.”

Lucas stares at her like everyone else has that’s ever seen her stepdad go off on his kid.

Max feels the lump crawling fast up her throat so she swallows to keep it tucked below her ribs where it can settle until later. “Lucas…” His name comes out soft on the end of a heavy sigh. She doesn’t really have anything to say, nothing she wants to admit to him right now, at least not while the sun is shining.

To his credit he looks uncomfortable in the face of her minor slip but it’s gone as soon as she notices it. “You’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”

Talking without talking. It’s like their special ability, their mutant powers, not quite mind reading but close. He asks her the obvious question without using the words so she isn’t embarrassed. So others don’t overhear.

She really thinks about it. Tries to remember a time that Neil had ever directed that temper at her and comes up with a blank. It’s always anger by association, always behind Billy when the blame rolls in no matter how loud she’d get about her part in the issue. That had only happened once and her mother had swiftly pulled her out of the room and into the car and they’d gone to the mall for most of the day. Max thinks about all the times she’s come home to a new bruise on Billy or another broken dish in the trash. She thinks about how Lucas has never seen the inside of her house but she’s been all over his, every nook and even through the attic, even through Mrs. Sinclair’s garden.

“Yeah.”

The game jingles at her in a mocking defeat but the wasted tokens don’t matter. She stares at Lucas who does his best to wait for her, his hands shoved far into his shorts pockets until she makes the slightest move for him and he wraps her in a hug, tight and lighting quick. Thankfully it’s lunch time and thankfully the attendant today has wandered off and thankfully it’s just them in the arcade with all its trills and beeps. Cabinet screens flash around them and all that matters is the hug and the quietly whispered “I’m sorry” that Lucas presses into the top of her head.

Lucas agreed to meet Max at the field ten minuets after her drop off time to avoid anymore general jackassery from Billy, but when he’d folded himself out of the backseat of Steve’s car he’d had to brace himself. The Camaro sat idling on the far side of the field with its owner leaning on the hood, a brunette vying for his attention next to him, but no redhead in sight.

“You okay?” Steve asks while pointedly staring at Billy across the field.

“Yeah I’m…he won’t do anything here.”

There’s the trill of whistles and Robin is shooting out of the passenger seat, cursing and slamming her foot into a cleat. “I told you we were gonna be late!” She screeches at Steve as she barrels down the small slope with her bag swinging wildly from her shoulder. She waves both hands at the coach and yells something about traffic and that’s when Dustin gets out of the car finally, his finger pointed to the middle of the group of girls.

“There she is.”

Red hair shines bright in the early morning sun and Lucas can’t help the smile that grows wide. Beside him Dustin nudges him, says something about googly eyes and makes his horrible whip sound but Lucas tunes him out. Max is tucked into herself until Robin pushes her way over and a smile appears, a laugh too when she points up to the three of them on the hill and she grabs Max’s hand to flop it at them in a crude wave.

Dustin waves back with the folded up signup sheet and he elbows Lucas again. “See man? Nothing to worry about.”

“I know. I just—“

“Worry?”

“Shut up.” It’s good natured. Dustin laughs and asks him again if he filled out the papers, if he brought his character sheet and it isn’t until Steve whistles at them and points to the school parking lot that Dustin finally cuts it out. A van has rumbled in and before it can park, a shaggy head pops out and looks around before throwing his hands up and yelling.

“Henderson!”

Dustin takes off, calling Lucas with him over his shoulder to follow, but Lucas hangs back for a minute. He watches Max whispering with Robin, can see her easing up. The smile hasn’t left her face, just faded into the conversation as she nods her head along to something said to her. Beside him Steve sighs when the horn on the van goes off three times in quick succession and Lucas looks over to see Dustin giving him a pointed, annoyed look.

“I’d go over there before he pisses Munson off.” Steve seems to be watching Lucas struggle to leave and he taps him on the arm to assure him. “I’ll keep an eye on her, okay? I promise I won’t let anything happen.”

“Thanks man.”

[nipuni]

I FINALLY GOT MY INVISALIGN REMOVED 🙌 I've had it for almost two years aaaaa I have straight teeth at last!! I'm so happy they really did wonders for my occlusion, it changed my whole lower face it's wild!!

[garr9988]

I'm certain someone's already had these thoughts and posted them somewhere, but I recently got to thinking about how, in an alternate plane of existence, there are eldritch tentacle beings with a serious fetish for vertebrates and digits.

They're imagining the firm strength of arms, the multitude of fingers. The dexterity of a handful of phalanges, the rigidity of the bones inside the yielding squishiness of flesh, like steel rods inside sponges. The way arms and hands can squeeze.

Getting flustered as they imagine their tendrils intertwining and curling between a handful of fingers like ivy over a trellis.

The stinging stripes of scratches from hard keratinous nails as opposed to the bruising mini-vacuums of suction cups.

You know they get tattoos of dozens of overlapping, intertwining hands or long, visceral scratch marks down their tentacles.

Not to mention the fact that vertebrates can have hands and feet. Variety!

[suckinitup]

actually i dont think he'd look at void like that but its too late so picture emizel instead . meow and everything

[why-the-heck-not]

2nd batch of sourdough! Lots better than the first, actually got some crumb structure this time (bc the starter is finally ready for bread)

[lebanesetoaster]

the common fanon is that they met over the eight dead bodies of agatha's original coven. and it makes as much sense as anything else

I know this wasn't a prompt but. I'm feeling fic-ish after all the unfinished questions. I'm not fact checking anything against canon, buckle up and come along for the ride if you please. How did they meet.

Agatha is reeling. She's sobbing. She feels like she can't pull enough fresh air into her chest. She's on her knees, surrounded by the mummified corpses of her coven. Of her mother. Of the only family she has ever known. The only thing she can see through her tears is purple light. It's cracking around her, popping and sparking and warm against the cool New England night.

And when she lifts her head, there's a soft green glow in the distance. She blinks once, twice, and her vision goes from purple to green, with a face alarmingly close, wide eyes peering at her curiously. Surrounded by calm green light, she can finally pull in a full breath of the cool night air, and another, and another. And suddenly, she's breathing rather than sobbing. And the dark eyes are still on her, brow furrowed in concern.

Moments pass, maybe seconds, maybe hours, with both of them breathing in unison. Just... breathing. Remembering how to breathe. Learning, perhaps. For a moment, she thought she might have forgotten how. But it's coming back to her. She's coming back to herself.

The purple has calmed too. It's dancing quietly along her fingertips now. Her vision is clearing. The woman's eyes are still on her.

Agatha knows all the women in town. This one is different. Unfamiliar. Clothes of moss and bark that almost appear to be growing from soft flesh. The woman tilts her head curiously, and Agatha mirrors the gesture. "Who are you," falls, unbidden, from her lips.

The woman startles, as if crashing back to reality, the soft calm in her eyes giving way to something else, something, for a moment, almost skittish, as her gaze flicks to the bodies. But Agatha shivers, and sways, exhaustion catching up to her. How long have they been here?

All at once, the ground seems to be rushing up to meet her, but not as quick as the woman. Her landing is soft.

[airenyah]

pics for better view:

(source)

pics for better view:

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pics for better view:

(source)

Joong talking about the moodboard tweets when a fan asked in his Twitter Space on August 3rd, 2024:

TRANSCRIPT (as far as I can make out the words)

*italics indicate a translation

Fan: Your tweet last night. (giggles continuously) Joong: Yep. Ah, it's about... [unintelligible] something? Buddy, did you see that? Buddy, did you see; did you see that? Dunk: I did. Joong: Super funny. Fan: You searched it from... Joong: Yeah. Fan: You searched it from Pinterest? (laughs) Or... well. Joong: It's actually, it comes from so many places like Pinterest, Canva, and my gallery already. I have [unintelligible]. Fan: (laughs) And Dunk, what do you think about that? Of what Joong tweeted. Dunk: Is it though? (everyone laughs) Fan: Or maybe another reaction? Or... yes, it... Yes.. it... Dunk: (pause) Could be for now. Could be, could be. (Joong and the fan giggle) Fan: Okay. Okay. Maybe... maybe yes, it's for me. 'Cause I'm still shaking right now, I can't imagine anything... anything else. Thank you so much. Joong: Thank you so much. Dunk: Thank you. Joong: Thank you.

(source)

[tagidearte]

There's something special about Moon being the only side of the DCA who has canonically (gameverse) voiced his counterpart's name ("No more Sun", which yes it's not him directly saying Sun's name since it's a figure of speech, but still) whereas Sun - the chatterbox - only refers to Moon via "he" or "other me". Moon, the quiet one who mostly laughs vs Sun who mostly uses words. Sun, who is scared of Moon, never utters his name whereas Moon clearly has no problem with it. Both of them using "we☀️/us🌙" prior to Eclipse. Moon, whose only opinion of Sun we can infer is "the other me trapped me in light so now I trap him in shadow", vs Sun's whole thing which is profoundly more fleshed out.

I don't know man, the "no more Sun" line always did things to me. I remember playing Ruin for the first time and getting this... jarring emotion when I heard Moon saying that. It's such a small line but good god did I latch onto it.

[right-agent]

me with. wilson

[angeltannis]

The fact that Symmetra’s seemingly only childhood friend was a boy she fundamentally disagreed with everything about and disliked pretty much everything that he stood for - and that it was exactly the same for him - is so so so funny to me. Unlikeable neurodivergent bitches gotta stick together

[messiahzzz]

the gale masterlist

(please read before interacting with me!)

last update: 05/09/2024

meta/write-ups:

approval bug & media literacy

relationship with mystra

gale (& wyll's) approach to romance

gale’s daydreams

“it was fine” and emotional incompatibility

gale’s sexual preferences and kinks

gale being a target of constant ridicule / part II

nettie poisoning the player

godhood and the loss of self / part II

grooming and overall timeline / the definition of grooming

does gale have bpd + his general alignment

orb volatility & intimacy

big mystra post

gale's flaws and needs

disk horse:

not being father material / part II // the finale

the IGN article™

drow foursome and coercion

sillies:

eff them kids

professor dekarios & his spouse

idle champions tidbits

terms of endearment

other:

illithid ending

on gale’s age / part II

combat lines

cut epilogue content

datamined additional kisses

a thousand times

gale's bisexuality

briefly touching on gale's moral compass

morena dekarios headcanons

the desire to live

[yergink]

ed throws out his leathers because the night before was the last straw. no more near-death experiences. no more watching your lover be tortured. no more strangers with grudges happening upon you in an hour of joy. no more killing. no more watching the man you love destroy himself by killing. he's tired. he's done. he wants to take it slow. he wants breakfasts in bed and chaste kisses in the moonlight and learning how to sit with himself. he wants safety, for him and stede, because it's becoming too much (it's been too much for a while now), and it was different when it was just him, when the only life he needed to concern himself with was his, which he didn't care too much about anyway, but his heart is bleeding now.

but the man he loves isn't at that same point, he's just starting, he's just gotten a taste of infamy, and ed knows what it feels like but he also knows that the high comes with a crash, and what's he meant to do? he's scared. he's just coming to terms with the fact that he wants to live, to chase the quiet, boring ideal of a normal life, but stede killed a man for the first time last night and didn't talk about it, and ed's been there, he knows what it's like, but stede wouldn't talk about it, and they made love, and maybe that was a comfort in substitute, but what now?

ed's heart is bleeding, and he can't keep being asked to stay in this limbo, in a shadow of his name, and he can't keep being asked to see stede in these situations. it hurts in a way that's different, raw, and he throws out his leathers but he still doesn't know who he is, doesn't know how to piece together the things he wants into a cohesive whole, and seeing stede settling into this new version of himself, becoming something closer to what ed is trying desperately to shed, the parts of himself he hated, it hurts. and he's thinking maybe he won't be able to have everything he wants. he throws out the leathers and it feels good, and maybe that has to be enough.

[haru-dipthong]

Humans are like tape recorders.

To all language learners out there drilling grammar structures (and vocab to a lesser extent), I have some bad news. No matter how much you rote learn or memorise, you can’t say something* in a language if you haven’t already heard it said by someone else, many times.

In order for you to say something, you must have recorded it in your brain first.

The reason for this is twofold.

If you haven’t seen or heard something actually used, how are you meant to know how it’s used!? Gonna go out on a limb and say not many people here are able to speak Pirahã. How would you say “I just drank some water” in Pirahã? You don’t know, right? Because you’ve never heard it said! In this respect, a language that you can’t speak at all is no different from a language that you can speak a bit, or even a language you’re fluent in.

Memorising stuff out of a textbook or flash cards is not sufficient to count as “hearing something many times”. It’ll give you some examples, but not enough (especially if what you’re memorising is the grammar structure itself, and not example sentences). Your conscious thought processes (which includes looking things up in long term memory) are simply too slow to be effective if they need to be used more than once every few seconds during conversation. Rote memorisation works at the conscious thought level, and is therefore only useful as a supplemental tool. Hearing something actually spoken (many times) internalises it on the subconscious level, which is what is needed for fluid speech and comprehension.

*That’s not to say that it’s impossible to ever say anything original. When I say you need to hear something before being able to use it correctly yourself, I mean you need to hear sentence structures and words, not necessarily whole sentences like a script.

Our brains are very, very efficient at acquiring language, provided we give them a non-stop stream of data to record (this is how babies learn - they don’t need textbooks). Then, the brain can cut up the tapes, analyse patterns, paste separate tapes together, and allow us to speak in our target language without manually recalling from memory.

What does this mean for you, the language learner? Put down the textbook and watch as much content in your target language as possible. Use the textbook/dictionary to help you look up something you’ve heard if you can’t figure something out from context, but that’s all it should be used for. Watch youtube, kids shows, regular tv, news, podcasts, anything you can find. And never use subtitles in your native language! Your brain will turn off the tape recorder automatically if it sees an easier way it can parse the information.

In this video, Matt (from the youtube channel Matt vs Japan) says the following, which I have translated to English:

こういうアドバイスする時に一番反論として出てくるのが 「でも観てもわからない！」 だから 「できない」 っていうんだけど、わからないからこそ観るべきだよね --- When I give the advice [to go hard on consuming input], the biggest counterargument people have is “When I watch it, I can’t understand what they’re saying! So it doesn’t work.” but it's actually the opposite: you don’t understand it, therefore you need to watch it!

The reason you should watch it is you don't understand it! You can’t understand it until your brain has recorded it!

[swinging-stars-from-satellites]

frickin shite that was the worst small group I've ever been to in my life

[toytulini]

me, stupidly and weirdly resistant to listening to audio books vs reading a physical book for no real reason: man i wish there was a way to like, read a book while i crochet like i do with tv shows and movies and podcasts

[agerefandom]

only seen s1 of the TV show but my iwtv friends have dubbed me Claudia Understander for my revolutionary thoughts on transfem claudia. anyway! not the point. agere related thoughts. if they suck then blame the fact that I've only seen s1 so far

i get the feeling that claudia both adores and hates the idea of regression. even though in hindsight she sees that louis and lestat didn't really see her as a person of her own at that point, those years of playing house together were at the time so uncomplicatedly joyful that there's part of her that yearns for that easy happiness. but then, she's so infantilised against her will, both by everyone around her and her unchanging body. she'd hate feeling like a child, acting like a child. even for the joy it gives her

that would only get worse with anyone else around, too. if she did regress, it would be alone.

anyway this isn't even a request im just rambling. i love her. she's basically gang with abigail hobbs to me (<- guy who has been spoiled on Claudia's eventual fate)

- @sleepy-lil-kit-kat (rare me signing things moment)

YES I have many thoughts about Claudia and regression; most of them are about book Claudia because FIVE YEARS OLD is so very different from fourteen -- but I do completely understand and respect the need to age her up for the tv show.

For Claudia, I'm super interested in the idea of involuntary regression, because... how frustrating would it be to be stuck in this infantalized state, and now your own brain is "teaming up" with the world to deny you your adult mind? Making you younger than your body, even? The resulting endless simmering resentment: partially for Louis and Lestat, partially for herself.

And yes, keeping it hidden from both of her 'father figures' because she fights so hard for either of them to take her seriously, and she would be so scared that it would undo all of her work. It's almost worse for her to think that Louis might enjoy it, as the rift between them widens: that he would appreciate the chance to have his daughter back, no matter how fleeting. That daughter that's too young to resent him, too young to have her own thoughts and opinions. Once again, regression and resentment just tangled up in each other. She wants Louis to take care of her, but she doesn't want him to want to take care of her. How can she let herself feel those contradicting emotions without guilt?

I also have season 2 opinions about Claudia as a caregiver so let me know when you watch it for sure >:)