#also see: they both keep putting it off in a game of identity reveal chicken.

[trentcrimminallybeautiful]

(via @rebloogggs ) #ok but wait wait WAIT HERE ME OUT#what if trent IS there for the diamond dogs meeting#and ted is freaking out over the ethics of being the celebrity crush of some rando on bantr#and he wants to be honest and come clean that he is He but beard points out that could be dangerous and could lead to stalker behavior#so they agree#talk to the bantr pal a bit more figure out if they can be trusted with his true identity#MEANWHILE trent is losing his shit because he just confessed to ted without knowing it was ted#hE CONFESSED TWICE since ted is both his celebrity and work crush#and now the ball's in his court and he has to figure out what to do next without humiliating himself any further or worse risk rejection#and he's gonna tell ted he is truly he will. but just not right now#LAYERS UPON LAYERS

oh DEFINITELY trent is freaking out death grip on pen it's a miracle no one's noticed bc he's dealing with Way Too Much Shit simultaneously. a) he just thought he was getting over ted and moving on to a really nice new guy he met on bantr. which was a big deal and really really good for him and he really liked this guy so much and---SIKE that's ted DUMBASS. get LASSO'D idiot b) which means he confessed he liked ted TO TED c) and was dumb enough to call it a 'celebrity crush' because he didn't want to explain it was more like a work crush considering he knew him personally, but like, ted's still kind of a celebrity so it counts for silly get to know you conversation right? haha? right? d) now the diamond dogs are discussing the ethics of ted dating him right in front of him and it's all his fault. this whole conversation is all his fault. ted's that meme of the guy at the party like "they dont know theyre talking about me specifically oh god oh jesus christ". ted's having a crisis over dating a 'fan' and poor trent's right there like there is no good way out of this!!!! there is nothing i can say or do that will not make this incredibly awkward!!!!!! fuck!!!!!!

ALSO losing my mind at the idea that they discussed work crushes AND celebrity crushes and trents like haha it's a harmless little. omission to not explain they're the same person, and pretty reasonable anyway considering that's kind of identity-sensitive information. and then he finds out that the person he's talking to is ALSO the same person and hes like what if i had an anxiety attack. right now. when ted eventually does find out and like all that drama is over and done with there is going to be SO much affectionate teasing. you had a crush on me THREE (3) TIMES trent.

but also just--idk man! trent dealing with the fact he'd thought he was getting over his hopelessly unrequited feelings for ted only to find out he'd been starting to get over ted by developing feelings........for ted. which is kind of a punch to the chest but also now he's left with--but ted likes him back. but only--like this. on bantr. when it's not him. when it's arguably more him, in some ways, but less him in others. when ted doesn't know it's him. and if he did know, would he still like trent at all? would he be embarrassed or mad or upset? would it make everything awkward and weird? like, for a split second trent's heart rises with hope like. oh, wait. but ted likes me back. ted had talked for ages about how much he liked his pretty pen pal (his words, even though obviously trent had never shown him a picture) and that's trent, right? but then it immediately drops like a stone because trent has the self-esteem of a dusty crumb left under a tv set for a decade and comes to the conclusion a second later that ted didn't like him, he liked his pen pal, and once he knew they were the same person he'd realize his mistake and any feelings he had would evaporate. because, you know. he's trent. and he's right here, and ted just doesn't like him like that, and why would he ever.

(also see, in this scenario: ted has mentioned his own work crush, but didn't describe features trent identifies as his own defining traits--for example, he doesn't mention trent's hair, but says his crush has pretty eyes, and that he's kind-hearted and clever and makes him laugh, and trent's like wow he sounds nice <- doesn't think these things particularly describe him)

meanwhile ted is freaking out again because like. he really really likes his pen pal!! he really likes him and he's 99 percent sure he's not a creepy stalker type and wouldn't do that but like there's degrees of bad possibilities here and just generally dating a fan doesn't sit super right, but also, it's not like he knew either, so it could be fine? aaa!!!!

ALSO ive just had the image of like. if trent WASN'T in the diamond dogs meeting he does pick up on his pen pal acting a bit weird/shifty about it and is like well i should probably clarify, it's a bit misleading to say celebrity crush as i do actually know him? and now ted is slamming the emergency diamond dogs button again (actually hilarious if just through sheer coincidence he gets this text right after but trent still wasn't there or sending it as a response to the meeting or anything, just a coincidence) and is like WAIT SO HE'S SOMEONE I KNOW?????? but ted's so friendly with a lot of people that technically that could mean anything and ironically increases the stalker concern. meanwhile trent is happily oblivious to all of this. until he walks in and they've got a big board with red string going "okay so someone ted knows is texting him on bantr but doesnt know it yet and we're trying to figure out who" and trent goes WHITE

so many other possibilities for a reveal too like. jesus christ.

oh man see this is what i'm talking about. there's just so many possibilities so many places to go with this it's so funny and also angst potential off the charts. and FLUFF too. aww trent you fell in love with ted twice? that's so sweet

i still think the funniest and most mortifying thing that can happen in any sort of bantr/"oops we started talking online not knowing we knew each other irl" scenario for tedependent is trent admitting he has a crush on ted in any capacity. this goes both ways but it's funnier for trent especially if it's like "hm, name a celebrity crush". you're talking to some stranger online and you're really vibing with them, they're really nice and smart and they make you laugh and listen to you and you like them a lot and then you ask them a silly get to know you question like "what's your celebrity crush" and they say Your Fucking Name. what is ted even supposed to do with that. is it unethical to not say anything? but also saying something would be the most awkward possible thing you could do, especially if they think you're messing with them. and then they follow it up with a defensive "i have actually met him! he really is that nice and handsome in person!" and ted's just putting his head in his hands. on one hand this is incredibly flattering and kind of sweet? on the other hand oh what the fuck

[kaweeella]

DAngAnronpA

Chapter 1 part 1- 1001 Stories Yet To Be Told

Warning for talks of hanging (let me know if there’s anything else!

~~~

Izumi tells herself that she just heard them wrong. “What did you say?”

“Welcome to the killing game!” No, she heard right.

Everyone stands still, holding their breath, unsure of what’s happening or what to do.

“The rules here are simple!” They speak in such a sickeningly happy tone. “Kill someone here and get away with it, and you’ll be allowed out! Well, there are a few more rules, but that’s the basics!”

“What the fuck?!” Banri yells. The person doesn’t respond.

Slowly as everyone processes what was said, they begin breaking down. Muku begins hyperventilating and drops to the ground. Banri continues to swear at the ceiling. It’s understandable, Izumi is scared too.

“Guys!” She yells, jumping onto a coffee table to use as a stage. “This isn’t the time to panic. We have to think rationally if we want to get out! Besides, they can’t keep us here forever, yeah? I mean, people will get concerned when we’re gone so long. Let’s just get along and stay calm until someone comes to save us.”

The young boy, who’s still yet to introduce himself, watches her before standing up. “Okay, I trust you, Izumi.”

“That does sound like a good plan.” Sakyo remarks. “Though we aren’t sure how much food we have.”

“Oh, don’t worry about food.” The voice speaks up again.

“Bitch!”

“The food is restocked every night. I should mention that one of the rules is that the kitchen is closed at night time.”

“Fuck you!”

“Banri, stop that.” Izumi scolds the boy before turning her attention back to the person. “Is that all you have to say?”

No response.

“Okay, then let’s get to what we came in here for.” Izumi gets off the table. “I think we should start at the beginning, what was everyone doing before you woke up here?”

“I had just arrived in Japan.” Citron says.

“I was looking for a job as a scriptwriter. I was looking in this area called Veludo Way.”

“Oh.” Izumi looks at him. “I was in Veludo. I was headed to my dad’s old acting company, Mankai.”

Sakuya and Sakyo look up.

“I was staying at Mankai to be an actor! I was actually supposed to perform before I got here…”

“I was also in the area.”

“I was in Veludo, too.” Tasuku says. “I was planning a street act with one of my troupe mates.”

The rest recount what they were doing; work, sleeping, just out, general things. Izumi realizes someone hasn’t spoken yet.

“Hisoka,” Said man is asleep on a couch. “What were you doing?”

“I… I don’t remember…”

Everyone seems shocked, though with their own lapses in memory, they can’t really judge.

“Well, it’s good to get all the information we can.” It’s strange. Only some of them have anything in common. Was there any rhyme or reason to it? Did they all manage to make a common enemy? Or were they just plucked off the street with bad luck?

“So now what?” Banri asks. “We just sit around and hope someone misses us?”

“I mean… yeah. What else can we do?”

“I hope my family can hold up okay without me.” Omi says.

“Yeah.” Tsuzuru says.

“I should also say,” The voice speaks up again. “Night time is from 10 pm to 7 am.”

“Cunt!”

“If we aren’t allowed in there at night time then it’s good to know when night time is.” Izumi looks around and spots a clock. Right now it’s 11:37. The kitchen is still open so it’s morning.

“We should do something together,” Azuma suggests. “Let’s play a game.”

“Sure. What game?” Itaru asks.

“I have some cards, so any of those games.”

“What about poker?”

So they spend time playing poker. Some do better than others at hiding their emotions.

“Raise.” Banri says confidently.

“Call.” Juza says, muffled by a pastry.

“Where the hell did you get that?”

“The kitchen.”

“You actually trust that it’s not poison or some shit?”

“We have to eat eventually.”

“Stop talking with your mouth full!”

“Stop talking to me.”

“Oh you think you’re some hot shit, huh?”

“S-stop-” Muku cuts in. They both look over at him. “Stop arguing.”

“Sorry…” Juza mumbles. Banri just scoffs.

“... fold.” Hisoka puts his cards down.

“All in.” Azuma says.

“What?!”

“All in.” Itaru says.

“Raise.” Citron says.

“You can’t raise…” Tsuzuru tells him. “All in.”

When they check their cards, Azuma wins.

“Where’s you get Uno cards?” Tasuku asks the blue haired man, who is also yet to introduce himself.

“Yahtzee.”

Izumi watches them play for a while, joining in some games herself, before going to what they have decided is her room. She looks around some. She finds her spices and clothes. At least she has something.

She falls over onto the bed. It’s quite comfortable. At least they can be comfortable in their imprisonment.

They need to focus on the little good things in this place until help arrives, or else… or else…

No. She shouldn’t think about that. They’re nice people and they wouldn’t do anything like that.

You don’t know them.

Shut up. Believe in the people around you. She scolds herself.

Izumi doesn’t realize that she fell asleep until she’s awoken by the sound of dinging.

“Good night, everyone.”

She covers her ears with her pillow. She can’t get that goddamn voice out of her head. That sing-songy voice rings in her ears even after they’re done talking. And she can’t sleep, either. She just woke up.

She groggily pulls herself out of bed. There’s a library. Maybe she can find a book to entertain herself either until she’s tired again or morning.

The hall is dark and quiet. She puts her hand on the wall to make sure she’s going the right direction. It takes a while, and she stumbles over a few things along the way, but she finds the library. She flicks on the light and looks around the shelves.

“Let’s see let’s see.” She mutters.

She finds a book labeled “1001 Nights”. A collection of Middle Eastern stories. It’s about a woman named Scheherazade who is married to the sultan. The sultan has taken to killing his wives after one night, so to keep herself alive she tells him half of a story on the first night to hook him, so he’d have to keep her alive to finish the story. She’d finish and start half of a story every night for one thousand nights, and by the time she is out of stories, he’s fallen in love.

It’s still night, and she’s not tired yet, so she grabs another book. This one is “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”. Alice falls into a world named wonderland, where nothing makes sense. She grows and shrinks, nearly drowning in her own tears; plays croquet with a flamingo; meets a french mouse; talks to a caterpillar; joins a tea party; and is taken to court. Not necessarily in that order.

The next book, “Phantom of the Opera”, is about a man haunting an opera house. It starts with a stagehand’s hanging. A girl named Christine is called as an understudy when the first singer falls ill. Christine starts getting lessons from, what’s she calls, the Angel of Music. A threatening letter arrives from the phantom, saying to make Christine the lead actress and that a box is left open for him. When it’s ignored, a chandelier falls into the audience. The phantom kidnaps Christine and reveals his identity, a man with a deformity named Erik. He plans for holding her for only a few days, but it changes when she unmasks him. With the fear of her leaving, he decides to hold her forever. He lets her out after two weeks, on the condition she remains faithful. She tells about her kidnapping to Raoul, her childhood friend, who says he’ll take care of it. She feels bad for Erik, however, so she decides to sing for him one last time. Unbeknownst to either of them, Erik was there. And he heard the whole conversation. He takes her again, traps Raoul and someone called the Persian, and threatens to kill everyone in the opera house unless Christine marries him. She agrees and he lets them go, telling the Persian to tell the newspaper of his death and Christine to return after he’s dead. They do, then Christine and Raoul elope.

Before she can grab another book, she hears footsteps. She freezes and tries to not make any noise. The door opens, and it’s Itaru.

“Oh,” He starts. “What are you doing up?”

“Just some reading. What about you? What brings you here?”

“I was a little restless so I decided to take a walk. Then I noticed the light was on in here.” He looks at her book pile. “Do you think they were telling the truth?”

“What do you mean?”

“That the only way out is to kill someone?”

“No. No! Of course not. That’s… that’s absurd.”

“Yeah. It’s just worrying.”

“How worried could you be if you’re wandering around in the dark?”

He chuckles. “Yeah, point taken.”

Ding dong, bing bong.

“Good morning, everyone!”

Itaru seems a little surprised. “That time already?” He turns back to Izumi. “Let’s go get breakfast.”

They leave and see some of the others exiting their room.

“Wow.” Yuki says. “Couldn’t even wait a night?”

“W… what?” Izumi contemplates if it would’ve been better for Itaru to have killed her in there.

“Good scores, guys.” Kazunari comments, unhelpfully.

“Wait, we didn’t-” Itaru starts.

“At least you’re quiet.” Yuki walks away.

“I…” Izumi’s at a loss for words.

“Let’s get breakfast.” Itaru quickly heads to the kitchen.

“Yeah…”

They eat and everyone goes their own separate ways. Izumi decides that if she’s going to be trapped with these people, she should get to know them.

She sees Tsumugi hanging out by himself. He looks kind of sad.

“Hey, Tsumugi.” She greets. “Do you wanna spend some time together?”

“Sure.” He smiles at her.

“So you work for the government?”

“Yeah, it’s not all that much, I was actually contemplating quitting.”

“Why?”

“I just… I don’t really like it. It was just kind of a backup job, I guess.” He looks around some. “So do you have any hobbies? I enjoy gardening.”

“I like cooking.”

“Really?”

“Yeah! Want me to cook something?”

“Ah, only if you want to.”

“And I want to!”

She quickly runs to her room and grabs her spices before running to the kitchen. She serves a Thai chicken coconut curry.

“It smells amazing.”

They eat the curry, talking some here and there.

“You’re a really good cook.”

“Thanks.”

They part ways. Izumi enjoyed spending time with him. She almost forgets where she is.

[spookyspaghettisundae]

Things Below

Voices. Voices, everywhere. Emily peered out the window from the backseat of the patrol car. Locked in, but free to hear all these confusing voices. She could hear the thoughts of the people the car drove past, picking up fallout from the minds of people on the sidewalk.

“He gave me too much change. Tough shit, sucker. I’m not telling and I’m keeping it. Those stores are insured against this kind of—”

“I’m late, I’m late, I’m late; oh my god, I’m gonna lose my job. What about—”

“I forgot to lock the front door. To hell with whatever he’s saying, I’m sure as hell that I forgot—”

“Stop staring, dumbass. Jeeze, I think I need to jack off in a bathroom stall, otherwise she'll—”

Emily didn’t even care about reading the thoughts themselves. She used to figure people to be thinking drivel like this just by looking at them. No, the reporter wanted to see how well she could focus this ability—how well she could control it. As far as she was concerned, she had developed a superpower. With it, she could change the world.

Only one thing gave her reason for pause; gave her a reason to worry. If she wasn’t dreaming—if this all was real—then it meant the demon she had met at the delicate age of 21 had been real, too.

The edges of her vision turned into streaks, stretching into infinity, blending together in a wild blur of colors and shapes. She only caught glimpse of their faces, all unimportant and forgotten within seconds, but their thoughts reached her mind in fragments, like a rain of glass shards falling into a bottomless pit. Clipped, ripped out of context—like switching rapidly through radio stations and never hearing anything out.

Officer Stanton glanced back at Emily through the rearview mirror. Judging by his furrowed brow, he was concerned about her mental well-being. That was when she realized that her head kept bobbing erratically, moving on a constant swivel. She must have looked like a crazy person to this cop.

“Your nose,” he said after clearing his throat and training his eyes on the road again.

Confounded, Emily dabbed her nose, only to find blood on her fingers.

The splitting headache set in. Or it had been there all along, except that it now cranked the dial to eleven in the very second she stopped tuning in to the thoughts of all the passers-by. She muttered a short curse and a emitted a soft, nervous chuckle.

Looked like the superpower came with a little price tag.

But it had already paid off. Under other circumstances, she would have had to go out on a limb in trusting this “Officer Stanton.” Letting him lock her into the backseat like a common suspect or criminal. But what choice did she have? A bomb turned her apartment block into a blazing inferno, she woke up naked in a dumpster, and she had no phone, no money, and was now wearing the borrowed clothes of her friend Maria—who probably had her pegged as crazy and she should never talk to again.

Scanning Stanton’s thoughts had revealed a certain level of surprising purity. Blue-eyed, this shmuck hadn’t seen anywhere near the amount of horrid things Emily had seen in her time as an investigative reporter, looking into human trafficking and pedophile rings. He was as concerned as she was about Detective Tanner, her single only trustworthy contact in the police—who had gone missing.

Reading Stanton’s mind, Emily knew that this cop had his heart in the right place and was going out on a limb himself. She looked and sounded like a crazy person, had no identification, and lied to him first thing upon their meeting. He had a lot to lose himself.

And she couldn’t tell him everything she had witnessed.

“I was drugged and abducted,” she had admitted to him in that first encounter. Only part of the truth she could speak without sounding like she had lost every last marble.

The other part involved what she could only describe as a trip into hell, where she was hounded by an antagonistic demon she dubbed “Stinky Jim.”

Eight years ago, Emily met Stinky Jim for the first time, though she did not have such a name for the demon yet. Had she known it was real, she would have lost her mind. She would have been the Other Emily, the Lost Emily—the one sitting in a padded cell, rocking back and forth, gibbering, and disconnected from reality.

If her recent awakening—the event since when she could read minds and bend space itself—had taught her anything, then it was that reality itself was a strained, malleable concept.

Even human identity crumbled in the face of enlightened scrutiny.

Back when she was 21, working the sixth McJob in a row before she got smart, got her GED, and got into studying to become a reporter; she still hung out in a basement with the rest of the “gang.”

She remembered that night with stunning clarity. The edges on everything remained sharp. The dive in the basement of the home of Rodney’s parents had burned itself into the pages of her memory.

Her birthday—the night Emily turned 21.

Both on the surface and in all things below, she was a different person. Dyed her hair pink, piercings in her ears and on her brow, royal blue lipstick, torn heavy metal T-shirts. Loved ranting about politics, economy, and social justice; but never lifted a finger to do a damned thing about it.

Just like then. They were sitting in Rodney’s parents’ basement, sprawled out over ratty old couches and chairs with the TV set and old video game consoles, smoking weed, and the four boys listening to one of her many unnumbered tirades on LGBTQ+ rights.

“Shut the fuck up if you ain’t gonna do anything ‘bout it,” Chris told her. “Gay Chris,” as he was nicknamed, which didn’t bother him at all once they grew older—he wore the name like a badge of pride.

His voice cracked as he kept the smoke from the bong in his lungs and passed it on to Carlos, and Chris added, “The fuck do you know about any of that, straightie?”

That stunned Emily. That’s when everything clicked for her. When it all changed. Speechless, she silently agreed with him. Everything she knew about the gay experience was theoretical or secondhand, drawing from Chris’ experiences.

But that’s when she found her true calling.

She wouldn’t “shut the fuck up about it.” She refused to, because it would have been against her nature. She would do the legwork, and tell the world. She would relay the truth, even when it hurt, or when it got her and others into hot water. That would be her strength. Her destiny.

It would take till the end of that week and some feverish reading until she figured out that journalism was the way for her to go, but that was the same night when Emily really took the reins of her life into her own hands, and forged the path she now followed with furious determination.

Carlos chortled, then took a long toke from the bong before passing it on to Rodney. Emily remained silent.

With her most recent rant dead in the water, and the only active water being the one making the bubbling and churning sounds whenever anybody inhaled another hit from the bong, her thoughts drifted. The night of her birthday dragged on like many others in this very place, the matter of her birthday only standing out by the amount of weed they would have burned through by the end of the night.

She loved these boys like her brothers. Loved the countless nights they spent together, shooting the shit about their work, their messes of what could barely be described as love lives, playing video games together on the couch in this same basement and getting into swearing matches more heated than the actual gameplay, going to metal concerts together, or talking about philosophy and spirituality into the ungodliest hours of the morning.

Some time around 2 AM, Carlos had already passed out. He snored in the corner with a pile of empty potato chip bags and plastic bottles piled onto him like a work of art. Chris had gone home to get some sleep because of an early shift the next day. Only Jimmy, Rodney, and Emily remained. Stabbing Westward’s Ungod was playing back from the old iPod in a soft volume.

Rodney climbed back onto the couch and slid onto the cushions between Jimmy and Emily. His eyes were bloodshot from all the beer and weed they had been kicking back and he gave her a stupid grin.

“Got something special for this special occasion,” he said in a conspiratorial tone.

He unfolded his fingers and presented three little things. To Emily, they looked like stamps or pieces of perforated cardboard just resting on his palm, each of them marked with a pastel yellow smiley face.

Before either Emily or Jimmy could ask, Rodney said, “LSD, hoes. Lucy seeing diamonds—in the sky—or something. So, uh, anyway, how about we go on a real trip?”

Jimmy’s brow furrowed and Emily snickered at him. Buff Jimmy over there, the racing car enthusiast who loved tuning cars and speeding in them, accustomed to acting like the biggest badass of their little gang, was now all skeptical and intimidated by this harmless-looking drug resting in Rodney’s hand.

“Fuck it, why not?” Emily asked.

“Nah, I’ll pass,” Jimmy predictably said. “Y'know what, you should too. Also, I should get back home and get some sleep.”

Jimmy scrambled to leave, looking half asleep already, and muttered a goodbye to Carlos who continued to snore away, oblivious to everything going on now.

“Pussy,” Emily called out after Jimmy just before he flipped her off and closed the basement door behind himself.

Rodney and Emily got a good laugh out of Jimmy’s departure. Then Rodney turned his head and waggled his eyebrows at her, holding out the three slips of LSD still.

“I could put one back, or one of us takes two of ‘em,” he said, letting his voice rise sharply towards the end in challenge.

Emily squinted and then snatched two of them out of his palm.

“Happy fuckin’ birthday to me, I guess,” she said, grinning with him in challenge, wondering if he wasn’t going to chicken out himself.

She stuck her tongue out at him like she was about to lick Rodney’s face, then placed the two pieces of LSD on her tongue and retracted it. Swallowed.

“How long?” she asked.

“My dick?”

“Fuck you.”

Rodney cackled and told her it would take two hours. They settled on re-watching Scream—one of Emily’s favorite horror movies. They talked over the flick, as usual. Laughed as Carlos turned over in his sleep at one point, knocking over the pyramid of junk piled onto him without even waking up, and they both wondered loudly if they weren’t going to have a horror trip if they watched a horror movie while tripping on LSD, like the idiots they were.

The movie ended and Emily still couldn’t tell if the drug was having any effect on her system.

“Get me another beer, beer bitch,” she told Rodney, softly kicking him in his thigh while she drooped lazily over the other half of the couch.

He got up and went to the small fridge in the corner of the room. She blinked and wondered why he did that without giving her any lip. Even on her birthday, Rodney wasn’t wont to do what she told him to. Returning to her, he uncapped the bottle of beer and held it out to her.

She took it and looked at him in disbelief. Rodney himself looked befuddled. He blinked and looked around. Was the LSD finally kicking in for him? If so, why was it taking so long for her?

If him tripping balls meant he was a compliant little sheep, she was going to have some fun with this. She pulled out her flip phone and started recording a grainy video on the device.

“Hey, Rodney, why don’t you stand on one foot and spin around in a circle for the audience,” she told him, biting her lip and sensing that he would do exactly as told.

And he did. Almost stumbling over the coffee table and falling onto his ass in the process, he did exactly that. Emily covered her mouth to stifle a giggle. She stared at him through the display of her phone, making sure to capture his dumbfounded facial expressions.

“Rodney, tell the world how much of a little skanky whore you are,” she said, mouth agape with a grin so wide that it almost hurt her cheeks.

“I’m such a little skanky whore that I’d eat Paris Hilton’s ass with whipped cream and a cherry on top,” he said, slurring it out as if his consciousness slipped farther away into a trance or delirium with each additional word.

Emily burst out laughing, “You will never live this one down when the others see the video, dipshit.”

Yet something crept up behind Emily. A dark, foreboding sense of something alien and sinister. It only reached the back of her mind with a delay: she heard Rodney’s thoughts before he did or said anything that she told him to. Or rather, she projected her self into him and he complied, pliable like a piece of wet cardboard.

These thoughts made more sense now, in the present, when she knew she could read minds. But back then, she had chalked it up to the acid trip. The day after, she would go back to her normal life, letting the details fade away into oblivion, dismissing them as nightmarish nonsense.

Except for the knock on the door.

Not the door leading in and out of the basement, but the door to the boiler room. A room where nobody should have been inside.

The hairs on the back of her neck stood up and she stared at it, wide-eyed and terrified. Rodney followed her gaze because she willed him to pay just as much attention to it.

Knock knock. Again.

Or rather: THUMP THUMP. Deep, bass. Menacing.

“Rodney, go check on the clown hiding in there,” Emily told Rodney, not even thinking things through. She couldn’t even chalk it up to the booze and drugs.

All she knew was that she feared whatever awaited behind that door.

Like sleepwalking, Rodney approached the boiler room door. Twisted the knob. Opened it.

A soft red light glowed, engulfing him. A light out of this world. It flickered, danced—like flames. But no heat or fire awaited beyond the door. Only madness.

Emily walked there herself, intrigued by the mysterious light. Her whole body tingled with dread, yet she could not help but approach. She knew deep down, lurking beneath the surface of her thoughts, that something evil awaited there. Something that would drive her insane. She didn’t need to approach, should have turned and fled from Rodney’s basement. But curiosity won out over common sense.

She stood next to him and peered into the place beyond the door.

There was no boiler room there. Instead of the dingy little room with the big cylindrical something, some old plastic crates, and a bunch of pipes and valves—a flight of stairs stretched down, winding around a curve. The fiery red light flickered from the depths, beckoning her.

“Rodney, go lie down and sleep.”

He acknowledged her order, not speaking the affirmation out loud but just thinking it. Emily, however, didn’t even register how the thought had reached her like a spoken word. She could taste his dread riding on the back of those thoughts—salty, smooth, bitter, clamping his throat shut and cutting his breath short.

But her eyes fixated on these stairs. Made of obsidian, covered in strange, indecipherable symbols, bearing names on each step. Names of the lost and the damned. The forgotten and the famous. She could not read them, but she knew the names were important. She would read them again one day, but that was not this day.

Rodney laid down onto the couch and fell asleep within an instant. His thoughts turned into a soup of drugged dreaming and Emily shut them out, probing for any presence at the bottom of those stairs. To see if anything dwelt there, any things below.

“Come on down and find out,” something replied. Not in words, but thoughts. Smoky, crackling like wood in a fireplace, with embers rising into a dark and starry night.

Emily took her first step down those stairs in this other-space. Then another. And another. She tread down this path, and the stairwell narrowed as it twisted and turned on her way downward. She burned with curiosity to find what things lay hidden in the depths.

The door slammed shut behind her and something laughed. Something in a deep, bellowing baritone, like a monster straight out of some horror movie. The laughter died down into a chortle, egging her on to turn around and see for herself.

Fear overtook her and prevented her from turning to behold this demon. This madness. She knew it was there, right behind her. Fetid breath rhythmically struck the exposed skin of the back of her neck. The thing was huge, like a man two heads taller than her.

“If you don’t have the balls to look at me, then you better keep movin’, little girl,” the demon spoke to her, cackling some more. The words carried the air of a threat. “What are you afraid of finding down here, anyway?”

More laughter. Sinister. Knowing. Knowing her deepest, darkest desires, and secrets she would learn in the future

Her heart thumped against her chest, pounding so hard that it threatened to explode out of her rib cage any minute now. And whether she was tripping on the LSD, having an overly vivid nightmare, or this was indeed real, she dreaded turning around and instead continued on her descent.

“Welcome to the maze, Emily,” the thing’s voice crackled. Flames licked from its voice and the biting smells of charcoal smoke and sulfur filled her nostrils, stuck to her tongue. Way too real to be imagined, yet even now, she struggled to explain how this experience or even this memory could be real.

Because right now, she sat on the backseat of Officer Stanton’s car. But the vivid recollection of this memory sliced through time and space, reaching her in the now. The demonic presence still lingered, lurking behind her, occupying the space in her mind.

The unwanted guest renting one of the rooms in the mindscape of Motel Emily. The neon sign of vacancy flickered unsteadily.

Where the stairs wound down further, she reached a door branching out to the side. Or rather, the word “door” didn’t really cut it. It was a stone portal, covered in more symbols or otherworldly runes.

Without thinking, she pushed it open, hoping to find escape from this place, praying to reach Rodney’s basement again, or appear back in Stanton’s patrol car. The past and the present started bleeding together. Had she really experienced all this, back then? Was this the madness, overtaking her mind, surfacing now, tainting the present and overwriting reality?

“This is as real as it gets, bitch,” the demon said, cackling yet more.

The pink-haired Emily celebrating her 21st birthday and tripping on LSD didn’t understand what she saw beyond the portal once she strained herself, putting her legs and back into pushing it open, her nerves fraying with each inch accompanied by the sounds of stone grinding against stone.

Beyond that portal, she saw another Emily, stripped half-naked, handcuffed to a curtain rack, with some man with a painted face sliding a knife into her exposed back. Bodies of the dead and the dying littered the dark and ruined room of some derelict house in that place and Helpless Emily screamed in agony.

Younger Emily gasped and backed away from this scene of carnage and despair, recalling a memory of something yet to come, which Present Emily knew already and remembered as the time the Grinning Man came close to killing her.

The man with the knife, with the face painted to display a horrid grin over a face of cold and sociopathic indifference, turned to look at Younger Emily. She pulled, tugged at the portal with all her might, desperate to close it before something worse happened.

The Grinning Man, that serial killer, turned from Tortured Emily. He tilted his head, staring into the stone portal in disbelief, studying its frame. Before Younger Emily succeeded in fully shutting the portal, he approached with swift steps, ready to pass from one place into another.

But she slammed it shut just in time, just before she could decipher shouts from beyond the portal.

Worse, the demon remained. Right behind her.

She dared not turn around completely to look upon its horrid visage, but glimpsed it from the corner of her eye. Red like a devil, covered in spikes and horns and smiling at her with a maw lined with rows and rows of jagged, shark-like teeth. Blackened, knife-shaped claws opening and closing in anticipation, ready to rip her to shreds if she looked at it for too long.

It cackled again and Emily continued down the stairs.

“That was you,” it said. “That’ll be you, in the future. You fuck-up. Nobody’s proud of you, Emily. Accomplishing nothing of value. Only watching people die in squalor and misery. You are nothing but a worthless witness. A voyeur in a voyeuristic world.”

Hearing the demon speak in such a modern vernacular and imagining to be such a clichéd presence clashed in her mind, and she almost turned to confront the creature. But she read its thoughts and they mirrored her own.

The first time she realized that turning only meant embracing the madness, and ending up in that padded little room, all alone, locked inside her head with drugs—and not the sort that Younger Emily found fun.

Picking up the pace, she continued down the winding, hellish stairs. The walls drew closer together with each step, never moving, but converging in angles that made her descent more claustrophobic with each passing moment.

Present Emily knew she had to break free of this memory, because it was bleeding into reality. The demon was taking hold. She dabbed more blood from her nose and barely perceived the world outside the patrol car, rolling by. This memory was real, made even more real through recent realizations, and recalling it now was rendering it even more visceral than ever before. The knowledge of Present Emily collided with the memories of Younger Emily and they coalesced. They coagulated.

She passed by another stone portal, almost screaming at what she felt from behind it. Younger Emily did not know what awaited there, but Present Emily did not want to see it, and the two of them refused to push it open and look inside.

“Yeah, you keep walkin’, you hypocritical asshole. Eager to discover the truth, but just another chickenshit,” the demon said.

Instead of the inevitable laughter she expected to ensue, the demon growled with anger, reflecting a rage welling in her bowels, only overshadowed by the terror and fear now gripping her heart and driving her down the stairs, faster and faster.

“He’s dead, Emily. Julian’s dead, and it’s all your fault,” the thing snarled.

Its hoofed feet thundered down the steps behind her, keeping pace with ease, the hulking presence chasing her down deeper into this pit of insanity.

“No,” she finally dared to reply, but the demon mimicked her word, mocking her. Then she repeated herself, “No, that’s not my fault. Not like with the others. Not everything is my fault.”

“Maybe not directly, but what if you never entered his life? What if he hadn’t been on that parking lot, that day? He might not have had some crazy stalker cave his skull in with a two-by-four. So maybe it’s still your fault,” the demon growled.

“Shut up,” she said. Then screamed it. “Shut the fuck up!”

“Yeah, shut the fuck up if you’re not going to do anything about it, right, Emily?”

The demon’s voice reached a fever pitch and now chased her. She ran, taking multiple steps down the well in strides, pushing through the narrow pathways, wasting no time to wonder how the demon’s sheer mass could fit through here behind her. The stink of fear erupted from her pores in a sheen of sweat, the heat of this hell engulfing her, and the stench of burning flesh rising from the depths.

The stone walls wriggled. They were not made of obsidian anymore, but worms. Millions and millions of pitch-black worms, things that did not belong in reality but were all too real. Slippery, alive. Writhing, as the mass reached out to her like walls of tiny fingers covered in myriads of chomping little mouths, provoking a shriek of terror to escape Emily’s throat, and the demon to laugh its sadistic laugh at her.

“Run, Emily! Run away, you disgusting fucking coward!” The demon spoke in many voices, those of Chris, her father when he slapped her cheek, the monster on her heels, and even herself. They all blended together. One of many, many in one.

There it was again: rocking back and forth, drool dripping from the corner of her mouth. White, padded walls all around.

Was she truly there? Was this even real? Was her entire life just a lie? Figments of her imagination, trying to make sense where none was to be made?

The stairs split into different pathways and Emily knew what to do. Present Emily wiped more blood from her nose and stared at her bloodied fingers in disbelief. Younger Emily had discovered her destiny, was glimpsing horrors from her future. Of the three possible ways to go, she squeezed into the narrowest one, screaming silently as she felt the wriggling mass of worms engulf her with the heat of a thousand fires, causing her skin to blister and painfully peel back. She clenched her teeth shut and feared the things entering through any orifices but pushed forward.

She had to live. She had to fulfill her destiny. She remembered all the people who died, or rather, those who would die.

She could change the world, but only if she didn’t give in now.

“Shit, I’ll give you a tissue once we reach the precinct,” Stanton said. His offer; his words helped, centering her in the now. The words he spoke bled through into that dark place where Younger Emily found herself, an unknown voice from a stranger from another world, or another time, piercing the veils of different realities, and guiding her through this horrid darkness.

The demon grunted and cackled and choked on the worms entering its maw as it squeezed itself through the narrow, suffocating passageway, following Emily without fail. It clawed its way forth, causing a cacophony of disgusting squelching noises, and sensations that reminded her of bones snapping to the point of sharp edges bursting through skin and protruding from human flesh, and teeth gnashing on exposed innards with blood spurting out, gushing, and the reek of feces in the air.

Her eyes long clamped shut, she dared not breathe but had to, and felt first worms trying to wriggle their way into her mouth. She sputtered and spat them out with an angry scream, controlling the rage that drove her, clawing her own way forth, mimicking the demon’s motions. Or it mimicked hers.

The stairs went upwards and she ascended, pulling her way through the narrowest spot of these walls of worms, fleeing up the stairs. The demon tumbled, but then continued giving chase on all fours, like the beast that it truly was. Like the beast in the back of her head, the madness always just a few steps behind her.

“You can’t get away from me,” Stinky Jim cackled, only to abruptly choke on his words, gagging and coughing up more worms. Through rows of bloodied, gritted teeth, he said, “I am always with you, Emily.”

She tripped, fell, scraped her hands on the jagged edges of the obsidian steps, right in front of one of the names inscribed upon the stairs: Xerxes. Younger Emily blinked, did not quite register what it meant until years later, first dismissing this memory and experience as a bad trip, induced by popping too much acid and being tired out of her mind.

Screams echoed through the infinite, infernal stairwell, bouncing off the walls and curdling her blood until she realized: the screams were her own. The demon’s growling matched them, blended in with them, and she screamed in pain as claws dug into her back, lifting her onto her feet and pushing her up a few steps until she ran on yet farther, stumbling forth and upwards, ever away from the madness that followed her wherever she went, ever away from the things below.

The things below the surface of her mind. The horrid things she pushed deep down to still her mind; the darkness she drowned in whiskey and cigarettes even as she grew older.

This could have been her awakening but she skidded right past it. It wouldn’t be for years until she had her world turned upside down. Never realizing the power she held. The demon followed closely, keeping her blood pumping and the adrenaline flowing like fire in her veins.

She reached a stone portal at the top of the stairs and pushed it open. Instead of meeting resistance and stone grinding upon stone once more, it swung open with ease. She burst right through it and stumbled again.

Catching her breath, wheezing, lungs screaming but only pained sounds emerging from her lips, she looked around. There was no demon behind her. Younger Emily, with her pink hair, and her piercings, and completely stoned, stood in Rodney’s basement. Behind her was only the door to the boiler room.

Rodney slept on the couch, curled up into a fetal position. Carlos slept on the chair, sprawled out, still blanketed by some empty plastic wrappers. Static on the TV screen.

Emily ripped the door to the boiler room open, needing to know if that had been real, but there was no hellish stairwell behind it. Just the regular old boiler room that it should have been, reeking of oil.

The demon’s laughter echoed in her mind. She checked the time, noting how many hours had passed and chalking this whole experience up to a bad acid trip after all. She didn’t go home, afraid to be followed or stalked out there in the dark and cold and wet autumn streets, all alone.

Even though she found blood when she wiped her nose, Younger Emily figured it fit. Demons and hell weren’t real. She didn’t have the power to control minds or enter strange otherworlds.

She curled up on the end of the couch, wrapping herself in a smelly old blanket that Rodney should have washed weeks ago. Although she thought the nightmarish imagery and things she had just witnessed would keep her up until the other two boys woke up, exhaustion dragged her into the realm of sleep within minutes.

Emily sat in the back of Stanton’s car, finally escaping from this memory. She looked out the window, at the people in the streets of New Haven. Instead of reading their minds, scanning their thoughts, and testing the limitations of her newfound powers, she decided against any of that.

“I’m still here,” the demon said—Stinky Jim. He sat right next to her, just out of sight.

The fear welled up again, churning in her guts as if the monster gripped her stomach with a claw and twisted.

“I’ll always be with you, Emily. Just one step behind. You ever want the security of that little padded room—to surrender all responsibility, let the world sort itself out and sink into darkness while you drool in the corner—you just turn back. Let me take the wheel,” Stinky Jim said. He cackled again, showing no hint of mercy.

“Or you keep going deeper down, scratchin’ at those wriggling walls, and dive into those lakes of blood and shit and fire. Find out what’s beneath the surface. Drown in the secrets of those things below, or spit ‘em out and curse the world with your wretched knowledge.”

More cackling.

Emily clamped her eyes shut. She willed Stinky Jim to shut up.

She centered herself. Pushed away every thought. Blocked it all out—she had gained that much control over it now. Focused.

Breathed.

Pushed the demon deep down, where it would lurk. And wait.

With the things below.

—Submitted by Wratts

[yoshi4sushi]

(purupurupuru) (purupurupuru) (gocha!) (coo!) (coo!)

 How’s it hanging, nakama?! I hope everyone is ok from this hot, cruel weather so you keep yourself hydrated, wear light clothing, wear plenty of sunscreen, and avoid sun burn. All said and done, we’re back to our weekly news with plenty, plenty of goodies so you know the drill. First off, last week’s chapter was totally chaotic as we see Luffy and the gang finally reached the area where Wano kingdom is, but the journey was full of dangerous waves as the gang are swamped by large koi fish and getting pushed around the sea. Oda-san re-created the scene Hokusai’s Sea of Japan storm painting with the koi fish splashing around. GUA! He’s totally gonna input a lot Edo style in this story. Anyway, the koi fish go up the mountain with a stream guiding them. At the end, Luffy woke with a pinch from a crab and encounters a lion and baboon ready to duke it out. Looks like he finally arrived at the destination. What action will he take? Where are the others? Let’s see how it plays out this week. Next, this past weekend’s episode was mind-blowing as we see the gang finally making their gateway, while they run into a familiar homie which was Kingbaum flirting with a female tree homie. Luffy and Nami were happy to see him alive, but Kingbaum was not thrilled to see them at all. So he’s back again being the steed for Nami. Poor guy can’t get a break. Back at the city, all of Big Mom’s crew are taking action to go after Luffy and Bege, but more deadly trouble approaches when Big Mom has again gone through her sugar meltdown, and starts rampaging the city. Perospero was able to calm her down telling her that the wedding cake was stolen by Luffy which is lie to keep the city safe. However, Big Mom threatens him if is lying, she will take his lifespan. He’s a big pinch. At the end, Big Mom flies at a fast speed and caught with them slashing like a maniac. Next time, Nami has a plan up her sleeve that will shake off Big Mom. Will it work? Guess we’ll see. Now on with the goodies! First off, look who came in for quick visit. Yup, it’s our totally fave nakama, Tongari-san. Sorry to make travel in this horrible weather, my friend. So what’s the buzz going at the tower? Tongari-san says that loads of amazing stuff is happening! First off, to celebrate the OP anniversary, the tower will be having lots of talk shows happening for next weekend. They’ll invite many special guests such as figurine creators, game creators of the new OP game, World Seeker, voice actors of the Straw Hats, cast of the PHANTOM live show, and Greg along with some editors of OP. They will give away free tickets to these events. Deadline already past, but if you were able to apply beforehand. You’re good to go. You can invite one friend w/ you to the event, and you can apply once for one show. Winners will be sent an email along with a number. Follow the instructions when you’re given the email. Bring an ID to confirm you’re identity. Schedule of the talk shows are posted up. Next, here are some yummy treats the tower will sell for the summer festival: they’ll have Buggy’s watermelon with pineapple gelatin vitamin drink, his chocolate banana pudding energy drink, Luffy’s citron salty gelatin mineral drink, and Chopper’s small bucket of cotton candy with various flavors. Yummy! Yum! Yum! Next, schedule of photo greet with Luffy, Zoro, and Sanji will be on July 17th, 19th, 24th, 26th, and 30th. They’ll give out lottery tickets with numbers around 6:15 to 7:30. If you see you’re number on the board, you win the lottery. Photo greet will be at 9:00 pm. We’ll leave a link with details for those interested. Next, don’t forget that Corazon’s birthday is coming up and you can still get the birthday bromide card of him if you visit the tower. They’ll also give away free birthday posters of him if you make purchases over 3000 yen. Don’t miss it! Next, new goodies will be sold at the store such as this limited ed. towel of the Straw Hats, and some yummy popcorn with flavors of cheese, caramel, salt butter, and milk chocolate. Great snack if you have the munchies. Next, all Straw Hat stores will be having a campaign to celebrate the Mugiwara Festival. Next week, they’ll give out free bromide cards Whole Cake Island special scenes if you purchase goods over 500 yen. Next, loads of new t-shirts: they’ll sell Chopper’s insignia hat t-shirt in navy blue & hot pink color, Germa siblings colored t-shirts with the double 66 of Ichiji, Niji, Yonji, and black color which I think it’s Judge’s. They’ll also sell, lil’ Sanji no.3 t-shirt that he wore back then. Next, they’ll sell this “don” gold color necklace, clear pouches with the OP logos, and a blue color with the gang on both sides, and this cute blue color OP logo scrunchy. Next, all JUMP shops will be selling awesome new goodies such as these three envelope set of devil fruit designs of Luffy’s gum-gum fruit, Law’s op-op fruit, and Buggy’s chop-chop fruit. They’ll also sell this Japanese cloth of Luffy’s gum-gum fruit good for a curtain decoration or table mat. Next, they’ll sell this neon bar themed goods such as acrylic figurines, water bottles, buttons, pouches, tote bags, Japanese coaster mats, and a big towel. Next, the HELLO OP exhibition in Eihime have more new items such as acrylic charms, a folder, a t-shirt, a mug of Law, and a colorful pencil pouch. Next, Jump WORLD is having a Treasure Hunting event where you try to find as many colorful jewels and you could get a free prize. More awesome the Straw Hat stores will be selling such as these totally rad hats of various jolly rogers characters including the navy hat and key holder hat of Luffy, clip boards of Luffy and the navy, & a long towel of the Straw Hats’ jolly rogers. Next, coming soon in Odaiba, a new OP event is coming up next month called “The Mist” where the gang meet with a mysterious man who ate a devil fruit made him a mist man.  More details will be revealed soon. Next, the 50th anniversary of the Jump exhibition will be serving food dishes from popular anime. The OP dish will have Luffy’s favorite food such as chicken drum stick, fried chicken, veggies, and straw hat rice. Very delish! Next, here is the CD cover album the for entire Island Song collection which will be released on Aug.24th. It will have all the characters songs including Big Mom’s Bloody Tea Party. Next, the title for the next book will be Vivre Card Fan Book which will contain fun facts of OP from fans. Also, if you buy either the new OP Open Door books or any of the volumes, you’ll get a free magnet clip, and if you collect them all, it will complete the picture of the Germa theme. Behind it will have a character collage of Luffy and the others. Last, but not least, here is the new DVD cover of vol.12 of WCI arc that has Yonji. It will be released on Aug.1st. One more thing, here is a new drawing that Oda-san made to celebrate the JUMP anniversary. He drew Luffy with Goku. And here’s a pic of seiyuu of Jinbei (Katsuhisa-san), Pedro (Miki-san), Perospero (Uchida-san) Luffy (Mayumi-san) Ussop (Kappei-san), and Nami (Akemi-san). Working together puts a smile on their face. Well done! PHEW! I think we covered everything. Well, that’s all we got for now. Tune in next week for more upcoming awesome goods and events. Special thanks to Tongari-san. We’ll see you at the anniversary party, my friend. Kikko! Momon! Excellent job as always!

[mollykittykat]

The Cupboard Game pt. 10

AU in which Splinter evaded the contents of the mutagen canister and ended up raising the turtles as a human.

No real warnings apply. Mostly family fluff/action-adventure with a teeny hint of angst.

(Also available on A03: http://archiveofourown.org/works/10471893/chapters/30131685)

None of the stolen keys looked like they would fit the lock. Splinter felt he should’ve expected that much, but luckily the cage was held shut with a simple padlock, which he knew he could easily undo with the pick he had the forethought to carry with him. He kneeled down and went to work, the trapped turtles rambling on about an ugly man and his weird friends. They asked questions of why and how, to all of which Splinter answered with requests for silence “I told you, I’ll explain later” he whispered, working to undo the cogs as quickly and efficiently as he could.

“They said they were going to sell us to a lab!” Donatello said “They’re pretty mad at you!” Leonardo interjected “They offered like… a billion dollars to who could beat you! Did you fight them? Are y’going to fight them?�� “Fight bad guys?” Mikey asked, eyes turning starry with awe “this mean you’re a superhero Papa?” “No no. Just a normal hero” Raphael answered his younger sibling, nudging him with his elbow “Superheroes have to have super powers dummy!”

“Look, will you please be quiet for a moment?” Splinter whispered back, tone far harsher than it had been before “If you’ll just stop asking questions and let me focus-”

Suddenly there was a click, but it didn’t emanate from a lock finally loosing it’s hold on the cage door, it was the click of a revolver from the outskirts of the ring behind Splinter. He froze, another flurry of clicks slowly surrounding him as barrels of guns peaked out of the shadows all around the fighting ring. Lights came on one by one, revealing the once empty space was now filled with men who’s weapons were fixed upon their one target in the center of the arena. Yoshi stood up and turned around, quick to realize his situation. In the back of his mind he’d had a bad sense about what he was walking into from the beginning, but his desperation had silenced his natural instincts.

There was a familiar crumb-clogged laugh. The obese form of Don Visioso sat just behind his line of hired gunmen, shoving another handful of popcorn into his mouth as his lackey’s infiltrated the ring from all sides and apprehended their target.

Despite the brief disappearance of the doorboy, the warehouse was opened up from the inside by the time 8:15 rolled around, and the swarm of thugs entered with loud anticipation and heavy indecisive footsteps like a pack of feral dogs. The world within was dim as the air filled with a shallow layer of smoke that further obstructed the view of the audience. There were a few lamps illuminating the back where a makeshift bar sold watered down alcohol and overpriced cigarettes, but most of the group eventually found their way to the edges of the spotlighted ring, like they had been turned from excited wolves to wandering moths. Of course the light wasn’t the main attraction, but rather the man standing calmly and quietly within the ring, feigning confidence even while his wrists were fastened to one of the four corners by a set of handcuffs.

He didn’t bestow the group with any sort of response, though he was forced to move his head slightly to the side in order to dodge glass bottle that was thrown his way by a drunken attendee. To his luck there was enough sportsmanship in the unruly crowd to put a stop to that, and the convicted assailant was immediately ushered out in a flurry of shoves and blows, knocking him about until with a final toss from the bouncer he was sent stumbling to the ground outside of the warehouse. The doors were shut behind him, and he groggily rolled over onto his bruised stomach and tried to get to his feet. Somewhere in the midst of his dizzy efforts, a large and cold foot pressed him back into the dirt as someone- or something- walked over him. They were from a pair of newcomers, utterly unfamiliar in appearance, well dressed but off in their arrival time. The drunken outcast squinted through his haze, and noted that one of them held something shaped vaguely like a gun.

“Hey!”

The two suited men halted and turned around at the drunkard’s shout. Their faces were identical and the gun they held was strange and unearthly, looking more like the prop to an 80’s scifi film than a legitimate weapon. Seeing this, and taking in the unsettling oddities through his alcoholic fog, the outcast simply squinted and muttered something unintelligible about ‘no violence’ as he stumbled away. The suited men glanced at each other for a moment, and looked at their instrument.

“The Mutant Scanner brings us to the place that is known as this place” one said to the other

“Kraang, mutants are not to be pursued in the places known as the places that are filled with that which are known as ‘witnesses’” his partner replied

“Protocols do not forbid that which is known as a ‘brief examination’ of the mutant location”

“Kraang is correct in that assertion”

“Then let us proceed with caution.”

Thus, the gun was folded up, and the two monotone men went in. They hadn’t really any solid indication of what they were getting into, though they had done enough research on the subject of human behavior to recognize an underground fight when they saw one. The shackled captive standing in the spotlight raised no questions with them, as the object of their interest was not at all the fight itself.

They scanned the room slowly and methodically, trying to indicate their vague unidentified target, which was a good deal more difficult now that their machinery wasn’t allowed to be put into use. However they suspected they’d know their target when they saw it, and one of them was certain they spotted the mutant when they noticed a lighted balcony just off from the ring, wherein a hideous thing sat between two armed men, shoving two ice-cream cones into his mouth at once. “Some mutated species of blob fish” was the Kraang’s guess, but his partner was quick to disagree.

“Negative. That which is falsely labeled a ‘mutant’ is just what some humans look like”

The Kraang further examined the fat man, staring through it’s expressionless gaze until he could confirm his partner’s correction. "That is... that which is known as... unfortunate”

No sooner had they made their criticisms did the fat man called for the unruly room’s attention. The identical newcomers paid momentary attention to the announcement, hoping it would aide them in their search, but they quickly lost interest. They cared for neither the reputation of the captured human nor the offer of money to whoever could succeed in beating him, all they wanted was the mutant their tracker had picked up on. Then something new caught their attentions: a the small glint of something hanging from the rafters high above. They both stared, their mechanical eyes zooming in on the darkened ceiling until through the shadows they saw the outline of a cage, and a tiny pair of green eyes looking down at them.

“Raph they’ll see you!” Leonardo scolded, pulling his brother back from the edge of the bars. Raph returned this tug with a sharp shove that caused their cage to sway. “I wanna see Dad fight!”

“Don’t worry Leo” Don muttered from his end of the cage, where he prodded his tiny finger into the padlock, working his brain to try and figure out his father’s progress in undoing it “it’s dark up here. If we get out of the cage now, we can prob’ly sneak down without being seen!”

“An’ fight the guys fightin’ Dad!” Raph added, going right back to watching what was going on below. By now things were finally getting exciting. The cuffs holding Yoshi in place had been undone, leaving him free to combat the first opponents climbing up over the ropes and into the ring. Leonardo wisely gave up on dragging his brother away, afraid of shaking the cage again, their perilous position up in the rafters only adding to his instinctive caution. “How do we get down once the cage is open?” “I dunno…” Donatello replied, jostling the door testily “but maybe we can be sneaky and get it unlocked first?”

“M‘kay. How do we get the door unlocked though?”

“I dunno!” Don suddenly snapped, his broken focus causing him to loose patience “Dad used a lock pick, but the bad guys took it!”

Leonardo narrowed his brow, frustration and fear tempting him to cry. Just old enough to have a sense of pride, he instead decided examine each of his brothers to see if any of them needed comforting. Raph was still trying to catch a glance at his fighting father, Donatello struggling to figure out how to undo the padlock, while Mikey… who had been oddly silent this whole time… continued gnawing on the thoroughly cleaned chicken bone as he tried to catch a peak of the pandemonium from over Raphael’s shoulder. With a frustrated humph Leo yanked the bone from his youngest brother’s mouth, and was about to throw it through the bars when he paused in realization. He looked the slobbery bone over, finding that without the sinews and the meat clinging to it it looked thin and pointy, like a caveman tool.

A spark of hope alighted in his tiny chest, and he hurried to Donatello and held it out “Will this work?” Donnie turned and looked at the bone his brother held. He appeared skeptical, but he took the object with a sigh and a nod before he  wriggled the end of the bone into the padlock, trying to see what gears he could configure with his measly tool.

Hamato Yoshi had walked right into a trap, and he was still trying to determine how much of that was bad luck or just his own stupidity. However, as was the pattern, the terrible twist of fate was peppered through with small instances of good luck, just enough to keep his hopes alive.

The throwing blades Yoshi had hid on his person were overlooked when he was frisked, the knives small enough to evade the searching fingers of those more accustomed to unveiling hidden revolvers. He had also convinced Don Visioso to allow him the keep the chest armor after informing him of his unfortunate collision with the car. He argued that if he went down too quickly it would make for a terrible show, as well as create bad press given the value placed on his defeat. Visioso, thankfully overconfident, fulfilled his simple request, but only after testing Splinter’s claim with a commanded strike to the ribs, causing him to buckle in pain before the gunmen took hold of him once more and dragged him into his restrains. There was undoubtably a feeling of indignity when Splinter was locked into the handcuffs, but it paled in comparison to the sinking helplessness he felt when the turtles were taken away once again, lifted high into the rooftops where their cage shackled to the rafters.

So here he was, his children dangling thirty feet above him, weaponized goons positioned all around to ensure he didn’t pull another stunt, the fat man himself sitting at a safe distance away, stuffing his face as he watched his captive fight for his kids like this was some sort of cheap gameshow.

But Yoshi still drew breath, and the turtles were still in his sights, thus… though the situation was bleak… there was still a chance of the situation somehow turning out okay in the end.

So he fought with all his might, forbidding his lack of sleep and the pressing injuries to impair him. He wasn’t sure if he was fighting just as well as he ever had, or better than ever due to the situation, but the audience sure seemed to grow more and more excited with every blow he delivered and ever fighter he cut down. He was determined to not allow himself to get distracted, but he could only follow through only to a certain extent. There was one moment in the middle of the fifth round when he saw something that nearly placed him on the receiving end to a solid blow to the temple There was a man climbing the walls. No... two men... one on each side of the room. They were mostly hidden in darkness but he could see them, spider-like as the scaled the vertical wall, well dressed, identical, and utterly unnerving, especially given the fact that they seemed to be heading straight for the rafters. Or, more specifically, the cage dangling from the rafters far overhead.

[howtohero]

#033 Roommates

Being a superhero can be expensive, you need to buy multiple costumes (if bad guys would just stop adorning their evil costumes with gratuitous evil spikes that can easily tear fabric we wouldn’t have this problem,) dry cleaning bills for all those costumes (and hush money so your drycleaner doesn’t show up on the front page of all the major {and minor} news outlets for giving an exclusive interview to the popular blog “Unmasking Heroes and/or Pictures of Cats Daily”), clandestine medical bills (if you’d stop tripping over the hem of your cape you wouldn’t have to go to the underground hero clinic nearly as often, lose the cape bub,) groceries probably (and do you see how much they’re charging for eggs these days? I should just get a pet chicken at this point!) Basically you’re bound to rack up quite the monthly bill (that last sentence was a mess punctuation-wise so I’m just started a new one whatever.) Plus, on top of all of that, you need somewhere to live. And I know what you’re thinking, yes, you need both a place to live and a hideout. You can’t live in your hideout. How are you gonna maintain a secret identity like that. Now, all of these factors combine to create a situation where a young superhero, one who is not of the billionaire with issues™ type of hero, might need a roommate in order to help pay the rent. (Ok obviously I’m not going to actually buy a chicken I don’t know the first thing about chicken farming. Like how do you even get them to produce the eggs? Do they just do it whenever they feel like it? How does the Easter Bunny play into that? What’s his egg deal? Would it perhaps be more profitable for me to take up ostrich farming? There are just too many complicated questions to deal with and I’m very busy making sure this blog updates twice a week.)

Finding a good roommate in general is difficult (I once had a roommate who screamed in his sleep in French), so finding a roommate who’s cool with you going off to fight living giant cake monsters on the reg is going to be even more difficult. You need to find someone who is trustworthy, not nosy, ok with the possibility that their roommate will be killed whilst jumping from rooftop to rooftop searching for bad guys to pick a fight with, clean, organized, able to pay the rent on time, respectful of boundaries, accepting of the possibility that they might be kidnapped by supervillains seeking to gain leverage over you, a good cook maybe. And you can’t exactly put up flyers with all that info in your local coffee shops and corkboards. That’s gonna draw in some real weirdos! Like “Hi, is this the apartment where I might get tortured by a supervillain. Because I’m very interested in being tortured by a supervillain.” Like gee man, yeah that’ll probably happen but you don’t need to be so enthusiastic about it.

Really you can’t know if your roommate will be a good superhero roommate until you’re actually living with them. You can’t exactly tell them that you’re a superhero beforehand. Unless you decide to room with one of the people who already knows your secret identity. There’s an idea. Especially if you’re one of those heroes who pay their support squad. Because this way you’re at least still making use of that money in the form of half the rent each month.

Some key attributes you should look for in a roommate though are “respectful of privacy” and maybe someone who also keeps odd hours like you. Ha, you know what would be funny? If you accidentally ended up with a roommate who was also a superhero! And you guys kept scrambling to hide your secrets from one another. No no wait, you know what would really be funny? If you accidentally roomed with a supervillain (they have expenses too!) and you guys were good chums by day but at night you tried to kill each other with eye lasers and giant drills. That’s a concept ripe for a sitcom (episode one: “Pilot”: Hiro G. Oodguy aka Ultiman needs a roommate and luckily E. Ville Crimelordstein showed up on his door step… the same day the evil Dr. Python rolls into town. Episode two: “Snakes on a Plain”: The evil Dr. Python has unleashed a snake army on a nearby plain, Ultiman is the only one who can stop him, but the refrigerator repairman is coming and someone has to let him in and E isn’t picking up his phone. Episode 15 “Hide and Sneak”: After an epic battle between their alter-egos Hiro and E struggle to come up with plausible excuses for their injuries. Episode 28: “Your Love Sends me to the Moon” E realizes he’s in love with Hiro meanwhile Dr. Python straps Ultiman to a rocket and sends him into space. These things just write themselves.)

Setting yourself up with another superhero as a roommate might actually be a good idea. A good way to make that happen is to put out an ad saying “man seeks roommate who will duck out at random times with little to no notice and has a knack for making atomic-powered enemies.” Superheroes will be tripping over themselves (and their capes,) to snag you as a roommate. Roommate search ads are also a great way to find and arrest supervillains. You’d be surprised how many responses “Seeking a roommate with their own weather-controlling machine and a knack for world domination” will get you.

Once you manage to successfully find a roommate keeping your secret from them should become a top priority (rank it just below preventing the world from being taken over by rat-men from the sewers of New York.) While it may very well be that your gut was spot on and the guy you’re living with is a swell, stand-up guy who would love nothing more than to secretly live with a superhero, you can’t really tell that kind of thing for sure until a month or two of living together. You’re going to really have to up your excuse game, make up a job with a long commute, invent a relative who needs caring for, take up a hobby that requires you to go out of town a lot, like exotic bird watching, or convention hopping. This requires an ability to both think on your feet and be creative so if you don’t think you’re ready for that kind of thing as a hero you can either wait a bit until we finish our list of handy dandy excuses or move back in with your parents.

In general though it’s always better for you to come clean with your roommate about your superheroic activities rather than them finding out on their own. Revealing your secret on your own allows you to control the situation somewhat and can have the added benefit of causing your roommate to trust you more and be more willing to keep your secret. If they find out on their own (because you keep losing track of your mask and it keeps accidentally ending up in public apartment spaces and honestly this is just yet another reason domino masks are garbage. You’d never lose track of a luchador mask or a winged war helmet,) they’re more likely to be hurt or try to use their newfound knowledge to extort or blackmail you. And that’s no good. Don’t be the reason your roommate becomes a supervillain (I should get that stitched onto a pillow.)

[rieshon]

Fall 2018 Power Rankings

Wow, I actually finished this shit sort of on time this season.

1 Yagate Kimi ni Naru: You know a show is good when you put off finishing it just because you don't want it to end. I did that with Yagakimi this season, and not only is it my favorite show of the season, I'm pretty sure it's my favorite yuri anime of all time. It's not just that Touko and Yuu are such an adorable couple, but that the story and relationship dynamics are genuinely original for a yuri anime. You've got two heroines who are de facto dating from the outset, so no will-they won't-they bullshit like most yuri stories (lookin' at you citrus)... But only sort of, because it's complicated. You've got one heroine who doesn't want her girlfriend to fall in love with her because she has a weird identity crisis because of past trauma and is afraid to embrace her own individuality which having someone fall in love with her would validate because she's "only herself" around said girlfriend... And then you've got the other heroine who thinks she's asexual/aromantic but slowly starts to realize she's actually just gay, but only after she's promised her girlfriend she won't fall in love with her because she "can't." To say this is a weird relationship is putting it mildly. There's also some stuff you usually don't see in anime at all, like another character who actually IS aro/ace, and a live-in adult lesbian couple (one of whom is actually revealed to be bi later on) who are the Big Gay Mentors to the younger characters. There is still the requisite amount of Yuri Melodrama, of course (elevated by a beautiful soundtrack from the venerable Haketa Takefumi) but it's so much more interesting than usual here. Oh, and of course, as I mentioned above, Touko and Yuu are the most darling couple ever, perfect cinnamon rolls who must be protected. Well, okay, maybe not perfect: they got issues. But I love this story and characters so much I actually picked up the manga to read what happens next, and I basically never do that. Maybe it's not technically the "best" anime of the season, but it's the one I love the most. ★★★★☆

2 SSSS.GRIDMAN: Somehow, based Trig just keep doing it. You'd be forgiven for thinking Darling in the Franxx, the show that has "SMART ANIME FOR ADULTS" practically engraved on everything about it, would be the 'cerebral' robot anime Trigger made this year, and Gridman, a spinoff of a cheesy tokusatsu show that was itself a spinoff of Ultraman, would be little more than a fun but forgettable robot romp. You'd be totally wrong, of course: Gridman is every bit the heavyweight that previous Trigger/Gainax robot anime are, with its own flair of course. It takes a while for it to fully develop and present its themes about social anxiety and isolation, but once it does it really pops off. The dual heroines of Akane and Rikka are brilliant, not just for their lewd character designs but also for how well their stories are written. Rikka is the real hero of the show--Yuuta might be the one jumping around in a robot, but ultimately Rikka is the most important. Stellar performances from both Ueda Reina and Miyamoto Yume as Akane and Rikka, respectively, really carry the thematic weight of the show. There is, of course, some great art and animation on display, as you might expect from Trigger, who always make the most (and then some) of whatever resources they're given. Episode 9, which takes place for the most part inside of a dream, was especially visually striking. An all around great production and one that won't soon be forgotten. ★★★★☆

3 Zombie Land Saga: With all that out of the way, here's a show about some moe zombies. Ah, anime, even after all these years it still finds ways to surprise me, like a show about moe zombie idols being as genuinely moving as it is hilarious. Probably the weirdest thing about Zombie Land Saga, even as a show that features the undead filming commercials for a Saga-based fried chicken restaurant and competing in a Takeshi's Castle-style mud Olympics, is that it unironically works as an idol anime, too. All the characters (well, except for Yuugiri, who is woefully underutilized) really do grow throughout the show and it gives the idol anime aspect a really solid backbone to build off of. Of course, Zombie Land Saga is more than just another idol anime, and calling it a zombie idol anime is somehow still selling it short. From the aforementioned chicken commercials, to the unforgettably epic zombie rap battle, to the middle schooler biker gangs, to basically everything Yamada Tae does, this show was not just surprisingly moving but shockingly hilarious at times. Also, it must be noted that these zombies are fricking adorable: definitely way cuter than the undead should ever be. Especially Junko who is the best girl, once again proving the superiority of Showa idols. ★★★★☆

4 Seishun Buta Yarou wa Bunny Girl Senpai no Yume wo Minai: Since this is a light novel anime through and through, it seems fair to describe it in terms of light novel anime: it's basically the Monogatari series meets Oregairu. Our sardonic protagonist with a heart of gold (and impossibly hot girlfriend) meets a bunch of high school girls with weird supernatural problems and helps them solve them. That might make it sound boring or derivative, but as I always harp on, it's really all in the execution and Aobuta sticks the landing. It reminds me of those above shows not just in narrative content but also in terms of how sharp the dialogue is: it is one of those delightful shows where you could have two characters just have a conversation for 24 minutes and it would still be endlessly absorbing. The reliable Ishikawa Kaito is great as our male lead, bringing not just snappy wit to the table but also a surprising amount of emotional depth in later story arcs. The aloof, sarcastic protagonist is of course done to death in this genre (hi, Kyon!) but Sakuta is certainly an example of it done well. It helps that he's such a loving oniichan and cute boyfriend, which really endears him to the viewer. The gallery of heroines is of course stocked with plenty of cute and sexy girls--the art and animation is top notch--but what really carries the show is Sakuta's relationship with his girlfriend (and best girl) Mai, which is a continuing story throughout the series even as the focus moves to other heroines. They're just so adorable together. Ironically, the element of the show that probably matters the least is the weird sort-of-sci-fi plot hooks: you're really just here to watch these characters talk through their emotions and stumble through adolescence, and the sci-fi plot devices are basically incidental to all of it. ★★★★☆

5 Himote House: Talk about a dark horse of an anime... Himote House is the latest... thing... from the man, the myth, the legend who brought us Minarai Diva, Ishidate Koutarou, and it's great. It's half nichijou-kei anime, half just a seiyuu radio show that's animated, and it's all superb. In the scripted bits, the show can get wonderfully weird, from the episode that used the Game of Life to teach us about the lack of gay rights in Japan, to the episode that took place entirely inside of a copy machine, and I haven't even mentioned the Bitcoin episode yet, which is too bizarre to even give away in this review no one will read. The unscripted bits are also great thanks to a collection of some of the seiyuu industry's top personalities, including the always great combination of Suzakinishi, comedic genius Mimorin, and the criminally underrated Mizuhara Kaoru whose performance as Tokiyo really must be experienced: it starts over the top and just keeps going from there. Even the cheap 3DCG animation is surprisingly charming, and it's at least good enough that these girls look genuinely cute, although the show is also helped along by regularly inserting some nice hand-drawn stills in the most important moments. Almost everyone probably overlooked this show this season, but I'd give it a hearty recommendation. ★★★★☆

6 Tonari no Kyuuketsuki-san: I hope Comic Cune anime are here to stay, because this was certainly the best pure nichijou-kei offering this season. It's "cute girl vampires" but, as you might expect from the source, this is the most laid-back depiction of vampires you're ever going to find in fiction. None of the human characters even seem to be remotely bothered that vampires are in their midst, the sun is an inconvenience that mostly makes it harder to go buy manga in the middle of the day, and they order their blood from Amazon. Even when a vampire hunter shows up, she's just won over by the vampire girls' cuteness. It does use vampire lore to tell some amusing jokes at times, like Sophie getting trapped outside because she had to count all the seeds in a sunflower, or Akari getting a plank put on her in bed because the vampires felt bad that her bed didn't have a lid, but mostly you're just here for the cute girls cuting, and cute they do. There's the requisite amount of soft yuri, and the character designs and animation are fantastic. Very little to complain about here--the show's only real weakness is that the jokes are occasionally kind of meh. Ellie is best girl. ★★★☆☆

7 Uchi no Meido ga Uzasugiru!: Shocking no one, the Comedy God delivered again. This show is frequently laugh out loud funny, and it's helped along by animation from Douga Koubou that is right up there with some of the best they've ever produced. The sole factor that makes this show somewhat weaker than Oota Masahiko's previous works is that with its completely absurd comedic premise it is ultimately trying to tell a very serious story--about a little girl who is terrified of having her late mother replaced by having any other adult woman enter her life--with a premise that definitely should not be telling a serious story. The show is at its best when Tsubame (voiced by Numakura Manami in some of her best-ever work) is being an irredeemable lolicon shithead, not a role model. Still, the show is pretty great most of the time, and it only gets better when ドM best girl Midorin turns up about halfway through. The Russian loli is pretty cute too I guess, but as seems to always be the case in these shows (I can't help but remember another Douga Koubou production, Mikakunin de Shinkoukei) the silliest and most perverted girls always steal the show. ★★★☆☆

8 Irozuku Sekai no Ashita Kara: It's a P.A. Works original, so that means it's time to complain about how it's not as good as other P.A. Works originals! Seriously though, although it's not the second coming of TARI TARI, this show is easy to recommend, being beautiful both artistically and narratively, with a simple and heartfelt story to tell about a girl going to a new place (well, a new time) to discover herself. Yep, you guessed it, this is one of my favorites: sentimentality anime! Girl literally learns to see the beauty in the world that she had been blind to by leaving her comfort zone and falling in love. Good shit, good shit. My main complaint is that the best girl, Kurumi, gets short shrift as best girls often do, although she at least does get one little story arc to develop her character. Ishihara Kaori is solid as the female lead, but I just loved Naobou as the snarky Kurumi so much. It's also worth noting that although the cast actually has a fairly even gender split, all the male characters are pretty much inoffensive to likable, which is all I really ask in a show like this. There's no one on the level of Wien, but Chigusa and Kurumi's relationship was pretty cute. Overall, though, this show is just about drinking in the atmosphere and the feels, and trying to avoid thinking about time paradoxes. ★★★☆☆

9 Akanesasu Shoujo: I had cautiously high expectations for this show going into the season, and although it didn't blow me away with a masterpiece, I was satisfied with what I got. The show doesn't have the best production values, but it has a solid premise that is executed well. A group of misfit high school girls in the incredibly lame Radio Club find a way to slip between alternate dimensions, have misadventures where they learn that The Real Power Was Inside Us All Along, and end up saving the universe from being consumed by some vague evilness. The story comes courtesy KID's Uchikoshi Koutarou, and definitely feels like something you might find in a science fiction visual novel. It's not afraid to be at least a little adventurous, with the various dimensions we visit being varying degrees and kinds of social commentary, and it even goes as far as killing off major characters and actually letting them stay dead! Plus, it had Kurosawa Tomoyo basically playing like three or four characters at once, which has to be worth something. If nothing else, I respected this series. ★★☆☆☆

10 Kishuku Gakkou no Juliet: Romeo and Juliet may well be the Bard's most widely popular play, so it's not surprising that now we have an anime version of it... sort of. In true anime fashion, this is not a tragedy of star-crossed lovers, but a comedy of errors about two goofball kids who fall in love at a ridiculous boarding school. Set against a backdrop of, uh, race war. Kayano Ai's blondenblu Juliet is pretty cute but as is typical in these shows the best girls never win, namely Ayaneru's Hasuki and the actual best girl, Shimamura Yuu's Chartreux. As always, the gay girls are the best. The show does have an unusually likable protagonist for one in this genre: Romio is a big dork who is singlemindedly dedicated to his cute girlfriend, and even if she's not the best girl, you definitely want to root for them. A pretty good show. ★★☆☆☆

11 Animayell!: Kirara anime are playing second fiddle to other cute girl shows again this season, but like Harukana Receive last season, this show is still decent. What it lacks in a compelling premise (sorry, not only do I come in thinking cheerleading is lame, but the show's animation isn't good enough to get it over as a cool thing) it makes up for in the most important ingredient for an anime, homosexuality. Not only is there the immaculately gay Hanawa-chan and the extremely homo Ukki, for some reason at one point theres also a completely random, out lesbian side character who asks our heroines for advice confessing to her female home tutor. But yeah, it's definitely worth it for Hanawa and Ukki at least; your mileage may vary on the rest of the actual show. ★★☆☆☆

12 Sword Art Online Alicization: I've repeatedly gone on record saying I love a slow burn, and I don't necessarily mind when nothing happens in a show if its at least giving me some good atmosphere and characters to gnaw on in the meantime... But man, is the new SAO one slow-ass show. Though I've never read the books, this really feels like a case of following the Original Way too closely. That's not to say that what is here is bad by any means; there's some truly interesting concepts, a good SAO story, and of course some stellar animation, but they probably could have cut this first cours down to like, six episodes and still accomplished the same things. I still have confidence that it will get more hype as we progress, though. There's a long way to go in this one yet, so this rating is anything but final. ★★☆☆☆

13 Debidoru!: This show is an ugly looking 3DCG abomination that was probably made in MikuMikuDance, but thankfully we now live in a post-Kemono Friends world, and so Debidoru! was still pretty great. You couldn't ask for a better trio of voices for an ad-lib stuffed comedy than Hanazawa Kana, Mimori Suzuko and Iguchi Yuka and they fill their roles with aplomb, especially Iguchi, who at one point tsukkomis so hard she clips the microphone. Like the best no-money shorts it also had some moments of true ART, like Sugahara Souta (the director) singing the moe opening song (in one uncut take) for no reason, or one of the greatest things I saw all season, episode 11, which was done (also in one take) entirely with paper cutouts of the characters in front of a camcorder. It's not really a mastapeece in the way Himote House was, but it was certainly a memorable little show. ★★☆☆☆

14 Beelzebub-jou no Okinimesu Mama: I'm as surprised as anyone that this show ended up as low as it did, but by the end of the season I had a hard time convincing myself to even load up the latest episode of this one, and it's hard for me to really even say why. On the face of it it should be my jam: it's full of cute girls and pastel colors, and it's even occasionally lewd. Really, it's probably just because there's so many male characters who get a decent amount of attention in the narrative. It also doesn't help that Beelzebub (despite being a cute blondenblu voiced by Oonishi Saori) is not really a very appealing character, which makes the protagonist, who is constantly fawning over her like she's the best thing since sliced bread, come off as less likable as well. It had some good stuff too, like Sargatanas's shyness and Gocchin's needing to pee constantly, but I guess it wasn't quite enough to hold my interest. It also doesn't help that my favorite girl, Eurynome, was barely even in the show after she was introduced. We ankle fetishists gotta stick together, man! ★☆☆☆☆

15 Tensei Shitara Slime Datta Ken: I had exactly zero expectations for this show to begin with, so I was pleasantly surprised with it at first. Those great typographic effects, especially, really sucked me into the first episode and I was excited to see where it went for the first few weeks, especially with the promise of cute girls on the horizon. The girls have been underwhelming, though (mainly by virtue of their having nothing to do in the story) and what actually is going on in the story, I find incredibly dull. Rimuru is just such a booooring protagonist, and his very existence tends to sap the tension out of scenes since you know he's ridiculously OP and will probably just absorb whatever bad thing shows up next like he's absorbed every other bad thing up to that point. 俺TUEEEEEE isn’t even necessarily something I hate, and it can be made to work, but Rimuru isn’t cool enough of a guy or really interesting in any way that I can self-insert and live vicariously through his TUEEEEE-ness. Just give me more Shion, she is the best purple oni secretary. ★☆☆☆☆

16 Hashiritsuzukete Yokattatte: I guess I should put this down since it's technically a show I finished from this season. It's kinda boring and lame, do not recommend. The girl with the glasses never even puts them on, she just wears them on top of her head like a doofus the whole time. Might have been able to deliver some feels if it was in a longer format, but just falls flat due to the <60 minute total runtime. ☆☆☆☆☆

[victorineb]

Fic Recs Mega Post

More fic recs for you fabulous fannibals, this time round there’s rare pairs a-plenty, actual devil Will Graham, and a fabulous Pacific Rim crossover AU

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Volume 1 by @fragile-teacup (fragile-teacup (Mrs_Gene_Hunt)): So what are the chances that Will and Hannibal emerge from the Atlantic with all their issues resolved, finally a stable unit, murder husbands for life? Pretty much none, right? Certainly, in this beautifully-written post-TWotL fic, there is still a massive amount of that typical Hannigram miscommunication, obfuscation and downright stubbornness that keeps our boys from their happy ending. None of which is made better by Hannibal keeping Will sedated while he recovers from his injuries, or by sequestering them in the house of the one person guaranteed to drive Will out of his mind with jealousy… Centred on that dinner hinted at by the post-credits scene in TWotL, this winds the tension between Will and Hannibal (and Bedelia) to a fever pitch, in an absolute riot of bitchiness, resentment and pining. And then busts everything wide open when Will just can’t keep his emotions under wraps any longer…

Tomorrow, More Sun by @shiphitsthefan: Beardogs (Nigel/Lee) is a new pairing for me but it took precisely five paragraphs of this fantastic fic to make me fall in love. For those who aren’t aware, Lee is the Hugh from the infamous “I like bears” gif, and more specifically is an adorable ball of sass and joy who loves wine and is suffering from terminal cancer (but don’t worry, this is very much not an angsty story). Anyway, our tale begins when Lee is suffering from the worst post-chemo effects of his life and, desperate for relief, begs his dealer – a certain formerly very bad man from Bucharest – to drive out in the snow and provide him with a hit. Now, I mentioned the part where Lee likes bears, right? And there’s no-one more bearlike than Nigel – even “New Nigel,” who’s had to reform his ways (a little) as a result of the bullet in his brain landing him in a wheelchair – and Lee is, unsurprisingly, infatuated. There follows a charming and romantic tale of getting high, telling wicked jokes, and maybe, just maybe, falling in love (but definitely getting the best shag of either man’s life).

To Fuel Your Radiance by @fancybedelia (GoldenUsagi): Mischa Lecter should have died. Should have… and did, except that her brother made a deal with the devil. Hannibal’s soul in exchange for Mischa’s life. Some forty years later, the devil pays Hannibal a visit (disguised as a rather handsome, blue-eyed man named Will) in order to see what he’s done with his life. And, as is the Hannigram way, a mutual interest quickly turns to something much more twisted and obsessive. The brilliant thing about this AU is that, despite being a devilishly sexy (literally), self-assured, phenomenally powerful version of himself, Will is still Will. He’s not some malevolent, flamboyant devourer of souls, he’s still conflicted and weighed down by the nature of what he is. Which leaves Hannibal to take up the role of tempter (yes, even to the Devil himself), drawing Will into killing with him (which, admittedly, takes much less effort with this version!) and falling helplessly in love with the beast that emerges.

Ugly by @slashyrogue (nightliferogue): We as a fandom should be immensely grateful to count slashy as one of our number. She turns out a frankly staggering number of AUs and rare pair fics (in addition to her wonderful Hannigram works) and they are all, without exception, imaginative and beautifully written. Recently she’s been writing a lot of Basic Chickens and this, her most recent (at the time of writing) might be the best yet. When Elias finds a strange, black egg in amongst the chickens, his superstitious brothers order him to smash it, fearing it contains a demon. Elias (of course, this is Elias) refuses, and tends to the egg until it hatches, revealing a small, black, winged monster, which Elias decides to keep,  christening it “Ugly.” Which is all well and good until it turns out that Ugly also sometimes takes the form of a man (quickly renamed Adam) whose determined seduction of Elias has worrying, potentially dangerous side-effects. This is Basic Chickens with a brilliant supernatural twist and the story is sexy, sweet, constantly surprising and very, very much worth your time.

Stricken by @crossroadscastiel (peacefrog): So say, instead of landing on the rocks at the bottom of that cliff, Will and Hannibal instead land in a completely different universe, one where everything seems to be the same, except that they’re not dead from their horrifying injuries. Seems like a win, right? Oh, except there’s the little issue of Hannibal suddenly producing slick and the pair of them needing to shag like bunnies every five minutes or they’ll explode. Yep, the boys are not in Baltimore anymore, they’re in an omegaverse, Hannibal’s in heat, and if they can stop knotting each other’s brains out for long enough, they’re going to need to have a serious talk about feelings. Wanna bet how well that turns out? This is such a fun exploration of the omegaverse concept, with our intrepid murder husbands utterly baffled by what’s happening to them and how they can deal with it. It’s also sexy and sweet as hell – if you’re not into a/b/o, give this a shot, I’d be surprised if it doesn’t change your mind.

Ananta by @unicornmagic (canis_m): A what-if fic, with the what-if in question being ‘how might things have gone, had Hannibal not rubber-stamped Will back into the field but instead recommended he receive further treatment. Oh, and asked him on a date while he’s at it.’ Well, in this ‘verse, it means Will stays away from murder scenes while Hannibal takes his place, that Will starts therapy with a certain blonde ice-queen, and Will has to navigate the beginnings of a relationship with Hannibal while contemplating when he should reveal that he’s asexual. This is a beautifully-paced, patiently crafted exploration of the complex relationship between these two characters and the ways in which they fit together with each other unlike with anyone else. Will’s asexuality is written with grace and sensitivity, as the writer explores the other, less obvious intimacies that he and Hannibal share. If you need something lovely in your life, read this.

The Best of All Possible Worlds by @desperatelyseekingcannibals (TigerPrawn): Mortimer (from Hysteria) is one of my favourite Hugh roles, so I’m always delighted when the adorable, slightly bumbly doctor turns up in a fic. And this one is so much fun, pairing Mortimer with Galen from Rogue One (via some timey-wimey shenanigans that land Galen back in ye olde England) and developing a very sweet romance between the two, even as they try to figure out how to get Galen home. These are two of the most decent characters in the madancy back catalogue and they work really wonderfully together, Mortimer’s eager earnestness nicely grounded by Galen’s steadiness. Plus I was very pleasantly surprised by how much chemistry the characters have together – not to put to fine a point on it, but they’re wicked hot XD. The rare pairs phenomenon is truly the gift that keeps on giving and this is one of my favourite ships to come out of it, please do hop on board and prepare to be totally charmed.

A Way to Live by @sugarmaus (Sugarmouse): Hannibal Lecter is in the market for a new slave. He goes through them quickly, always on the lookout for some elusive something that even Hannibal doesn’t seem able to define. When he spots Will Graham in the dealer’s catalogue, he thinks there’s a chance he may have found it, and when he sees the man in the flesh he is almost certain of it. But Hannibal soon learns an important lesson: Never Underestimate Will Graham. And so begins a complex, high-stakes game of shifting identities and hidden desires between master and slave, with Hannibal’s rigid control slipping further and further as he loses himself to his fascination with getting inside Will’s mind. Essentially an AU in which Hannibal can buy and dispose of murder interns instead of influencing them via therapy this is a sharp and intense character study of our darling cannibal. Hannibal’s ennui and loneliness are front and centre here as he both strives to gain control over Will and hopes that he will not be able to. It’s fascinating, compelling, intelligent stuff, with more than a few surprises up its sleeves.

Fais Do-Do by @moku-youbi: Will is on the run. He has lost control and shot a man, and now he’s tasted blood for the first time and Jack Crawford is on his tail. Which is how he winds up staying at The Little Bear Inn, owned by Mischa Lecter and currently being run by her brother while she is unwell. Of course, this is an establishment run by the Lecters, so nothing is quite as it seems and it may not turn out to be the safe haven Will is looking for. Even if Hannibal is unexpectedly easy to talk to (and not too hard on the eyes, either). Then again, Will’s got some secrets of his own, and we all know what happens to people who underestimate Will Graham… This is a really fun trip through some classic horror tropes, stylishly fusing a Hitchcockian vibe with supernatural elements as Will’s paranoia grows in the face of the Lecters’ strange behaviour and the threat of Jack hunting him down. It’s atmospheric, sexy, and thrilling – old-fashioned horror at its very best.

An American Empath in London by @legohanniballecter (MaddyHughes): In this (very slight) Sherlock crossover AU, Jack loans out Will to Scotland Yard in order to aid them in investigating a series of horrific murders involving Tory politicians (seeing as their normal consulting detective recently jumped off a roof…). Except here, Will hasn’t met Hannibal Lecter, not until he sits next to him on the plane to London, that is, though it doesn’t take long for the pair to become intimately acquainted. Yeah, ain’t no slow burn around here, and Will finds himself in a strange city, attempting to deal with a case that frustrates him, a police force that doesn’t understand him, and an intense, overwhelming attraction to a man he barely knows. Not to mention that Hannibal’s up to his usual tricks: murder, manipulation, and winding Will Graham up to see how he goes. Two years in the making, this densely-plotted, highly intelligent case fic also features some seriously intense Hannigram, with its trademark mix of sexual tension, blood and mind games turned up to the nth degree. I highly recommend giving it a shot – once I started, I found it nigh-on impossible to put down!

And Do Abominable Things With Grace by @thedancingwalrus-blog (The_Dancing_Walrus): I love and adore Pacific Rim, let’s get that out of the way. That said, it’s not exactly the subtlest movie ever made and I always kind of wished they’d done more to explore the concept of drifting. Well, wish granted and with Hannigram into the bargain in this fascinating crossover AU. Set sometime in s2, after Will’s mistrial but before his release, things diverge sharply from canon when Beverly and the FBI arrest Hannibal for his crimes. And then leave canon in the fucking dust when the first Kaiju arrives and Will and Hannibal are kidnapped by the government to be used as guinea pigs in the development of drift technology. Of course, it turns out that fusing the consciousnesses of two people like Will and Hannibal – who are pretty much inextricably bonded from their first glance anyway – has some interesting, and not altogether pleasant, side-effects. This is a genuinely stunning piece of work, playing with POVs and levels of consciousness to portray the invasive intimacy of being forcibly mind-melded with another person and written with a lyrical, experimental style that is both effective and highly memorable. It also has one of the most interesting, insightful depictions of the relationship between Hannibal and Will I’ve had the fortune to read – by turns sad, hopeful and endearing, and never less than utterly beautiful.

Caging the Beast by Vulcanmi: How many have us have begged pleaded wondered how things might have gone if Will had called off his Mizumono dinner plans with Jack and Hannibal? In this AU the stupid idiot our intrepid empath does just that, and, having realised that he doesn’t want to live in a world where Hannibal is behind bars, sets about constructing one in which he can tame the beast and put it in a cage of his own. His decision sets everybody on an unfamiliar path but while some things change (no Florentine jaunt for Bedelia this time), others just can’t be avoided (Mason still needs to be someone’s bacon, and Will and Hannibal still dance around each other like a pair of nervous teenagers). Or put off forever, as Will’s growing awareness of the nature of his feelings for Hannibal shows. Many Mizumono fix-its focus on the murder fam running off together and trying to avoid capture. This takes the opposite approach, keeping everybody in Baltimore with the inherent dangers and tensions that involves, extending the game between Will, Hannibal and Jack, even as the former two inch their way towards true Murder Husband status. It’s a fascinating reframing of canon, retaining many elements from s3 but with Will and Hannibal acting as a team and a family. I lost count of the number of times I sighed “If only…” while I was reading this – if you still dream of what could have been that rainy night in Baltimore, this is definitely the fic for you.

Yet Another Hannigram S1 AU (series) by @coloredink: Fans of intense, complex, drawn-out conversations between Will and Hannibal (which is… all of us, right?) will be in heaven with this two-part series set sometime post-Tobias Budge in s1. Both instalments see the boys thrust into close living quarters and exploring the powerful but confusing nature of their relationship. In and built a little house that we could live in, Will takes Hannibal up on the offer of using his vacation house for a week, on one condition: Hannibal comes with him. There follow seven days in which two solitary men begin to realise they might not want to be solitary anymore, and tentatively negotiate how that might work. By contrast, there’s nothing tentative in follow-up a tower to broadcast all our dreams, in which Will and Hannibal have to pretend to live together as a couple in order to draw out a serial killer. The pretence soon gives way to something else, but when you’re the Chesapeake Ripper, deciding you want a boyfriend comes with extra complications… This series is a beautiful riff on some favourite tropes, the second instalment in particular playing on the “fake date” with brilliant results. It also lets us see a charmingly domestic version of Hannigram, investing time and care in building up the relationship without sacrificing the dark and twisted aspects of their story. And really, does it get any better than domestic fluff with a bit of murder on the side? Nah, didn’t think so…

As ever, if there are bad links, or I’ve misattributed anything, let me know and I’ll fix it lickety-split. Happy reading, lovely fannibals!

[hotfitnesstopics]

When it came to starting a wedding diet, I procastinated. Hard. In fact, a month before the big day I went on a work trip to Morocco and Paris where I ate all of the bread, butter, and chocolate my appetite desired (as one does). Which is all part of the how I found myself muffin-topping over the sides of my strapless Reem Acra gown (pictured, top left) at my last fitting, just two weeks before I was supposed to walk down the aisle. I'll admit, I was bloated at the time from my period, so when it ended a few days before my wedding, my body tightened. But, I was also up a few pounds. Instead of accepting it, I took about four private workout sessions per week with celebrity trainer David Kirsch. The pro is responsible for sculpting the bodies of celebrities (like Jennifer Lopez and Heidi Klum) and has a wealth of fitness and health knowledge (to recap, he's written five books, has his own line of shakes and supplements, and owns a top-notch NYC gym). He put me on a routine that was a mix of cardio, strength training, HIIT, and TRX. Every time we met up, the moves and sequences were different, which kept my body guessing and metabolism revved. But anyone who has successfully lost weight knows diet is more than half of the battle. And pre-getting "Kirsched," I had been working out almost every day anyways. So I do credit his eating plan for partly pushing those five extra pounds off of my body. Related: 25+ Planning, Style, and Life Wedding Tips From a Newlywed Editor Here, I am going to share exactly what I ate - and most importantly, did not eat! - to shed the lbs, so my dress fit perfectly (top right). Note, the dress was not taken in or out between the two images, but my body actually transformed in two weeks! "In my experience working with a bride-to-be, the last couple of weeks leading up to the wedding is uber stressful," Kirsch told me. "As you can attest to personally (Lauren), slight tweaking of your diet will go a long way to keeping you optimally energized, fueled, and looking your very best on the big day!" Image Source: POPSUGAR Photography / Lauren Levinson Let's start with the hard part, things to avoid according to Kirsch: Say goodbye to pizza, because you will not be eating processed carbs (bread, pasta, crackers, etc.) or dairy. "I have found that dairy can cause bloating, and who wants to be bloated on their day?" Kirsch said. And no whole grains or potatoes either. I have personally eliminated both gluten and dairy for weeks and added them back to reveal that I am not intolerant to either. I can have a slice of pizza and feel like a peach, but kicking them out of my diet definitely made my belly flatter. After three days of no carbs, I was craving them! So I texted Kirsch asking if I could have a sweet potato. He told me to crunch on celery instead. It took willpower to follow his advice, but it was worth it. I surely enjoyed sliding into my bathing suit when I arrived at my tropical honeymoon a few days after my wedding. You'll also need to revamp your drinking game. That means, no alcohol (NONE!). While this meant sitting through events, family dinners, and bar nights totally sober, I enjoyed the mental clarity and increased energy in the mornings. "Save the glass of champagne for after you walk down the aisle!" he said. And yes, I got to enjoy a few flutes of well-earned bubbly at my affair . . . and a margarita! Related: How to Customize and Glamorize Your Wedding Look From Head to Toe I also had to limit the amount of coffee I drank. Kirsch recommends having one espresso in the morning. While I stuck to brewed coffee beans, I drank it black. I didn't even add almond milk, and I swear it makes a difference in better digestion. Kirsch believes that "too much coffee can lead to belly bloat!" Think about it, coffee dehydrates you, so you retain water to hold on to it. Instead, switch over to green tea, which has both caffeine and antioxidants. Every morning, I also had one of his A.M. Detox Drinks (it's yummy and fantastic for your skin!). You can see it in the mason jar above. Finally, the hardest (for me, since I have a sweet tooth): no sugar. Even dark chocolate. OK, I may have had a handful of dark chocolate-covered almonds one rough night, but for the most part (like 95 percent) I kissed my beloved cookies, ice cream, and cupcakes goodbye. In fact, my husband hid the chocolate on a very high shelf so I could not reach or find it in our apartment. Do what you need to do to survive, brides! Image Source: POPSUGAR Photography / Lauren Levinson Now onto what you can eat. Disclaimer, this was not Kirsch's exact plan but one loosely based off his advice and what I know works best for my body. For breakfast I stuck to two options. The first, two eggs and sauteed spinach, all cooked in EVOO. Earlier in my wedding prep, I enjoyed that dish with a side of avocado, but the last two weeks I cut it based on Kirsch's recommendation to limit my fat intake (even healthy ones!). Otherwise, I had an antioxidant-rich bowl of unsweetened coconut yogurt with a handful of raw almonds, chia seeds, flax seeds, cacao nibs, and blueberries. While Kirsch recommended no fruit (remember, no sugar!), I know blueberries are good for eliminating belly fat and making skin glow, so I had some anyways. If you're going to have sugar, eat it in the morning so you can burn it off throughout the day. When it came to snacks, I sipped on dark green pressed juice (the kind without fruit) and crunchy veggies (Kirsch likes celery, red peppers, and jicama sticks). I also ate GoMacro bars, which were referred to me by another trainer I'd been working out with, Steve Pasterino. I bent the rules a little since these are made with brown rice syrup, but it ensured that I had an option when I was on-the-go. Dinner and lunch were pretty similar. I'd either have what I dubbed a "Sad Salad" of spinach, crunchy water veggies (cucumber and snow peas), and lean protein (homemade chicken or salmon with no sauces) - all drizzled with EVOO and a lemon squeeze. Snooze. Otherwise, I would cook veggies (such as steamed green beans or asparagus) and have it with the aforementioned lean meat or fish. Sometimes, I would even have the eggs (see: breakfast!) for dinner, which I found very easy to digest. Occasionally, I'd enjoy a green smoothie (kale, spinach, blueberries, almond milk) with pea protein powder. Image Source: Bruce Plotkin Photography And for our grand finale, what to eat during your actual wedding weekend: By then being a bride had taken over my identity (it happens to the best and most chill of us ladies in white). So I brought my own food to the weekend destination, including unsweetened coconut yogurt, hard-boiled eggs, green juice, nuts, seeds, bars, etc. I made sure my hotel room had a fridge to store it in. "The day before is a day that you want to make sure to put the finishing touches," said Kirsch. "You have planned hard, sweated hard, and stayed away from the obvious no-nos. What else can you do? I suggest a relaxing massage, sauna, and steam. Eating foods like asparagus and celery will help keep you full and debloat you." So I couldn't resist a taste of homemade pasta during our rehearsal dinner at a delicious Italian restaurant, but by 7 a.m. the next day, I was back on it. "The day of, I would have a couple of eggs in the morning and oatmeal as you will need the energy and fuel for the rest of the day," Kirsch recommended. "A protein shake for lunch and water for the rest of the day. Save the drinking and eating for after the ceremony, or better yet, for the honeymoon!" Here's what I consumed for breakfast on my wedding day: I had the antioxidant yogurt and seed bowl as well as black coffee; for lunch I ate a simple salad with grilled chicken provided by my venue; and for snack, I went with a GoMacro bar. After the ceremony, my husband and I sat in a separate room and ate every single appetizer (including pork buns, pulled BBQ chicken, mini grilled cheese sandwiches, and more!) and drank champagne. Diet. Over. As the evening went on, I enjoyed the goat cheese salad (CHEESE!), the short rib and sweet potato entree, wedding cake, homemade cookies, and apple cider donuts. There was pizza at our afterparty. I ate that, too. Was dieting fun? No. Was it satisfying? Absolutely not. Was it worth it? Hell yes! For two weeks, you can do this! And you likely will lose inches, but you have to stick to it almost perfectly. We all have our handful of dark chocolate almonds here and there, but make sure you get right back on track. The best part in addition to your tight bod? You can pig out on your honeymoon! (On mine, I sure did my job consuming all of the noodles and dumplings Southeast Asia had to offer . . . and that is another story. Next up: How to get back your hot wedding bod of yesteryear.) Workout sessions for the author were provided by David Kirsch for the purpose of writing this story. from POPSUGAR Fitness https://ift.tt/2qP6hA9 via IFTTT

http://www.fitnessclub.cf/2018/06/exactly-what-to-eat-2-weeks-before-your_9.html

[samanthasroberts]

ReflexLOLogy: Inside the Groan-Inducing World of Pun Competitions

From the moment he spoke, I knew I was screwed. On the surface, the guy wasn’t particularly fearsome—pudgy, late thirties, polo shirt, plaid shorts, baseball cap, dad sneakers—but he looked completely at ease. One hand in his pocket, the other holding the microphone loosely, like a torch singer doing crowd work. And when he finally began talking, it was with an assurance that belied the fact that he was basically spewing nonsense.

“I hate all people named John,” he said with surprising bravado. “Yeah, that’s right, that was a John diss!” The crowd roared. John-diss. Jaundice. A glorious, groan-inducing precision strike of a pun.

Welp, I thought. It was fun while it lasted.

If you’re an NBA rookie, you really don’t want to go up against LeBron James. Anyone’s trivia night would be ruined by seeing Ken Jennings on another team. And if you find yourself at the world’s biggest pun competition, the last person you want to face is four-time defending champion Ben Ziek. Yet that’s exactly where I was, on an outdoor stage in downtown Austin, Texas, committing unspeakable atrocities upon the English language in front of a few hundred onlookers who were spending their sunny May Saturday reveling in the carnage.

The rules of the 39th annual O. Henry Pun-Off World Championship’s “Punslingers” competition are simple: Two people take turns punning on a theme in head-to-head rounds. Failure to make a pun in the five seconds allowed gets you eliminated; make a nonpun or reuse a word three times and you’ve reached the banishing point. Round by round and pair by pair, a field of 32 dwindles until the last of the halved-nots finally gets to claim the mantle of best punster in the world and what most people would agree are some pretty dubious bragging rights. It’s exactly like a rap battle, if 8 Mile had been about software engineers and podcasters and improv nerds vying for supremacy. (Also just like 8 Mile: My first-round opponent had frozen when his turn came to pun on waterborne vehicles. Seriously, yacht a word came out. Canoe believe it?)

Eventually, there we stood, two among the final eight: me, a first-timer, squaring off against the Floyd Mayweather of the pun world. Actually, only one of us was standing; I found myself doing the world’s slowest two-step just to keep my legs from trembling. I’d been a little jittery in my first couple of rounds, sure, but those were standard-issue butterflies, perched on a layer of misguided confidence. This was the anxiety of the sacrificial lamb. I was punning above my weight, and I knew it. Once the judges announced that we’d be punning on diseases—hence Ziek’s joke about star-crossed livers—we began.

“Mumps the word!” I said, hoping that my voice wasn’t shaking.

Ziek immediately fired back: “That was a measle-y pun.” Not only was he confident, with a malleable voice that was equal parts game show host and morning-radio DJ, but his jokes were seemingly fully formed. Worse, he was nimble enough to turn your own pun against you.

“Well, I had a croup-on for it,” I responded. Whoa. Where’d that come from?

He switched gears. “I have a Buddha at home, and sometimes”—making a rubbing motion with his hand—“I like to rubella.”

I was barely paying attention. Diseases, diseases—oh! I pointed at people in different parts of the audience. “If you’ve got a yam, and you’ve got a potato, whose tuber’s closest?”

“There was a guy out here earlier painted light red,” Ziek said. “Did you see the pink guy?”

“I didn’t,” I responded. “Cold you see him?”

Again and again we pun-upped each other, a philharmonic of harmful phonics. From AIDS to Zika we ranged, covering SARS, migraines, Ebola, chicken pox, ague, shingles, fasciitis, streptococcus, West Nile, coronavirus, poison oak, avian flu, gangrene, syphilis, and herpes. Almost five minutes later, we’d gone through 32 puns between the two of us, and I was running dry. As far as my brain was concerned, there wasn’t a medical textbook in existence that contained something we hadn’t used. Ziek, though, had a seemingly endless stockpile and tossed off a quick alopecia pun; I could have bald right then and there. The judge counted down, and I slunk offstage to watch the rest of the competition—which Ziek won, for the fifth time. Knowing I’d lost to the best cushioned the blow, but some mild semantic depression still lingered: Instead of slinging my way to a David-like upset, I was the one who had to go lieth down.

Author Peter Rubin doing the punning man.Ryan Young

When I was growing up, my father’s favorite (printable) joke was “Where do cantaloupes go in the summertime? Johnny Cougar’s Melon Camp.” This is proof that—well, it’s proof that I grew up in Indiana. But it’s also proof that I was raised to speak two languages, both of them English. See, there’s the actual words-working-together-and-making-sense part, and then there’s the fun part. The pliant, recombinant part. The part that lets you harness linguistic irregularities, judo-style, to make words into other words. It’s not conscious, exactly; it just feels at some level like someone made a puzzle and didn’t bother to tell me, so my brain wants to figure out what else those sounds can do.

A lifetime of listening to hip hop has reinforced that phonetic impulse. Polysyllabic rhymes aren’t strictly puns, but they’re made of the same marrow; when Chance the Rapper rhymes “link in my bio” with “Cinco de Mayo” in the song “Mixtape,” I get an actual endorphin hit. Besides, rap is full of puns already: instant-gratification ones—like Lil Wayne saying “Yes I am Weezy, but I ain’t asthmatic” or MF Doom saying “Got more soul than a sock with a hole”—as well as ones that reveal themselves more slowly. Kanye West might be more famous for his production than his lyricism, but he endeared himself to me forever on the song “Dark Fantasy” by spitting the best Family Matters pun of all time: “Too many Urkels on your team, that’s why your wins low.”

I was punning above my weight, and I knew it.

Whether this is nature or nurture, though, the end result is the same: I’m playing with language all the time, and Kanye and I aren’t the only ones. “I can’t listen passively to someone speaking without the possibility of puns echoing around in my head,” says Gary Hallock, who has been producing and hosting the O. Henry Pun-Off for 26 years. He’s seen the annual event grow from an Austin oddity to a national event and watched dad jokes, of which puns are the most obvious example, take hold in the millennial consciousness; a dad-joke-devoted Reddit board boasts more than 250,000 members. “I’ve often compared punsters to linguistic terrorists,” Hallock says. “We’re literally stalking conversations, looking for the weak place to plant our bomb.”

And we’ve been doing it for a long, long time—verbal puns date back to at least 1635 BC, when a Babylonian clay tablet included a pun on the word for “wheat”—and the world has been conflicted about them for nearly as long. (Linguists can’t even agree whether the word pun derives from French, Old English, Icelandic, or Welsh, though there’s no point heading down that scenic root.) On one hand, puns are the stuff of terrible children’s joke books. Oliver Wendell Holmes likened punsters to “wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.” On the other, God, how can you not feel a little thrill when you make a good one or a begrudging joy when you hear a better one?

Humor theorists generally agree that comedy hinges on incongruity: when a sentence or situation subverts expectations or when multiple interpretations are suggested by the same stimulus. (Also, yes, humor theorists are a thing.) That stimulus can be visual (looking at you, eggplant emoji!) or auditory (what up, tuba fart!); most commonly, though, it’s linguistic. Language is slippery by nature, and of the many kinds of wordplay—hyperbole, metaphor, spoonerisms, even letter-level foolery like anagrams—nothing takes advantage of incongruity quite like puns, of which there are four specific varieties. In order of increasing complexity, you’ve got homonyms, identical words that sound alike (“Led Zeppelin’s guitarist was interrogated last week, but detectives weren’t able to turn the Page”); homophones, which are spelled differently but sound the same (“I hate raisins! Apologies if you’re not into curranty vents.”); homographs, which sound different but look the same (“If you’re asking me to believe that a Loire cabernet is that different from a Napa cabernet, then the terroirists have won.”); and paronyms, which are just kinda similar-sounding (“I have a ton of work to do, but I ate so much cucumber chutney that I have raita’s block”). When we hear a pun, the words we hear aren’t the words we think we hear, and the burden’s on us to crack the code.

Granted, there are people out there who hate puns, and maybe rightly so. But for many of us, that decryption process is a reward unto itself. “Humor happens when something important is being violated,” cognitive scientist Justine Kao says. “Social norms, expectations. So for people who are sensitive to the rules that language follows, puns are more entertaining.” In other words, if you work with words on a daily basis—writing, editing, translating—you’re simply primed to appreciate them more. Behind every great headline, any editor will tell you, is a great pun. (I have a colleague at WIRED who once looked at a page about chef’s knives and gave it the headline “JULIENNE MORE”; people lost their goddamn minds.)

Still, even among the nerdiest of word herders, there are some rules. Two years ago, Kao and two colleagues at Stanford and UC San Diego decided to prove empirically that incongruity was the root of humor. They tested people’s reactions to hundreds of sentences that varied from one another in minute ways. Some used homophones; some didn’t. Some added detail supporting the nonpun interpretation of the sentence; some stripped detail away. They were able to demonstrate that ambiguity of meaning is necessary for a pun to be perceived—but it’s only half of the equation. (And literally, there’s an equation.) After all, “I went to the bank” is ambiguous, but it’s not a pun. The true determining factor of a pun’s funniness is what the team calls distinctiveness.

Take the sentence “The chef brought his girlfriend flours on Valentine’s Day.” It’s a homophone, so it’s not the most complex pun. But if you turn the chef into a pastry chef, that added vocation property makes the pun more distinctive. “When you’re able to identify keywords from different topics,” Kao says, “it clues you in on the intentionality of it—you’re forcing together two things that don’t often co-occur.”

Of course, “The pastry chef brought his girlfriend flours on Valentine’s Day” still isn’t funny. It’s the kind of pun a bot would make, and maybe has made in the decades since programmers created the first pun generator. There’s no storytelling to it, no drama. A good pun isn’t just an artless slab of sound-alikeness: It’s a joke that happens to hinge on wordplay. A truly formidable punner knows that and frames a sentence to make the pun the punch line. The longer you delay the ambiguity, the more tension you introduce—and the more cathartic the resolution. A pun should be an exclamation point, not a semicolon.

But was I a truly formidable punner? I’d thought so—hell, my lifelong dream is seeing Flavor Flav and Ellen Burstyn cohosting a talk show, just so it can be called Burstyn With Flavor—but after Austin, I had my doubts. I’d cracked under pressure once; until I tried again, I’d never know fissure. As it turned out, a second chance was around the corner.

The Bay Area Pun-Off, a monthly philharmonic of harmful phonics.Ryan Young

Compact and jovial, Jonah Spear is a dead ringer for Saturday Night Live’s Taran Killam—or at least for Taran Killam in high school: Spear recently shaved off a grizzled-prospector beard and looks about half of his 34 years. He’s also a professional play facilitator and counselor at an adult summer camp (no to phones and drinking, yes to sing-alongs and bonfires). That loosey-goosey vibe has carried into the Bay Area Pun-Off, a monthly event Spear began hosting in January that’s just one of a handful of competitive punning events popping up across the country.

If the O. Henry Pun-Off is the Newport Folk Festival, then its Bay Area cousin—like Punderdome 3000 in Brooklyn, Pundamonium in Seattle, or the Great Durham Pun Championship in, well, Durham—is Coachella. The audience is younger, and the raucous atmosphere is fueled as much by beer as by unabashed pun love. It started in the living room of a communal house in Oakland in January 2016 but quickly outgrew its confines; in June the organizers even staged a New York City satellite event.

But on this Saturday night, a week after O. Henry, it’s a high-ceilinged performance space in San Francisco’s Mission District where I’m looking for redemption. The pool of contestants at the Bay Area Pun-Off is small by O. Henry standards, and we commence with an all-hands marathon on tree puns designed to winnow the field of 12 down to eight. “I’m just hoping to win the poplar vote,” one woman says. “Sounds like birch of contract to me,” says someone else. A lanky British guy whom I’ll call Chet rambles through a shaggy-dog story involving a French woman and three Jamaican guys to get to a tortured “le mon t’ree” punch line. The crowd eats it up.

“Keep the applause going. It takes balsa get up here and do this.”

When you’re waiting for 11 other people to pun, you’ve got plenty of time to think of your next one, so I try to Ziek out a good-sized reserve of puns—and when it’s my turn, I make sure that my puns build on the joke that came before me. “Keep the applause going,” I say after someone boughs out. “It takes balsa get up here and do this.” After someone delivers a good line, I admit that “I ended up being pretty frond of it.” They’re not distinctive, but at this stage they don’t need to be, as long as they’re ambiguous. Things go oak-ay, and I’m on to the next round. (What, yew don’t believe me? Olive got is my word.)

After I indulge in a muggleful of Harry Potter puns, I find myself in the semifinals against a Quora engineer named Asa. Spear scribbles the mystery topic on a small chalkboard hidden from sight, then turns it around. It says … diseases. The same category that knocked me out in Austin? The category I dwelled on for the entire flight home, thinking of all the one-liners that had eluded me?

This time, there’s no running dry. Not only do I remember all the puns I used against Ben Ziek, but I remember all the puns he made against me. So when Asa says, “I’m really taking my mumps,” I shoot back with “That’s kinda measly, if you ask me.” I reprise puns I’d made in Austin (“Did you see that Italian opera singer run through the door? In flew Enzo!”); I use puns that I’d thought of since (“My mom makes the best onion dip. It’s HIV little concoction you’d love”). Asa fights gamely, but I have immunerable disease puns at my fingertips, and it’s not much longer before the round is over.

And then, again, there are two: me and Chet. The difference now is I’m locked in: no nerves, no self-consciousness, just getting out of my brain’s way and letting the connections happen. When Spear announces the theme—living world leaders—I don’t even start trying to stockpile puns. I just wait, and they come.

Chet opens the round: “Ohhhh, BAMA. I don’t know anything about world leaders!”

This time, just hearing him mention Obama conjures up a mental image of Justin Trudeau. Before the laughter even dies down, I nod my head encouragingly: “True, tho—that was a decent pun!”

It’s Austin all over again, just in reverse: Now I’m the quick one and Chet’s the one who has to scramble. He fumbles through a long story about rock climbing that leads to a pun about his cam-bell. (And before you ask: Chances are he wasn’t actually talking about Kim Campbell, who was prime minister of Canada for all of six months in 1993, but in the heat of the moment no one realized he’d just screwed up David Cameron’s name.)

My turn? No problem. Just keep flipping it back to him. “Another patented long-ass Chet story,” I say. “I am Bushed.”

“Well,” Chet says, then pauses. “He thinks he can just … Blair shit out.”

It’s his one solid blow. I talk about the “bonky moon” that’s shining outside that night. I confide in the audience about my own alopecia problem, and how I needed to buy a Merkel. And each time, the audience is right there with me. They don’t necessarily know what’s coming, but they’re loving it. Chet’s used three US presidents and two prime ministers; meanwhile, I’ve been from South Korea to Germany, by way of Canada.

Even better, I’ve got another continent in my pocket. “Have you guys been to Chet’s farm?” I ask the audience. “He has this group of cows that won’t stop talking.” I wait a beat. “They are seriously moo-gabby.”

What happens next is a blur, to be perfectly honest. I can’t even tell you what comes out of Chet’s mouth next, but it’s either nothing or it’s the name of someone dead—and either way, the Bay Area Pun-Off is over.

I might not have been able to vanquish Ben Ziek; this may be my only taste of victory in the world of competitive paronomasiacs; hell, I may never know the secret to the perfect pun. But as long as I’ve got the words to try, one thing’s for sure: I’ll use vaguely different words to approximate those words, thereby creating incongruity and thus humor.

Or maybe I’ll just plead raita’s block.

Phrase the Roof!

Author Peter Rubin set up a Slack channel here at Wired to crowdsource the punny headlines for the opening illustration to this story. He compiled more than 150 of them. Here are the ones we couldnt fit.

1. PRESENTS OF MIND

2. SHEER PUNDEMONIUM

3. VIRULENT HOMOPHONIA

4. OFF-SYLLABLE USE

5. PUNBELIEVABLE

6. HEADLINE BLING

7. LIVE A CRITIC, DIACRITIC

8. FEAST OF THE PRONUNCIATION

9. VERBAL MEDICATION

10. THE BEST OF BOTH WORDS

11. SUFFERING FROM INCONSONANT

12. DAMNED WITH FAINT PHRASE

13. THE SEVEN DEADLY SYNTAXES

14. THE NOUN JEWELS

15. PUNS THE WORD

16. CONSONANT READER

17. FARTS OF SPEECH

18. PUN-CHEWATION

19. GRAMMAR RULES

20. POISSON PEN

21. PUNS AND NEEDLES

22. DEATH AND SYNTAXES

23. THE WRITE STUFF

24. MAKING THE COPY

25. SLAIN LETTERING

26. PUN AND GAMES

27. VALLEY OF THE LOLZ

28. NOUN HEAR THIS

29. WHATEVER FLOATS YOUR QUOTE

30. PUT A VERB ON IT!

31. CRIME AND PUN-NICHE-MEANT

32. TIC TALK

33. ECCE HOMONYM

34. DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXTS ASS

35. WRITES OF MAN

36. VERB APPEAL

37. THE RHYME DIRECTIVE

38. SLOGAN’S RUN

39. REBEL WITHOUT A CLAUSE

40. BURNS OF PHRASE

41. ARTLESS QUOTATIONS

42. BON MOT MONEY, BON MOT PROBLEMS

43. JESTIN’ CASE

44. LET ‘ER QUIP

45. ADVERB REACTIONS

46. INFINITE JESTS

47. ARTS OF SPEECH

48. DIGITAL PUNDERGROUND

49. THE PUN-ISHER

50. IMPUNDING DOOM

51. BEYOND PUNDERDOME

52. BAUHAUS OF CARDS

53. TEXTUAL HARASSMENT

54. IT’S A PUNGLE OUT THERE

55. GRAND THEFT MOTTO

56. IT HAD PUNNED ONE NIGHT

57. PLEASE GRAMMAR DON’T HURT EM

58. RHETORICAL QUESTIN’

59. ACUTE PUNS? SURE

60. BAWDILY HUMORED

61. DAMNED IF YOU INNUENDO, DAMNED IF YOU INNUENDON’T

62. TROUBLE ENTENDRES

63. WITS UP, DOC

64. SELF-IMPROV MEANT

65. PUN-EYED JOKERS

66. LAUGHTERMATH

67. JAPES OF WRATH

68. MAKING HA-HAJJ

69. MUTTER, MAY I?

70. BATTLE OF HALF-WITS

71. DEMI-BRAVADO

72. MALCONTENT MARKETING

73. NON-SILENT OFFENSES

74. ORAL HIJINX

75. THE PUN-ISHER

76. NOUNS, YOUR CHANCE

77. TEXT OF KIN

78. OH, PUN AND SHUT

79. JOKE OF ALL TRADES

80. PATTER UP

81. SCHTICK IT TO EM

82. BOOS HOUNDS

83. IT’S NOT EASY BEING GROANED

84. FAR FROM THE MADDENED CROWD

85. COMPETITIVE DEBASING

86. THE PUNFORGIVEN

87. THE PUNCANNY VALLEY

88. INTENTIONAL FORTITUDE

89. CHURCH OF THE LETTER DISDAIN

90. POETRY IN MASHIN’

91. CREATIVE SENTENCING

92. DAAAMN, DACTYL!

93. NO CONTEXT

94. A TALE OF TWO SILLIES

95. THE WIZARD OF LOLZ

96. IT’S A PUNDERFUL LIFE

97. WHAT’S HA? PUNNIN’

98. THE ZING AND I

99. THE WILD PUNS

100. THE PUN ALSO RISES

101. HOW THE REST WERE PUNNED

102. RAGING SYLLABLE

103. DANGEROUS ELISIONS

104. GOODWILL PUNTING

105. FELLOWSHIP OF THE WRONG

106. INGLOURIOUS LAST WORDS

107. THE LIMITATION GAME

108. APPETITE FOR DISTRACTION

109. HOW I MEANT ANOTHER

110. LARKS AND RECREATION

111. COMEDY OF AIRERS

112. DECLARATION OF INNER PENANCE

113. BOO HA-HA

Senior editor and pun criminal Peter Rubin (@provenself) wrote about the roadblocks to VR in issue 24.04.

This article appears in the October 2016 issue.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/2017/09/12/reflexlology-inside-the-groan-inducing-world-of-pun-competitions/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2017/09/12/reflexlology-inside-the-groan-inducing-world-of-pun-competitions/

[adambstingus]

ReflexLOLogy: Inside the Groan-Inducing World of Pun Competitions

From the moment he spoke, I knew I was screwed. On the surface, the guy wasn’t particularly fearsome—pudgy, late thirties, polo shirt, plaid shorts, baseball cap, dad sneakers—but he looked completely at ease. One hand in his pocket, the other holding the microphone loosely, like a torch singer doing crowd work. And when he finally began talking, it was with an assurance that belied the fact that he was basically spewing nonsense.

“I hate all people named John,” he said with surprising bravado. “Yeah, that’s right, that was a John diss!” The crowd roared. John-diss. Jaundice. A glorious, groan-inducing precision strike of a pun.

Welp, I thought. It was fun while it lasted.

If you’re an NBA rookie, you really don’t want to go up against LeBron James. Anyone’s trivia night would be ruined by seeing Ken Jennings on another team. And if you find yourself at the world’s biggest pun competition, the last person you want to face is four-time defending champion Ben Ziek. Yet that’s exactly where I was, on an outdoor stage in downtown Austin, Texas, committing unspeakable atrocities upon the English language in front of a few hundred onlookers who were spending their sunny May Saturday reveling in the carnage.

The rules of the 39th annual O. Henry Pun-Off World Championship’s “Punslingers” competition are simple: Two people take turns punning on a theme in head-to-head rounds. Failure to make a pun in the five seconds allowed gets you eliminated; make a nonpun or reuse a word three times and you’ve reached the banishing point. Round by round and pair by pair, a field of 32 dwindles until the last of the halved-nots finally gets to claim the mantle of best punster in the world and what most people would agree are some pretty dubious bragging rights. It’s exactly like a rap battle, if 8 Mile had been about software engineers and podcasters and improv nerds vying for supremacy. (Also just like 8 Mile: My first-round opponent had frozen when his turn came to pun on waterborne vehicles. Seriously, yacht a word came out. Canoe believe it?)

Eventually, there we stood, two among the final eight: me, a first-timer, squaring off against the Floyd Mayweather of the pun world. Actually, only one of us was standing; I found myself doing the world’s slowest two-step just to keep my legs from trembling. I’d been a little jittery in my first couple of rounds, sure, but those were standard-issue butterflies, perched on a layer of misguided confidence. This was the anxiety of the sacrificial lamb. I was punning above my weight, and I knew it. Once the judges announced that we’d be punning on diseases—hence Ziek’s joke about star-crossed livers—we began.

“Mumps the word!” I said, hoping that my voice wasn’t shaking.

Ziek immediately fired back: “That was a measle-y pun.” Not only was he confident, with a malleable voice that was equal parts game show host and morning-radio DJ, but his jokes were seemingly fully formed. Worse, he was nimble enough to turn your own pun against you.

“Well, I had a croup-on for it,” I responded. Whoa. Where’d that come from?

He switched gears. “I have a Buddha at home, and sometimes”—making a rubbing motion with his hand—“I like to rubella.”

I was barely paying attention. Diseases, diseases—oh! I pointed at people in different parts of the audience. “If you’ve got a yam, and you’ve got a potato, whose tuber’s closest?”

“There was a guy out here earlier painted light red,” Ziek said. “Did you see the pink guy?”

“I didn’t,” I responded. “Cold you see him?”

Again and again we pun-upped each other, a philharmonic of harmful phonics. From AIDS to Zika we ranged, covering SARS, migraines, Ebola, chicken pox, ague, shingles, fasciitis, streptococcus, West Nile, coronavirus, poison oak, avian flu, gangrene, syphilis, and herpes. Almost five minutes later, we’d gone through 32 puns between the two of us, and I was running dry. As far as my brain was concerned, there wasn’t a medical textbook in existence that contained something we hadn’t used. Ziek, though, had a seemingly endless stockpile and tossed off a quick alopecia pun; I could have bald right then and there. The judge counted down, and I slunk offstage to watch the rest of the competition—which Ziek won, for the fifth time. Knowing I’d lost to the best cushioned the blow, but some mild semantic depression still lingered: Instead of slinging my way to a David-like upset, I was the one who had to go lieth down.

Author Peter Rubin doing the punning man.Ryan Young

When I was growing up, my father’s favorite (printable) joke was “Where do cantaloupes go in the summertime? Johnny Cougar’s Melon Camp.” This is proof that—well, it’s proof that I grew up in Indiana. But it’s also proof that I was raised to speak two languages, both of them English. See, there’s the actual words-working-together-and-making-sense part, and then there’s the fun part. The pliant, recombinant part. The part that lets you harness linguistic irregularities, judo-style, to make words into other words. It’s not conscious, exactly; it just feels at some level like someone made a puzzle and didn’t bother to tell me, so my brain wants to figure out what else those sounds can do.

A lifetime of listening to hip hop has reinforced that phonetic impulse. Polysyllabic rhymes aren’t strictly puns, but they’re made of the same marrow; when Chance the Rapper rhymes “link in my bio” with “Cinco de Mayo” in the song “Mixtape,” I get an actual endorphin hit. Besides, rap is full of puns already: instant-gratification ones—like Lil Wayne saying “Yes I am Weezy, but I ain’t asthmatic” or MF Doom saying “Got more soul than a sock with a hole”—as well as ones that reveal themselves more slowly. Kanye West might be more famous for his production than his lyricism, but he endeared himself to me forever on the song “Dark Fantasy” by spitting the best Family Matters pun of all time: “Too many Urkels on your team, that’s why your wins low.”

I was punning above my weight, and I knew it.

Whether this is nature or nurture, though, the end result is the same: I’m playing with language all the time, and Kanye and I aren’t the only ones. “I can’t listen passively to someone speaking without the possibility of puns echoing around in my head,” says Gary Hallock, who has been producing and hosting the O. Henry Pun-Off for 26 years. He’s seen the annual event grow from an Austin oddity to a national event and watched dad jokes, of which puns are the most obvious example, take hold in the millennial consciousness; a dad-joke-devoted Reddit board boasts more than 250,000 members. “I’ve often compared punsters to linguistic terrorists,” Hallock says. “We’re literally stalking conversations, looking for the weak place to plant our bomb.”

And we’ve been doing it for a long, long time—verbal puns date back to at least 1635 BC, when a Babylonian clay tablet included a pun on the word for “wheat”—and the world has been conflicted about them for nearly as long. (Linguists can’t even agree whether the word pun derives from French, Old English, Icelandic, or Welsh, though there’s no point heading down that scenic root.) On one hand, puns are the stuff of terrible children’s joke books. Oliver Wendell Holmes likened punsters to “wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.” On the other, God, how can you not feel a little thrill when you make a good one or a begrudging joy when you hear a better one?

Humor theorists generally agree that comedy hinges on incongruity: when a sentence or situation subverts expectations or when multiple interpretations are suggested by the same stimulus. (Also, yes, humor theorists are a thing.) That stimulus can be visual (looking at you, eggplant emoji!) or auditory (what up, tuba fart!); most commonly, though, it’s linguistic. Language is slippery by nature, and of the many kinds of wordplay—hyperbole, metaphor, spoonerisms, even letter-level foolery like anagrams—nothing takes advantage of incongruity quite like puns, of which there are four specific varieties. In order of increasing complexity, you’ve got homonyms, identical words that sound alike (“Led Zeppelin’s guitarist was interrogated last week, but detectives weren’t able to turn the Page”); homophones, which are spelled differently but sound the same (“I hate raisins! Apologies if you’re not into curranty vents.”); homographs, which sound different but look the same (“If you’re asking me to believe that a Loire cabernet is that different from a Napa cabernet, then the terroirists have won.”); and paronyms, which are just kinda similar-sounding (“I have a ton of work to do, but I ate so much cucumber chutney that I have raita’s block”). When we hear a pun, the words we hear aren’t the words we think we hear, and the burden’s on us to crack the code.

Granted, there are people out there who hate puns, and maybe rightly so. But for many of us, that decryption process is a reward unto itself. “Humor happens when something important is being violated,” cognitive scientist Justine Kao says. “Social norms, expectations. So for people who are sensitive to the rules that language follows, puns are more entertaining.” In other words, if you work with words on a daily basis—writing, editing, translating—you’re simply primed to appreciate them more. Behind every great headline, any editor will tell you, is a great pun. (I have a colleague at WIRED who once looked at a page about chef’s knives and gave it the headline “JULIENNE MORE”; people lost their goddamn minds.)

Still, even among the nerdiest of word herders, there are some rules. Two years ago, Kao and two colleagues at Stanford and UC San Diego decided to prove empirically that incongruity was the root of humor. They tested people’s reactions to hundreds of sentences that varied from one another in minute ways. Some used homophones; some didn’t. Some added detail supporting the nonpun interpretation of the sentence; some stripped detail away. They were able to demonstrate that ambiguity of meaning is necessary for a pun to be perceived—but it’s only half of the equation. (And literally, there’s an equation.) After all, “I went to the bank” is ambiguous, but it’s not a pun. The true determining factor of a pun’s funniness is what the team calls distinctiveness.

Take the sentence “The chef brought his girlfriend flours on Valentine’s Day.” It’s a homophone, so it’s not the most complex pun. But if you turn the chef into a pastry chef, that added vocation property makes the pun more distinctive. “When you’re able to identify keywords from different topics,” Kao says, “it clues you in on the intentionality of it—you’re forcing together two things that don’t often co-occur.”

Of course, “The pastry chef brought his girlfriend flours on Valentine’s Day” still isn’t funny. It’s the kind of pun a bot would make, and maybe has made in the decades since programmers created the first pun generator. There’s no storytelling to it, no drama. A good pun isn’t just an artless slab of sound-alikeness: It’s a joke that happens to hinge on wordplay. A truly formidable punner knows that and frames a sentence to make the pun the punch line. The longer you delay the ambiguity, the more tension you introduce—and the more cathartic the resolution. A pun should be an exclamation point, not a semicolon.

But was I a truly formidable punner? I’d thought so—hell, my lifelong dream is seeing Flavor Flav and Ellen Burstyn cohosting a talk show, just so it can be called Burstyn With Flavor—but after Austin, I had my doubts. I’d cracked under pressure once; until I tried again, I’d never know fissure. As it turned out, a second chance was around the corner.

The Bay Area Pun-Off, a monthly philharmonic of harmful phonics.Ryan Young

Compact and jovial, Jonah Spear is a dead ringer for Saturday Night Live’s Taran Killam—or at least for Taran Killam in high school: Spear recently shaved off a grizzled-prospector beard and looks about half of his 34 years. He’s also a professional play facilitator and counselor at an adult summer camp (no to phones and drinking, yes to sing-alongs and bonfires). That loosey-goosey vibe has carried into the Bay Area Pun-Off, a monthly event Spear began hosting in January that’s just one of a handful of competitive punning events popping up across the country.

If the O. Henry Pun-Off is the Newport Folk Festival, then its Bay Area cousin—like Punderdome 3000 in Brooklyn, Pundamonium in Seattle, or the Great Durham Pun Championship in, well, Durham—is Coachella. The audience is younger, and the raucous atmosphere is fueled as much by beer as by unabashed pun love. It started in the living room of a communal house in Oakland in January 2016 but quickly outgrew its confines; in June the organizers even staged a New York City satellite event.

But on this Saturday night, a week after O. Henry, it’s a high-ceilinged performance space in San Francisco’s Mission District where I’m looking for redemption. The pool of contestants at the Bay Area Pun-Off is small by O. Henry standards, and we commence with an all-hands marathon on tree puns designed to winnow the field of 12 down to eight. “I’m just hoping to win the poplar vote,” one woman says. “Sounds like birch of contract to me,” says someone else. A lanky British guy whom I’ll call Chet rambles through a shaggy-dog story involving a French woman and three Jamaican guys to get to a tortured “le mon t’ree” punch line. The crowd eats it up.

“Keep the applause going. It takes balsa get up here and do this.”

When you’re waiting for 11 other people to pun, you’ve got plenty of time to think of your next one, so I try to Ziek out a good-sized reserve of puns—and when it’s my turn, I make sure that my puns build on the joke that came before me. “Keep the applause going,” I say after someone boughs out. “It takes balsa get up here and do this.” After someone delivers a good line, I admit that “I ended up being pretty frond of it.” They’re not distinctive, but at this stage they don’t need to be, as long as they’re ambiguous. Things go oak-ay, and I’m on to the next round. (What, yew don’t believe me? Olive got is my word.)

After I indulge in a muggleful of Harry Potter puns, I find myself in the semifinals against a Quora engineer named Asa. Spear scribbles the mystery topic on a small chalkboard hidden from sight, then turns it around. It says … diseases. The same category that knocked me out in Austin? The category I dwelled on for the entire flight home, thinking of all the one-liners that had eluded me?

This time, there’s no running dry. Not only do I remember all the puns I used against Ben Ziek, but I remember all the puns he made against me. So when Asa says, “I’m really taking my mumps,” I shoot back with “That’s kinda measly, if you ask me.” I reprise puns I’d made in Austin (“Did you see that Italian opera singer run through the door? In flew Enzo!”); I use puns that I’d thought of since (“My mom makes the best onion dip. It’s HIV little concoction you’d love”). Asa fights gamely, but I have immunerable disease puns at my fingertips, and it’s not much longer before the round is over.

And then, again, there are two: me and Chet. The difference now is I’m locked in: no nerves, no self-consciousness, just getting out of my brain’s way and letting the connections happen. When Spear announces the theme—living world leaders—I don’t even start trying to stockpile puns. I just wait, and they come.

Chet opens the round: “Ohhhh, BAMA. I don’t know anything about world leaders!”

This time, just hearing him mention Obama conjures up a mental image of Justin Trudeau. Before the laughter even dies down, I nod my head encouragingly: “True, tho—that was a decent pun!”

It’s Austin all over again, just in reverse: Now I’m the quick one and Chet’s the one who has to scramble. He fumbles through a long story about rock climbing that leads to a pun about his cam-bell. (And before you ask: Chances are he wasn’t actually talking about Kim Campbell, who was prime minister of Canada for all of six months in 1993, but in the heat of the moment no one realized he’d just screwed up David Cameron’s name.)

My turn? No problem. Just keep flipping it back to him. “Another patented long-ass Chet story,” I say. “I am Bushed.”

“Well,” Chet says, then pauses. “He thinks he can just … Blair shit out.”

It’s his one solid blow. I talk about the “bonky moon” that’s shining outside that night. I confide in the audience about my own alopecia problem, and how I needed to buy a Merkel. And each time, the audience is right there with me. They don’t necessarily know what’s coming, but they’re loving it. Chet’s used three US presidents and two prime ministers; meanwhile, I’ve been from South Korea to Germany, by way of Canada.

Even better, I’ve got another continent in my pocket. “Have you guys been to Chet’s farm?” I ask the audience. “He has this group of cows that won’t stop talking.” I wait a beat. “They are seriously moo-gabby.”

What happens next is a blur, to be perfectly honest. I can’t even tell you what comes out of Chet’s mouth next, but it’s either nothing or it’s the name of someone dead—and either way, the Bay Area Pun-Off is over.

I might not have been able to vanquish Ben Ziek; this may be my only taste of victory in the world of competitive paronomasiacs; hell, I may never know the secret to the perfect pun. But as long as I’ve got the words to try, one thing’s for sure: I’ll use vaguely different words to approximate those words, thereby creating incongruity and thus humor.

Or maybe I’ll just plead raita’s block.

Phrase the Roof!

Author Peter Rubin set up a Slack channel here at Wired to crowdsource the punny headlines for the opening illustration to this story. He compiled more than 150 of them. Here are the ones we couldnt fit.

1. PRESENTS OF MIND

2. SHEER PUNDEMONIUM

3. VIRULENT HOMOPHONIA

4. OFF-SYLLABLE USE

5. PUNBELIEVABLE

6. HEADLINE BLING

7. LIVE A CRITIC, DIACRITIC

8. FEAST OF THE PRONUNCIATION

9. VERBAL MEDICATION

10. THE BEST OF BOTH WORDS

11. SUFFERING FROM INCONSONANT

12. DAMNED WITH FAINT PHRASE

13. THE SEVEN DEADLY SYNTAXES

14. THE NOUN JEWELS

15. PUNS THE WORD

16. CONSONANT READER

17. FARTS OF SPEECH

18. PUN-CHEWATION

19. GRAMMAR RULES

20. POISSON PEN

21. PUNS AND NEEDLES

22. DEATH AND SYNTAXES

23. THE WRITE STUFF

24. MAKING THE COPY

25. SLAIN LETTERING

26. PUN AND GAMES

27. VALLEY OF THE LOLZ

28. NOUN HEAR THIS

29. WHATEVER FLOATS YOUR QUOTE

30. PUT A VERB ON IT!

31. CRIME AND PUN-NICHE-MEANT

32. TIC TALK

33. ECCE HOMONYM

34. DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXTS ASS

35. WRITES OF MAN

36. VERB APPEAL

37. THE RHYME DIRECTIVE

38. SLOGAN’S RUN

39. REBEL WITHOUT A CLAUSE

40. BURNS OF PHRASE

41. ARTLESS QUOTATIONS

42. BON MOT MONEY, BON MOT PROBLEMS

43. JESTIN’ CASE

44. LET ‘ER QUIP

45. ADVERB REACTIONS

46. INFINITE JESTS

47. ARTS OF SPEECH

48. DIGITAL PUNDERGROUND

49. THE PUN-ISHER

50. IMPUNDING DOOM

51. BEYOND PUNDERDOME

52. BAUHAUS OF CARDS

53. TEXTUAL HARASSMENT

54. IT’S A PUNGLE OUT THERE

55. GRAND THEFT MOTTO

56. IT HAD PUNNED ONE NIGHT

57. PLEASE GRAMMAR DON’T HURT EM

58. RHETORICAL QUESTIN’

59. ACUTE PUNS? SURE

60. BAWDILY HUMORED

61. DAMNED IF YOU INNUENDO, DAMNED IF YOU INNUENDON’T

62. TROUBLE ENTENDRES

63. WITS UP, DOC

64. SELF-IMPROV MEANT

65. PUN-EYED JOKERS

66. LAUGHTERMATH

67. JAPES OF WRATH

68. MAKING HA-HAJJ

69. MUTTER, MAY I?

70. BATTLE OF HALF-WITS

71. DEMI-BRAVADO

72. MALCONTENT MARKETING

73. NON-SILENT OFFENSES

74. ORAL HIJINX

75. THE PUN-ISHER

76. NOUNS, YOUR CHANCE

77. TEXT OF KIN

78. OH, PUN AND SHUT

79. JOKE OF ALL TRADES

80. PATTER UP

81. SCHTICK IT TO EM

82. BOOS HOUNDS

83. IT’S NOT EASY BEING GROANED

84. FAR FROM THE MADDENED CROWD

85. COMPETITIVE DEBASING

86. THE PUNFORGIVEN

87. THE PUNCANNY VALLEY

88. INTENTIONAL FORTITUDE

89. CHURCH OF THE LETTER DISDAIN

90. POETRY IN MASHIN’

91. CREATIVE SENTENCING

92. DAAAMN, DACTYL!

93. NO CONTEXT

94. A TALE OF TWO SILLIES

95. THE WIZARD OF LOLZ

96. IT’S A PUNDERFUL LIFE

97. WHAT’S HA? PUNNIN’

98. THE ZING AND I

99. THE WILD PUNS

100. THE PUN ALSO RISES

101. HOW THE REST WERE PUNNED

102. RAGING SYLLABLE

103. DANGEROUS ELISIONS

104. GOODWILL PUNTING

105. FELLOWSHIP OF THE WRONG

106. INGLOURIOUS LAST WORDS

107. THE LIMITATION GAME

108. APPETITE FOR DISTRACTION

109. HOW I MEANT ANOTHER

110. LARKS AND RECREATION

111. COMEDY OF AIRERS

112. DECLARATION OF INNER PENANCE

113. BOO HA-HA

Senior editor and pun criminal Peter Rubin (@provenself) wrote about the roadblocks to VR in issue 24.04.

This article appears in the October 2016 issue.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/09/12/reflexlology-inside-the-groan-inducing-world-of-pun-competitions/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/165253970052

[allofbeercom]

ReflexLOLogy: Inside the Groan-Inducing World of Pun Competitions

From the moment he spoke, I knew I was screwed. On the surface, the guy wasn’t particularly fearsome—pudgy, late thirties, polo shirt, plaid shorts, baseball cap, dad sneakers—but he looked completely at ease. One hand in his pocket, the other holding the microphone loosely, like a torch singer doing crowd work. And when he finally began talking, it was with an assurance that belied the fact that he was basically spewing nonsense.

“I hate all people named John,” he said with surprising bravado. “Yeah, that’s right, that was a John diss!” The crowd roared. John-diss. Jaundice. A glorious, groan-inducing precision strike of a pun.

Welp, I thought. It was fun while it lasted.

If you’re an NBA rookie, you really don’t want to go up against LeBron James. Anyone’s trivia night would be ruined by seeing Ken Jennings on another team. And if you find yourself at the world’s biggest pun competition, the last person you want to face is four-time defending champion Ben Ziek. Yet that’s exactly where I was, on an outdoor stage in downtown Austin, Texas, committing unspeakable atrocities upon the English language in front of a few hundred onlookers who were spending their sunny May Saturday reveling in the carnage.

The rules of the 39th annual O. Henry Pun-Off World Championship’s “Punslingers” competition are simple: Two people take turns punning on a theme in head-to-head rounds. Failure to make a pun in the five seconds allowed gets you eliminated; make a nonpun or reuse a word three times and you’ve reached the banishing point. Round by round and pair by pair, a field of 32 dwindles until the last of the halved-nots finally gets to claim the mantle of best punster in the world and what most people would agree are some pretty dubious bragging rights. It’s exactly like a rap battle, if 8 Mile had been about software engineers and podcasters and improv nerds vying for supremacy. (Also just like 8 Mile: My first-round opponent had frozen when his turn came to pun on waterborne vehicles. Seriously, yacht a word came out. Canoe believe it?)

Eventually, there we stood, two among the final eight: me, a first-timer, squaring off against the Floyd Mayweather of the pun world. Actually, only one of us was standing; I found myself doing the world’s slowest two-step just to keep my legs from trembling. I’d been a little jittery in my first couple of rounds, sure, but those were standard-issue butterflies, perched on a layer of misguided confidence. This was the anxiety of the sacrificial lamb. I was punning above my weight, and I knew it. Once the judges announced that we’d be punning on diseases—hence Ziek’s joke about star-crossed livers—we began.

“Mumps the word!” I said, hoping that my voice wasn’t shaking.

Ziek immediately fired back: “That was a measle-y pun.” Not only was he confident, with a malleable voice that was equal parts game show host and morning-radio DJ, but his jokes were seemingly fully formed. Worse, he was nimble enough to turn your own pun against you.

“Well, I had a croup-on for it,” I responded. Whoa. Where’d that come from?

He switched gears. “I have a Buddha at home, and sometimes”—making a rubbing motion with his hand—“I like to rubella.”

I was barely paying attention. Diseases, diseases—oh! I pointed at people in different parts of the audience. “If you’ve got a yam, and you’ve got a potato, whose tuber’s closest?”

“There was a guy out here earlier painted light red,” Ziek said. “Did you see the pink guy?”

“I didn’t,” I responded. “Cold you see him?”

Again and again we pun-upped each other, a philharmonic of harmful phonics. From AIDS to Zika we ranged, covering SARS, migraines, Ebola, chicken pox, ague, shingles, fasciitis, streptococcus, West Nile, coronavirus, poison oak, avian flu, gangrene, syphilis, and herpes. Almost five minutes later, we’d gone through 32 puns between the two of us, and I was running dry. As far as my brain was concerned, there wasn’t a medical textbook in existence that contained something we hadn’t used. Ziek, though, had a seemingly endless stockpile and tossed off a quick alopecia pun; I could have bald right then and there. The judge counted down, and I slunk offstage to watch the rest of the competition—which Ziek won, for the fifth time. Knowing I’d lost to the best cushioned the blow, but some mild semantic depression still lingered: Instead of slinging my way to a David-like upset, I was the one who had to go lieth down.

Author Peter Rubin doing the punning man.Ryan Young

When I was growing up, my father’s favorite (printable) joke was “Where do cantaloupes go in the summertime? Johnny Cougar’s Melon Camp.” This is proof that—well, it’s proof that I grew up in Indiana. But it’s also proof that I was raised to speak two languages, both of them English. See, there’s the actual words-working-together-and-making-sense part, and then there’s the fun part. The pliant, recombinant part. The part that lets you harness linguistic irregularities, judo-style, to make words into other words. It’s not conscious, exactly; it just feels at some level like someone made a puzzle and didn’t bother to tell me, so my brain wants to figure out what else those sounds can do.

A lifetime of listening to hip hop has reinforced that phonetic impulse. Polysyllabic rhymes aren’t strictly puns, but they’re made of the same marrow; when Chance the Rapper rhymes “link in my bio” with “Cinco de Mayo” in the song “Mixtape,” I get an actual endorphin hit. Besides, rap is full of puns already: instant-gratification ones—like Lil Wayne saying “Yes I am Weezy, but I ain’t asthmatic” or MF Doom saying “Got more soul than a sock with a hole”—as well as ones that reveal themselves more slowly. Kanye West might be more famous for his production than his lyricism, but he endeared himself to me forever on the song “Dark Fantasy” by spitting the best Family Matters pun of all time: “Too many Urkels on your team, that’s why your wins low.”

I was punning above my weight, and I knew it.

Whether this is nature or nurture, though, the end result is the same: I’m playing with language all the time, and Kanye and I aren’t the only ones. “I can’t listen passively to someone speaking without the possibility of puns echoing around in my head,” says Gary Hallock, who has been producing and hosting the O. Henry Pun-Off for 26 years. He’s seen the annual event grow from an Austin oddity to a national event and watched dad jokes, of which puns are the most obvious example, take hold in the millennial consciousness; a dad-joke-devoted Reddit board boasts more than 250,000 members. “I’ve often compared punsters to linguistic terrorists,” Hallock says. “We’re literally stalking conversations, looking for the weak place to plant our bomb.”

And we’ve been doing it for a long, long time—verbal puns date back to at least 1635 BC, when a Babylonian clay tablet included a pun on the word for “wheat”—and the world has been conflicted about them for nearly as long. (Linguists can’t even agree whether the word pun derives from French, Old English, Icelandic, or Welsh, though there’s no point heading down that scenic root.) On one hand, puns are the stuff of terrible children’s joke books. Oliver Wendell Holmes likened punsters to “wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.” On the other, God, how can you not feel a little thrill when you make a good one or a begrudging joy when you hear a better one?

Humor theorists generally agree that comedy hinges on incongruity: when a sentence or situation subverts expectations or when multiple interpretations are suggested by the same stimulus. (Also, yes, humor theorists are a thing.) That stimulus can be visual (looking at you, eggplant emoji!) or auditory (what up, tuba fart!); most commonly, though, it’s linguistic. Language is slippery by nature, and of the many kinds of wordplay—hyperbole, metaphor, spoonerisms, even letter-level foolery like anagrams—nothing takes advantage of incongruity quite like puns, of which there are four specific varieties. In order of increasing complexity, you’ve got homonyms, identical words that sound alike (“Led Zeppelin’s guitarist was interrogated last week, but detectives weren’t able to turn the Page”); homophones, which are spelled differently but sound the same (“I hate raisins! Apologies if you’re not into curranty vents.”); homographs, which sound different but look the same (“If you’re asking me to believe that a Loire cabernet is that different from a Napa cabernet, then the terroirists have won.”); and paronyms, which are just kinda similar-sounding (“I have a ton of work to do, but I ate so much cucumber chutney that I have raita’s block”). When we hear a pun, the words we hear aren’t the words we think we hear, and the burden’s on us to crack the code.

Granted, there are people out there who hate puns, and maybe rightly so. But for many of us, that decryption process is a reward unto itself. “Humor happens when something important is being violated,” cognitive scientist Justine Kao says. “Social norms, expectations. So for people who are sensitive to the rules that language follows, puns are more entertaining.” In other words, if you work with words on a daily basis—writing, editing, translating—you’re simply primed to appreciate them more. Behind every great headline, any editor will tell you, is a great pun. (I have a colleague at WIRED who once looked at a page about chef’s knives and gave it the headline “JULIENNE MORE”; people lost their goddamn minds.)

Still, even among the nerdiest of word herders, there are some rules. Two years ago, Kao and two colleagues at Stanford and UC San Diego decided to prove empirically that incongruity was the root of humor. They tested people’s reactions to hundreds of sentences that varied from one another in minute ways. Some used homophones; some didn’t. Some added detail supporting the nonpun interpretation of the sentence; some stripped detail away. They were able to demonstrate that ambiguity of meaning is necessary for a pun to be perceived—but it’s only half of the equation. (And literally, there’s an equation.) After all, “I went to the bank” is ambiguous, but it’s not a pun. The true determining factor of a pun’s funniness is what the team calls distinctiveness.

Take the sentence “The chef brought his girlfriend flours on Valentine’s Day.” It’s a homophone, so it’s not the most complex pun. But if you turn the chef into a pastry chef, that added vocation property makes the pun more distinctive. “When you’re able to identify keywords from different topics,” Kao says, “it clues you in on the intentionality of it—you’re forcing together two things that don’t often co-occur.”

Of course, “The pastry chef brought his girlfriend flours on Valentine’s Day” still isn’t funny. It’s the kind of pun a bot would make, and maybe has made in the decades since programmers created the first pun generator. There’s no storytelling to it, no drama. A good pun isn’t just an artless slab of sound-alikeness: It’s a joke that happens to hinge on wordplay. A truly formidable punner knows that and frames a sentence to make the pun the punch line. The longer you delay the ambiguity, the more tension you introduce—and the more cathartic the resolution. A pun should be an exclamation point, not a semicolon.

But was I a truly formidable punner? I’d thought so—hell, my lifelong dream is seeing Flavor Flav and Ellen Burstyn cohosting a talk show, just so it can be called Burstyn With Flavor—but after Austin, I had my doubts. I’d cracked under pressure once; until I tried again, I’d never know fissure. As it turned out, a second chance was around the corner.

The Bay Area Pun-Off, a monthly philharmonic of harmful phonics.Ryan Young

Compact and jovial, Jonah Spear is a dead ringer for Saturday Night Live’s Taran Killam—or at least for Taran Killam in high school: Spear recently shaved off a grizzled-prospector beard and looks about half of his 34 years. He’s also a professional play facilitator and counselor at an adult summer camp (no to phones and drinking, yes to sing-alongs and bonfires). That loosey-goosey vibe has carried into the Bay Area Pun-Off, a monthly event Spear began hosting in January that’s just one of a handful of competitive punning events popping up across the country.

If the O. Henry Pun-Off is the Newport Folk Festival, then its Bay Area cousin—like Punderdome 3000 in Brooklyn, Pundamonium in Seattle, or the Great Durham Pun Championship in, well, Durham—is Coachella. The audience is younger, and the raucous atmosphere is fueled as much by beer as by unabashed pun love. It started in the living room of a communal house in Oakland in January 2016 but quickly outgrew its confines; in June the organizers even staged a New York City satellite event.

But on this Saturday night, a week after O. Henry, it’s a high-ceilinged performance space in San Francisco’s Mission District where I’m looking for redemption. The pool of contestants at the Bay Area Pun-Off is small by O. Henry standards, and we commence with an all-hands marathon on tree puns designed to winnow the field of 12 down to eight. “I’m just hoping to win the poplar vote,” one woman says. “Sounds like birch of contract to me,” says someone else. A lanky British guy whom I’ll call Chet rambles through a shaggy-dog story involving a French woman and three Jamaican guys to get to a tortured “le mon t’ree” punch line. The crowd eats it up.

“Keep the applause going. It takes balsa get up here and do this.”

When you’re waiting for 11 other people to pun, you’ve got plenty of time to think of your next one, so I try to Ziek out a good-sized reserve of puns—and when it’s my turn, I make sure that my puns build on the joke that came before me. “Keep the applause going,” I say after someone boughs out. “It takes balsa get up here and do this.” After someone delivers a good line, I admit that “I ended up being pretty frond of it.” They’re not distinctive, but at this stage they don’t need to be, as long as they’re ambiguous. Things go oak-ay, and I’m on to the next round. (What, yew don’t believe me? Olive got is my word.)

After I indulge in a muggleful of Harry Potter puns, I find myself in the semifinals against a Quora engineer named Asa. Spear scribbles the mystery topic on a small chalkboard hidden from sight, then turns it around. It says … diseases. The same category that knocked me out in Austin? The category I dwelled on for the entire flight home, thinking of all the one-liners that had eluded me?

This time, there’s no running dry. Not only do I remember all the puns I used against Ben Ziek, but I remember all the puns he made against me. So when Asa says, “I’m really taking my mumps,” I shoot back with “That’s kinda measly, if you ask me.” I reprise puns I’d made in Austin (“Did you see that Italian opera singer run through the door? In flew Enzo!”); I use puns that I’d thought of since (“My mom makes the best onion dip. It’s HIV little concoction you’d love”). Asa fights gamely, but I have immunerable disease puns at my fingertips, and it’s not much longer before the round is over.

And then, again, there are two: me and Chet. The difference now is I’m locked in: no nerves, no self-consciousness, just getting out of my brain’s way and letting the connections happen. When Spear announces the theme—living world leaders—I don’t even start trying to stockpile puns. I just wait, and they come.

Chet opens the round: “Ohhhh, BAMA. I don’t know anything about world leaders!”

This time, just hearing him mention Obama conjures up a mental image of Justin Trudeau. Before the laughter even dies down, I nod my head encouragingly: “True, tho—that was a decent pun!”

It’s Austin all over again, just in reverse: Now I’m the quick one and Chet’s the one who has to scramble. He fumbles through a long story about rock climbing that leads to a pun about his cam-bell. (And before you ask: Chances are he wasn’t actually talking about Kim Campbell, who was prime minister of Canada for all of six months in 1993, but in the heat of the moment no one realized he’d just screwed up David Cameron’s name.)

My turn? No problem. Just keep flipping it back to him. “Another patented long-ass Chet story,” I say. “I am Bushed.”

“Well,” Chet says, then pauses. “He thinks he can just … Blair shit out.”

It’s his one solid blow. I talk about the “bonky moon” that’s shining outside that night. I confide in the audience about my own alopecia problem, and how I needed to buy a Merkel. And each time, the audience is right there with me. They don’t necessarily know what’s coming, but they’re loving it. Chet’s used three US presidents and two prime ministers; meanwhile, I’ve been from South Korea to Germany, by way of Canada.

Even better, I’ve got another continent in my pocket. “Have you guys been to Chet’s farm?” I ask the audience. “He has this group of cows that won’t stop talking.” I wait a beat. “They are seriously moo-gabby.”

What happens next is a blur, to be perfectly honest. I can’t even tell you what comes out of Chet’s mouth next, but it’s either nothing or it’s the name of someone dead—and either way, the Bay Area Pun-Off is over.

I might not have been able to vanquish Ben Ziek; this may be my only taste of victory in the world of competitive paronomasiacs; hell, I may never know the secret to the perfect pun. But as long as I’ve got the words to try, one thing’s for sure: I’ll use vaguely different words to approximate those words, thereby creating incongruity and thus humor.

Or maybe I’ll just plead raita’s block.

Phrase the Roof!

Author Peter Rubin set up a Slack channel here at Wired to crowdsource the punny headlines for the opening illustration to this story. He compiled more than 150 of them. Here are the ones we couldnt fit.

1. PRESENTS OF MIND

2. SHEER PUNDEMONIUM

3. VIRULENT HOMOPHONIA

4. OFF-SYLLABLE USE

5. PUNBELIEVABLE

6. HEADLINE BLING

7. LIVE A CRITIC, DIACRITIC

8. FEAST OF THE PRONUNCIATION

9. VERBAL MEDICATION

10. THE BEST OF BOTH WORDS

11. SUFFERING FROM INCONSONANT

12. DAMNED WITH FAINT PHRASE

13. THE SEVEN DEADLY SYNTAXES

14. THE NOUN JEWELS

15. PUNS THE WORD

16. CONSONANT READER

17. FARTS OF SPEECH

18. PUN-CHEWATION

19. GRAMMAR RULES

20. POISSON PEN

21. PUNS AND NEEDLES

22. DEATH AND SYNTAXES

23. THE WRITE STUFF

24. MAKING THE COPY

25. SLAIN LETTERING

26. PUN AND GAMES

27. VALLEY OF THE LOLZ

28. NOUN HEAR THIS

29. WHATEVER FLOATS YOUR QUOTE

30. PUT A VERB ON IT!

31. CRIME AND PUN-NICHE-MEANT

32. TIC TALK

33. ECCE HOMONYM

34. DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXTS ASS

35. WRITES OF MAN

36. VERB APPEAL

37. THE RHYME DIRECTIVE

38. SLOGAN’S RUN

39. REBEL WITHOUT A CLAUSE

40. BURNS OF PHRASE

41. ARTLESS QUOTATIONS

42. BON MOT MONEY, BON MOT PROBLEMS

43. JESTIN’ CASE

44. LET ‘ER QUIP

45. ADVERB REACTIONS

46. INFINITE JESTS

47. ARTS OF SPEECH

48. DIGITAL PUNDERGROUND

49. THE PUN-ISHER

50. IMPUNDING DOOM

51. BEYOND PUNDERDOME

52. BAUHAUS OF CARDS

53. TEXTUAL HARASSMENT

54. IT’S A PUNGLE OUT THERE

55. GRAND THEFT MOTTO

56. IT HAD PUNNED ONE NIGHT

57. PLEASE GRAMMAR DON’T HURT EM

58. RHETORICAL QUESTIN’

59. ACUTE PUNS? SURE

60. BAWDILY HUMORED

61. DAMNED IF YOU INNUENDO, DAMNED IF YOU INNUENDON’T

62. TROUBLE ENTENDRES

63. WITS UP, DOC

64. SELF-IMPROV MEANT

65. PUN-EYED JOKERS

66. LAUGHTERMATH

67. JAPES OF WRATH

68. MAKING HA-HAJJ

69. MUTTER, MAY I?

70. BATTLE OF HALF-WITS

71. DEMI-BRAVADO

72. MALCONTENT MARKETING

73. NON-SILENT OFFENSES

74. ORAL HIJINX

75. THE PUN-ISHER

76. NOUNS, YOUR CHANCE

77. TEXT OF KIN

78. OH, PUN AND SHUT

79. JOKE OF ALL TRADES

80. PATTER UP

81. SCHTICK IT TO EM

82. BOOS HOUNDS

83. IT’S NOT EASY BEING GROANED

84. FAR FROM THE MADDENED CROWD

85. COMPETITIVE DEBASING

86. THE PUNFORGIVEN

87. THE PUNCANNY VALLEY

88. INTENTIONAL FORTITUDE

89. CHURCH OF THE LETTER DISDAIN

90. POETRY IN MASHIN’

91. CREATIVE SENTENCING

92. DAAAMN, DACTYL!

93. NO CONTEXT

94. A TALE OF TWO SILLIES

95. THE WIZARD OF LOLZ

96. IT’S A PUNDERFUL LIFE

97. WHAT’S HA? PUNNIN’

98. THE ZING AND I

99. THE WILD PUNS

100. THE PUN ALSO RISES

101. HOW THE REST WERE PUNNED

102. RAGING SYLLABLE

103. DANGEROUS ELISIONS

104. GOODWILL PUNTING

105. FELLOWSHIP OF THE WRONG

106. INGLOURIOUS LAST WORDS

107. THE LIMITATION GAME

108. APPETITE FOR DISTRACTION

109. HOW I MEANT ANOTHER

110. LARKS AND RECREATION

111. COMEDY OF AIRERS

112. DECLARATION OF INNER PENANCE

113. BOO HA-HA

Senior editor and pun criminal Peter Rubin (@provenself) wrote about the roadblocks to VR in issue 24.04.

This article appears in the October 2016 issue.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/09/12/reflexlology-inside-the-groan-inducing-world-of-pun-competitions/

[marybarbara1]

The World According to a Free-Range Short Seller With Nothing to Lose Bloomberg

The roosters begin crowing at four a.m. on Alder Lane Farm, about an hour north of San Francisco on the sting of Sonoma wine nation. While horses stir of their stables and chickens start to roam the 20-acre property, one of many world’s most fearsome brief sellers places on his normal apparel—shorts and flip-flops—and makes his means at midnight to the room behind his storage. Six pinball machines, a gigantic flatscreen, and a pingpong desk compete for consideration. If not for the Bloomberg terminal within the nook, you may assume this was your typical man cave.

But let’s not dwell on Marc Cohodes’s pastured chickens, or his present-leaping horses, and even his do-it-yourself apricot jam that, on particular events, San Francisco’s Una Pizza Napoletana places on its pies in lieu of tomato sauce. Some of probably the most revered individuals within the investing business say that, courting again to the 1980s, no one has had a higher nostril for sniffing out fraud than the 56-year-previous Cohodes. He’s uncovered suspect accounting at a variety of excessive-profile corporations, together with the Belgian speech-­recognition software program developer Lernout & Hauspie, which went bankrupt in 2001 after being valued at about $10 billion, and mortgage lender NovaStar Financial, the place his efforts earned him a Harvard Business School case research revealed in 2013.

Photographer: Brian Frank

“I would not want to be his adversary if I was still a criminal today,” says Sam Antar, who was sentenced to six months of home arrest and 1,200 hours of group service for cooking the books at New York shopper-electronics chain Crazy Eddie in one of many largest securities frauds unearthed within the 1980s. “A character like Marc”—the 2 crossed paths later in his life when each have been targeted on detecting fraud—“you stay away from.”

And that’s been comparatively straightforward for no less than a part of the previous eight years. In 2008 the hedge fund Cohodes labored at for greater than 20 years went out of enterprise beneath controversial circumstances. He maintains that Goldman Sachs, its prime dealer, closed it too rapidly by making unnecessary margin calls, a declare Goldman disputes. The fallout spurred a bout of what Cohodes likens to submit-traumatic stress dysfunction. “What happened to me would put the average person under,” he says. He retreated to his farm, the place he recuperated by spending his days delivering eggs to San Francisco, cheering on the Oakland Raiders, and touring to see a pal’s rock band, Collective Soul. Besides, the overwhelming majority of shares have been rising due to central financial institution stimulus, depriving him of superb alternatives as a brief vendor.

“Legitimate companies don’t know who the f— I am. And they don’t care. The bad guys? They know. And they do care”

Now Cohodes is again. His time among the many horses and chickens—outdoors the cash administration business—might even have helped him return to the highest of his recreation. Slimmed down and preventing match, he’s been profitable massive on a collection of brief bets towards Canadian corporations since he made his comeback. Cohodes says he’s been betting towards embattled Valeant Pharmaceuticals International because the summer time of 2015. Around the identical time, he started shorting one other debt-laden Canadian drugmaker, Concordia International, which he calls “the poor man’s Valeant.” Both shares misplaced most of their worth final yr.

Cohodes says he’s dedicated to exposing corporations that he believes could also be ripping off peculiar, unwary buyers—“Joe Six-pack,” as he places it. “Legitimate companies don’t know who the f— I am. And they don’t care,” Cohodes says. “The bad guys? They know. And they do care.” And he’ll go to nice lengths to chase them down: dumpster-diving to discover clues of wrongdoing, lambasting enemies on Twitter (the place his rambunctious character is on full show), and hotfooting it throughout Las Vegas to examine whether or not new enterprise workplaces reported by NovaStar have been actual. (They weren’t, in accordance to Cohodes; one was a personal residence, one other a therapeutic massage parlor.) “I’m a pretty driven guy,” he says.

Indeed, press him on his return to the markets, and Cohodes will reveal one more reason that introduced him again from the wilderness. Short selling—borrowing inventory and promoting it, hoping to revenue by shopping for it again later at a lower cost—is a “dying art,” he fears. Short-biased funds managed solely $5.5 billion in belongings as of the top of September, a tiny fraction of the roughly $three trillion the hedge fund business oversees, in accordance to Hedge Fund Research. The variety of brief-biased funds had fallen to 18 at the moment, from 50 in 2009. Cohodes needs to make certain the “old-school” craft will get handed alongside to a new era of individuals with—he jokes—that “genetic defect” that makes them need to tackle all of Wall Street.

As the bounty hunters of the inventory market, brief sellers have uncovered some main failings through the years. Think Jim Chanos’s position in highlighting the fraud at Enron, or David Einhorn’s name on Lehman Brothers. But the lengthy listing of allegations towards brief sellers is as previous because the markets themselves. They unfold false rumors to revenue when shares fall, a apply dubbed “short and distort” that has typically gotten them into hassle with regulators. They conspire to torpedo share costs in “bear raids.” They destroy good corporations and trigger individuals to lose their jobs. They have many pure enemies, together with buyers betting shares will rise, analysts issuing purchase suggestions, and executives whose entire careers are abruptly referred to as into query when brief sellers degree costs towards them. And they’re not regulated the best way Wall Street analysts are, in order that they aren’t as accountable.

To brief a inventory after which publicly advocate promoting it “absolutely should be illegal,” says Amir Anvarzadeh, head of Japanese fairness gross sales at brokerage BGC Partners in Singapore, stressing he doesn’t know Cohodes and is speaking about brief promoting basically. “It’s morally wrong. It’s called front-running, and it’s wrong.”

At the identical time, the dangers brief sellers take could be big. Stocks have a tendency to edge greater naturally, doubling or tripling even when the case towards them is justified. That can imply losses for the brief vendor, not to point out psychological despair. Then there’s the vilification—and the lawsuits, 4 of which Cohodes has skilled. It’s “just a nasty, difficult, ruthless, bare-knuckled, tough business,” he says. “And no one cuts you any breaks.”

Yet there are individuals who wouldn’t do anything.

Cohodes’s journey to the highest ranks of brief promoting started in Chicago, the place he didn’t do nicely at college—he recollects his ­second-grade instructor worrying he’d find yourself in jail. He managed to keep away from that destiny, graduating from Babson College in Massachusetts, the place he studied finance. In 1982 he landed a place again in his hometown with Northern Trust, the place he met an analyst named Paul Landini who taught him about brief promoting. The two started visiting a native gaming arcade after work. There, one among Landini’s hunches grew into a conviction as they watched individuals spend their quarters: Video video games would quickly usurp pinball machines. They shorted a main pinball firm, Bally Manufacturing, and watched with euphoria because the shares misplaced half their worth from the beginning of 1983 to the top of 1984. Cohodes was hooked.

In 1985, Cohodes took a job in New York with David Rocker, who’d simply began a hedge fund that may come to concentrate on brief promoting. “They were very thorough, swung big, and put together a really nice track record in short selling, which is really hard to do,” says Jeff Ubben, who runs ValueAct Capital Management, an activist fund in San Francisco. Rocker Partners posted a gross annual return of 12 % from April 1985 to the top of 2007, when shorting the S&P 500 would have produced an 11 % yearly loss.

“He’s like a terrier. When he gets his jaws on the leg of whatever he’s going after, he can’t let go”

One of Cohodes’s most well-known shorts at Rocker Partners got here from a want to assist his son Max, now 30, who was born with cerebral palsy and lives in his personal home on the farm. Cohodes thought Lernout & Hauspie’s speech-recognition software program may assist Max talk, however he quickly discovered it acknowledged little of what individuals stated. In the summer time of 1998, Rocker Partners began shorting the corporate, which counted Microsoft as a giant shareholder. So started a lengthy marketing campaign of tipping off the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to irregularities in L&H’s books and briefing monetary journalists.

The inventory virtually tripled within the first three months of 2000, inflicting a number of buyers to withdraw cash from Rocker Partners. Only afterward did the hedge fund get its huge break. When L&H began submitting detailed quarterly U.S. disclosures following the acquisition of two American corporations, Cohodes and others observed unusually giant gross sales to South Korea, which have been largely uncovered as pretend. In 2001 the corporate filed for chapter. In 2010 a Belgian courtroom sentenced founders Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie to 5-yr jail phrases, two years of which have been suspended. The doggedness with which Cohodes pursued L&H was typical of him, says Jeff Matthews, who labored at Rocker Partners from 1989 to 1993: “He has the biggest balls of anyone I’ve ever known.”

Bet the jockey, not the horse, Cohodes says. Find executives who as soon as ran corporations that carried out poorly or have been accused of wrongdoing. Look for pink flags—serial acquisitions of corporations, opaque accounting, overstated numbers. If issues don’t add up, don’t cease till you discover out why. “He’s like a terrier,” says Herb Greenberg, who co-manages funding evaluation firm Pacific Square Research. “When he gets his jaws on the leg of whatever he’s going after, he can’t let go.”

Cohodes and Rocker Partners’ successes embrace NovaStar, the subprime lender he sparred with earlier than the monetary disaster; it was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange in 2008. Another was AremisSoft, a enterprise-administration software program supplier that artificially inflated income. It filed for chapter in 2002, however not earlier than it sued Rocker Partners and others for inventory manipulation, a go well with it shortly dropped. In 2010, Roys Poyiadjis, the previous chief government officer, was sentenced to probation for a inventory fraud that a decide stated was “of almost unthinkable magnitude.”

In the case of AaiPharma—a drugmaker in North Carolina that was delisted, and whose former chief working officer pleaded responsible in 2005 to fraud conspiracy expenses—victory was notably candy for Cohodes. He recollects when the corporate introduced in April 2004 that it had acquired subpoenas from a grand jury looking for testimony and paperwork regarding its monetary reporting. “I just, like, opened the window, and I yelled out at the top of my lungs,” Cohodes says. “This piece of s— stock was kicking our ass for so long.”

It was the knock-down, drag-out struggle with Utah-based Overstock.com which will have helped sink Rocker Partners. Patrick Byrne, the founder and CEO of the low cost retailer, sued the hedge fund in August 2005, claiming it labored with a analysis agency to manipulate the corporate’s shares. Byrne instructed that “miscreant hedge funds,” journalists, overseas inventory exchanges, and a clearinghouse have been amongst these conspiring to drive down his inventory utilizing bare shorting—that’s, promoting brief shares that ­haven’t been borrowed.

“I have a strange affection for Marc as one sometimes develops for an opponent. At the end of the day we sort of put it behind us”

Byrne says he was “completely vindicated,” as a result of defendants in lawsuits Overstock introduced, together with Goldman and Cohodes’s agency, ultimately settled. There’s a distinction between betting towards a horse and “trying to poison” it, he says. Still, “I have a strange affection for Marc as one sometimes develops for an opponent,” Byrne says of Cohodes now. “At the end of the day we sort of put it behind us.”

The 2005 lawsuit hastened Rocker’s retirement the next yr—a minimum of in accordance to Cohodes—and not directly had a hand within the fund’s demise. As for Rocker and Cohodes, they don’t converse. Cohodes blamed Rocker for unnecessarily riling Byrne, whereas the argument could be made that the techniques Rocker Partners used towards Overstock have been no totally different from these it employed for another brief funding. (Rocker declined to remark for this story.)

Whatever the case, Cohodes was left in charge of the corporate, whose identify he modified to Copper River Partners. Then got here the monetary disaster, which ought to have been a godsend for a short-­biased fund. “We were having an outstanding year. Outstanding,” Cohodes says. “We were knocking the ball out of the f—ing park.”

Until issues began to go incorrect.

On Sept. 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for chapter. Lehman Brothers International in London, which Copper River used as a prime dealer, owed the hedge fund about $100 million on the time, says Phil Renna, who was Copper River’s chief monetary officer. Copper River misplaced entry to that cash. Days later, in an echo of Byrne’s marketing campaign, the SEC took motion towards bare brief promoting. That spurred shopping for of closely shorted shares together with Jos. A. Bank Clothiers and Overstock, creating what Cohodes calls “horrific” losses for Copper River. Then the SEC banned brief promoting of monetary corporations, which once more despatched shares the fund was brief surging.

At that time, Goldman stepped in. As Copper River’s principal prime dealer, it instituted home margin calls, which in contrast to regulatory margin calls are made at its discretion. Before lengthy, Goldman was liquidating Copper River’s brief positions. Goldman blocked Cohodes’s try to promote them to one other hedge fund, he says. By October the corporate’s funds have been down greater than 50 %. Copper River was unsalvageable. “It’s almost like a bomb blows up near you or near your brain, and it sort of blows your eardrums out, but it doesn’t kill you,” he says.

Testifying in 2011 in reference to a lawsuit Overstock introduced towards Goldman and others in California, Cohodes stated he and his companions speculated that Goldman shut the fund as a result of it hadn’t borrowed shares for Copper River’s brief gross sales and was overlaying its tracks after the SEC clamped down on bare shorting. He additionally stated he didn’t know for positive. Goldman was faraway from the case, which contended that prime brokerages deliberately drove down the worth of Overstock’s shares via bare brief promoting, on the grounds that not one of the alleged conduct had taken place in that state. Overstock later said that Goldman had settled a New Jersey motion for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) and securities fraud claims following the California rulings. Goldman additionally agreed to pay fines to the SEC final yr and in 2010 for violations of securities lending guidelines, not associated to Copper River, with out admitting or denying the allegations both time. “Mr. Cohodes is wrong,” Michael DuVally, a Goldman Sachs spokesman, stated in a assertion. “We met our obligations under applicable law,” he stated. “Copper River’s problems were the result of the extreme stress in the financial markets at the time.” For his half, Cohodes says Copper River didn’t sue Goldman as a result of no one had the urge for food for a drawn-out legal battle. “I’m a really, really, really good investor, but obviously I was s—-y at the investment business, because my fund closed due to what I would call factors beyond my control,” Cohodes says. Even so, he accepts duty. “I’m the captain of the ship,” he says. “The ship sank.”

Photographer: Brian Frank

Alder Lane Farm, which Cohodes stored in a settlement when he obtained divorced in May 2011, is sprinkled with bodily reminders of battles previous. They embrace the pinball machines (thanks, Bally), a Porsche 911 with custom-made plates that say “Gowex” (a Spanish telecommunications firm he guess towards), and a 6-yr-previous Holsteiner horse named Concordia after the drugmaker whose former CEO is suing him. “It showed up the day I got sued—so it just had to be,” he says. He even names a few of his roughly 300 chickens after pals and foes. Anyone who doesn’t take the investing recreation personally is improper, Cohodes says.

Which might assist clarify his day without work from investing. “I don’t want to say I took a break from investing, but I sort of took a break from it and just sort of decompressed,” he says of the interval following Copper River’s closure. After a couple of years, he started to miss it and began to spend increasingly more time on brief investments. He turned a energetic presence on Twitter, the place he has greater than eight,000 followers. He says it’s simpler for him to be forthright on social media than it might be if he have been nonetheless working for a hedge fund, the place lawsuits are dangerous for enterprise.

He may be forthright elsewhere, too. At a Grant’s Interest Rate Observer investing convention in New York in October, Cohodes shared the stage with a few of the largest names within the business, together with Julian Robertson of Tiger Management fame and bond investor Jeffrey Gundlach. Some individuals within the viewers have been bowled over by Cohodes’s “rhetorical style,” as Jim Grant, who organizes the occasion, places it. “Marc comes across as kind of an angry and certainly intentionally profane growling bear,” he says. “Beneath that exterior beats the heart of an idealist.”

Cohodes himself says his power for brief promoting additionally comes from having a aggressive nature that makes him relish the battle—all of the extra so if he thinks he’s being disrespected, particularly by what the straight-speaking self-described “scrapper” sees as ­buttoned-up Harvard varieties. Making cash from brief promoting, he says, isn’t that essential to him, though the 2 Porsches on his farm recommend he’s removed from brief himself.

This story seems within the February / March 2017 concern of Bloomberg Markets.

Cover paintings: Oriol Angrill Jordà

Whatever the motivation, most roads for Cohodes today lead over the U.S. border into the Great White North. When many different brief sellers have been descending on Valeant, whose inventory fell 86 % final yr, he additionally took an interest within the smaller Concordia, which he says is bedecked in purple flags. The firm’s founder, Mark Thompson, and different executives beforehand labored for Biovail, which the SEC charged with fraudulent accounting, Cohodes says, recalling his jockey principle. (Biovail agreed to pay $10 million to settle the fees with out admitting or denying the allegations. Thompson, who stepped down as Concordia chairman and CEO in November, wasn’t accused of wrongdoing at Biovail.) Concordia went public by way of a reverse merger, a course of that the SEC says can typically lead to fraud and different abuses. It expanded via acquisitions, which brief sellers akin to Cohodes typically see as grounds for suspicion, as a result of they will open the door to accounting tips. And its enterprise mannequin of shopping for medicine and jacking up their costs (comparable to the technique that was utilized by Valeant) is coming underneath growing scrutiny. (“Valeant’s new management team is working diligently to earn the confidence of the investment community and deliver on our commitments,” together with repaying debt, says firm spokesman Scott Hirsch.)

Cohodes turned satisfied Concordia would buckle beneath the massive money owed it assumed to fund its acquisitions. Dissecting the corporate’s accounts, Cohodes observed that it was recognizing income on cargo quite than when merchandise are bought to the buyer and that it had opaque reserves. Those practices aren’t unlawful however have been utilized by corporations up to now to inflate gross sales in what’s generally known as channel stuffing.

Before lengthy, Concordia’s earnings began to miss estimates. Last September, the U.Okay. authorities launched a bill proposing controls on overcharging within the pharmaceutical business. Debating the invoice, members of Parliament stated it will shut a loophole that allowed corporations together with Amdipharm Mercury, as Concordia’s largest buy was named earlier than Concordia purchased it, to purchase off-patent generic medicine with dominant market positions and push up their costs. “When price gouging ends, the channel gets drained and the results just completely suck,” Cohodes says. (Concordia didn’t reply to requests for remark however stated in a assertion in December that it believes it could possibly service its debt whereas specializing in creating a new lengthy-time period plan.)

Concordia shares plunged 95 % in 2016, handing Cohodes a big revenue. He additionally acquired slapped with a libel and defamation lawsuit from then-CEO Thompson for feedback he made on Canadian TV concerning the government’s work historical past. Cohodes traveled to Toronto in January and filed a 494-page movement to contest the go well with, which he sees as a commonplace tactic to silence brief sellers. (Peter Downard, Thompson’s lawyer, disagrees: “Don’t be diverted by the suggestion that Mr. Cohodes is being sued for criticizing Concordia. Mr. Cohodes went on television and alleged that Mark engaged in misconduct early in his career, long before he was involved with Concordia.”) Cohodes continues to berate Thompson on Twitter. He says he spent about 2,000 hours researching the corporate and considers it his greatest-ever brief funding.

Since the autumn of 2014, Cohodes has additionally been shorting one other Canadian enterprise, mortgage lender Home Capital Group in Toronto. The firm stated in 2015 that it suspended 45 brokers for alleged mortgage fraud, and its inventory fell by virtually half from November 2014 by means of the top of January. (Home Capital declined to remark for this story, nevertheless it stated final yr that “there have been no unusual credit issues on these mortgages.”)

For all the great bets, Cohodes says, there have been loads of dangerous ones, too. Take Ebix, a U.S. provider of software program to the insurance coverage business, and Keurig Green Mountain, a specialty espresso maker. Ebix surged greater than sixfold from June 2013, and Keurig Green Mountain was taken personal at a giant premium. Still, Cohodes says his return to brief promoting has “been blessed” and he’s “had two really good years,” however he declines to give particulars.

As properly as betting towards many corporations in Canada, which he sees as a prime searching floor, Cohodes has appeared regularly in Canadian media since 2015 to expose what he sees as the rationale for the bubble in Vancouver actual property. He says the provincial authorities has ignored and even inspired unlawful cash getting into the nation from China. Cohodes says he’s campaigning on this problem with out a revenue motive: His Canadian actual property shorts haven’t any publicity to Vancouver, the place the worth of a typical single-household house surged to C$1.5 million ($1.1 million), about 20 occasions what the median family earns in a yr. In August, British Columbia’s authorities imposed a 15 % tax on overseas consumers to tackle the state of affairs that Cohodes helped spotlight. Vancouver house gross sales plunged 40 % in January over a yr earlier.

In addition to taking care of his son and speaking to regulators, buyers, and journalists about his brief bets, Cohodes makes time to mentor individuals who share the fraud-sniffing gene and whom he’s recognized as brilliant prospects within the short-­promoting enterprise. He speaks with them repeatedly about their concepts—one thing he says additionally advantages him, particularly as a result of he not has the analysis and analytical assets of his personal fund.

It’s one thing he’s all the time achieved. Jerome Souza was a batboy for the Oakland A’s earlier than Cohodes took him beneath his wing, gave him a job at Copper River, and taught him how to be a brief vendor. After the fund closed, Cohodes was supportive when Souza determined to use the detective expertise he discovered there to go to work for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Souza says Cohodes is like a dad to him. The Sunday after Thanksgiving, Souza, 32, and his household drove 13 hours from Tucson to have dinner with Cohodes, his second spouse, Aurora, 51, and Max.

Then there’s Fahmi Quadir. “I don’t know whether to call him my ideal father or ideal lover,” says Quadir, 26, who began brief promoting in 2015 at Krensavage Asset Management in New York. Cohodes calls her “the assassin,” as a result of she operates within the shadows and her brief analysis may be devastating. “He’s so passionate about what he does,” she says of Cohodes. “Meeting Marc changed my life and made me realize what it means to be a short seller.”

Cohodes says he’ll by no means return to managing different individuals’s cash, as a result of his new setup provides him the thrill of being a brief vendor with out hassles like assembly buyers. “Marc has figured out a way to be in the game without being in the game,” Pacific Square’s Greenberg says.

At Concordia’s shareholder assembly in April 2016, in accordance to native media reviews, then-CEO Thompson stated, “If you are a chicken farmer, your chickens will come home to roost.” Cohodes interpreted this as a menace: that he’d get what’s coming to him. Being threatened, Cohodes says, isn’t one thing he takes kindly to, and when he’s he turns into much more decided.

As for these chickens, positive, Cohodes’s eggs might promote for $13 a dozen at Bi-Rite Market in San Francisco, however he warns Thompson and different targets, current and future, not to underneath­estimate him. “Yeah, I have chickens, and yeah, I sell eggs in the city, but I spend about 1/32nd of my day doing chicken work,” he says. “I’m happy that he thinks I’m a chicken farmer. But I’m still intensely focused on some stuff. I will knock their heads off.” 

—Redmond is Japan markets editor for Bloomberg News in Tokyo. With Dakin Campbell, Luke Kawa, Sarah McDonald, Marine Strauss, and John Martens

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[hotfitnesstopics]

When it came to starting a wedding diet, I procastinated. Hard. In fact, a month before the big day I went on a work trip to Morocco and Paris where I ate all of the bread, butter, and chocolate my appetite desired (as one does). Which is all part of the how I found myself muffin-topping over the sides of my strapless Reem Acra gown (pictured, top left) at my last fitting, just two weeks before I was supposed to walk down the aisle. I'll admit, I was bloated at the time from my period, so when it ended a few days before my wedding, my body tightened. But, I was also up a few pounds. Instead of accepting it, I took about four private workout sessions per week with celebrity trainer David Kirsch. The pro is responsible for sculpting the bodies of celebrities (like Jennifer Lopez and Heidi Klum) and has a wealth of fitness and health knowledge (to recap, he's written five books, has his own line of shakes and supplements, and owns a top-notch NYC gym). He put me on a routine that was a mix of cardio, strength training, HIIT, and TRX. Every time we met up, the moves and sequences were different, which kept my body guessing and metabolism revved. But anyone who has successfully lost weight knows diet is more than half of the battle. And pre-getting "Kirsched," I had been working out almost every day anyways. So I do credit his eating plan for partly pushing those five extra pounds off of my body. Related: 25+ Planning, Style, and Life Wedding Tips From a Newlywed Editor Here, I am going to share exactly what I ate - and most importantly, did not eat! - to shed the lbs, so my dress fit perfectly (top right). Note, the dress was not taken in or out between the two images, but my body actually transformed in two weeks! "In my experience working with a bride-to-be, the last couple of weeks leading up to the wedding is uber stressful," Kirsch told me. "As you can attest to personally (Lauren), slight tweaking of your diet will go a long way to keeping you optimally energized, fueled, and looking your very best on the big day!" Image Source: POPSUGAR Photography / Lauren Levinson Let's start with the hard part, things to avoid according to Kirsch: Say goodbye to pizza, because you will not be eating processed carbs (bread, pasta, crackers, etc.) or dairy. "I have found that dairy can cause bloating, and who wants to be bloated on their day?" Kirsch said. And no whole grains or potatoes either. I have personally eliminated both gluten and dairy for weeks and added them back to reveal that I am not intolerant to either. I can have a slice of pizza and feel like a peach, but kicking them out of my diet definitely made my belly flatter. After three days of no carbs, I was craving them! So I texted Kirsch asking if I could have a sweet potato. He told me to crunch on celery instead. It took willpower to follow his advice, but it was worth it. I surely enjoyed sliding into my bathing suit when I arrived at my tropical honeymoon a few days after my wedding. You'll also need to revamp your drinking game. That means, no alcohol (NONE!). While this meant sitting through events, family dinners, and bar nights totally sober, I enjoyed the mental clarity and increased energy in the mornings. "Save the glass of champagne for after you walk down the aisle!" he said. And yes, I got to enjoy a few flutes of well-earned bubbly at my affair . . . and a margarita! Related: How to Customize and Glamorize Your Wedding Look From Head to Toe I also had to limit the amount of coffee I drank. Kirsch recommends having one espresso in the morning. While I stuck to brewed coffee beans, I drank it black. I didn't even add almond milk, and I swear it makes a difference in better digestion. Kirsch believes that "too much coffee can lead to belly bloat!" Think about it, coffee dehydrates you, so you retain water to hold on to it. Instead, switch over to green tea, which has both caffeine and antioxidants. Every morning, I also had one of his A.M. Detox Drinks (it's yummy and fantastic for your skin!). You can see it in the mason jar above. Finally, the hardest (for me, since I have a sweet tooth): no sugar. Even dark chocolate. OK, I may have had a handful of dark chocolate-covered almonds one rough night, but for the most part (like 95 percent) I kissed my beloved cookies, ice cream, and cupcakes goodbye. In fact, my husband hid the chocolate on a very high shelf so I could not reach or find it in our apartment. Do what you need to do to survive, brides! Image Source: POPSUGAR Photography / Lauren Levinson Now onto what you can eat. Disclaimer, this was not Kirsch's exact plan but one loosely based off his advice and what I know works best for my body. For breakfast I stuck to two options. The first, two eggs and sauteed spinach, all cooked in EVOO. Earlier in my wedding prep, I enjoyed that dish with a side of avocado, but the last two weeks I cut it based on Kirsch's recommendation to limit my fat intake (even healthy ones!). Otherwise, I had an antioxidant-rich bowl of unsweetened coconut yogurt with a handful of raw almonds, chia seeds, flax seeds, cacao nibs, and blueberries. While Kirsch recommended no fruit (remember, no sugar!), I know blueberries are good for eliminating belly fat and making skin glow, so I had some anyways. If you're going to have sugar, eat it in the morning so you can burn it off throughout the day. When it came to snacks, I sipped on dark green pressed juice (the kind without fruit) and crunchy veggies (Kirsch likes celery, red peppers, and jicama sticks). I also ate GoMacro bars, which were referred to me by another trainer I'd been working out with, Steve Pasterino. I bent the rules a little since these are made with brown rice syrup, but it ensured that I had an option when I was on-the-go. Dinner and lunch were pretty similar. I'd either have what I dubbed a "Sad Salad" of spinach, crunchy water veggies (cucumber and snow peas), and lean protein (homemade chicken or salmon with no sauces) - all drizzled with EVOO and a lemon squeeze. Snooze. Otherwise, I would cook veggies (such as steamed green beans or asparagus) and have it with the aforementioned lean meat or fish. Sometimes, I would even have the eggs (see: breakfast!) for dinner, which I found very easy to digest. Occasionally, I'd enjoy a green smoothie (kale, spinach, blueberries, almond milk) with pea protein powder. Image Source: Bruce Plotkin Photography And for our grand finale, what to eat during your actual wedding weekend: By then being a bride had taken over my identity (it happens to the best and most chill of us ladies in white). So I brought my own food to the weekend destination, including unsweetened coconut yogurt, hard-boiled eggs, green juice, nuts, seeds, bars, etc. I made sure my hotel room had a fridge to store it in. "The day before is a day that you want to make sure to put the finishing touches," said Kirsch. "You have planned hard, sweated hard, and stayed away from the obvious no-nos. What else can you do? I suggest a relaxing massage, sauna, and steam. Eating foods like asparagus and celery will help keep you full and debloat you." So I couldn't resist a taste of homemade pasta during our rehearsal dinner at a delicious Italian restaurant, but by 7 a.m. the next day, I was back on it. "The day of, I would have a couple of eggs in the morning and oatmeal as you will need the energy and fuel for the rest of the day," Kirsch recommended. "A protein shake for lunch and water for the rest of the day. Save the drinking and eating for after the ceremony, or better yet, for the honeymoon!" Here's what I consumed for breakfast on my wedding day: I had the antioxidant yogurt and seed bowl as well as black coffee; for lunch I ate a simple salad with grilled chicken provided by my venue; and for snack, I went with a GoMacro bar. After the ceremony, my husband and I sat in a separate room and ate every single appetizer (including pork buns, pulled BBQ chicken, mini grilled cheese sandwiches, and more!) and drank champagne. Diet. Over. As the evening went on, I enjoyed the goat cheese salad (CHEESE!), the short rib and sweet potato entree, wedding cake, homemade cookies, and apple cider donuts. There was pizza at our afterparty. I ate that, too. Was dieting fun? No. Was it satisfying? Absolutely not. Was it worth it? Hell yes! For two weeks, you can do this! And you likely will lose inches, but you have to stick to it almost perfectly. We all have our handful of dark chocolate almonds here and there, but make sure you get right back on track. The best part in addition to your tight bod? You can pig out on your honeymoon! (On mine, I sure did my job consuming all of the noodles and dumplings Southeast Asia had to offer . . . and that is another story. Next up: How to get back your hot wedding bod of yesteryear.) Workout sessions for the author were provided by David Kirsch for the purpose of writing this story. from POPSUGAR Fitness https://ift.tt/2qP6hA9 via IFTTT

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