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worldwidebt7 · 5 years ago

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Hell(L)ing || 03

§ — Pairing: Chimera!Taehyung x Empath!Reader (with mentions of Reader x Other Members)

§ — Genre: SciFi AU, fluff, angst, smut, horror

§ — Wordcount: 4,456

§ — Rating: M

§ — Warnings: None yet~

§ — A/N: Reader and Namjoon get formally introduced to Taehyung! Though he doesn’t really make the best first impression…. But he still cute af! Thank you so much for all your feedback so far guys! I hope you’re enjoying the story!

Summary: You moved out into the wilderness to live a calm, peaceful life. Your abilities made it impossible to live in crowded places, so even if you wanted to you couldn’t return. But when something happens outside the realm of even your normalcy, you start to think that maybe having everyone else’s emotions bearing down on you isn’t such a bad alternative to being trapped with your own.

Before you knew it, you were preparing a light lunch for when Namjoon arrived for your book meeting on Monday, the previous nights’ events pushed aside, but not forgotten. When you had woken up Sunday morning, Yoongi was still soundly sleeping on your couch, face pressed into the back cushions and hands wedged between his knees. You had smiled fondly at the scene, nostalgia flashing images of his past sleeping habits like a slideshow in your mind. Somehow, you were perfectly content with being his friend— now at least, the first two years after the breakup had been filled with sad one-sided longing to be embraced by him.

You only lingered in the living room for a few moments before passing through to the kitchen, starting a pot of coffee immediately, knowing that the man on the couch would be in need of it when he finally woke. It wasn’t long after the brewing process started that the half-asleep zombie staggered into the kitchen in search of the dark liquid. You laughed when he walked directly into the kitchen island before sliding into one of the bar chairs at the counter. He never brought up the incident, nor did he comment on your disheveled appearance, ever the gentleman. You fed him a simple breakfast of cereal, and allowed him to drink more than half your pot of coffee before he slinked home, looking only a little more alive than he had when he first emerged.

The rest of the day had been just as unproductive as the last and you were significantly more relaxed than you thought you’d be, though you had gone to bed with all of the lights on in your house once more. Now you were making bibimbap and bulgogi for Namjoon’s arrival Monday morning as you struggled to keep the eerie feeling of being watched from creeping under your skin.

Cooking for Namjoon had quickly been established as tradition for your meetings. The first time you did it, it was due to the fact that the two of you were meeting at your house at dinner time and Namjoon had confessed to not having eaten. Instead of ordering takeout, you quickly whipped something up for the two of you and discussed the manuscript of your book over tteokbokki. He complimented your cooking to the point that you had unknowingly agreed to cook for him each time he visited, not that you particularly minded preparing food, you just weren’t sure how it had gotten to that point. It was nice, though, to share a meal with someone; especially someone as intelligent and handsome as your editor.

The rice for the bibimbap was just about done when you felt the familiar tingle of another person’s presence enter your perimeter, and judging by the inquisitive yet poetic nature of the emotions connected to this individual, you could only assume that it was Namjoon. Soon, a knock came at your front door and you called out, letting him know that the door was unlocked and that he may enter.

“Y/N?” He called, closing the door behind him. You leaned over the kitchen island, hands wet from washing lettuce, and beckoned him into the kitchen. You saw his form appear, clad in a tan trench-style coat, white button-down, black slacks, and think-rimmed glasses. He had a laptop bad slung over his shoulder, obviously containing his electronic device as well as several other packets of paper if you had to guess by the size.

“I’m just finishing up preparing lunch,” You hummed, happy that your company has finally arrived and you were no longer alone with your thoughts. The tall man placed his bag on the quarts surface and shuffled out of his coat— one that he clearly did not need as it was still early September and still clinging to the warmth of summer. He draped it over the back of one of the pub stools at the island and propped himself on his forearms against the counter, peering at the food being fixed.

“Smells good,” He mused, a pleased warmth spreading through your body and letting you know that he was happy with the cuisine he saw. You were suddenly then hit by the sharp pang of hunger he sent your way. Normally, you’d think nothing of it considering hunger is one of the most common things you experience from other people. However, this time it instantly brought you back to the faint, yet no less potent reading you received from the creature outside your house two evenings ago— its hunger crawled under your skin like an army of insects marching in every direction, the detached curiosity only making it more violent.

The ceramic cup you had pulled from the cabinet to offer Namjoon a drink with slipped from your hand, shaken by the memory, and it shatters on the floor, startling both you and your editor. You stare at the once beautiful cup before turning to Namjoon, who’s eyes were large and alarmed, with an embarrassed grin. You could feel the concern and fright spiking from the man in front of you, but most notably there was confusion.

“What happened? Are you okay?” You stepped back from the pile of shards on your floor with a small smile— Namjoon was a genuine person; caring, intelligent, lyrical, and even if you weren’t empathic, you feel as though you’d have no problem understanding him and his emotions. He made everything apparent in his words and actions.

“I’m okay,” You replied, slipping out of the kitchen quickly and retrieving your broom and dust pan before scurrying back to the mess you’d created. “Wet hands.” You gave a light laugh, trying to explain away your upset.

Your editor didn’t know about your empathic abilities, and you really didn’t feel the need to tell him. In a sense, it was nice having someone that didn’t have expectations of having their emotions perceived by an outside source, which, if you thought about it, was rather invasive and you could understand how it might make people uncomfortable. While you considered Namjoon a friend, he was also your editor, so it was less about you trusting him, and more about keeping your relationship on a more professional spectrum.

As you began sweeping, the kind man straightened completely and attempted to round the island.

“Do you want some help?” His inquire has you shaking your head and pleasantly grinning at him.

“No, it’s fine, I got it. Sorry about this,” you swept the fragments into a small pile and collected it in the dustpan before making your way over to the trash bin on the other side of the peninsula separating your kitchen from your dining space. Namjoon gave a snort laced in amusement.

“Why are you sorry? It was your cup….” When you returned to your original spot you noticed his left eyebrow quirked, clearly entertained by your needless apologies. You rolled your eyes playfully and began fussing with the food once more.

“Just go sit down,” you said turning your back to him when you heard the tell-tale ‘click’ of your rice cooker alerting you to the completing of the rice for the bibimbap. Thankfully, you had already placed two large bowls out in preparation and simply began filling the bowls about a third of the way with the steaming rice.

Behind you, you heard Namjoon treading away from the kitchen and towards your small kitchen table set up in front of the large windows that made up the entirety of the back wall facing the lake on the first floor of your house. You only had four chairs for the table in total, however you rarely ever had the need of all four and opted to keep two, as you usually only had one visitor at a time. He unpacked his bag into a neat pile and set it to the side, obviously intent on eating before getting to the heart of the meeting.

“Do you want anything to drink?” You asked, successfully removing two glasses from your cabinet without incident this time. You filled yours with iced barley tea, a favorite of yours in the heat of the summer.

“Whatever you’re having is fine,” He answered as he plopped himself into a chair at the table. You felt the anticipation buzzing in the air and stifled a laugh— the man really wanted his food. So, you poured his drink and delivered both glasses to the table before returning to the kitchen to bring the remaining items out for your lunch.

Once both of you were sat, the food presented appetizingly, the two of you settled into comfortable conversation. Lunch with Namjoon was always pleasant because Namjoon was pleasant— you could talk about anything, and any topic could easily slip into something philosophical. You enjoyed this; the intellectual talk kept your mind sharp and fulfilled, and you always felt the most satisfied after a long talk.

You had considered Namjoon a potential partner at one point, and when the two of you had first met, it was immediately apparent that he too had been attracted to you. But breaching the line between professional and personal relationship was not something that you particularly wanted to risk. Plus, you still had the lingering pain of your experience with Yoongi to keep you in check. And so, not wanting to experience another person falling out of love with you again, you kept any feelings to yourself until both yours and Namjoon’s sentiments faded into a fond friendship not unlike the one you had with Yoongi now.

Once the two of you had your fill, you placed the dirtied dishes in the sink to wash later and returned to the kitchen table where Namjoon was booting up his computer and sifting through a folder of papers. You almost huffed in disappointment— time to get down to business. You excuse yourself for a moment to grab your journal from your office.

You only needed to be in your office for a moment— just long enough to seize your journal and turn back to return to Namjoon in your kitchen. Your desk was facing the window overlooking the water; you liked looking out at the diamonds of sunlight dace across the ripples as you let your imagination carry you away too far off land. Whilst retrieving your notes you gazed out the window absentmindedly only to find something out of place. Or rather, something that didn’t belong.

There, standing at the edge of the water, was a man of rather average height and a mop of black hair on his head. You were frozen momentarily, something about the scene reminding you of your chilling visitor from the other night. Taking a deep breath to stabilize your racing thoughts enough to think rationally, your mind pulled a small piece of information out of your haze.

Seokjin’s roommate. The one he said would probably be wandering around. The one you saw on their property before. It must be him; it has to be him— the shaggy dark hair, though you only saw it from afar last time, was surely enough to tell you it was this mystery roommate.

You released a few more uneven breaths, holding your journal tightly by your side, and you took him in now that you had a better view. He was still outside your radius, so you couldn’t get a read on him, and his back was facing you as he stared out over the water, but you could tell he had a well-built form beneath his loose-fitted clothing. His stature though… was he smaller than your nightmare? Or was the presence of the specter looming outside your house that night so overwhelming that you had imagined him much larger than he truly was?

The man tilted his head slightly and you caught just the slightest view of his jawbone. You jumped slightly for reasons unbeknownst to you. It almost felt like he knew you were watching him silently from within your home. However, your startled brain soon posed the question: why on earth was he in your yard?

“Y/N” You heard Namjoon call, though he sounded close; was he calling from the bottom of the stairs? Backtracking, your eyes lingered on him for as long as your retreating form would allow before quickly darting down the stairs to find that your editor was, in face, awaiting you at the bottom. He wasn’t looking at you, though. He was staring out towards the back of your house and when you joined him on the ground floor you focused your attention in the same direction. “There’s someone in your yard…” You nodded at his statement, a still bit bewildered yourself.

“Yup…” You said, glancing at the tall man beside you before turning back to gaze out your window. “I think he’s my new neighbor,” you mused, more to yourself than your companion. You cleared your throat then, gaining his attention as you peered up at him. “Should, uh… should we go say hi?” Your brows furrowed, trying to express the uncertainty buzzing about. You could feel the same spike within Namjoon, however there was a bit of humor laced within it.

“We? He’s your neighbor,” he teased, causing you to send him a disgruntled, yet good-natured scowl. He chuckled at that, rolling his eyes as he nudged you with his elbow. “Like I would let you go out there with some weird dude.” Sighing, he began towards the back door, “Come on. We’ll say hi, send him home, and then finally get the meeting started.” You trailed after him, placing your journal on the kitchen table as Namjoon opened the door and stepped out. You followed suit, closing the door as to not let the cool air out of your house. The moment the door clicks shut, the mystery boy at the edge of the late spins to look at you, his gaze guarded at first. As you approached, what you felt made your blood run cold.

There was virtually nothing.

There were blips of emotions like caution and fear, even aggression. But there was nothing substantial to latch onto and this was both exciting and terrifying. How was it possible that he was evading your senses? How could he be keeping his feelings from flooding into you? Was he aware of your abilities? Or was he naturally repressive?

Not human.

You visibly tensed and stopped your approach, causing Namjoon to halt as well and turn to you in confusion, though you hardly noticed the taller man as you take in the daunting stranger. Now that you were within closer proximity, you were able to see his face— and he was stunning. You drank in his round eyes, sharp jawline, perfectly full lips, and flawless golden skin, each feature just as impeccable as the last. He was quite possibly the loveliest person you’d ever seen, and yet there was something unsettling about his beauty, the ethereal air radiating off of him almost too dreamlike.

Not human.

Your heart rate sped up, the same disturbing feeling from the other night creeping into your bones and setting your nerve endings alight. The dark-haired stranger locked eyes with you, and suddenly the small blips of intense emotions shifted— they were still on high alert, still nervous, but there was suddenly a softness to them, almost as if he were being cautious for you, rather than being cautious of you. At this, you couldn’t help the slight furrow of your brow as you regained your slow stride towards the boy, only stopping when you reached Namjoon’s side.

The unfamiliar man flicked his gaze between the two of you guardedly, looking as if he were to take off into the woods again any moment. You made no indication that you were going to initiate conversation, which Namjoon noticed and fortunately took the obligation from you at a low clearing of his throat.

“Uh, hello?” His deep voice and small step forward caught the other male’s attention and his eyes sharpened, locking onto your editor’s form. You felt a shiver at the aggressive spike in the air, both from Namjoon, and from the blips of emotion you could pick up from the stranger. Clearly Namjoon had picked up on the hostility directed towards him as well, and luckily for everyone, he was a smart man with a level head. However, he wasn’t immune to emotional outbursts, and the unwarranted behavior from this weird boy was clearly ticking him off.

“I-I’m Y/N!” you interjected quickly, trying to dispel the tenseness in the air to avoid a brawl. At your voice, the beautiful visitor snapped his eyes to you, still very much heavily guarded, and you sucked in a shallow breath through your nose. His gaze a piercing, almost as if he could see every muscle twitch, every pulse of your heart from where he stood— almost predatory.

You tried to control your heart beat, but with no success. Penetrating eyes, no stable emotional readings, predatory stare, defensive like a cornered animal…

Not human.

His eyes flicked between you and Namjoon, his body tense and when you glanced at his feet you saw that he was poised to dart off at any moment. What worried you is that you didn’t know if he meant to run at you, or away from you. You attempted talking to him again, hoping to calm him, but not before taking a step back away from him and sliding a bit closer to Namjoon.

“You’re Seokjin’s roommate, right? It’s nice to meet you…” You kept your voice as steady and pleasant as you could. He continued to scrutinize you, and you continued to try and hone in on what his intentions were, still only catching the small blips of hostility and distress at first until you saw his shoulders relax fractionally and you caught the smallest spark of the gentle caution you had earlier.

“Who’s Seokjin?” You heard Namjoon whisper to you, causing another aggressive spike in the air. This time, your head throbbed as well; an oncoming migraine more than likely caused by how hard you were trying to focus on your mysterious neighbor. You winced slightly, looking at Namjoon and withdrawing your abilities as much as you could.

“He’s—”

“KIM TAEHYUNG!” Speak of the Devil, and so shall he appear. All three of you snapped your head in the direction of the voice that you vaguely recognized as your new neighbor. You saw him before you sensed him, and usually feelings began faint and grew stronger as they neared you. However, when he entered the radius in which your abilities were effective, you were blind-sided by the power of his emotions. Anger, fear— panic, panic, panic. Always with the panic with this man; was he always going to be this intense? At least now his face matched his emotions. Breath knocked from your lungs, you nearly doubled over by the force and you immediately became overwhelmed, only finding little relief in your editor’s voice giving you something different to focus on.

“Seokjin?” He asked you, to which you nodded. The scattered throbbing in your head became a cutting pain, one that had you shying away from the sunlight and gritting your teeth. You felt a wave of concern come from Namjoon at your sudden change in behavior and your sent him a tight smile in return to reassure him.

“Yeah, he just moved into the house up the lake…” Namjoon nodded, taking in this information, and you both turned to readdress the other men before you. Seokjin had made his way to his roommate’s side quickly, clearly out of breath from his fast pace, and you expected the black-haired boy to be looking at the purple-haired man. Except, he wasn’t; his gaze bore into your own as you made eye-contact and you froze, unable to look away. His eyes were onyx, so dark that you couldn’t see his pupils, and completely bottomless, as if they were a gate to the deepest part of the universe.

“What are you doing here?!” Seokjin’s voice ripped through your hypnosis as you regained some of your composure, taking in the situation before you. Your neighbor was furious; his anger like hot coals burning behind your eyelids. His hand was wrapped around the boy’s forearm as if to ensure he wouldn’t be escaping his wrath. “When I said you could go outside, I specifically told you not to wander out of our yard, Taehyung! Why did you leave?!” Despite the fuming man’s temper, Taehyung, so you assume, gave very little as a reaction. He blinked at Seokjin and then pouted lightly like a scolded child. He glanced back in your direction before looking at his feet.

“I like it here better…” The baritone of his voice caught you off guard— the softness of his masculine face led you to believe his voice would be just as soft, but you realized that deep dulcet voice was a beautiful contrast to his looks. Strangely, you felt yourself eager to hear him speak again, as if his voice held some sort of magic over you. Instead, you heard Seokjin scoff.

“And that seemed like a good enough reason to disobey me? You know you can’t just be walking around—”

“Excuse me?” You nearly jumped at Namjoon’s interruption, as you had been too consumed by the unearthly boy with the deep voice. When you looked at Namjoon, you saw the exasperated irritation and confusion you felt lying beneath Seokjin’s anger written clearly on his face. You almost wanted to laugh, except you were just as confused as he was. What was going on here? This entire situation was absurd; a strange boy wanders into your yard, doesn’t speak to you, and then your furious new neighbor comes barreling in to scold the boy who is his roommate? So much for your peaceful sanctuary in the middle of the woods.

“Oh my God,” Seokjin finally seems to realize that you and Namjoon were in attendance, and the panic again overrides his anger to the point that you want to twist your face at it as if it were sour candy. Though, once more, you were pleased to find the panic present on his face. “I’m sorry! Did Taehyung disturb you?” Said boy’s pout deepened as he snuck glances at you, which you vigorously ignored due to the strange spell he had seemed to cast on you earlier.

“Actually—” You cut off Namjoon before his temper got the best of him. He was noticeably, and rightfully, annoyed at the moment. He had come here for lunch and a meeting, not to get wrapped up in some nonsensical drama that he probably had no time for. Still, you’d like to stay on good terms with your neighbors if at all possible, so you chirped up in an attempt to mellow-out the pressure hanging in the air.

“N-no! It’s fine, we just weren’t sure who he was…” You trailed off with an awkward laugh, hoping that Seokjin’s emotions would ease up and allow you the opportunity to breath. It seemed to work fractionally as you felt a small wave of relief. There was no hope for Namjoon’s irritation on the other hand— he would likely be in this mood for the rest of the day.

“Oh! Yeah, sorry about that,” the purple-haired man let out a tense laugh. “He’s not supposed to be out too much… he’s quite ill, so he’s often in bed.” Ah, there it is again. “I guess he got a bit restless and wanted to wander.” Again, more truths, half-truths, and lies and you were unable to decipher which was what. Still, that little voice inside your head was telling you to leave it be, Seokjin’s a good person. How frustrating.

“Oh, um, well my house isn’t too far from yours…He’s welcome to stop by from time-to-time if he’s able…” Perhaps then you could better understand why you couldn’t get full readings off of him. At your suggestion, you saw the boy in question look up at you, suddenly, with a child-like hope shining on his face. He was almost… cute. His hope was crushed, however, when Seokjin attempted to refuse your offer.

“No, I wouldn’t want to impose,” He looked at Taehyung, who looked back at him with the pout he had been sporting earlier. A melancholy leaked into the air slowly, something along the lines of remorse. At what you couldn’t place, but it was an unexpected emotion from the man who seemed to have no shame.

“It’d be no problem… It’d be nice to have company every once-in-a-while,” You assured him that having the sickly boy over wouldn’t be an issue, but it seemed to do very little to persuade him. Still, he seemed weak to Taehyung’s pouting face as you felt his resolve melt a bit.

“Well… we’ll see…” He said, looking back at you. Taehyung looked back at you as well, pout gone and entire demeanor brighter, sharp blips of excitement popping in the air like fireworks. He was cute. Namjoon, who had been standing grumpily at your side as you attempted to sooth the parties involved in this incident, had become quite impatient, and while you felt bad, you also knew that a smile was spreading onto your lips at his expense.

“Well, just know that it’s okay with me!” You placed your hand on Namjoon’s shoulder, getting the full brunt of his frustration though it was no less amusing to you. “We should head back in and finish our meeting,” You felt a string of emotions rolling off your tall friend that could all be condensed into the word ‘finally.’ Seokjin nodded, sliding behind Taehyung to grasp his other arm before he turned the both of them and began pushing the boy along back towards their house.

“I need to get him back home anyway,” He smiled— charming, lovely, and not completely sincere— and Taehyung sent you what you assumed was his signature pout. “Sorry for taking your time!” You wanted to laugh at their antics, but instead sent a friendly wave.

“It was nice to meet you, Taehyung!” You called after them, and you swore you saw his shoulders tense a bit. Once they were down the lake’s shoreline and out of view, Namjoon turned to you with an unamused face. You could only shrug, not knowing what exactly he wanted to hear from you, and he heaved a loud sigh and rolled his eyes.

“I still have a little time left. Let’s go talk about that book, shall we?” He said gruffly, making his way back to your house.

Ah. Right… about that…

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angstchim · 6 years ago

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Native Bear | knj

Koala Hybrid Namjoon x Biologist Reader

Based/ Inspired by @couchbrotato ‘s trip to Australia :)

The 4th installment of my hybrid series

➻ Rating: M

➻ Words: 8.2k

➻ !!: SMUT, language, being treated like test subjects, ignorance, angst, facials, cum play, happy ending, rushed romances, new experiences, dirty talk, public sex, more to be added, master kink, sweet love, lots of firsts,

Preview

Bookbag heavy your feet clambered their way through the squeaky halls of your university. Eyes peering at the room number, your headphone almost falling from your ear as you entered the lab. Grabbing your white lab coat, bookbag resting on the table you sat at your station. Professor Shin at his desk, his eyeglasses perched at the tip of his nose, his wrinkled cheeks pulling into a bright smile as he read his monitor. Your eyes caught the glare that bounced from his glasses, the rest of your very small hybrid ethics class poured into the lab. Each of your classmates taking their seats.

"I have good news today everyone. Very good news!!" Mr.Shin chuckled as he grabbed his clipboard, his worn hands shakily checking everyone off.

"And that may be?" You chimed, stowing your phone before the senile old man could snatch it.

He let out a chuckle, pointing to the world map above the board. "Now my young scientists, can you guess what country on that map I will be taking you to?"

Sehun raised his hand, "Brazil?"

"That's a good one but no." the old man chuckled, "Anymore guesses?"

Hwasa raised hers, "India?"

Mr.Shin gently tapped the top of her head with a ruler stick making a buzzing noize, "Bzz Bzz Wrong my dear."

You raised your hand, blurting, "The Down Under?"

His face lit up, "That's right everyone, pack your bags I'm taking you lab rats to Australia."

Sehun let out a laugh, "And what are we gonna do there watch tarantulas have sex?"

Hwasa letting out a groan if disgust, "That's terrifying stop please."

Mr.Shin let out his rusty chuckle, "To answer your question Sehun, No we aren't going to watch the natural horror that is tarantulas mating. We will be studying something a little more human."

"I don't think Australia has monkeys.." Hwasa pondered aloud.

You squinted your eyes, "Could it be hybrids..?"

Mr.Shin smiling, "Bingo Bingo we have a winner!!"

"Hybrids..?" Sehun repeated, "In Australia, you mean wild hybrids, not just the domesticated ones, you mean real hybrids in the wild?!"

"I like your thinking Lackey, and yes real hybrids in the wild." Mr.Shin gave the top of his head a soft tap with the ruler stick before he put away the map and turned on the projector screen, his computer bringing up a slideshow. "Now my lab rats, never before have there been accounts of wild hybrids, yes we know the world about our domesticated ones, but wild is uncharted territory. We knew of their existence but as for hands-on communication, we haven't made it that far. They are their own peoples and they chose not to interact with us but in Australia, a few have come forward, and we are very, very lucky that we were able to get to be one of the few schools who get to study them." He clicked his tongue, the slideshow showing up with three hybrids on the screen.

"So they just came and said, Here I am study me??" Sehun rhetorically asks, sarcasm oozing in his voice.

"No, they wanted to leave the wild and to integrate into our society, such a peculiar request when hybrids are considered pets in today's world." Mr.Shin shook his head. He brought up photos of three hybrids, two male, one female.

Mr.Shin's thumb clicking on the clicker, "This here is a koala hybrid, his name is Namjoon, last name I don't believe he was given one but we call him Joon Bear. He's roughly 25 in human years, from what we know he's in his prime, and we have lots to test when it comes to his interactions with humans as well as with koalas."

Your eyes pierced the screen, you took in the hybrids handsome features, your cheeks a little flushed, "He's so pretty.." Your whisper going unnoticed.

"Next." Mr.Shin clicked the small remote once more, "Here we have Jungkook, he's a jackrabbit hybrid, he's a feisty one, a little on the younger side 4 years Namjoon's younger, and I would suggest some caution when interacting with him. He is very hyper and at times the things he says can be distracting." he chuckled, showing the jackrabbit's photo, ears erect and his hair dark ebony, you could hear Hwasa's breath leaving her body. You let out a giggle.

"Lastly, we have Hani, she's a dingo hybrid, oldest out of the three, she is pretty docile but she can have a temper and lash out at times, she also is the easiest to work with when it comes to the three of them. So we will spend a fair amount of time with her." Mr.Shin smiled up at the dingo hybrid's long flowy hazel hair and soft features.

"Thank god," Sehun mumbled as he stared up at the pretty hybrid, you let out a giggle. Everyone seemed to have taken a liking to the three hybrids. Your mind plagued with the image of Namjoon, your stomach holding a cage of butterflies as you thought about his features, how could someone be so attractive?

"Seems like no one has questions." Mr.Shin chuckled, "Aside from that we will be there for 2 weeks conducting small tests and simulations. Observing and creating charts and data."

"What about our papers and things?" Hwasa curiously asked.

"The school should be taking care of most of that for the most part right?" Sehun cut in.

Mr.Shin tapped his head with the ruler, "Yes for the most part but you do have to take care of your information yourselves, now everyone in the lab we have to check up the gametes from the cat hybrids."

Grabbing your data sheets, tongue swabbing the inside of your cheek, eyes peering back over the projector screen the handsome face of the koala hybrid fixed in your mind. "How can someone look like that?" You muttered to yourself as you filed into the lab.

❉❉

The airport boisterous, your eyes heavy, hair messy, hands gripping your luggage as you drug it from the plane, the Australian wind hitting your face. The gust if hot hair and smell carrying salt from the ocean woke you from your jetlag.

"Salt?" You chimed.

"Well we are in a country surrounded by the ocean," Sehun grunted, giving you a light pinch as he hauled his luggage next to yours.

"It's a nice change though," Hwasa commented, her voice slightly groggy as she rested her head against you.

"Alright, lab rats stop ya blabbing." Mr. Shin clapped his hands eagerly as he pulled his ruler from his coat. The wooden ruler smacking each of your bums as he walked by.

Sehun standing straight, jumping from his skin, "How did you even manage to smuggle that here you old man?!"

Mr.Shin gave his head a light swat with the ruler, "I went through the checkpoints like everyone else, and call me an old man again and I'll whack you so good your pretty boy face won't recover."

"Mr.Shin we are all jet lagged and tired... Can we head to the hotel?" You cleared your throat as you glanced over at the elder.

He gave you a wrinkled smile, "Mhm, we do have cars waiting for us out in the lot. Best make our way over so we can get some rest." He looked up at the dark Australian sky, "It's night now, early in the morning we make our way over to the labs."

"Labs all day every day while we are here?" Sehun asked, "No time to go and see this place? I don't know about you but I don't know when I'll be back in Australia."

Hwasa nodded, "Yeah. Mr.Shin we will have a day or two to enjoy it here won't we?"

Mr.Shin chuckled as he waved down the cars, "Of course we will have three days of free time for us, but we also have to bring the hybrids. We won't be doing any labs or tests but they do wish to integrate into human society so it will be good for them to experience this."

Your eyes heavy and arms weak as you slid your luggage into the back of the school van. "Let's discuss this after we rest because I can't fathom doing anything but sleeping right now."

Sehun grunted, "Negative Nancy."

Hwasa gave him a light swat, "What are you twelve? We are all tired and jet-lagged." She tussed as she hopped into the van her luggage in tow. Mr.Shin added his luggage to the back before taking shotgun. His voice lively as he made small talk with the driver. Head pressed against the glass of the van's windows, music blaring in your ears, you drifted off.

❉❉

Palms sweaty, chest heavy and with small steps you walked in into the lab with your fellow classmates. Eyes nervously scanning the walls of the polished and neat lab. Sehun and Hwasa murmuring and laughing like excited children. Mr.Shin checking over what appeared to be a list. "Everyone calm down and act your age. I know this is exciting but please let's not scare them when they come in." He sighed, his ruler in hand, waving it slightly as to warn them.

Just as everyone had settled the door opened in came five people, three of them the hybrids from the photos. Your breath hitching as they entered, the sight of them breathtaking. The koala's silvery hair matched with his fluffy round ears, his dark brown eyes and godly body covered in a tight grey muscle shirt and brown knee-length shorts that display powerful sunkissed calves. His eyes scanning over everyone in the room, tracking collar around his neck giving off a small beeping, his eyes resting on you.

Next to him stood a woman with beautiful golden hair her dingo ears proudly perked, her golden eyes scanning the room she wore a white sundress, tracking caller wrapped a little loosely around her small neck. Next to her towered an ebony haired buck, his black ears pinned back his eyes not meeting anyones, as he held a cocky smirk, his eyes narrowing as you were certain he was looking at your chest and Hwasa's thighs. Hwasa noticeably shuffling under his gaze, you already squirming under the gaze of the stoic bear. Sehun letting out an awkward grunt as he looked at the dingo goddess standing before him.

The two accompanying the hybrids their caretakers one male and the other female they introduced themselves as Ricky and Angelina. Ricky a happy fellow heading to the back of the lab telling the male hybrids he was there if they needed him. Angelina staying by Hani's side as she whispered to the female hybrid making sure she was okay before following Ricky to the back of the room.

Mr.Shin setting his clipboard down. "Hello, Hani, Jungkook, and Namjoon. I'm Mr.Shin and I'm here with my students. We will be with you two weeks and we have lots of things to do hope we get along." He chuckled outstretching his hand to each hybrid. Namjoon's eyes piercing you. "I'll partner you up now." he chuckled reaching for his keyboard.

Namjoon clearing his throat, everyone's eyes looking at him. "Can we partner ourselves up?"

Your mouth dry. His voice was deep. It was so deep, ears feeling hot. Mr. Shin throwing him a bright smile. "I don't see why not, go ahead pair up."

Jungkook smirking, his eyes landing on Hwasa, walking over to her his nose twitching slightly. "Oh, man don't you smell good."

Hani sending him a glare, "Don't be a pervert you sketchy rabbit."

Jungkook, stomping his foot on the lab floor, his cotton tail twitching. "I wasn't smelling that you perverted overgrown mutt." He snarled.

She straightened, giving a low growl, "Dingos eat rabbits keep it up bunny boy and I'll skin ya!"

Jungkook tissed, turning to Hwasa, "Sorry about that Cute. What's your name?" Hwasa flushed, "Hwasa."

Jungkook flashed her his pearly whites, "Be my partner for two weeks?" You giggled as you watched your embarrassed classmate give a shy nod.

Hani huffing walking over to Sehun, the dark-haired male biting his lip. His pencil tapping the desk. "Be mine for two weeks?"

Hani furrowed her brows, "Be yours?" She questioned.

Sehun realizing his mistake cursing his nerves, "I-I meant be my partner for two weeks!!" He huffed, avoiding her gaze.

The beautiful dingo hybrid giving a small giggle, "Sure." Her tail brushing his leg.

"That leaves you with me. I hope you don't mind." A deep voice from behind you whispered into your ear. Shivers running down your back. Behind you stood Nmajoon.

"Yes, we are partners.." You looked up at the hybrid whom stood behind you. His stature holding a presence as it loomed over. His aura one that made you want to quiver. How could a hybrid of such a small and harmless creature make you feel the need to cower before him? His lips a light cherry tint, his scent that of greens and something else. Leaning a little close he whispered, his breath tickling the shell of your ear. "I'm glad we are partners Sweetheart." He lets his breath linger on your ears shell before gently tapping your clipboard, "These questions look like they need answers." His ears twitching, he took a seat on the stool next to yours, "Sit Sweetheart, I don't have much time." He sent you a smirk, his eyes taking delight in the shivers he sent through you.

A blush dusting your cheeks, picking up your pencil and data sheet. Eyes avoiding the piercing brown orbs of the handsome male, "Mind if I take your pulse?" Voice a bit shaky, chest slightly strained. "Sure." He smiled. Giving a nod your hand outstretched to his wrist only for him to pull it away. His hand grabbing yours leading it to his heart. "I think this is the best way to check for a heartbeat don't you think?" Your lips quivering as you fought a smile, "The most straightforward of ways but yet effective."

He chuckled, "Straightforward isn't bad is it?" His warm hand pressing yours against his firm chest, his ears twitching. You knew this question was as far from the topic of taking a pulse, your own heart spiking as your eyes met. "No, it's not." You replied, your teeth nibbling your bottom lip. Counting his heartbeats, waiting for his response. His thumb gently rubbing your palm.

"How straightforward are you sweetheart? I'm very." He looked at your data sheet. Your cheeks feeling a familiar warmth, hand pulling from his chest.

"110," You said aloud.

"105" He corrected, your eyebrow-raising at him.

"I got 110 beats per minute.. hybrids on average have a faster heartbeat than humans."

"Yes but you are a tad bit off sweetheart."He chuckled.

"If you knew your heartrate why didn't you just tell me?" You huffed, cheeks a little puffy as you recorded 105 onto the data sheet.

"You didn't ask for that sweetheart." He gave a breathy laugh, shooting you a good-natured smirk.

"Are we going to talk to each other in riddles and poems then Namjoon?" You smirked, leaning a little closer to him, your shoes now pointed in his direction.

"Depends are you willing to play this game with me?" Once again a question disguised as on topic but it couldn't be any farther from the topic.

Your heartbeat tripping over itself, "I'm willing."

He leaned a bit closer to you, "You learn quick. Straightforward is how we will be no holding back."

You gave a nod, a tingling in your chest. Turning to the next question on the data sheet, "Average hours of sleep?"

❉❉

After two days of meeting Namjoon so many boundaries have been transcended it made your head spin. The constant flirting hidden through normal questions. Every word having a deeper meaning. Being straightforward made your head whirl. Your hands rubbing the sleep from your eyes, looking over to see Hwasa brushing out her hair.

"Someone is up early." She comments.

"Can't sleep any longer."

"The koala on your mind?" She asks, your mouth forming into a pout as she read you. "It's okay Jungkook is ..." She blushed, "A handful."

You smirked, "Seems like I'm not the only one having trouble." Hwasa gave a nod.

"Jungkook said he'd like to come back with us?"

Your head whipping to look at her, "Is that even possible..?"

Hwasa bit her lip, "They did say they didn't want to be lab rats forever, they did say they wanted to integrate into our society.."

Your tongue swabbing the inside of your mouth, "Yes, but hybrids are still considered pets... sure there is progress and their list of rights is becoming longer and longer but do you think they would be allowed to come back with us?"

Hwasa paused, still brushing her hair, eyes looking at her reflection in the hotel vanity, "We have Mr.Shin."

"Mr. Shin?"

Hwasa sighed, "Think about it. He's very well known in this industry hence why he was able to get our school in this program in the first place. He's contributed a lot to hybrid science and if the hybrids speak out we have a fighting chance. We aren't a hopeless cause. I know Sehun..he's falling hard for Hani. He's a love-struck puppy, of course after we take all the data we need we could possibly take them back with us."

Your heart skipping, "I don't even know if Namjoon wants to come back with me..."

Hwasa tissed, "We still have 12 days to find out, Sehun plans to bring the matter up to Mr.Shin today during lunch."

You nodded, "I don't know if they will be able to back with us right away if we do get the okay. They are still being studied it may be a while before they can come back with us.."

Hwasa sighed, "You're right there's no way this is going to be an easy breezy process, but I say let's get the most data we possibly can. Take the most tests, anything others may try to do. If we do it all here there won't be much left to do."

You giggled, "Bust our ass for two weeks then?"

Hwasa smiled at you, "Yes, let's get this data and maybe some love and dick."

You threw a pillow at Hwasa blushing, "Dirty Girl!!"

She smirked, "Jungkook keeps talking about it.. maybe I'll let it happen."

You squeaked, "Stop talking like that!"

❉❉

Sehun in charge of the physical tests the whole week filled with games and monitors, Hwasa was focused on the diet looking at what they ate, how it digested etc. Lastly, you were in charge of the body, blood tests, screening, shots, cell counts, and x rays. Today you were in charge of collecting such data from Namjoon. You gave a sigh, heart skipping when the man in question had entered the room.

He wore sweats and hoodie, the grey of his clothes almost blending perfectly in with the grey on his head. His ears back as they twitched. His usual smirk greeting you. "There's my Sheila." You shuddered, at his stereotypical Australian accent and comment.

"Don't do that again.." You giggled, preparing cotton swabs, small dishes, and needles. "Take a seat, I need to swab your mouth, draw some blood, and collect some cells from you." You looked at the empty stool, the rubber gloves a bit tight around your hand.

"Mhm, Yes doctor." He chuckled, taking a seat on the stool.

"I'm no doctor Namjoon, far from it." You raised a brow at him.

He sat on the stool, hands resting on the stools edge his legs slightly spread. "We can pretend can't we?"

You prepared some needles, checking and sterilizing them, walking over to the hybrid. "If you want."

He chuckled, rolling up his sleeve, his forearm slim yet muscular, he gave a small yawn. "Doctor this is taking place during my midday nap you know."

"Tragic, everything will be interfering with your midday nap these two weeks Joon."

He chuckled, biting his lip lightly as you injected the needle drawing blood. "Yes, but I feel like I should get some compensation for this constant messing with my naps. Whaddya say, sweetheart, your bear wants some compensation."

You raised a brow, taking the needle from the sleepy hybrid, his veins protruding lightly from his arm. "This bear can take his naps later once I'm done with these data collections."

He puffed his cheeks, "What's next Sweetheart?"

You pulled out a small scraping tool, running it across his arm, sealing it in a plastic bag. "Skin Cells collected."

He raised his brow, "You stole my skin cells."

You rolled your eyes, "You have trillions more that regenerate every two weeks due to a process called Mitosis. Those ones were dead anyways that's why they came off so easily." You giggled plucking a hair from his head and tucking it in another small plastic bag. "Piece of hair acquired."

"You stole my hair." he joked

"It grows back." You giggled, grabbing a cotton swab from the tray nearby. "Open up."

"Oof didn't expect you to be so blunt." He chuckled.

You rolled your eyes. "We agreed to be straightforward, no?"

He smirked, "Aye, we did." He opened his mouth, your hand holding the swab as you gently began to scape at his cheek, his eyes on yours. Brown orbs boring into you, his breathing a little ragged as he let you poke at his cheeks, his tongue carefully running against your fingers. The hot muscle twining around you, his mouth closed as he gave your finger a gentle suck, teeth lightly grazing the gloves before he opened his mouth again. His eyes boring into you, your cheeks a blazing crimson as you pulled your hand away. Stunned.

"Straightforward remember?" He smirked, eyes small crescents he tilted his head a little, his grey hair framing his face. His ears twitching and you could've sworn his sweatpants twitched in a specific area.

Your cheeks hot. "Mhm, yes I remember." Biting your lip you continued on with the rests of the collections. Getting the bottom of the sheet, seeing that you had one more collection to do. Gamete collection. You gulped. Grabbing a plastic cup from the cabinet. "Here take this."

He twitched his ears. "What's this one for?"

"Gamete collection." You responded, blushing.

"What's that in English?"

You bit your lip looking at his sweatpants. "Sex cell collection, I need semen in this cup."

He raised his brow, "That's all? No need to be so blushy about it." he grabbed the cup seating himself on the stool once more.

You gulped looking at him, "The bathroom is on the left.." You pointed to the bathroom only mere meters away from the man.

He looked over at it. "I know where it's at I spend lots of time in there sometimes. I sure you've noticed." He looked up at you from the stool. His eyes lidded. Veiny hand traveling to his sweats, a twitching more noticeable from his bottom half. Your throat running dry he sat the cup back on your tray, sliding the hem of his sweats aside, his member standing tall and proud as he wrapped his hand around the throbbing flesh.

His eyes staring into you, a throbbing in your heart and pants with each passing second. "N-Namjoon stop that!" Your hand snatching the cup from the tray, looking over your shoulder at the door's window. Hoping and praying that no one would dare walk by or enter the lab.

He didn't respond, his eyes dark, his hand working faster, his wrist flicking his cock glazed at the tip. Beads of pearly cum threatening to fall on the floor. The very thing you needed for research about to drop on the floor. Wasted. His smirk growing as he watched your eyes trail his cock, his wrist going faster, hips stuttering as his teeth gnawed into his lip.

"Joon!!" You panicked in a whispered shout as you inched closer to the male, his pace increasing the closer you got to him. His eyes narrowing, hips bucking, head thrown back. "F-Fuck this feels good, your pretty little eyes on my cock." Cheeks a flame, your hand shaking as his cock twitched, his hand squeezing, wrist twisting, hips trembling. He was about to cum. Body moving fast your hands trembling as you got to your knees. Cup in your hand.

His teeth gritted, chest heaving, hips jerking, cock spirting pearlescent ropes against your cheeks, chin, and lips. Swiping the cup from your hands he bit his lip pressing the plastic cup to your cheek. Gently he scrapped at your cheek collecting the creamy essence. A Cheshire grin adorning his face. "You look so good painted white."

Face burning, chest heaving, the thin bralette and tee shirt you wore outting you as your pert buds reared themselves. His gaze trailing down to them, his hand holding the cup, his other hand dipping his finger into his white cocktail. Coating it he lifted your chin. "Open up Sweetheart." Jaw-dropping for him against your better judgment, tongue lapping at the sweet gift he offered. He let out a hiss, his semi-threatening to stand erect once more. His cock twitching the more you swirled your wet muscle around his digit.

Ears twitching he pulled his finger away. "Such a dirty girl." He grunted, his eyes darkening. "You came here for research, want to test something Sweetheart?"

Your professionalism leaving you, "What might you have in mind?"

His gaze darkened. His hand heavy as lifted you from the ground clearing a nearby table he laid you on it. A harsh smack landing against your thigh. "My kind are treated as pets in the outside world." Your heart starts to sink, you bit your lip avoiding his gaze as you didn't know how to respond. His large hand gripped your chin, forcing you to meet his gaze. "That means that when I fuck you I'm the master. Got it, Sweetheart?"

A burning sensation returning to your abdomen. "Yes, Master."

He chuckled. "I'm gonna make you mine, you'd like that won't you?" Hot hands traveling to your shoulders stripping the white lab coat from your form. His grey hair wisping across his sunkissed skin, his dark brown focussing in on your pert buds. He smacks his lip, grabbing your hips, positioning you so that you bent over the table, back arched, tippy toes touching the cold tiled floor of the lab. "There we go. Time to experiment with you."

Your body twitching, breath hitching, as he lifted your mini skirt. Hiking it to your waist revealing your thin panties. Thoroughly soaked. He let out a groan, your scent hinting him, with careful fingers he traces over your slit, digits lightly grazing your cotton covered clit. "So sweet." He slid the fabric aside, two fingers collecting your slick using it as a lubricant as he coated your slit. Your hands gripping the desk, body trembling under his ministrations.

"Heres the question we are going to answer Sweetheart." He grinned, fingers dipping into you, gently pumping, his thumb carefully rolling over your clit. "How far can a human cunt stretch?"

You let out a gasp, "A-As much as you want it to!" Your words not well thought through.

"That sounds like a challenge Sweetheart, and Master doesn't like it when his Sweetheart challenges him." He growls, landing another hard smack to your ass, his two digits turning to three as his pumping increases. Dipping down to your core he began to lick and roll his tongue around the intruding digits. The extra slick making his fingers plunge deeper and deeper into your core. His fingertips curling as they stretched your walls. The stretched welcomed, your eyes lidded, knuckles white. Gentle and raspy pants and whimpers escaping you.

"Such pretty sounds. Mhm." He picked up his pace, fingers curling at a faster rate, a fourth finger ass, his free hand sliding up and down your ass. Fingers lightly pressing against your second opening as he teased. Watching it twitch, he let out guttural growls. Dipping down again, he lapped at his digits, giving your clit a few gentle sucks before he began to pump his four digits further into you. The soft squelches coming from core only encouraged his ministrations. His pace increasing, his eyes darkening, "Such a tight fit, how much more can you take?"

You let out a cry, gently you rolled your hips against his hand. His four digits knuckles deep as they pierced your core. Buddles of sensitive nerves getting much-needed friction with your added hip movements. He let out a chuckle, "Mhm can you take my whole fist Sweetheart?" his tone deep, an edge to it yet concern. Your heart skipping, your face cherry.

"I can try." You whimpered, rolling your hips against his four digits.

He grinned, "That a girl." Flowering kisses down your back, he inched further and further into you. Knuckles white, back arching with legs spread, your walls stretched, his fingers carefully curling. Chest heaving as his hand reached a halt. His fingertips now kissing your cervix. His pace increasing. Walls spread and mouth agape, tears threatening to fall from the sheer pleasure. "Like that Sweetheart?" He grunted, arm moving. In and out. In and out. His free hand on the small of your back steading you.

Soft tears racing down your cheek, lips abused and swollen, hips pressing against you. His knuckles kissing your cervix as his fingers curled. His growls resonating in your ears, his hair wisping over his eyes slightly blocking his view. "F-Faster!" your whine encouraging him.

His hand landing another harsh smack to your ass, your rear already decorated with red and brown marks. Giving your clit a pinched he increased his pace, knuckles kissing your cervix with each pump he gave. Your thighs trembling, whimpering louder. "A-Ah, Ah!!" You head sicking down as you came, walls convulsing around his arm, carefully he pulled out. Your slick coating his arm, lifting his knuckles to his lips he gave a few curious licks, his other hand patting your hip. "Can you stand?" His voice soft, carefully he cleaned you, his tongue gently lapping as what dripped from your thighs.

You shook your head, chest heaving. "You might have to carry me back to the hotel." He nodded as he dressed you. Strong arms lifting you, his firm body giving your support. "Did you take all the data you needed to?"

You buried your nose into his chest, his scent fresh and a little leafy. "I have to take a few more small tests."

He patted your back, "Well there's no comfortable place for you to sit and do that here, the hotel is rather far when I think about it....would you like to come to my dorm?" His voice a bit shaky, thumbs rolling against your skin anxiously.

"Sure, I'll have Sehun pick me up later then." Grabbing your phone you sent your classmate a text. Namjoon cradling you against his chest as he led you back to his dorm. With the push of a few buttons, he pulled you into the small dorm that he shared with Jungkook. The vast personalities of the hybrids evident even in their dorm. Jungkook's half decorated with a few questionable posters and you swore you saw a fleshlight that was poorly hidden. Namjoon's half minimally decorated, a map of Australia stuck onto the wall and a plush of a brown bear on his bed.

Your lips curling as you took notice of the small bear. "Cute."

His cheeks a light blush tint, stripping off his hood to reveal a white tee underneath. "I'm not cute but I have something that is." He chuckled, his sweatpants a little tight on his form. Resting yourself on his bed, you gazed at his form.

"You better not say your dick." You commented.

He chuckled, lightly tapping your knee. "Do I look like Jungkook to you?" He chuckled as he disappeared returning with a baby-sized ball of grey fur in his arm. The tiny grey creature clinging to him, its ears twitching. A baby koala.

Your awws dropping as you reached out to the small creature, gently pet the top of its head. It's soft snores filling your ears. "What's its name?" Your voice quiet to not wake it.

"Koya", he smiled, he was an orphan and the dorm master found him in the tree garden, his mother a few meters away dead, the birds of prey starting to circle the little guy."

Your heart sinking, "Is he yours? Or are you just taking care of him since he isn't able?"

Namjoon poked the baby bear's nose, "Just taking care of him till he is able to do so himself."

Your heart aching for the small bear, "How long will that be?"

Namjoon smiled, "I've had him for a couple months now, in an about two more weeks we will be able to integrate back into nature. The dorm masters are speaking with my old clan to see if anyone there is willing to take on another baby."

You looked up at him, "Your clan?"

He smiled, "I suppose you don't know much about wild hybrids." Your eyes on him as you listened. "Out in the while hybrids live in clans. We grow up and mate within our clan or with members of another clan from the same species, the mothers, fathers, elders, young ones, fathers, everyone contributes and the lifestyle repeats. I have a big mind, and lots of things I want to experience and that lifestyle wasn't for me." He looked down at Koya, "The mothers would help and take care of koalas, we share lots of the same food and land in the wild so koalas and their hybrids are close-knit. I'm sure a mother will take him in."

You looked at the little one, "With that cute little face anyone would take him." With gentle hands, you pinched the baby's cheek, before Namjoon returned him to his bed. The male climbing back over to you, pulling you close to him as he lied down in bed.

"Mhm, you have two more collections to do correct?"

"Yes, but they can wait." You gave a yawn, tucking your head into his neck, his scent surrounding you, his large hands caressing the back of your head. His fingers tangling themselves in your hair.

"Joon.."

"Yes, Sweetheart?" His voice soft, his breathing steady. His lips leaving gentle peck atop your forehead.

"Do.." You paused, "Would you like to come back home with me?"

He looked at you, his eyes wide. "Back home with you. You mean back to your home?"

You gave a nod.

"Is that even possible?" He asked, a blush on his cheeks.

"Well, we have Mr.Shin,, he has influence and I know you and the others said you wanted to do more with your life than being a test subject.." You looked up at him biting your lip.

His fingers letting your tresses wisp through them, his gaze on you. "Of course I'll go, I know Jungkook is taken with your friend, and I think Hani already claimed Sehun as hers.. I want to make you mine. I want to live with you, learn with you, experience life with you."

You smiled at him, "I do too, it's only been a short while but it feels so right.."

He chuckled, "I'll talk to Hani and Jungkook. I'm sure they will jump at the opportunity."

Burrowing your nose into his chest, his hands traveling down twining themselves with yours. His thumb gently caressing your hand, soft strokes. The blanket covering the two of you. This was what you wanted. For now and for forever. Time like this wasn't something that occurred often, and now you relished in it. After getting a taste of sleeping next to Namjoon you couldn't dare imagine what it would be like to sleep alone again.

A few hours pass, the orange afternoon sun peeking through the blinds of the dorm. A slight knocking on the door. Sehun's voice calling through the door. "Hey, wake up time to head back to the hotel. Mr.Shin is worried about you."

Gentle kisses waking you from your slumber, a small mark left on your neck. "Sweetheart." He whispered into your ear. "Time for you to head back to the hotel."

Rising to your feet, hips still a bit sore from today's activity you let out a small whine. Grabbing your things, Namjoon led you to the door, after a few kisses goodbye he sent you off. Sehun pulling you along, "Hwasa mentioned something about speaking to Mr.Shin about letting the hybrids come back with us? Did you bring this up to the hybrids? Is this why the two of you packed the schedule?"

Giving a sleepy nod you responded, "Yes, yes, and yes."

Sehun gave a smile, "Let's do this, tonight?"

You looked over at him, "I suppose we can ease Mr.shin into the idea at dinner."

Sehun nodded getting out his phone, "I sent Hwasa a text. At dinner, it is then."

The two of you made it back to the hotel passing the hotel diner where Hwasa and Mr.Shin sat and conversed. Sehun and you walking over, Mr.Shin chuckling. "Looks like you had fun today." He referred to your hair, Sehun chuckling as he looked at Mr.Shin.

"It wasn't my doing sir."

Mr.Shin chuckled, "Love in Australia? The joys of being young." He ate his dinner, the two of you sitting at the empty seats.

"Sir?" You asked, giving a glace to Hwasa seeing her nod.

"Yes?" He took a sip of his coffee, you took a deep breath.

"You said the hybrids would like to integrate into our society correct?"

He raised a brow as you as he gathered food on his fork. "I do recall saying something along those lines."

"You also have lots of influence.. You contributed lots to hybrid science."

He nodded, "Indeed I have."

You cut the chase, "Do you think we can take the hybrids back with us?"

He looked at all three of you, his eye jumping from you to Hwasa to Sehun. His freehand pushing his glasses further up the bridge of his nose. "Take them back with us?" He repeated. "Why?"

The three of you avoiding his gaze, the answer obvious now. Mr.Shin gave a sign. "The three of you all found love in Australia?" The white hair on his head reflecting a bit of light as he checked his watch. The three of you giving shy nods, grunts, and awkward coughs of confirmation. The elder chuckling, "I can talk to my friends here and see if that can be arranged. They did say they wanted to integrate into society but I feel like if they do come home with us data still will need to be collected. These three hybrids are the only three wild hybrids in the world who agreed to this. You do know. Not many people will want them to go home with us but it's my word against theirs." He continued to eat. "I was in love once too, and I wish I had the chance to take her home with me.." He smiled as he looked down at the pendant on his neck. A small silver figure of a fox rested on a chain.

Your eyes dropping to the chain suddenly understanding why Mr. Shin dedicated much of his life to hybrid science and research. Why he is agreeing to help your cause. Your heart ached for him. New respect growing for the elder who sat before you. "Thank you Mr.Shin...Thank you so much." You smiled. Hwasa and Sehun quickly running to embrace the elder in hugs.

❉❉

It's nearing the end of your two-week stay in Australia and with all of the data collections and tests finished today was spent by the pool. All six of you waiting for Mr.Shin's arrival. Today he delivered the news of whether you could take Namjoon home with you.

The two of you sat under the giant umbrella, neither of you very fond of the harsh sun. He sat in navy swim shorts that clung a little close to his thighs, a towel resting around his neck, his ears lost in his fluffy grey hair. Beads of sweat forming around his chest, his eyes on your phone as you let him play with it. He never had one of his own.

Your eyes moving to the pool, in the water was Jungkook, he stood off in the deep end with Hwasa on his shoulders the two of them laughing. Hwasa playing with his ears. Your cheeks blushing as you watched him nip at her thigh. Face a cherry your attention got turned to Hani and Sehun who were towards the shallow end of the pool. You giggled watching Hani struggle to teach city boy Sehun how to swim.

Strong arms wrapping around your bare hips. Your two-piece doing little against his heated skin. "You'll burn if you don't put on any sunscreen."

"Put some on me?"

Letting out a chuckle, "Sure sweetheart. On your stomach."

Your face heating, a rush in your stomach hearing him say that. Laying on your stomach, with nibble hands he untied the straps of your top. "Don't want any lines now do we?" He smirks. You could hear the Cheshire in his voice. Lathering the sunscreen in his hands he began to work it into the skin on your back. His form climbing over you as he rested himself on your thighs, you could feel him lightly brush your ass as he worked.

His large hands working from the bottom of your back up. Breath hitching as his fingers grazed the sides of your breast. His fingertips staying there for a second longer.

A cough tearing you away from the task at hand. A few meters away stood Mr. Shin, he was in his usual polo shirt and khaki pants. "I have news." He declared.

Namjoon tied your top once more, setting a towel around you. "Yes, Sir?"

Mr.Shin waved Hani and Jungkook over. Sehun and Hwasa following after them. "Pack your bags, you're coming back with us." He smiled, his smiled a proud one yet a bit bittersweet as he once more looked down to the silver fox that rested on his chest. Jungkook tapping his feet against the cement as he lifted Hwasa in his arms. Hani jumping onto Sehun, knocking him to the ground she had no shame, her lips attacking his. Namjoon resting his head atop of yours, his hands twining with yours.

"I'm ready to go home." He whispered.

❉❉

Luggage placed over the top of your seats, Namjoon carrying a small baby blanket with him, he fisted the fabric as he sat next to the window. He bit his lip. He was nervous. Taking a seat next to him you placed a beanie over his head to cover his ears as you could hear others beginning to whisper. "It's going to be okay, you're off to experience something new Joon."

He smiled at you, his dimples peeking at you, "I know." He looked out the window as the plane started to take off, his hand grasping yours, "I hope Koya is well-taken care off."

Resting your head on his shoulder, "We can come back and visit him one day if you'd like."

He chuckled, "I'd like that." His eyes on the window, "What's home like?"

"Busy."

"Busy?"

"I live in a city, there will be people everywhere, it's never quiet, lots of things to do. It'll be quiet the change from the coast here." You buried your nose into his chest.

"I've read about places like that. Are there other hybrids?" he asked, his eyes glowing with the need for knowledge.

"Yes, there are. Lots of dog, and cat hybrids. A few domestic bunnies, hamsters, mice, etc." You looked at him, "You'll be the only cuddly bear."

He chuckled, "I'll be a pet huh?"

You frowned, "I mean to everyone else you'll be a pet. I won't ever make you feel that way. Last I check considering hybrids to be pets is gonna change."

"Why?" he asked

"Because of people like us, all those tests, all the data it was taken to prove that even the wildest of hybrids are more human than animal, to prove to the world that keeping hybrids as pets is wrong."

The male looking at you, a dopey smile across his face as he just responded with a simple kiss on your cheek.

❉❉

Your fists gripping the sheets, his lips traveling down your back as he mounted himself. Keeping your thighs spread, his breathing heavy he slid into you. "F-Finally!!" He grunted, his pants heavy. Your back arched, hips gently moving against him. His hips starting to thrust. In and Out. In and Out.

"J-Joon A-ahh."

"Shh, I've been wanting to feel this for a while now." He grunted, his fingers twining with yours, his weight pushing your weight into the mattress, hips steady he pumped himself into you. With each thrust, he pulled out, before easing into you once more. Each time his tip didn't fail to kiss your cervix. Sweet friction. His grunts loud, he was in no rush and neither were you.

Slow strokes and wet kisses. Jagged breathes, and pinches of your breasts. Light slaps and gentle caresses. Lewd sounds at war with the squeaking of the bed. His tongue gently traveling along the shell of your ear, "Sweetheart?.." His voice ragged, his pace increasing, he going faster, his thrusts aimed to pierce you deeper.

Soft mewls escaping you, your hips gently rolling to meet his pace, "Y-Yes?"

His hips pistoning into your core, his lips trailing your neck, his teeth softly grazing the sensitive skin. "I love you." His voice genuine, his strong arms flipping you over, your chests against one another, his face flushing as he gripped your hips drilling himself into you.

Your cries louder, "J-Joon, I love you too." You hands cupping your breasts as he lost himself in you. His hips slamming into you, his chest heaving.

"I love you so fucking much, so so much." His eyes lidded, his head thrown back. His hips stuttering, his hips moving on their own. His thumb flicking your clit. The sensation pushing you near the edge.

"D-Don't Stop!!" You cried out, body trembling.

"I wouldn't dare!" He grunted, his body trembling, his thumb rolling against your clit.

"Joon!!!" You whined, walls clenching around him as you lost yourself in the pleasure, slick coating him.

"Fuck, Fuck, Fuck!!" He cried out, pulling out from your core, white spurts of cum landing on your abdomen, his ears twitching, his chest heaving.

You let out a soft whine, lightly curling up, your core and clit vibrating. He let out a chuckle, his finger dipping into the cum on your abdomen, he painted a small heart.

"I meant it when I said I loved you." He smiled.

Your cheeks flushing, your hand grabbing the nearest pillow tossing it at him.

❉❉

After the jetlag left, after life had returned to normal, after all, that had happened in your two weeks in Australia you wanted to surprise Namjoon. After sending him off for a guys day with Jungkook and Sehun. Sehun eager to show the two what a gamers cafe was.

Hwasa and Hani arriving at your apartment, hands filled with grocery bags. "Let's make them dinner." Hwasa giggled. Hani's tail wagging with excitement.

Ingredients on the counter you began to cook the meats, Hwasa a few feet away teaching Hani how to cut vegetables. The dingo female having a hard time cutting a tomato. She complained every step of the way about how a tomato was the worst vegetable. Both you and Hwasa humoring her, step by step the three of you prepared a big dinner. Hani set the tables, Hwasa pored the drinks and you served the food. Eyes on the clock, ears listening for the click of the door.

Anticipation grew, and soon enough the click of the door came. Filing in were the three boys, Jungkook carrying arms full of Spider-Man pushed, Sehun holding dog figurines and Namjoon holding two bear plushes. One of a bear in a blue jacket another of a bear in a pink jacket. The little bears paws were connected. Namjoon blushed trying to hide the plushes when you took notice of them.

Walking over you grabbed his hand. "I have something for you Joon."

He smiled, "What might that be?" He asked as you led him to the kitchen.

You smiled, entering the kitchen looking over at him, "Your first homemade dinner."

He set the plushies down, his eyes glossy, his mouth dry. "Sweetheart.. you did all this for me?"

You blushed, giving a nod.

His large hands wiping a tear from his eye, pulling you close he rested his head atop of yours. "Thank You."

"Oh fuck its time to eat!" Jungkook cried out with excitement.

Namjoon glared over at the jackrabbit. The boisterous rabbit ruining the moment. His eyes returning to you, "I want you to feed me."

Your cheeks flushing as you gave his chest a pinch. "Fine."

#bts #bts fanfic #bts fanfiction #kim namjoon #namjoon smut #koala hybrid #koala namjoon #hybrid namjoon #bts oneshot #part of my hybrid series #smut #kpop fanfiction #bt21 koya #mutuals

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his-tori-an · 5 years ago

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This week I had the opportunity to visit Fishbourne Roman Palace, and was very excited to see how they portray a Roman site to the public and engage their visitors. I went with my grandma, who I remember a few years ago saying to me “I don’t like museums”, although she seems to enjoy them much more now when we go together, especially if there’s something pretty to see and take photos of. We had an amazing experience there and I’ve picked out a few of the things that stood out to me to talk about; the museum area, the walk across the mosaics and the gardens. I will be writing about the “hands on” area in my next article, and following this I’ll be summing up my thoughts about how they have portrayed their site and how -theoretically- we could portray Malton Roman Fort (where my department have been excavating) to visitors if it were to be an attraction and museum in a similar way.

A picture of me standing in front of banners showing different types of artefacts

Content warning: images of and discussion of human skeletons

(And yes, I’m wearing a Pokemon T-shirt in the featured image, I had to stick an awkward photo of me in here somewhere)

My grandma looking at a model of a Roman bathhouse

History of the Site

Fishbourne Palace, located in West Sussex, is the largest surviving Roman building in Britain and dates to about 75AD. Most of the palace was excavated in 1960 by Sir Barry Cunliffe after it was accidentally discovered by a water company laying a new line over the site. The palace is so big that a museum has been built over the site to try and preserve as much of the building in situ as possible.

In size, it is approximately equivalent to Nero’s Golden palace in Rome and in plan it closely mirrors the emperor Domitian’s palace (the Domus Flavia) completed in AD 92 on the Palatine Hill in Rome. Fishbourne is by far the largest Roman residence known north of the Alps. At about 150 square metres, it has a larger footprint than Buckingham Palace.

Museum

The museum is the first part you will see on your visit, it is laid out with information on walls in a numbered sequence which gives a background to the Roman occupation of England and the context of the site. These exhibits are very text heavy, and are balanced by the display of artefacts and images & diagrams.

Panel 1 was about the discovery of the site

Panel 2 explained stratigraphy and the display demonstrated this.

Panel 3 was about the site

Panel 4 explained the Roman invasion with diagrams

As well as these more factual exhibits there are interactive activities such as building a Roman road and identifying gods by matching pictures together on a low table. The scale model of the site in the first room attracted my Grandma, allowing for a more tactile experience than viewing a local map.

A scale model map of the area. On the glass there is a diagram indicating where the modern road is.

There were also a lot of kids when I went who were all fascinated by the example weaving activity, the scale model map and the bust of Vespasian, shouting “That’s what he looks like!!”. It is so important to have such tangible links for people to be able to relate to people in the past and see even emperors as “human”.

A bust of Vespasian

The curators of the exhibition have clearly put a lot of thought into weaving multiple themes into one, for example the “imported elegance” panel, which displays wall plaster from Fishbourne, explaining how the elaborate finishes would have been done by a skilled craftsman probably from Italy, and displaying two images of wall paintings found in Italy which compare to the evidence from Fishbourne.

Panel 24: Imported elegance. The display shows wall plaster from the site, and shows wall paintings from other sites which are similar.

The final parts of an exhibition are just as important as the introduction and can leave a lasting impact on the audience, and at Fishbourne the final space has three panels, “Disaster”, “Burials”, and “The Jigsaw”.

The disaster panel explains how between 270 and 280 AD the palace was destroyed by a fire, and how it cannot be certain if the fire was accidental or deliberate, but notes that pirates were raiding the south coast at that time, a neat way of painting a picture and explaining a narrative whilst not asserting facts we don’t know, a lot of archaeologists I know would say that if we’re not sure on the facts we shouldn’t tell stories, which are vital to public engagement and understanding.

The accompanying display is a show of the destruction, with puddles of melted lead, buckled window glass and broken and discoloured pottery which has been repaired and reconstructed for the exhibit. Personally my eyes are drawn to the reconstructed pots more than the disarticulated glass. On the top shelf by comparison, there are lots and glass from the late third century that survived the fire, it’s a massive shame that my photographs didn’t survive however.

The human remains in the museum lie in a glass case.

The burials section is in association with the human remains that lie in the centre of the room which is captioned with “a pagan burial, oriented on a north-south line and discovered in the demolished ruins of the Roman Palace”, which is on the opposite side of the room to the rest if the information. This is probably due to issues to do with space, but it did confuse me having the information, remains and the explanation all in different places.

The panel explains how the ruin was salvaged after it burnt down and that people would take things of value before further demolishing the building. They say that later, probably towards the end of the Roman period, shallow burials were made in the rubble, and one grave was in the north wing which was much deeper and is still there now.

Human remains in a grave cut into the floor

The ethics of displaying human remains in museums is contentious, and I won’t go into full details here. I think it is a lovely gesture to have left the skeleton in the north wing in its final resting place. The sign accompanying the burial simply says that there was no dating evidence in the form of grave goods, but we know that the graves were cut after the palace was destroyed. I was left feeling a little bit frustrated about the lack of information about the burials, although I’m aware that specific information is missing from our records as archaeologists, even more general information about human remains and osteology would benefit visitors. All in all I felt like this lack of information translated to a lack of “respect” for these people as individuals, and that they were seen as artefacts only.

Panel 34: The jigsaw

(Sorry for the image with me in the background.. I guess we can say I’m a treasure?)

The final panel is a neat conclusion to the exhibit, displaying modern and medieval artefacts which were found in the excavation such as coins and pottery which got there through ploughing, and captions this with the story of how the site was uncovered by workmen in 1960. Finally the last image of the exhibition is comprised of images of trenches, finds, archaeologists and analysis overlaid with a jigsaw which is a beautiful and emotive image. This choice to focus on archaeology and archaeologists as well as Roman history is masterfully played out, integrating the modern process of excavation neatly with the archaeology itself.

Image with a jigsaw overlay of archaeologists working on different aspects of the Fishbourne excavations

The Mosaics

Cupid on a dolphin mosaic

Walking around the bridges to see the mosaic floor was by far my favourite part. It was amazing to see the beautiful mosaics, each one different, laid out as though in the villa. The open layout of the room gave an immense sense of space and a feeling of awe, which is a key part of engagement at any heritage site. It is also almost entirely flat or ramped sections, making the exhibit one continuous experience.

My grandma looking at the mosaics

Practically, each mosaic is separated and labelled in a numbered sequence, meaning that you can walk around the room in a loop following the trail and and back at the start, although the route is not necessarily fixed. Each information board is located where you can see both it and the mosaic at the same time, with a description of the art style or purpose of the room and a reconstructed diagram of the art. Of course, at a basic level it is very important to be able to see both the information & diagrams and the mosaic at the same time to be able to understand and compare the information to reality and encourage learning and critical thought.

A shell mosaic

Something which I only spotted on my second visit was “the digital palace”, an amazing model which lets the user explore a reconstructed villa, clicking to walk into different rooms and looking around in 3d using the mouse. This was on understated computer desk in the middle of the exhibition which the user had to sit down to use, hopefully the museum will be able to find a way to make this technology easier to access for everybody to see and enjoy on a bigger screen!

The computer desk with “the digital palace” on the screen

Computer screen showing a digital model of a roman room, it says “Room N1, Hypocaust Room

Information and instructions about The Digital Palace; a representation of the North Wing made by Anthony Crew.

At the far end of the room there is a viewing platform displaying a slideshow of old and funny images of the archaeological process, and the options of three films called “1960s excavations”, “New Discoveries” and “Mosaic Care”. The use of audio and video technology allows a different way of presenting the archaeology than in the rest of the exhibit which gives the audience a different way to learn that appeals to them most, not to mention being very valuable for visually impaired or hearing impaired visitors. My only concern was that there were no chairs, meaning that visitors must stand to watch the films, which can be difficult or offputting- I also found the soundscapes coming from the viewing platform to be a bit odd.

The Hadley Trust viewing platform showing Barry Cunliffe working on the Medusa mosaic

Garden

The garden didn’t engage me as much but my grandmother loved it; she said she enjoyed the “colourful part with flowers and the pretty green shaped hedges”. It can be difficult for people without an interest in history to engage with museums, but the way the garden was portrayed clearly made an impact on her and she said that she would be happy to revisit based on that. It was designed to look like the grand garden of a Roman villa, with a beautiful scented lavender bed funded by the friends of Fishbourne Roman palace.

View of the gardens; a big grassy space surrounded by hedges laid out in angular patters.

The best part of the garden for me was the themed Roman flower beds. I thought it was an incredibly creative idea, with each flower bed representing a different theme, including medicine, herbs, beauty and all sorts. It smelled and looked incredible and that sensory experience made all the difference to me in enjoying the garden. I’m not sure if my grandma noticed the themes but she loved the flower beds in the same way as I did, noticing the strong scents and bright colours.

A flowerbed with a panel which says “medicinal plants”

Collections Discovery Centre

This building is separate to the museum, opened by Tony Robinson on Time Team in 2007, allows visitors to see artefacts in a more peaceful and very well lit modern area separate to the main museum. There are interactive drawers where visitors can open them to see collections of pottery, glass, bone and more and curated displays behind windows. Visitors are able to look through the window displays and see the store room and scientific research room, adding a new depth to the museum which isn’t just about the Roman history but also the archaeological process and storage of artefacts, which Fishbourne highlights very well.

A window into the conservation laboratory

Artefacts in drawers which visitors can open.

A window into the conservation laboratory

The Sensitive Store is behind a window display, which displays a variety of artefacts

All in all our visit to Fishbourne was very enjoyable, and I was inspired by the way in which they portrayed Roman history and culture to a modern audience. I’ll be posting soon about their “hands on” area, which was an incredible way of engaging all ages and types of audience in hands on activities related to archaeologists and archaeology. Following that I’ll be using this research to construct a theoretical plan of how we could portray Malton as a site if we were to have a visitor centre or museum, so stay in touch and make sure you subscribe to email notifications!

Let me know what you think in the comments or tweet me @EdgyTrowel!

This article was written by myself with help from Chloe Rushworth, you can check out her heritage blog and posts about the Malton dig here: https://archloology.wordpress.com/. Photos by myself and my Grandmother.

I visited Fishbourne Roman Palace: Here's my review on how they engage their audience... This week I had the opportunity to visit Fishbourne Roman Palace, and was very excited to see how they portray a Roman site to the public and engage their visitors.

#archaeology #children #featured #marketing #museum #Museums #student #tourism #travel #University

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mysynthfetish · 5 years ago

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Soundcraft Shithead

Right so I played at Showa Techno April 29th. Some really neat acts this year (as every year). Personal favorites this time were Jin-Cromanyon (of course), T.S.P. (nice improv, 2P battle style techno), and Hidetaka Matsumae (fantastic). Lemme see if I can put a link up to my set from the show here...

youtube

Yeah so there ya go. Make sure to read the video description for all the gory details. Some stupid shenanigans went on that I wrote about there so do check it out. The video is just a slideshow of gear photos, and maybe a smidge of video from the event, but not a video of my performance (didn’t feel like bothering with shooting video this time). It was fun. I’ll do it again next year.

So, Soundcraft. Yeah. A while back I bought a used Spirit Folio Si 18-2, and used that for the show. I was running the Mix Inserts to a Focusrite Compounder, but the signal started getting scratchy and intermittent, and I had to fuck with the jacks to get it to stay stable. Aaaaargh. Two weeks ago, the left insert just totally shat itself, no signal unless I pushed super hard sideways on the cable and I knew that was definitely Not A Good Thing. So fine then time for some surgery.

Here’s the mixer. The Mix Inserts are in the back row of sockets at the upper right, middle row, second and third over from the right. The jacks Soundcraft went with on this mixer are a funky kind made by Neutrik. All plastic body, with a plastic retainer ‘nut’ that can be removed by inserting a coin into the + and gently rotating to the left. It’ll make a nice CLICK and then you can carefully pull the ‘nut’ off. I’m not so sure how I feel about these. For ease of disassembly, compared to metal threaded jacks with actual nuts and washers, these Neutriks are definitely the winner. But they’re plastic, and plastic is obviously not as robust as metal, so you have to wonder about the lifespan of the ‘nut’ part itself. In any case, opening the mixer wasn’t a huge pain in the ass.

Underside of the PCB. It’s all one gifuckingnormous PCB, which was a nice surprise. (Mackie I’m looking at you here). Pretty easy to navigate, and as these are Made In England the soldering and build was actually very, very good (sorry if I offend anyone but fuck made in china, end of brief rant, we now return to program in progress). I desoldered the L Mix Insert jack to see what there was to see. This is what I seed:

Well, the little metal part there had worked its way loose. It seems the ‘teeth’ that are used to hold these things in had worn away at the plastic after who knows how many times a cable was inserted and removed over how many years. Ok. At this point I had two questions. First, is this part still available, as the mixer is from the early 2000s? Second, is flattening the teeth out and snapping the metal piece back in going to work (or last)? The answer to the first question was yes. After some data sheet detective work, I found out that the currently available part (NJ5 FD-V) has the same footprint and is basically drop-in compatible. The only difference is that the ‘nut’ is no longer a + shaped weirdo, but looks like a nut. Here:

Anyway, I ordered two pairs from Mouser, but for the time being, finagled and Ghetto Engineered the metal piece back in, re-soldered it, and so far it’s been working fine. So the answer to the second question is a tentative yes. Here’s more fun photos:

In any case, I’m happy I got the thing working again. These mixers hit the spot in a way that no other fucking mixer on the market since has. Tons of stereo inputs, a minimal pair of mono inputs. I have shitloads of stereo stuff, be it synths themselves or synths being run through stereo effects units/pedals. I don’t need a half-dozen mono channels. WHY ARE THERE NO MIXERS LIKE THIS?!!?! 2 mono (with mic pre-amp), and 8 stereo channels. Nice EQs. Sweepable mid on the mono channels. Tape input. Monitor and Main outputs. Mix Inserts. The only thing I wish it had was a Mute button on every channel. Why they left that out bewilders me. Anyway, when the Insert shat itself I immediately jumped to the Worst Case Scenario Useless Mixer Dilemma Must Buy Replacement Immediately If Not Sooner Arrrgh, and bought another one off Digimart (an online amalgamate of new and used gear shops here in Japan). So, the latest incarnation of the Lab Of Machines Of Nefarious And Questionable Repute looks like this:

Under the pimped out MPC500 you can see a HHB Radius 3 Fat Man Stereo Tube Compressor (made by TL Audio). I tooled with a Presonus Bluetube DP for a bit but it wasn’t what I was after. This thing though, fucking hell. Or more like FUCKING HELL YES! I swapped the factory tube out with a Mullard tube and have the Spirit Folio Lite Mix Inserts running to it. I’m using that little mixer as a sub-mixer for all my drum machines. Let me just say, I am fucking more than happy with this. Warms up and glues the drum mix together SO NICELY. I’m toying with the idea of picking up NOS tubes periodically to see how the character of the sound changes. Need a budget first... (sigh).

That’s about it for this time, kiddies. I’ll end with some shameless self-promotion and throw up some action photos from the show. Take care y’all!

#fucktrump #showa techno 2019 #soundcraft #soundcraft spirit folio si #soundcraft spirit folio lite #neutrik #neutrik jack repair #hhb radius 3 fat man #mullard #satan #darkness #闇

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businesssetupindubai4-blog · 5 years ago

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Essential IT Infrastructure for a Small Business Setup

If you're reading this, you are in the process of taking your business from an idea you've talked to a few people about to something to make some serious money from.

What I'll cover will give you all the essential knowledge to cover at least 5 employees. This setup will run and run, and when you finally hire an IT person, they'll be able to take over effortlessly (and possibly question whether they're really needed).

Laptops and Desktops

First you need to decide between a desktop and a laptop. I would strongly advise on a laptop, as this gives you the portability you might need, and you don't have to plug anything aside from the charger in. Simple and straightforward.

Internet Connection

The first thing you'll need to make your system work is an internet connection. It can be through a mobile, cable, or ADSL. All are great, when used appropriately, but you need to choose one to start with.

For any office of ten or less people, you will be very comfortable with an ADSL connection from whoever the cheapest and best reviewed provider in your area is. You'll want to ask for a static IP when you set it up, and be adamant that you need one. Right now, it's not important, but it might be down the line and it'll save you time later on. Some services will charge a little more for this, so I suggest shopping around.

In terms of speed, the speed that's quoted on advertisements (for example 20Mb) is how fast you can get stuff from the Internet, and is mainly what we're concerned with at this point. Uploading will generally be a much smaller number, perhaps 512kbps, but generally the amount of traffic you'll be sending back to the internet is minimal.

You should look for bandwidth caps: some service providers will either restrict your speed, or cut off your connection all together when you've downloaded too many files from the Internet. This is less common now, but important to ask about.

Email, Calendaring, and Contacts

A lot has changed over the last six years, with the focus being to move away from having a mail server all of your own, to using one managed by someone else (also known as 'moving to the cloud').

There are only really two players in this field: Google, and Microsoft.

A lot of IT consultancies will push you towards a Microsoft Small Business Server, which whilst it can appear attractive is very expensive both up front, and in the long term when you move away from it. I cannot advise you enough to stay clear of this product.

If you're still stuck on the idea of Microsoft, most IT consultancies will be delighted to offer you a hosted Exchange server, but at its cheapest, this will be 100% more expensive than the next offering, which provides everything hosted Exchange does, and more.

The key innovator in this area has been Google: initially, they launched their incredibly popular Gmail product, which popularized the idea of threaded conversations and a lot of space for free. This, coupled with unobtrusive advertising and a clean interface took them to being probably the biggest provider of email today.

Office Suite and Note Taking

Office Suite

If you've opted for Google Apps, you've already got your office suite set up: it doesn't have every feature of either iWork or Microsoft Office, but it has so many that for free, there's very little point in going further initially. It has capability for word processing, spreadsheets, slideshows, drawings, and very neat data collection tables (useful for emailing a questionnaire, or posting one to a website).

But let's say you need more: you're trying to produce a very complex layout for a flyer, or you have a fiendish spreadsheet that Google Docs just can't quite handle. Microsoft has very carefully written its office suite for Macs, and it works very well. Apple has its competitor platform, iWork, which for an extra charge ties in very neatly with iWork on your iPhone or iPad if you get one. You can buy Microsoft Office for Mac (traditionally Microsoft awards odd years to Apple and even to Windows) from anywhere else that sells software, or you can buy iWork from the App Store on your Mac. The advantage of the App Store approach is that you'll have it installed and ready in a few minutes. For Pages, Numbers, and Keynote the total is £42, but each application is purchased individually for £13.99. Office for Mac runs to around £150 or so, and you'll need to use a DVD drive to install it.

Any files that you create should be saved somewhere that's backed up, for example your Dropbox (keep reading... ).

Note Taking

Note taking is useful. Synchronised note taking across Mac, Windows, iPhone, and Android a web browser-based client is even more useful. The chosen product in this category is Evernote, which for free gives you a generous account, and if you upload a photo (of a business card, for example) you can later find that picture by searching for text in it. You can share notebooks with other people, which is excellent for building a shared repository of information. These notebooks can also be shared to anyone on the Internet, although this is completely at your discretion.

Evernote will let you encrypt pieces of text, so it's very useful for saving passwords to. Select the text, right-click, and choose encrypt.

Evernote is also an excellent place to store your documentation.

Shared Storage

So now you have your Internet connection, your computer, and you're able to send people emails, you'll probably find you want a space to store your files.

My first recommendation for a startup will always be Dropbox. Dropbox is a small piece of software that runs on your computer, and watches a special folder, called Dropbox. It's available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile. Every time you add a file to that folder, or make a change to it, that file or those changes are written back to the central Dropbox servers.

A free account will give you 2GB of space, and will keep any changes you make to a file for the last 30 days, turning it into your personal time machine for everything stored in there. If you delete a file you can restore it immediately.

Additionally, you can have a shared folder with someone, which means that the folder on your computer you've shared with them is a mirror image of the same folder on theirs. You can see when they're working on a file, and vice versa. As soon as they save changes, these changes are replicated across to your computer.

Finally, there is a special folder in your Dropbox, called Public. Anything you put in here can be shared with someone else by emailing them a link to the file. This is an excellent alternative to emailing large attachments, or using FTP servers (fantastic for artwork files, for example).

If you pay Dropbox, they'll give you more than 2GB, and instead of saving changes to your files for the last 30 days, they'll save them forever, which can be useful if you need to show a chain of work.

For a more serious, server-like approach to file serving, I suggest buying a Synology disk station. Synology make incredibly user-friendly self-contained servers that can hum quietly to themselves in the corner of a room without anyone noticing. They have support for something called RAID, which means that if a disk fails, you can just slide out the broken one and replace it with a new one. They have built-in virus scanning for peace-of-mind (although you do have to enable it), and can function as a web server if you ever need to.

Remember when you buy a Synology, you need to buy the hard drives separately: you don't have to buy enough to fill your device at once, but you do need to buy at least one to be able to use it business setup in dubai.

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margaretbeagle · 5 years ago

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Inside the Facebook Ads of Your Competitors: How to Research, What to Learn

If you’re looking for inspiration for your next great Facebook ad, then we’ve got you covered with this post!

We’re diving into the Facebook Ad Library to give you tips on how to research the ads of your competitors and how to find inspiration from some of the most creative and effective Facebook advertisers out there. We’ll share some specific tips on how to get meaningful Facebook ad results, and we’re hopeful you’ll leave with a list of ideas that you can test today.

Let me know if this resonates with you: Social media sometimes feel like more art than science.

That’s a bit hard to admit since our Buffer podcast is called The Science of Social Media!

But it’s true. There are strategies and tactics, especially on the brand side of things, that can be hard to measure and hard to quantify. Still, we want to do our best to give you the specifics on what works and why — and we have an especially cool way of doing that when it comes to Facebook ads.

The state of Facebook advertising

You’ve probably heard public perception shifting a little bit in recent months regarding Facebook. Despite this change, the advertising potential of Facebook remains huge. When we talk about Facebook, we’re really talking about Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp — all the assorted properties that Facebook owns. This year, Facebook is nearing 2 billion users on its platforms — that’s nearly 1 in every 3 people over the age of 13 in the world.

Moreso, Facebook ads still get clicks. According to stats as of April of this year, the average Facebook user clicks on 11 ads in 30 days.

Anecdotally, those click numbers sound great, though they have been better. Cost per click on Facebook is as high as 15 cents versus 12 cents a year ago, and clickthrough rate for brand ads was at 1.6 percent at the start of the year and is now closer to 1.1 percent.

So the takeaway here is that Facebook has a huge potential audience, people still click Facebook ads all the time, and the competition is strong for who gets those clicks.

Now we can bring in the science!

Takeaway: Use Facebook Ad Library to see how other Pages are advertising

With this new tool, you can enter the name of any Facebook Page, and it will show you all the ads that the page has, both active and inactive.

The tool has a lot of features built around political and issue-based ads in order to provide transparency on who pays for what. Marketers can benefit from it, of course, by using the tool to do some research and gain inspiration from the brands that are doing great things with Instagram ads. For instance, if you pull up Airbnb on the Facebook Ads Library tool, you’ll see that they currently have over 930 ads running in the U.S. alone. Additionally, you can see that they’ve spent $58,000 on political or issue-based ads since May 2018.

Fascinating stuff.

So we’ve put some time into using this tool to come up with some best practices for Facebook ads along with some research on the ‘net to see what other advice is out there. If you have any favorite ad examples you love, feel free to share with us on social media using the hashtag #bufferpodcast. We’d love to hear them.

Tips for Facebook image ads

We’ve seen a couple of popular varieties of images in our Facebook Ads Library research. First, some successful brands use images that re-enforce the copy claims in the ad’s text and call-to-action. For instance, Lululemon’s ads for a ventilated shirt show a man exercising while wearing the shirt — and looking cool and ventilated while he does it.

Of course, it may not always be possible to come up with like-for-like images, especially if you don’t have a physical product. We find this a lot with our social ads at Buffer since we sell software.

In that case, we’ve seen a lot of brands go for either an attractive image that catches attention while relating somewhat to the image copy — for instance, AirTable used a dog photo, which is always a winner. Or, if you can swing it, we’ve seen brands like Headspace have great success with illustrations and graphics.

Vibrant imagery can be really effective on Facebook. If you’re making graphics, you can do this with color, like The Guardian has with its ads. They placed their weekly magazine on a bright yellow background for some ads. We’ll link to it in the show notes so you can see it. It’s striking!

Get an in-depth view of global issues with The Guardian’s essential weekly magazine. Subscribe today and get 6 issues for $6 with free worldwide delivery.

Posted by Guardian Weekly on Thursday, January 31, 2019

One way that seems to work well with testing which images could be ad-worthy is to use organic posts as a testing ground. A lot of our very best ads at Buffer have started as organic posts to our Page. We boost high-performing content — especially content that has high engagement rates — and we’re able to learn what type of visuals and copy resonate with the Facebook community.

Tips for Facebook ad copywriting

With image ads — and every other type of Facebook ad, really — one of the most important elements after the visuals will be your call-to-action. What words will you use to convince someone to click or tap?

You’ll find a lot of great inspiration with copywriting, too, when you spend some time in Facebook Ads Library. Here are a few of our favorite discoveries.

You can point your call-to-action to a Facebook Event. This comes with a bunch of benefits: people get to stay on Facebook rather than leave to a new site, which may boost your click rate. Those who RSVP can act as a form of viral promotion since their “Yes” replies may send the event into their feed and surface the event on their friends’ feeds. And of course, in tying the even back to your Facebook page, you get the added bonus of extra exposure for your page itself, which will hopefully bring you some more follows.

You can put social proof in your copy, sometimes even making the call-to-action as explicit as “See the reviews” or “1,000-plus Google Reviews.”

And along with reviews, we’ve seen a lot of brands embracing the Instant Experience storefront, which allows people to stay on Facebook but still browse your products through an experience that you can customize. Instant Experiences can be used with almost all Facebook ad formats–Carousel, Single Image, Video, Slideshow and Collection. The one thing to keep in mind is that it’s mobile-only for now.

Ultimately, the best calls-to-action we’ve seen written are those that take you to a page that matches the text in the call-to-action itself, creating a sense of continuity for the customer. Whenever possible, we highly recommend building a custom landing page experience that matches the messaging of your ad.

Tips for Facebook video ads

Another popular type of Facebook ad is video. There are a couple of main tips we’ve noticed when it comes to video ads on Facebook.

First, brands create videos that can be effective with the sound turned off. Data shows that as much as 85 percent of Facebook videos are watched without sound, so it’s imperative that whatever video you use in your advertising that it can get its point across through visuals alone. You can do this purely by visuals — say, if you’re a clothing brand and want to show off your outfits, or if you’re a food or cooking product and can show your stuff at work in the kitchen. If you really do need words, though, there’s always captions. We’ve seen a lot of effective ads that go with captions to support the story of their ad.

Another common best practice is to use square video rather than landscape video. This is especially important when you consider the viewing experience across mobile and desktop — landscape videos just don’t work as well on phones.

We ran a study about this and found that square video outperformed landscape video on every social media network in terms of video views, engagement, and completion rate.In some cases, square video resulted in 30-35% higher video views and an 80-100% increase in engagement.

If you happen to be running just a mobile ad, then you might consider a vertical format instead. Otherwise, we suggest keeping your videos square so that they work great everywhere.

Tips for Facebook carousel ads and lead ads

Carousel ads are another neat way to tell a story with Facebook ads.

One of the best ways we’ve seen this work is to visually tie the images together, either thematically by choosing similar images or quite explicitly by cutting up a single image into multiple frames or using graphic design elements that carry over from one carousel image to the next. With carousel ads, you can apply many of the same techniques as with the image ads we discussed earlier: use images that relate to the copy, be vibrant, be engaging.

That’s probably good advice for any visual you use on any of the different Facebook ad types.

Take Lead Ads for instance.

In addition to the visual marketing tips, we’ve seen brands really make the most of this ad type by being smart about the way they set up the lead capture forms. Facebook will autofill certain types of information, which makes these lead forms as easy-as-can-be for the people signing up. Brands use this to their advantage by only asking for the essential information. We’ve seen some companies only ask for email addresses — say, if you’re wanting to send an e-book.For others, especially those with brick-and-mortar locations or regional events, we’ve seen simple forms with email, city, and country.

As you’re scrolling through Facebook Ads Library, one thing you’re likely to notice is that many of the ads show text that says the ad you’re looking at has multiple versions.

Tool: Dynamic creative ads

This Facebook ads feature will automatically optimize and deliver the highest-performing combinations of visuals and copy. You simply give Facebook a bunch of options to choose from, and Facebook will serve variations across its ad network until it finds the best-performing combinations. These combos then get served more widely as the winning ads.

You can apply dynamic creative ads to Conversion, Traffic, Video Views, Reach, Brand Awareness, and App Install campaigns. Pretty much anything you could hope for.

And when you’re coming up with options, the limits for creative are 10 images or videos and 5 options for each of body text, title, description, and call-to-action.

Tool: Text overlay

Another favorite tool of ours — and one we see put to good use very often in the Facebook Ad Library ads — is the Text Overlay Tool.

You can upload your ad to this tool, and it will tell you whether your ad contains a High, Medium, or Low amount of text. This is important because the amount of text can affect the reach of your ad.

Ideally, Facebook prefers visuals that have little to no text. You’ll see this in the ads of top brands — they all have bright and stunning visuals with very little text.Still, if your ad image does need some text on it — say, with a brand message or tagline — you can test it on the Text Overlay tool first.

After uploading, the tool will give your image a score of High, Medium, Low, or OK. High-text images may not run at all.Medium-text images may have much lower reach.Low-text images may have slightly lower reach.And OK images should run as expected.

How to say hello to us

We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!

Heather-Mae on Twitter

Dave on Twitter

Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!

About The Science of Social Media podcast

The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode. It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!

The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.

Inside the Facebook Ads of Your Competitors: How to Research, What to Learn published first on https://improfitninja.weebly.com/

0 notes

mariemary1 · 5 years ago

Text

Inside the Facebook Ads of Your Competitors: How to Research, What to Learn

If you’re looking for inspiration for your next great Facebook ad, then we’ve got you covered with this post!

Let me know if this resonates with you: Social media sometimes feel like more art than science.

That’s a bit hard to admit since our Buffer podcast is called The Science of Social Media!

The state of Facebook advertising

Moreso, Facebook ads still get clicks. According to stats as of April of this year, the average Facebook user clicks on 11 ads in 30 days.

So the takeaway here is that Facebook has a huge potential audience, people still click Facebook ads all the time, and the competition is strong for who gets those clicks.

Now we can bring in the science!

Takeaway: Use Facebook Ad Library to see how other Pages are advertising

With this new tool, you can enter the name of any Facebook Page, and it will show you all the ads that the page has, both active and inactive.

Fascinating stuff.

Tips for Facebook image ads

Get an in-depth view of global issues with The Guardian’s essential weekly magazine. Subscribe today and get 6 issues for $6 with free worldwide delivery.

Posted by Guardian Weekly on Thursday, January 31, 2019

Tips for Facebook ad copywriting

You’ll find a lot of great inspiration with copywriting, too, when you spend some time in Facebook Ads Library. Here are a few of our favorite discoveries.

You can put social proof in your copy, sometimes even making the call-to-action as explicit as “See the reviews” or “1,000-plus Google Reviews.”

Tips for Facebook video ads

Another popular type of Facebook ad is video. There are a couple of main tips we’ve noticed when it comes to video ads on Facebook.

If you happen to be running just a mobile ad, then you might consider a vertical format instead. Otherwise, we suggest keeping your videos square so that they work great everywhere.

Tips for Facebook carousel ads and lead ads

Carousel ads are another neat way to tell a story with Facebook ads.

That’s probably good advice for any visual you use on any of the different Facebook ad types.

Take Lead Ads for instance.

As you’re scrolling through Facebook Ads Library, one thing you’re likely to notice is that many of the ads show text that says the ad you’re looking at has multiple versions.

Tool: Dynamic creative ads

You can apply dynamic creative ads to Conversion, Traffic, Video Views, Reach, Brand Awareness, and App Install campaigns. Pretty much anything you could hope for.

And when you’re coming up with options, the limits for creative are 10 images or videos and 5 options for each of body text, title, description, and call-to-action.

Tool: Text overlay

Another favorite tool of ours — and one we see put to good use very often in the Facebook Ad Library ads — is the Text Overlay Tool.

You can upload your ad to this tool, and it will tell you whether your ad contains a High, Medium, or Low amount of text. This is important because the amount of text can affect the reach of your ad.

How to say hello to us

We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!

Heather-Mae on Twitter

Dave on Twitter

Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!

About The Science of Social Media podcast

The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.

Thank Inside the Facebook Ads of Your Competitors: How to Research, What to Learn for first publishing this post.

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lunarose99 · 8 years ago

Text

Dorks

I wrote another thing. It’s actually fluffy and... well maybe not romantic but certainly less angsty than my usual stuff.

Enjoy Keith and Lance being dorks getting together because of aliens.

Read on AO3

Lance is about to pee himself.

Why, you may ask?

Well, now, that would be an excellent question. The short answer is the presentation he is listening to is hilarious. It’s supposed to be about one of the early humans, he doesn’t remember which one, but the point is it’s supposed to be boring as dirt. And he supposes if this kid was actually talking about what he’s supposed to be talking about, it would be.

That’s why no one in the class is listening, anyway. The slides for the presentation have neat little pictures of early human skulls and the perfect amount of text and boring titles. And every now and then the kid clicks through them to make it look like he’s going along with it.

The words coming out of this kid’s mouth, however, do not match his slides at all. He got started on a tangent at some point and just rolled with it. The teacher hasn’t said anything, and every time Lance glances over at Professor Sendak the man has had his head down over his desk. No one else is paying attention, either, hence why the kid went on with his tangent.

The tangent? Conspiracy theories. This kid has been ranting about fake moon landings and aliens for five minutes now, and he shows no signs of stopping. It’s kind of adorable, actually.

Lance wishes he could remember the kid’s name. They’ve had class together all year, but the kid was quiet and never raised his hand, and Lance never paid attention during roll call. So to see this quiet, shy, nerdy kid become so animated and passionate about conspiracy theories of all things is downright hilarious.

It’s always the quiet ones, right?

What made it worse is Lance is pretty sure he is the only person in the room paying attention to what this kid is saying. He ran late today and so ended up in the front row, his traitorous friends not saving him a seat. There had been several angry texts about that.

He wanted to take it all back. This kid was amazing. Lance needed to learn his name and everything else about this kid. This was his new best friend right here.

“And the pyramids!” the kid said, waving his arms. “Did you ever notice the pyramids are the same in central America and Egypt, despite the two regions having no contact with each other? It’s obvious aliens were involved! They taught the humans how to build!”

Lance is having a hard time figuring out if this kid is serious or not. At this point he was only talking to meet the time limit their presentations had to be, so the actual sanity of the kid was questionable.

Lance’s sanity, however, was going to take a nosedive if he didn’t let out his laughter soon. He’d shoved a fist in his mouth a while ago and bitten down on his knuckle, which had been working. But the more he watched the kid the harder it was becoming to keep his composure. But if he laughed it would break whatever reverie has the class ignoring this presentation, and he doesn’t want to get the kid in trouble. Not when he has made Lance’s week.

Like all good things, the presentation does eventually end. The kid hits the key to end the slideshow and then looks around to see if anyone has noticed. Lance takes several deep breaths to calm down.

The kid has to call Sendak’s name to actually alert him the presentation is over, and Lance is pretty sure the kid just got full marks for that reason alone, which is so unfair in the grand scheme of things, but he’ll let it go this once.

“Oh, thank you, Keith. That was very enlightening, well done.”

Lance almost loses it again. Enlightening indeed.

Keith gathers his few materials and goes back to his seat. Sendak gives them a few reminders about their essay and when their final will be, and then he ends the class early. Keith was the last presenter.

Lance books it to Keith’s seat before the kid can leave.

Keith pauses in gathering his things. “…can I help you?”

He’s cute, Lance decides. He’s got a messy haircut and pale skin, and his typical black t-shirt and dark skinny jeans. He pulls it off well.

“Your presentation was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen,” Lance said, breaking out into a smile again.

Keith’s eyes widen, a pink dusting covers his face. He bites his lip and his face gets even redder. “Uh…thanks.”

“No problem! I mean, that takes serious balls to do what you just did!” Lance looked away for a second to wave and acknowledge Hunk and Pidge. He swears it was just a second. But when he looked back, Keith already had his bag over his shoulder and was running out the door.

Lance blinked.

“Um…what just happened?”

He ran away? Why did Keith run away? Lance hadn’t even asked if he wanted to get together sometime! Hell, he hadn’t even gotten a last name! How was he supposed to find him now?

“Lance, come on! I’m hungry!” Pidge complained.

“Yeah, yeah I’ll be right there.” Lance stared at the place Keith had disappeared a little longer. Was it something he said?

Keith wants to die. Let it be known on all records that dying of embarrassment is, in fact, possible.

God, he hadn’t thought anyone was actually listening! He never would have rambled on about all those theories otherwise! Especially not the cute Spanish boy!

To: Shiro

I want you to write ‘Killed by aliens’ on my tombstone.

To: Keith

Part of me wants to ask why, the other part of me doesn’t want to know.

Is there a reason you’re thinking about your post-mortem desires?

To: Shiro

I did something stupid and I will never be able to recover. The only repentance is death.

To: Keith

Okay, before you actually give a heart attack, tell me what happened. Are you okay?

To: Shiro

Remember that cute guy in my bio class?

To: Keith

The one with the amazing butt, yes I remember.

To: Shiro

And you know how I had my presentation today?

To: Keith

I remember something along those lines. How are these related?

To: Shiro

Well I was the last presenter, so of course no one is listening by that point. Not even prof. I had a throwaway line about aliens early in the presentation but no one reacted, so I thought fuck it and just spent the time talking about aliens. Prof had no idea, he didn’t even know when I was done.

To: Keith

You didn’t.

And let me guess, guy with the amazing butt was actually listening.

To: Shiro

he came up to me after class and said it was the best thing he’d ever seen??? Shiro I’m dead I can never show my face in public again.

I ranted about aliens in front of the hottest guy I’ve ever seen

To: Keith

Please tell me you got his number

To: Shiro

Shiro. What part of this conversation makes you think I got his number.

To: Keith

Well what else would you have done after he said your speech about aliens was the best thing he’s ever seen?

That’s a keeper right there. Never gonna find another one like him.

To: Shiro

I want to remind you who you are talking to.

To: Keith

So what did you do then? You had to have said something

To: Shiro

I said thanks and booked it first chance I had

To: Keith

Keeeeiiiitttthhhhh

To: Shiro

This why I need you to kill me and put me out of my misery.

Much to Keith’s chagrin, Shiro is not willing to kill him. Keith is forced to suffer his humiliation. By the time that class came around again, Keith almost skips it. And he would have, if they didn’t have to turn in their final essays that day.

Hot Guy is standing outside the door to the room when Keith gets there, and he notices Keith before Keith notices him. So Keith has no chance to escape.

He should have planned his funeral better over the last few days.

“There you are!” Hot Guy says. “Why’d you run off so fast the other day? I didn’t even get to introduce myself!”

Keith blinks. He…wants to introduce himself?

“What?”

“My name’s Lance Sanchez. You want to sit together today?”

Keith can no longer process what’s happening. His body moves on autopilot separate from his mind, and he finds himself sitting in the middle of the room next to Lance.

“So…how’d you learn so much about aliens anyway?” Lance asks.

Keith continues to stare at Lance. “You…really were listening.”

“Um…yeah, I thought we established that?” Lance asks, looking side to side.

Crap. Keith is blowing it. Hot Guy is actually talking to him and Keith can’t stop being an idiot for two seconds to actually enjoy it.

He’s saved from further embarrassment when Sendak starts the class. It’s a review day mostly, and just when Keith thinks he’ll be able to run away and never see Lance again Sendak hands out study guides and tells them to work on it together.

“Perfect, now we can talk more!” Lance says, flashing a gorgeous smile at Keith.

Yeah, if Keith could just stop time and stare at that smile until he dies he’d be very happy with his life. It’s a little crooked, the right side pulling up slightly higher than the left, but the way it makes Lance’s face crinkle is to die for and Keith thinks that would be a wonderful reason to stop breathing.

“Uh, are you okay, buddy?” Lance asks.

The smile disappears and Lance’s brows drop into concern. It’s not as pretty as the smile, but any look directed at him is good enough and oh crap when did it get this bad? He knew he was crushing on the guy but that was strictly because Lance was aesthetically pleasing to look at. He should be a little more functional than this.

“Keith?”

Keith blinks and shakes himself out of it. He should probably respond. “Yeah, sorry, I was just…”

“Distracted by my good looks?” Lance asks. His voice dropped an octave and he raised on brow, smirking, actually honest-to-God smirking.

And it shouldn’t, Keith knows it really shouldn’t, it was barely a sentence, but those words have his face heating up again. For God’s sake he doesn’t even know if Lance swings his way!

But, as usual, his mouth runs faster than his brain. “Yes.”

The flirty look drops immediately, replaced by wide-eyed surprise. Lance leans back a little, the tips of his ears turning red. “Wait, really?”

Keith buries his face in his hands. “You’re stupidly attractive and if you could just get the rejection over with already that’d be great.”

It’s a few moments before he feels Lance prying his hands away. Now Lance looks amused, a softer smile on his face this time. “How about instead of a rejection, I give you my number and we go on a date.”

“What.” Keith.exe has stopped working.

Lance’s smile grows. He rips off a corner of the study guide and writes down some numbers, sliding the paper over to Keith when he’s done. “You’re not so bad on the eyes yourself.”

Keith’s gaze darts down to the phone number. Is this real life? Did he actually get Hot Guy’s number? Or did Shiro actually kill Keith and this is some weird post-mortem dream?

“This is real, right?” Keith asks. He’s asking to make sure this isn’t a dream, but Lance thinks he’s talking about the number.

“Of course it’s real! You think I’d give you a fake number after all of this? I haven’t been able to stop thinking of you for two days, man.”

“I…really? You’ve been thinking of me?” Keith asks. His face is heating up again, but for once it’s not in embarrassment.

Lance’s blush, however, might be. “Don’t look so pleased.”

Keith smiles and picks up the paper, taking his phone out so he can program it in right now. As soon as that’s done, he sends Lance a smiley face.

Lance brightens as soon as he gets it.

Keith is ready to walk out right then and process what just happened, but he realizes something crucial.

They’re still in class. What are two people who just agreed to date but haven’t actually gone on a date supposed to talk about?

“What are we supposed to talk about for the next half hour?” Keith asks.

“Whatever we want, I guess,” Lance shrugs.

“You could try doing the study guide in front of you,” a girl on the other side of Lance suggests.

Both boys freeze and blush in embarrassment. The fact that probably half of the class heard their getting together is just dawning on them.

Keith buries his face in his hands again and sinks down in his seat. “I’ll just die now please.”

Lance laughs. “Not until after the second date, at least.”

Keith peeks out from behind his fingers.

“Come on, you little rabbit, let’s study so we don’t fail.”

“I can’t fail this class, I’ll never be able to look Sendak in the eye again after the last two days.” Between an alien presentation and scoring a date in his class, there was going to be very little biology that Keith actually remembered.

Lance scoots his chair closer and leans over the worksheet, reading aloud the first question.

Keith stares at him for a moment and decides it’s a good thing he’s not a biology major anyway.

To: Shiro

Shiro. what do you wear on a first date.

To: Keith

YOU HAVE A DATE????????

To: Shiro

Please don’t freak out I’m alREADY FREAKING OUT

To: Keith

I’ll be there in ten minutes and I want details. Who is it even with?

To: Shiro

Hot Guy with the Amazing Butt from Bio

To: Keith

The one who listened to your alien presentation?

To: Shiro

…

To: Keith

I don’t believe this. Aliens actually got you a date.

gemcM��|�

#klance #voltron #vld #keith #lance #fanfic #fic #my fic #my writing

62 notes · View notes

hydrus · 5 years ago

Text

Version 385

youtube

windows

zip

exe

macOS

app

linux

tar.gz

source

tar.gz

I had an ok week. There are more improvements to mpv and the shortcuts system, and a few misc small jobs done as well.

mpv

Some more general improvements this week:

MPV windows now work in slideshows, and all audios/videos are smoother to move to the next file when slideshows are running.

When you scrub the seekbar below a native or mpv video player, the video should now more reliably pause itself while you drag. Also, more kinds of one-frame music videos (where it is just an image webm with a song in the background) should now appear with their seekbars now, and the seekbars for all these unusual videos and audio files should work better.

A zoom bug where video could navigate down a few pixels on zoom in/out cycles is fixed, and the blank audio mpv window now has some hardcoded zoom capability and should scale itself to fit in the small preview window, always letting you interact with its seek bar.

I attempted to get mpv working for macOS but ran into some technical walls, I think because I am limited to 10.12 Sierra. I do not think there are excellent solutions for this, at least for my macOS expertise, so mpv support on macOS is unfortunately on hold until I learn more.

shortcuts

The media viewer gets more shortcut work this week. Until now, hitting enter, return, or escape on any viewer, and middle or double left-click on the normal browser, was hardcoded to attempt to close that viewer. This is now all plugged into the shortcuts system and is editable. It comes under the 'close_media_viewer' command for all the 'media_viewer' sets. Mouse integration is not complete, but we are almost there, and most actions should work, if you want to map, say, alt+left click to something.

Last week's double click support added an interesting bug to existing workflows: whenever you intended to click twice fast--like when using the archive/delete filter quickly--the second click was detected as a double-click instead, and often nothing would happen. This is now fixed. Now, if there is no double-click command mapped, including on any parent window, that second click will be attempted instead as a second single click. So, you can now click through the archive/delete filter fast again.

This new single/double click logic (when any parent window does have a double-click command mapped, the single click substitution does not occur and that double-click does count and is passed up) adds a neat new capability to mpv windows, which, because they scale up so well and usually almost fill the screen, leave little whitespace to click 'outside' the window to do anything but pause/unpause on a left-click. Now, a double-click can be neatly passed up to a parent if there is a mapping. For instance: a double-click on an mpv player in the regular browser media viewer will now pause and then close the window (rather than doing a quick pause/unpause), because 'media_viewer_browser' on the larger window has double-click mapped to close the window. I have also made it default that double left-click in the archive/delete filter is now mapped to 'keep', so in a similar way, double clicking an mpv window in the archive/delete filter will now do 'keep and move on'! If this is a bit complicated to read, don't worry--have a play with it and you'll get the feel. I hope this makes filtering videos a bit nicer now we have mpv.

the rest

Danbooru apparently changed how their tags work behind the scenes, so this week adds new parsers for danbooru that should have everyone working again. Thank you to a user for submitting these.

I fixed some searches, usually ones without inclusive tags, where files in the trash could appear even though the domain was 'my files'.

A popup message now appears while a session is loading, just as a little indicator for slow-loading sessions until I can get better loading progress ui integrated here.

The splash screen looks less ugly, but it is still bad. I will keep working on this to get the greys/whites/blacks and layout margins looking better for all stylesheets.

full list

mpv:

the mpv window is now plugged into the slideshow system, so when an mpv window has played its media once, a media viewer browser currently slideshow-ing will now correctly know to move to the next media

slideshows of videos should progress to the next file faster and more smoothly, with no more half-second blit of the start of the movie before the next file loads

pausing video/audio is no longer cause for the slideshow to move on--now only the 'has played once through' check will naturally trigger it. you can now more reliably seek/scrub a video during slideshow

the mpv window and native animation player is now better about pausing while a seek drag (scrub) is ongoing

various music videos that have 1 frame should now show a seekbar correctly for the mpv window, with correct timecode based seeking

fixed a bug in the video/audio resizing code that meant zoom in/out cycles would move a video player down a few pixels off center

the blank audio mpv window now has basic hardcoded zoom support and will scale down to a too-small viewer window, so you can still access the seek bar

fixed some 'has duration' calculations for audio/video that has duration but no frame count

shortcuts:

if a shortcut handler on an individual window does not have a double-click mapping for a command--and furthermore if none of its parent windows that are fully plugged in have one either--it will attempt to map the single-click version of the event as a backup. so now if you have an archive/delete filter, you can click fast again and the double-clicks will be interpreted as single-clicks (unless you map double-click to mean something else on the media_window or one of the media_viewer parents)

the media viewers across the program are now fully plugged into the shortcuts system for key presses, and half-plugged in for mouse clicks

'close_media_viewer' is added to all 'media_viewer' shortcut set types. enter/return/escape are now defaults for 'media_viewer' (applying to all), and middle-click/double left-click are now defaults for 'media_viewer_browser'. this is no longer hardcoded. if you are a madlad, you can now unmap all 'close_media_viewer' commands

double left-click is now assigned to 'keep' in the 'archive_delete_filter' shortcut set. due to the new click/double click rules above, this means that by default double clicking a video/audio in the archive/delete filter will now mean 'keep and move on' on that fast second click!

edit shortcut set ui now sorts its command list on load

significant shortcuts refactoring

general shortcuts code and debug code cleanup and improvement

local file import pages and most downloaders will now report more file import steps to their status labels. most will blit by too fast to see, but if it hangs for a bit, you will now see the step it is caught up on. I imagine in most cases, this will be metadata generation for large videos

fixed a variety of searches that could return files not filtered to the current file domain (e.g. files in trash while in my files, or not in ipfs while in ipfs) when the search did not include an inclusive tag

updated the default danbooru file page parsers to get their new tag format, thank you to a user for submitting these

a popup message now appears while sessions are loading. it auto-dismisses once the load is complete

the edit media view options dialog (under options->media, launched from the filetype list) is now better at disabling non-applicable widgets based on filetype

fixed an issue where clicking from the autocomplete dropdown floating window to the same control's text input could result in a single flicker-frame where the dropdown is hidden

tightened the size of the splash screen white background. figuring out appropriate colour from the current stylesheet remains elusive lmao

cleaned up and wx->Qt converted a variety of event handling code

updated some 'mime' labels across the program to the new 'filetype' wording

next week

Next week is a cleanup week. I will catch up on some general background code improvement. Some users are getting crashes with the new mpv window swapping system, so I will also look at that.

#release

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cgrasso1 · 5 years ago

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Hey there! I wanted to share a quick recommendation post with you. This will be very beneficial to those who use music as a type of therapy, work in a studio, or who just loves a great pair of headphones in general.

The headphones I am recommending are not your typical headphones. They are much more advanced and personalized than any headphones I have ever heard put on my head. They are called Nuraphones. Here are some of the amazing features these wonderful headphones have to offer:

They adapt to your hearing a lot like how hearing aids do. They test your hearing and set up a personalized profile just for you. They even adapt over time. How cool is that?

Amazing noise cancellation

A social mode where you can hear things around you while listening to the headphones

A feature called immersion where it makes it feel as if you are at a concert in the first row

The sides of the headphones have the option to be customized (1 tap turn off/on social mode, 2 taps answer phone calls, etc)

They come with a warranty. If you lose or damage your current headphones they will simply deactivate your subscription and send you a new pair at no extra cost.

The pair I selected have a $15 a month plan!! (You don’t even have to pay for shipping or need great credit!!)

You get a new pair every 24 months and you get to keep the old pair!

Photo by Mohamed Abdelgaffar on Pexels.com

How in the World can a pair of headphones adapt to my hearing??

When you first get your Nura headphones there is a minute process where you download the app you go through a hearing test. There are a series of tones played that bounce off the eardrum. The Nura headphones record the bounce-back of the sounds played and then personalizes the headphones just for you. Additionally, you can have up to 3 profiles on one set of headphones. Pretty neat.

Why I love Nura Headphones

I work from home and my office area is also my son’s playroom. These headphones have helped me in so many ways from answering calls, attending webinars, finding a way to drown out my little one’s loud toys, and more. If you work from home and need a reliable headset, you have my word these are amazing.

I also use them for meditation. I turn on my meditating music, the noise cancellation, and relax to the sound of the music. The Nuraphones are the best headphones I have ever come across.

Also, they come in a beautiful magnetic case with different size earpieces (small, medium, large), an aux cord so you can use them with or without Bluetooth, and the charger for the headphones. Everything is beautifully designed and well packaged.

Wait! There are even more amazing features! I decided to charge them to 100% and let them die on their own. I am on day 3 and I still have 60% battery life left! Another great feature is they go into standby mode when you take them off and they turn back on when you put them on.

If you are interested in the Nuraphones all information can be found here. Just click the highlighted word and it will redirect you to the website.

Here is a short slideshow to when I unboxed Nura.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to read this short recommendation post. Additionally, there will be a YouTube review of the Nuraphones next month. I want to test them out for a whole month and give a more detailed review.

Thank you to everyone who likes, comments, shares, and supports Maybe Crazy Help and our mission to help others out of the darkest parts of their minds while spreading light on the subject of mental health. You guys are amazing.

Searching for an amazing pair of headphones? Nuraphones may be what you are looking for. Hey there! I wanted to share a quick recommendation post with you. This will be very beneficial to those who use music as a type of therapy, work in a studio, or who just loves a great pair of headphones in general.

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templified · 6 years ago

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Best WordPress Themes for Beginners

New Post has been published on https://www.templified.com/best-wordpress-themes-for-beginners/

Best WordPress Themes for Beginners

These are the best WordPress themes for beginners. Really user friendly and simple to manage.

That doesn’t mean that these themes skimp on features. Each one of these themes is packed with the kinds of tools and capabilities that can make your blog, shop or magazine a powerful marketing tool. Just because you may not have a lot of experience with WordPress, that doesn’t mean you should have to stick with one of the default themes. These premium quality templates are a great way to get an awesome looking website up and running quickly. The support and documentation are top quality too, so you’ll never run into issues you can’t handle.

So, here we go, the best WordPress themes for beginners.

Infra, WordPress Beginner Friendly Reviews Magazine Theme

Clean, Elegant, Infra. I don’t know what that means, I mean I do, but I don’t…it doesn’t matter. Ignore me.

Anyway, this theme is called Infra, it’s by Orange Themes, and it’s a simple little magazine theme with a twist…or orange! Get it?! Infra bills itself as a very simple to use, very user friendly and easy to customize theme for beginners. If you’re not too experienced with WordPress, customizing your own theme can be a bit of a chore. But Infra uses the WordPress theme options panel to make that process a relative breeze.

Infra has a high res display, a ratings system for reviewing products. It’s really an ideal reviews magazine or blog where reviewing products is a key component of what you have to offer the internet. Simple design, clear navigation, Infra does a lot at a very reasonable price. The support from Orange themes is solid, though this theme only receives a 4.0 rating from ThemeForest, which isn’t that high, to be honest. All in all though, if you like the style, it may be worth the money.

Demo More Information Get Hosting

Blogojoy

Blogojoy is a minimalist WordPress blogging theme that has stripped away all the unnecessary features and focuses on letting you easily share your content through blogging. You can set it up in just a few minutes so that you can quickly get your blog up and running. To make it even easier to use, Blogojoy is powered by the Tesla Framework, an administrative tool that makes it easy for users to customize their themes, even without having extensive knowledge of coding or web design. With Responsive Design, you have an assurance that your blog will display well on a variety of displays, including mobile devices such as smartphones with smaller screens. Extensive HTML documentation is provided with full step-by-step instructions and screenshots so that you can easily get your website up and running.

Blogojoy comes with the Slider Revolution WordPress plugin for free. Slider Revolution not only allows you to make your own sliders from scratch, it also shares content on them, including the capability of embedding videos on the slider. You can also customize your slider using 3D effects, transitions and animation, among other features, and you can use the drag and drop editor, so you can easily add the features you want to the slider. Blogojoy also comes with different post types that you can use to create a distinctive look for your blog. You have the option to create different types of posts, including posts with videos and images, posts with sliders as well as those that display in full width. Short codes are also included with the theme that let you quickly add special features to your site, such as buttons, tabs and even price tables. You can easily connect your social media to your blog as Blogojoy allows complete integration with the most popular sites, including Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook.

Demo More Information Get Hosting

Bold, Beginner Friendly Blog and Magazine Theme

Bold, from Organic Themes, is a really underrated blog theme for WordPress. It’s clean, flat style lends itself to any kind of topic. I think the layout is so clear, so clean, navigation is going to be really simple for your readers. It just feels like a theme that will be ‘sticky’ for readers, because they don’t get confused and leave after getting frustrated. Some themes, that happens. With Bold, you get all the features you might expect, perfect responsive design, WooCommerce support, customization options that are thorough and simple to use. You also get a handful of great page templates for featured videos, featured images and other cool page types. For personal bloggers who want an attention getting theme, Bold is a perfect fit.

Demo More Information Get Hosting

Nexus

Nexus is an Elegant Themes offering, one of their many magazine WordPress themes, which means a few things right away. Clean code, great support and a host of awesome plugins and short codes included with every download. You can join their theme club and download a whole bunch of themes for pennies each. Nexus itself is a versatile Magazine theme, with reviews and more. All in a neat, tidy design package that will keep your readers happy to learn more about the information you have to offer. But like most magazine themes, it works great for a personal blog too. So, that’s it for Nexus.

Demo More Information Get Hosting

Zero

Tesla Themes has another great offering called Zero. This is a WooCommerce ready WP blog theme, perfect for just about any kind of online store, and perfectly coded for great stability and prompt page-load times to keep Google or Yahoo satisfied. The Zero demonstration was built to be an app design retail store, yet there’s not a single limit to exactly what products and solutions it is possible to market with this online site, from trinkets to personal computer tools, sporting items, pet rocks or various other type of business where you desire a feature-rich eCommerce option at a good price. If you need a blog theme that also offers WooCommerce functionality, Zero may be a real winner. This theme is unique in its own right, being one of the most versatile WordPress themes which are compatible with contents that contain lots of visuals like photos and videos. First time WordPress users will definitely find this theme enthralling owing to its ease of setup and customization. This personal blog theme is ideal for websites that cover fashion, health and sports niche, among others. There are lots of layout options contained in this theme, which you can be used alongside with a sidebar. No matter the challenge you may encounter when trying to make your blog stand out from the rest.

Demo More Information Get Hosting

Studio 8

Studio 8 is a creative, bold and beautiful minimalist blog theme for WordPress, wonderful for any sort of written material. Why does any blog post look so good on a theme like Studio 8? Partially, at least, it’s because a minimalist theme doesn’t overshadow the material on the page. I think that the stunning typography helps out a lot in this case as well, Studio 8’s pre-set fonts look great together. Blog post images look great too, perfectly accentuating each post, making them look even better than just the text on the page would look. But if you want to ditch the images, there’s nothing that says you have to have them. Studio 8 looks great no matter how you slice it.

Demo More Information Get Hosting

Uno

Uno is a minimalist WordPress theme perfect for those who want to showcase their photo gallery and want to set up a photo blog. This uses a child theme for its base theme framework, and offers a ton of features for easy blogging.

Uno is a theme that is easy to customize, making changing the site’s background, menus, and headers very simple. The blog’s logos and favicons can also be customized with ease in this theme. Its custom widgets feature lets the user add some images, forms, texts, and other information they want to put into their site. It contains slideshows and unlimited galleries where the user can choose an unlimited number of images and other content that they want to highlight in their site using various layouts.

This theme has a responsive design, which adjusts to the screens of the viewers’ different devices. It is open to different post formats – like videos, photos, links, audio, and quotes – making blogging much simple and convenient. It also offers one-click updates upon download, and uses the HTML5 Markup for easier blogging. To add to these excellent features is a translation and accessibility ready feature, perfect for the blog’s different viewers. Check out the live preview to have an idea on what Uno has to offer.

For more photography themes, check out our fill collection.

Demo More Information Get Hosting

Paperbag

The Paperbag WordPress Theme is specially designed to give readers smooth navigation and an unparalleled reading experience. The theme is also speed optimized, which results in faster page loading and higher search engine ranking. These features make Paperbag one of the best themes for personal and lifestyle blogs.

Aside from smooth navigation, the theme also boasts of design flexibility. Paperbag features eleven pre-designed layouts, each with varying column and display settings to choose from. The theme’s style settings have over 80 customizer options to edit, including background and content colors. Designers also have access to over 20 color and typography settings, opening the possibility of unlimited variations. The theme is also compatible with certain page builders for hassle-free editing.

The Paperbag WordPress Theme also allows individual post formatting. This feature helps the blogger highlight each content for optimum personalization. It further allows access to the various WordPress widgets available to help create an engaging environment for readers. The theme is also translation ready to aid foreign readers.

Content is generally displayed in columns or grids, whether viewed from a computer or a mobile device. This highly responsive theme automatically adjusts its display settings when accessed from different screens. It is also optimized for retina devices. After it’s most recent updates, this theme now supports Elementor and Gutenberg. Nice!

Demo More Information Get Hosting

Atmosphere Pro

This theme is called Atmosphere Pro, a StudioPress Genesis Framework child theme that’s great for bloggers of all sorts. StudioPress creates powerful, easy to manage and simple to customize themes and Atmosphere Pro is definitely all of that. Atmosphere Pro uses a professional boxed layout to give a stylish and simple presentation to your written content. When your words are the center of attention, it’s important to let them breathe with plenty of white space. That’s why they’ve designed Atmosphere Pro to do that. If you also like to post images with your posts, they’re going to look stellar as well.

It’s not needed for some bloggers, by WooCommerce (any sort of eCommerce plugins really) is fully supported by Atmosphere Pro. There are a lot of helpful theme options to get you started quickly and efficiently. There are multiple homepage widgets areas for extending the functionality of your website with the exact features you want to offer. The header is completely customizable, it’s fully responsive on all devices, the theme customizer is easy to use and allows for changes to colors, fonts and other settings, all in real time. Atmosphere Pro is like all of the blogger friendly StudioPress themes in that it’s very solid in terms of SEO, it loads up fast and can really help you rank. Just add content!

Demo More Information Get Hosting

Elegance Pro

A minimal, modern and clean WordPress blog theme like Elegance Pro can help your site get more views and keep your readers coming back for more. Elegance Pro is built on the Genesis framework, so it loads up quickly and perfectly on all devices. That’s because the code is absolutely pristine and the theme itself is responsive. Modern websites really need to work on any type of device, from handheld to desktops, so Elegance Pro has you covered there. Elegance Pro improves the browsing experience for everyone. Elegance Pro is WooCommerce ready too, so if you’d like to establish an online eCommerce site, you can make that happen. There are several different styles for the homepage and best of all, you don’t have to be an expert at coding to make it happen. I really like Genesis child themes like Elegance Pro because you can install the theme and never worry about an update breaking your site. Genesis is updated frequently to keep it up with the newest iterations of WordPress. Elegance Pro really does give you a simple, clean platform for any type of content too, meaning no matter what you blog about, it’s going to look fantastic.

Demo More Information Get Hosting

#Beginners #Blog #eCommerce #Magazine

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toptecharena · 6 years ago

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SimpleSite is a Copenhagen-based WYSIWYG website builder for novice users.

The service is surprisingly basic in some areas. You don’t get any website templates, for instance. Instead, SimpleSite uses a few very standard layouts, and provides controls to help you customise the colours and the content.

There’s better news in SimpleSite’s Basic plan, which enables building website up to a maximum of 15 pages, entirely for free. This has some of the issues you often see with free website builder plans – limited design features, ads for SimpleSite – but there’s also a very unusual plus: you can sell up to five products in your own web store, a feature just about everyone else reserves for their high-end commercial plans.

You can sign up for SimpleSite here

SimpleSite’s Pro plan drops the ads, allows unlimited pages and gives you access to all design features, while also throwing in a free domain with up to 5 email addresses. The web store still only supports a maximum of five products, unfortunately. But if that’s not a problem, you can sign up for £8.33 ($10.83) per month billed annually.

The E-Commerce plan allows unlimited web store products, but doesn’t appear to add anything further, and it’s expensive at £23.33 ($30.33) per month. Shopify’s Basic plan has vastly more features and many more addons available, but is fractionally cheaper at $29 (£22.74).

Getting started

A chunky ‘Get Started’ button on the SimpleSite home page makes it very obvious where to begin, and one click later, SimpleSite’s Design Wizard began walking us through the process of creating our first site.

This started by choosing the purpose of our site (personal, business), before moving on to pick a colour scheme, a page background, main opening image and site title. We’re not sure it makes sense to select all these design elements before you’ve even begun to work on the site, but you can always accept the default settings and change them later.

Design wizard complete, you’re prompted to sign up with your email address, before being asked to choose your URL. You can get a subdomain for free (yourname.simplesite.com), but we were also given the option to register a .co.uk domain for only £1 ($1.30).

We took the subdomain option and were redirected to the SimpleSite editor, where a couple of tiny tutorials explained the basics of adding content and previewing the results. These contained no surprises, so we cleared them and were ready to go.

Editor

The SimpleSite editor is one of the most stripped-back and minimalist we’ve ever seen. Forget the usual densely packed sidebars or other screen clutter, SimpleSite has a single toolbar with only five buttons Preview, Share, Design, Pages and Account – and a Help button, bottom-left.

The body of the page is devoted to a view of your website. Hovering your mouse over any component on the page displays some basic actions you can perform on it, and left-clicking the component gives you access to more.

Unusually, SimpleSite doesn’t allow you to add new page components by dragging and dropping from a sidebar. Instead the service displays ‘Add Content’ buttons everywhere you’re able to insert objects on the current page, and clicking any of these displays a toolbar with items to choose from.

SimpleSite’s choice of objects is, well, limited, to put it politely. We were offered just ten: Headline, Text, Image, Divider, Slideshow, Video, Poster, Contact Form, Map, Signature.

These objects are generally very basic. There’s no image editor, for instance. The text object doesn’t support bulleted lists. You can’t have a slideshow play automatically. You can’t customise the Contact form to use it for other purposes. You get the idea.

Perhaps the most interesting editor feature is how easily you can add objects side by side. Add a video, for instance, and you might want to insert an image or block of text to one side. That’s fiddly in some editors, impossible in a few, but here you simply click the Add Content button alongside the video, and choose the Image object, the Text box, or whatever else you need.

This can be a neat touch in some situations, but there’s a problem: it’s very inflexible. Your image can only go to the left or right of the video, for instance. Each object gets half the allocated space, with no resize option, and no way to separately align the objects (centre the video, maybe, and right-align the text.)

SimpleSite offers some site-wide configuration options in its Design panel. You can switch between five layout options, for example, altering details like the width of your website (does it take all the available space, or sit somewhere in the middle of the browser tab?) and how content is ordered. You also get to choose colour schemes and combinations of fonts. The most interesting feature is the background option, which not only allows using static images, but also offers a few video backgrounds (clouds, snow, waves and so on.)

The Design panel doesn’t allow you to turn off the visitor counter on your website footer, unfortunately, a feature which was laughably dated fifteen years ago. But this can at least be hidden from the Visitor section of the Account panel, where you’ll also find a hidden option to allow visitors to comment on your site, and some very simple analytics to help you monitor visitor numbers over time.

Overall, SimpleSite’s editor may appeal to newbies, as it’s easy to pick up and build very simple pages. But if you’re looking to do anything advanced, it’s not the service for you.

Media

The SimpleSite image object is a little short on functionality. You can add pictures from your own system, with a maximum file size of 5MB, and we like the integration with Pixabay’s free image library. But there’s no way to add images by link, or import them from other services. There’s no editing features beyond crop and rotate. And there’s no server-based media library where you can store commonly-used images for easy access later.

A basic Slideshow object helps you present multiple images to your visitors, but this also has its limitations. For example, there’s no obvious way to reorder the images, once they’ve been added. You can’t prevent the slideshow from automatically playing, or define the number of seconds each image is displayed. The free plan also restricts the Slideshow to just five images, potentially a real annoyance.

The Add Page section includes the ability to add a Photo Album page. This is basic, little more than a page of thumbnails, but there’s no obvious limit on the number of images, and you can reorder them by dragging and dropping.

The closest we could find to a highlight was the Video object, which not only allows embedding YouTube and Vimeo clips, but can also upload movies of your own up to a maximum of 100MB (the free plan also limits video length to a maximum of ten minutes.) That could be very useful for a family site, perhaps, where you want to share clips with friends, but without having to host them elsewhere.

If you’re more interested in standard video embedding, though, SimpleSite is a little underwhelming. You can enter a URL, add a heading and description, but that’s essentially it. You can’t hide or tweak the player controls, or prevent the ‘related videos’ displaying at the end of the clip.

There were odd technical issues, too. For example, when we previewed our page, started a video, then returned to the editor, the video would continue to play, with no way to turn it off (until we hit Preview again.)

Once again, then, SimpleSite managed to produce one or two interesting features, but these were drowned out by the general lack of functionality and the poor implementation.

Blog and e-commerce

SimpleSite advertises itself as being able to create a blog, but that’s a very questionable claim. There is no separate blogging system, no concept of blog articles, no way to add regular metadata (author, tags, metadata), no way to schedule article publication, and no generation of a front-end page with summary text and images for each post.

All you can really do in SimpleSite is create new pages to represent posts, then manually build another page to summarise and link to them. There’s some supporting technology in the ability to allow users to add comments to each page, but we don’t think that’s enough to call this a ‘blog’.

SimpleSite deserves a little more credit for including a web store with even its free plan. Okay, it may only support five products, but that could be enough for casual users.

Explore what the store has to offer, though, and you begin to realise why SimpleSite is giving it away. The platform is horribly underpowered, and utterly unsuitable for any form of serious application.

There’s no option to import product catalogues, for instance. Product descriptions don’t support rich text, and can’t have attached videos. There’s support for ordering products by size, but you can’t add custom variations of your own (colour, material.)

SimpleSite isn’t equipped to take orders from overseas. The service can’t vary taxes, shipping options and prices or quoted delivery times to take account of the destination.

The only automated payment method available is PayPal, although you can opt to handle payments yourself via email.

If you understand the issues, and you’re happy with the 5-product limit, then SimpleSite’s store could still be a useful element of its free plan. But again, if you’re looking for anything even slightly advanced, this isn’t the product for you.

Support

SimpleSite isn’t exactly crammed with features, but it has so many quirks and issues that you’re sure to need help and assistance occasionally.

The editor’s reassuring green Help icon suggests that’s never far away, but click it and you should prepare to be disappointed. There’s no knowledgebase, no links to helpful articles or in-depth information on the service, just a handful of very basic tutorials which tell you little more than “this button does that.”

There is a little more help tucked away in the Account section, which seems bizarre to us. Why is anyone going to look there? But if you do stumble across it, you’ll find a few very basic FAQ pages on getting started, marginally more technical issues and the terms and conditions of the service. It’s better than nothing, though totally inadequate for any serious troubleshooting.

If your question still isn’t resolved, then you can contact the company via email, but the website statement that “we try to respond to all requests within two business days” isn’t exactly encouraging.

This may not be a major issue for everyone. If you just want to build a very basic free site, with some text and a few images, you might never need urgent technical support at all. But if your website is genuinely important, SimpleSite’s laid-back approach to support is likely to be a major problem.

Final verdict

Outdated and underpowered, SimpleSite doesn’t deserve your cash, although the free plan and web store could be interesting to some.

We’ve also highlighted the best website builders in this roundup

Go to Source Author: SimpleSite SimpleSite is a Copenhagen-based WYSIWYG website builder for novice users. The service is surprisingly basic in some areas.

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digitalmark18-blog · 6 years ago

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Webs.com review

New Post has been published on https://britishdigitalmarketingnews.com/webs-com-review/

Webs.com review

Launched as Freewebs.com back in 2001, Webs.com is a simple drag-and-drop website builder, now owned by the printing and marketing giant, Vistaprint.

If you’re familiar with Vistaprint, you might know the company already has a website builder on its own site (we review it here), but this is entirely separate from Webs.com. Pricing, features, editor and everything else are all very different.

Webs.com presents its service better than most, with pages displaying all of its templates, a video explaining the editor, details on the features available and the process of building your website. It’s all very clear and straightforward.

A free plan enables trying out the service basics for yourself with no risk. Free websites are feature-limited (up to five pages only, no mobile site, no web store) and include Webs branding, but there’s enough functionality to give you an idea of how Webs.com works.

The $5.99 (£4.61) a month (paid two-yearly) Starter plan drops the Webs branding and gives you a free domain name and a mobile website (a parallel site rather than a strictly responsive theme), but limits storage to 1GB and offers support via email only.

The $12.99 (£9.99) a month Business plan gets you 5GB storage, premium themes and three custom email addresses. You can sell up to 20 items in your web store, and there’s live chat support if you need it.

Spending a monthly $22.99 (£17.68) on the top-of-the-range Pro plan allows unlimited storage and web store items, supports 25 custom email addresses, throws in search engine submission and ‘SEO Booster’ tools, and adds telephone support.

The lack of true responsive themes is the major issue here, especially as the free plan doesn’t have any mobile support at all, but on balance Webs.com offers what looks like a reasonable set of features for a fair price.

Getting started

Signing up with web services can often be a hassle, but Webs.com streamlines the process so much that you’ll barely notice it happening.

Tap the Sign-Up button, for instance, and you’re prompted to enter your email address and choose a password. But the very same page also tries to ease you into the web design process by prompting you to pick a site title, and choose a template from the selection available.

The template designs look reasonable at first, until you notice that the best ones are only available with the Business and Pro plans, while the free and Starter plans only get you around 40 more basic examples (check the full set here, the starred themes are premium-only.)

The templates are presented a little oddly, too, forcing you through endless horizontal scrolling to view the full set. That might be fine on a tablet where you can swipe right, but it’s not a smart use of screen space on a desktop. Still, we made our choice in a very few seconds, and moved on to the next stage.

Webs.com allows you to use a free subdomain (myname.webs.com) or a domain you own already. The company can also register a domain for you, but with the website quoting prices ‘from $19.95’ (£15.34) for a dot com, it’s probably better to look elsewhere (someone like name.com will register dot com domains from around £10 ($13) a year, and regular sales mean it’s often less.)

Finally, confirm your choice of Webs.com plan, the website opens your template in its editor, and displays a tutorial video which walks you through all the operational basics in three minutes.

Editor

The Webs.com editor gets off to a disappointing start with its bare-bones templates. We had chosen an example with three attractive pictures and a text box on the front page, for instance, but on launch the editor displayed a single empty image box, leaving us to select the rest.

The default layout is a simple empty page, but there are other basic structures to choose from, combining your choice of a website banner with a left and right-hand sidebar.

A dock at the bottom of the page provides a decent set of widgets, covering text, images, layout (columns, tables), photo galleries, slideshows, video, audio, Twitter feeds, Facebook comments and Like boxes, PayPal buttons and more.

There are no visual previews for any of these, a problem with some of the more complex groups of widgets (Timeline, Features, Services, Team.) A Contact widget had a vague icon with a few lines on it, for instance, so we had to drag and drop it onto a page to see what it did. That’s a nuisance, although the widget did at least turn out to be very capable, a block of elements including a map, text address, phone numbers, email and social media links.

Understanding what you can do with a page element also takes more work than usual. The best editors display a toolbar close to the element whenever you hover your mouse over it; Webs displays only a few, requires a left-click to display more, and even then, most of those options are displayed in a distant toolbar at the top of the screen. You’ll quickly learn where to look, but the interface never feels quite as comfortable as it should.

The editor has some technical issues, too. We left our test site open until its session timed out, for instance, expecting the editor to ask us to log in again. But it apparently didn’t notice, instead displaying oddball errors for even simple tasks, such as replacing an image. This can be fixed by backing out of the editor and logging in again, but newbies may not realize that, and it’s easy to see how someone could spend an age trying to solve these strange issues.

There are some neat touches, such as the ability to add multiple new form data types to the Contact Form. But for every one of those, we came up with problems and issues. Like the horribly basic Twitter feed widget, for instance, which in the editor is a left-aligned box which can’t be centered or significantly repositioned. Oh, and who had the bizarre idea of using a standard Search icon for the Preview function?

Media

Webs.com has several media-related widgets, but they’re spread a little awkwardly between two areas of the editor dock. The ‘Popular’ section has Image and ‘Image & Text’ elements, while a separate Media section has Slideshow, Video, Audio and Icon options.

The Image widget doesn’t have an integrated editor, but it covers the core basics with resize, crop, zoom and rotate tools. You can store commonly-used images (up to a total of 500MB) in a server-based My Images library, and an integrated stock image library gives you access to multiple high-quality images for free.

Videos aren’t available with the free Webs.com plan, and the standard video widget only supports YouTube links. But you can host small videos on your own site, and support for custom embed codes could allow you to insert videos from many other providers.

While most website builder Audio tools essentially just embed the player from a third-party service like SoundCloud, the Webs.com offering aims to play MP3 files hosted on your own website. That could be more convenient, but we tried it with a couple of MP3s and it just didn’t work. The player displayed a duration of zero seconds for our choices, and maybe investigating different encoders would fix the problem (although both our MP3s played locally), but this shouldn’t be an issue Webs.com customers have to worry about.

The Photo Gallery widget allows importing images from your local system or any previously uploaded images, although annoyingly it doesn’t give you access to the stock image library.

Once we had uploaded our Gallery images, though, we found it very configurable. Images can be reordered by dragging and dropping from within the editor, and you’re able to adjust settings like the photos per row, the crop style, hover action, title and caption rules (when they appear, when they don’t), while an optional Lightbox switch enables displaying all your pictures as a full-screen slideshow.

Alternatively, you can just use a regular Slideshow widget. It’s not quite as much fun as the Gallery, but you still get to define the player background, color, the length of time to play each slide, any transition, and more.

Blog and e-commerce

Webs.com doesn’t have a blog widget, instead requiring you add a blog at the page level. That’s not difficult to do (click Pages, Add A New Page, choose Blog), but it’s a little inflexible, as blog pages can’t be customized and tweaked in the same way as the rest of your site.

When you create a new post, for instance, you must use a simple stripped-back editor which has only a tiny fraction of the features of the main page builder. This supports formatted text, images, audio and video files, but there’s no direct support for adding a photo gallery, map, or any of the other features (although an unusual feature to edit the HTML source might allow you to insert other page objects.)

Formatting issues aside, the rest of the blog performs reasonably well. The editor allows you to assign up to three categories to a post, they can be scheduled to publish at some point in the future, you’re able to make posts viewable to groups of users depending on their role on the site (Members, Moderators, Administrators, more), and a very simple built-in comments system enables users to say what they think of each post.

The Webs.com web store is basic, but delivers most og the core features we would expect. Your products can have multiple images attached, you’re able to define product variations like size and color, and the catalog may be organized into categories to help customers find the goods they’re interested in. Payments may be taken via cards (using Stripe) or PayPal, and inventory control helps to monitor and manage your stock levels.

Specialist platforms such as Shopify give you many more settings and extension options, but the Webs.com solution isn’t bad, and if you can live with the 20-product limit, the $12.99 (£9.99) a month Business plan could be very good value.

Support

Whether you’re at the Webs.com dashboard, editor, page manager or anywhere else, the Support button is always visible, apparently as an easy and convenient way to get help on your current task.

The Support interface looks good. It uses a drop-down window, rather than taking you away to another page; a search engine helps you find articles, and read their content; and there are links to video tutorials and other support routes.

Unfortunately, while the presentation is good, the support site is let down by the content. Top of the Popular Topics list is a video tutorial designed to help first-time users, for instance, but clicking this took us to a “the page you were looking for doesn’t exist” error message. This wasn’t a one-off mistake, as we noticed the same problem with every embedded link we tried. Webs.com clearly needs to spend more time checking and maintaining the site.

Other articles referred to features which no longer seemed to exist, such as the ability to add a video gallery. This seems to be another indicator that the help database hasn’t been updated for some time.

It’s not all bad, and in simple situations, we found the system worked very well. If you don’t understand why there’s no Blog widget, for instance, typing Blog in the search box immediately displays an article explaining how to add it from the New Pages menu. The support interface is good, but the content desperately needs an upgrade.

If you can’t find what you need on the database, you’re also able to contact the Webs.com support team via live chat, email or telephone, depending on your plan. We’ve seen a lot of online customer reviews complaining about the level of support they’ve received, but if nothing else, the Webs.com 30-day money-back guarantee gives you plenty of time to try the service before you buy.

Final verdict

Webs.com has a few interesting and worthwhile features, but they’re outnumbered by all the hassles and problems. Ignore it, until Vistaprint spends the money to give it a massive overhaul, or closes it down.

Source: https://www.techradar.com/reviews/webscom

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