#also would like to note that i text edited and posted this via my laptop rather than my phone so hopefully theres no fatal errors LOL

[slightlyunconventional]

Here goes:, because this has been swimming around in my head:

K/az has injured his arm(s) on their last job. He’s sore, having trouble moving it, it's in a sling, etc., something like that.

And on top of it all, for reasons of your choice, he’s SUPER sneezy.

I just want to read I/nej helping him tend to his nose. Since K/az can't reach it himself (or he can but not without immense amounts of pain). Like, I/nej rubbing his nose gently for him, massaging his nostrils through cloth to help him sneeze or not sneeze, soothing the itch, cleaning it up--anything, just give me I/nej tending to Kaz’s super sneezy irritated nose ^__^; only if you like

THANK YOU for this prompt i adore it so much and i genuinely had so much fun writing this! i hope you enjoy :D

assistance (basically, k/az is a TOTAL mess and i/nej is lovely as usual)

After a nasty run-in with some thugs from a rival club during a job gone sour, K/az found himself in quite the predicament. The kind of predicament that meant both of his arms were out of action. To his credit, he’d held up his own against the gang for a surprisingly long time but still walked away with a broken wrist and a very painful forearm that was most likely fractured - not to mention the sizeable purple bruise he was sporting on his jaw. 

K/az threw open the door and stomped into the Slat looking positively bedraggled. His hat had been discarded somewhere amidst the conflict. 

“It was twenty versus one! I can’t believe he wouldn’t let us get involved!” 

“What, and blow our own cover? Did you want us to die?”

“He probably died!”

“Saints, J/es, N/ina, calm down. He was putting up a good fight, I’m sure he’ll be- oh, K/az,” I/nej said, spotting K/az as he entered the room. She stood up from the table where J/esper and N/ina were bickering and approached the rain-soaked man.

“Yes, I took care of them all,” Kaz rasped, answering Inej’s question before she could even ask it. 

The gap between them was almost closed as Inej stepped forward, looking closely at his face. 

“Are you okay?” she dared to ask.

Kaz let his expression soften at her words.

“I’m okay,” he hesitated, “well, I’ll be okay.”

Concern blossomed in Inej’s eyes like the petals of a crocus.

“You know that’s not what I want to hear.”

Kaz remained silent. He was suddenly acutely aware of each and every droplet of water sliding from his hair and onto the floor, and the way his sodden clothes clung to his skin, and the warmth he felt in his cheeks from Inej’s proximity even under the sting of a fresh bruise. Another drop of rain slipped from Kaz’s mess of soaked black hair, falling down right between their faces. Inej’s eyes tracked the droplet down as it fell to the floorboards. She lifted her gaze to meet his. The heat in Kaz’s cheeks grew, much to his resentment.

“I think you dropped something,” she said quietly, looking back down at the rain-spattered ground.

The corners of Kaz’s lips twitched. He noted the glint in Inej’s deep brown eyes.

A (surprisingly clean) towel ruined the moment by soaring right into their faces. Kaz and Inej looked up simultaneously, met by Jesper’s shit-eating grin.

“Good fight, boss? I knew you’d come out on top,” he said smugly.

“Were you not just panicking because you thought he was dead?” Nina asked with her eyebrows raised.

Inej snorted.

“No idea what you’re talking about, Nins.” 

Now it was Kaz’s turn to raise his eyebrows. “And why did you throw a towel at me?”

Jesper shrugged. “Looked like you needed it.”

Kaz sighed. He took the towel from Inej who had picked it up off the floor where it had landed. Inej clocked the way he winced when reaching his arm out.

“Thank you,” Kaz said quietly. He made his way over to the stairs, the gazes of everyone in the room like lasers on his back. Inej watched him closely and, seeing his extra-pronounced limp and the shake of the arm holding his cane with every step, decided to follow him. 

“I don’t believe I asked for an entourage.” 

“It’s not just your room that's upstairs,” Inej replied, a little too quickly. She knew Kaz didn’t believe her, but he still let her trail behind him as he ascended the stairs lopsidedly. They walked in silence until they reached Kaz’s room, when he looked back at her with a single eyebrow lifted. Inej took this as her cue to pretend to disappear into her own room. She definitely didn’t imagine the pained sigh that escaped Kaz. As soon as he’d shut his door, she slipped back out into the corridor and stood quietly outside, listening.

She heard the creak of Kaz’s chair as he lowered himself into it, then a heavy clatter on the floor.

“Shit,” muttered Kaz. The chair creaked again. Probably dropped his cane, Inej thought, strange, though, that’s not like him. The patter of the rain on the roof and windows severely hindered her ability to listen in on him, however. 

After a few moments, Inej did manage to hear a rather wet-sounding thump, presumably Kaz discarding his thick, wool greatcoat onto the floor. Another sigh. Part of her wanted to enter the room and see him, help dry his hair, hang his coat up by the window, fall asleep with her head resting on his firm shoulder, but she knew she shouldn’t. So she waited, she listened. 

“Oh, Saints,” Inej heard after a short while. She had not a second to wonder why Kaz had said that, as the next moment she heard a sound she hadn’t heard in a very long time. 

“hehH’GNKTSschew!”

She then heard what she thought was Kaz sucking a sharp breath in through his teeth. He’s in pain, she realised. A million thoughts barrelled through her mind - is he sick? Injured? Both? Inej worried at her lower lip, knowing now that Kaz was in way worse condition than he was letting on. Against her better judgement, she slowly pushed open the door… right as Kaz was (trying to) stifle another harsh sneeze.

“hH’GKKTTSChhiew! Huhh…” 

The hand he used to pinch his nose was shaking slightly as he lifted it from his face. His brows were drawn tightly together and his teeth were gritted, hard - Inej had never seen him looking so pained. He looked up at Inej who was hovering in the doorway, hand still lifted cautiously in the air, as though he was scared to put it down. 

“Saints above, Kaz. You said you were fine,” Inej said with worry.

Kaz averted his eyes. “I am fine,” he replied shortly. 

Inej approached him and gently took his gloved hand in hers. 

“Don’t-” he started, teeth still gritted. He yanked his hand away instinctively. She noticed how his face paled slightly.

“What happened to your hands, Kaz?” asked Inej, quietly but firmly. Kaz still didn’t meet her gaze.

“Nothing.”

“You can’t expect me to believe that.”

Kaz hesitated. He looked down at his hand.

“Broke it. My wrist,” he muttered with reluctance, “Think the other arm’s fractured, too.”

Inej held back a gasp. “Tell me you’re joking.”

Kaz shook his head, hair still damp from the torrential rain.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” she asked incredulously, “In fact, nevermind that, we need Nina to fix-”

“No, we don’t-!” Kaz cut in. His words were tinted with a note of panic that she’d never heard before.

Inej let her shoulders lower. She sighed. “At least let me patch you up, then.”

“Fine.”

“Right. Good. I’ll get the first aid kit,” Inej said, beginning to turn away.

“-hahH’KKSCHHhiew! Oh, God, I-” Kaz sneezed wetly and openly, cringing at the mess it left on his upper lip. He raised his hand weakly to his face to cover it.

“Saints, and I’ll get some tissues. Try not to move your arms around too much, okay?” Inej said. She left the room.

-

A short while later, Inej returned to Kaz’s room, clutching a box containing the Slat’s first aid kit, as well as a rather old-looking box of tissues. He was still sitting at his desk, one arm hanging at his side, the other with its hand resting carefully on the tabletop. His nose had become significantly pinker since Inej last saw him, which was only mere minutes prior. She was greeted with another grating sneeze.

“haHH’GKKSHHhiew!”

“Bless you,” Inej offered.

“I’m sorry, I… cah-cahhn’tseemtostop-! huhH’KTSCHHh! ‘GKKSCHH! hah-hAH’KKTSCHHhiew!”

“Wow. Bless you, bless you, bless you,” Inej said with a sympathetic smile, “Oh, you’ve made a real mess of yourself there, Kaz.”

He lifted his hand to clean himself up, but tensed up at the pain. Inej leaned forward and gently helped his arm back down.

“Here, let me.”

“There’s a hahh-handker-’TSSCHhiew! Ugh. Handkerchief, in my coat.”

“That’ll be soaking wet, Kaz. I have tissues.”

She plucked a couple of tissues from the box she’d placed on Kaz’s desk and used them to gently clean up Kaz’s face. He sighed.

“You know I can do it myself,” he said thickly, voice muffled by the soft tissues in front of his face.

“I know you can, but is it going to do you any good?” Inej asked; a rhetorical question. She made sure to keep her touch on his face gentle. She knew how sensitive his nose could get. As if on cue, Inej felt Kaz’s nose flare under the tissues.

“‘Nej, I’m going to-” His breaths were rapid and shallow.

“I know.”

“But I don’t wanna sn- haHH’GKKTSCHHhew! haH’ISCHHhiew!” He cut himself off with two heavy, messy sneezes, right into the tissues in Inej’s hand. “Saints, I’m sorry,” he added breathlessly.

“Bless you, bless you. It’s okay.” Inej gently cleaned his face once again. The pure exhaustion in his coffee-brown eyes sent a pang of pity through her heart.

“You really don’t need to say ‘bless you’ every… hahh… every- oh- sorry, I’m- haHH’KKSHHHhiew!”

Inej smiled. “Bless you.”

Kaz rolled his eyes. Inej tightened her hand on his face slightly.

“Blow,” she instructed. Kaz looked up at her in disbelief.

“I really don’t think that’s-”

“You heard me,” she cut in, “By the sound of those sneezes, you need it.”

The dark haired man hesitated, but eventually leaned into the tissues with a sigh, and blew his nose heavily. Inej smiled sympathetically. Kaz emerged looking positively mortified.

“Never doing that again,” he muttered.

“You wouldn’t have had to if you didn’t insist on taking on that entire gang on your own,” Inej pointed out. Kaz shot her a look. She tilted her head at him, still smiling softly. “Now let’s get you bandaged up, okay?”

He nodded. Inej opened the first-aid box and pulled out a roll of wide bandages.

“Roll up your sleeve for me,” she said gently. He obliged.

Inej got to work wrapping his broken wrist in bandages - it was the best she could do, considering Kaz refused to let Nina see to him, at least for now. It wasn’t long before Kaz’s breath caught again. He turned his head away from Inej, trying his best to keep his hand still as she tended to it.

“Sorry- hahH’KKSCHHIEWhh!” 

“Bles-” Inej started.

Kaz shook his head. “N-not done-” he said, panting. “hAH’KTSCHHUHh!”

His whole body shook with the force of each sneeze, his shoulders tensing and legs jolting slightly upwards. Luckily, Inej had finished wrapping his broken wrist, so she could stop to once again tend to Kaz’s nose. She pressed two fresh tissues to his face and massaged his nose ever so gently. His breath caught sharply.

“Don’t, that’s too- hahH-! Too gentle, I’m g-go--huHH’GKKSCHHHh! ‘SSCHHHhiew!”

“Oh, Saints, sorry. You really can’t stop, can you?” Inej said, still cradling his face with the thick wad of tissue.

“It’s the rain, or something. Apparently it really g-gets to… to… me-'' Kaz's eyes narrowed and Inej felt his nostrils flare desperately even through the tissues. His breath hitched.

“haAHhdt-! huh-hUH-huhHh- oh, S-saints, it’s not comi- haAH-!”

“Stuck, huh?” Inej teased, “Happens to the best of us.”

Inej decided to reuse her “too-gentle” massaging technique to ease Kaz along. Perhaps it worked a little too well - he exploded into a series of tearing, messy sneezes, each outburst just barely caught in Inej’s hand.

“haAHh’GNKTSCHHhuhh! ‘KKSCHHIEW! ‘SHHHhew! hah-hAH-hAHH’KZZSCHIEWhh! ‘IZZSCHHhiew!”

He was left panting, almost unable to catch his breath. Inej reached for a few more tissues, keeping the used ones braced to Kaz’s face in case of another incident. She now held a thick wad of tissues, pressed to Kaz’s streaming reddened nose. 

“Bless you - I don’t even know how many times,” Inej said with a slight laugh. She cleaned up the rest of the mess that had gathered on his face with the tissues, all while Kaz’s cheeks turned pink in true mortification. Inej noticed this and added, “You don’t have to be embarrassed. This happens to everyone.” 

She saw Kaz’s shoulders relax slightly and he exhaled slowly.

“Saints, that was awful. I’m sor-” he started.

“Don’t apologise. You know I value being able to care for you. I’m glad you let me.”

Kaz nodded silently. He leaned back in his chair, exhaustion now clear in his face.

“Let’s get to that other arm now, shall we?”

[mittensmorgul]

The Tumblr Beta Version: an objective analysis

I was tempted to just type “it sucks.” And while that is an objective analysis, it’s not exactly helpful. I’ve sent several requests to @staff and @support to restore my account to the old tumblr dashboard format, and received the same automated reply twice now. I’ll copy/paste it here so everyone is on the same page:

(lol, I had to go back and edit this, because apparently the beta version doesn’t display block quotes on the dash. So I’ve also put the block quotes in italics... hopefully it’ll display properly... note after editing: nope, it doesn’t display italics either... how the heck am I supposed to differentiate quoted text? I’ll start each quoted bit with an asterisk, I guess...)

*Thanks for reaching out about the beta dashboard.

*We're currently testing it out, and your account seems to have been selected to take part in the test. Thanks for your patience while we work on it! At this time there is not a way to opt out of testing. You may see your Tumblr experience return to normal as we continue testing.

WE CAN ONLY HOPE.

*In the meantime, check out some of the new features available only in the beta dashboard:

OKAY TUMBLR, IF YOU INSIST, though I would MUCH rather have back all the functionality I personally invested into this website through xkit... you know... making the site ACTUALLY FUNCTIONAL. Let’s see what this beta version has given me instead of functionality:

*Change Palettes: Go to the person icon, then click "Change Palette." You'll find the classic Tumblr blue, dark mode, and a few other color palettes for your dash.

So I tried out all the color palettes. In addition to the ones mentioned here, there’s one that’s trying to look like a green screen terminal that gives me flashbacks to the early 80′s. There’s a reason we stopped using green screen terminals... Another one is “canary yellow.” It’s very yellow. The “classic tumblr” isn’t actually classic tumblr... all the post boxes are dark blue with grey type, not white with black type. And all the other colors are the insanely bright fluorescent of the new Dark Blue standard tumblr scheme. Which means links are practically invisible unless I highlight them. It’s migraine inducing. The one theme with a light colored background is called “Concrete” or “Cement” or something like that and even that only works for about half an hour before the migraine aura really kicks in. I just want my Old Blue via xkit back. You know, what tumblr actually used to look like. I don’t want any of these horrible color palettes. None of them work for me.

*The new "meatballs" menu: This is where you can copy the post link, unfollow the Tumblr who made or reblogged the post, or report a violation to our Community Guidelines.

I could do all of this from the user menus with xkit, too. I don’t regularly report violations or have the urge to block people I have chosen to follow. Why on earth would I want to do any of this? And why would I want these features located directly beside the post link copy feature? 

You know what I do miss? I miss the xkit timestamps feature. I didn’t have to hover dangerously close to the KILL IT WITH FIRE meatballs menu in order to see when a post was made, and in this era of disinformation and misinformation spreading around this site faster than Covid-19, being able to see when a post was ORIGINALLY created is a far more useful feature than an easier way to block people. For reference: I currently have three blogs blocked. Two of them are pornbots. One is a nazi. If I don’t want someone’s content on my dash, I don’t follow them. This “feature” is entirely useless to me.

*A quick note: Pagination is not supported in this beta test, but we're collecting feedback to send to our engineers.

THIS IS THE ABSOLUTE WORST. This beta test might actually be tolerable if I wasn’t trapped into endless scrolling. If I could page through my dash, refreshing it every ten posts or so. You know why? Because once I scroll about 30 posts down my dash, tumblr starts overheating my laptop under the load of ALL THOSE POSTS. Things start malfunctioning-- it takes longer and longer to load new posts the farther I scroll. And the keyboard navigation (both page down and hitting J to advance to the next post, and even just using the down arrow to scroll as I read a long post) freeze and stop functioning. One of my laptop fans has actually begun to malfunction.

You know why this wasn’t a problem on the old version? If the data load got to heavy, I could open a post in a new tab, click view on dash with xkit, and voila! Brand new tab! I could close the malfunctioning tab and everything would be refreshed to normal! But without pagination, THAT IS IMPOSSIBLE.

Also, after reblogging a few posts, the beta version of this site breaks, and doesn’t open a post tab to add commentary or even tags. It just... reblogs the untagged post with no warning whatsoever. You know... that’s really really not cool. I tag EVERYTHING. Well, almost everything. The tags are the only way to keep track of the 40k+ posts on my blog. And warn people that I am posting potential spoilers, or other specific content. It’s REALLY inconvenient to have to either immediately go to my blog to edit the post and add tags, or even comments. The alternative is to scroll up to open individual posts I want to reblog in a new tab, and then reblog directly there. Ironically enough, THOSE pages actually open with xkit installed, and everything (surprise!) functions perfectly there.

It’s perfectly reasonable to understand why this specific issue has limited the number of posts I reblog. Reblogging content should not be this much of a hassle. Creators have been complaining for a while that reblogs have drastically slowed down, and I think making it even more annoying and difficult to reblog posts will not help this problem.

Also, with xkit enabled, there’s a function that auto-loads images as you scroll, so the images are always visible BEFORE they appear on screen. I don’t have to look at the colored boxes and wonder if this is a post I’ve already seen or something I should sit and wait for. Don’t even think about watching tumblr videos. Loading priority is given to the ads that you cannot pause or dismiss, so that video loads and plays in choppy two second bursts instead of being given priority. Since that’s the content I am actually here to consume, it kinda makes me want to do the opposite of patronizing anyone who advertises here with graphically intense ads. And then when you scroll away, with xkit, gifs and videos you’ve scrolled past STOP loading and playing, which I think might be contributing to the intensity of the resource hogging that’s literally melting down my laptop.

And for reference, I have a pretty decent little gaming laptop. A blogging platform shouldn’t be driving it to the brink of frying itself. I didn’t realize just how much xkit worked to streamline this and provide basic functionality to this site.

*And lastly, if you're an XKit user, know that the XKit team is working hard to update things on their end to make it compatible with the beta dashboard.

And this doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what I’ve lost without xkit. And this is a really REALLY garbage response to user complaints. “Oh, yeah, sorry we made our site suck even worse, but those nice people who do our jobs for free will surely fix our garbage soon!”

Dear wonderful people at @new-xkit-extension, I love you, and I miss you, and while I wish xkit worked with this beta version I’ve been forced into living with, I truly feel for y’all who are trying to deal with this nonsense on behalf of all of us.

And to the folks at Tumblr... maybe try to just... make your site actually more like xkit. You know, actually functional. None of these special new features are useful or functional to me. I respectfully request for a fourth time to be removed from this inane beta test.

Give us OPTIONS. Let us display ALL THE TAGS without having to click a button. Let me have back my Activity+ that actually allowed me to interact with people from my dash! That showed me real-time inline notifications in a way that I could reply to with a single click! Bring me back to my column of open messaging conversation icons so I have easy access to the people I talk with throughout the day instead of closing them all every time I refresh the page. I already feel socially isolated in freaking quarantine, please stop shutting off all my avenues of communication!

Let us have pagination! I mean, maybe it wasn’t the best idea to force heavy users of this site into a beta version that doesn’t allow us to opt out until your engineers had actually figured out how to make it work in a very basic way.

*Let me know if there's anything else I can help you with!

YES. PLEASE REMOVE ME FROM THIS BETA TEST NOW. I have let you know exactly what I want from this site. I just want it to ACTUALLY WORK. For someone who spends 12+ hours a day on this site, this beta test version is NONFUNCTIONAL. PLEASE ALLOW ME TO OPT OUT. I AM LITERALLY BEGGING YOU. I WILL ACTUALLY PAY YOU CASH MONEY TO ALLOW ME TO OPT OUT OF THIS AND GO BACK TO HAVING A FUNCTIONAL BLOG AGAIN. WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!

PLEASE! 

I AM OFFICIALLY AT THE END OF MY PATIENCE FOR ENDURING THIS NIGHTMARE.

(one final quick note... I’ve only been back on my dash long enough to make the parenthetical edits-- i.e. adding italics that don’t display and then adding the asterisks at the beginning of each section of quoted text, and already my laptop is overheating again. For reference, I originally typed this entire post from within my tumblr inbox page-- which still functions normally with xkit-- and spent over an hour on it. My laptop was fine the entire time. Clearly the issue is this beta version of the website. I will never forgive tumblr if y’all fry my literal only portal to the outside world at this time. PUT ME BACK TO NORMAL NOW. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY INFURIATING AND ENTIRELY UNACCEPTABLE. Thanks)

(oops apparently i lied... when the asterisks and the previous final note failed to display, I thought that seemed suspicious, and realized that I literally needed to refresh my entire dash in order to see edited changes. Funny how xkit enabled me to do that in real time, which is just another bit of functionality I’ve lost with this beta program. Please guys, this is really, really not working for me at all, just put it back.)

[clarawatson]

Give us some book or poetry recommendations, Please.

This ask has blessed me 💖💖. This is also a long post, promise I'll put it under 'read more' once I turn on my laptop

Hmm let us see. I'll try to get my finger into every pie.

🌸poetry🌸

I am very white in my poetry consumption, I admit this. (And very limited, poetry confuses me) so I'll give you 2 categories: ones that inspired my Quiet Birds AU and poems I know my friends enjoyed).

Quiet Birds Inspo:

Do Not Stand At My Grave and Weep (Mary Elizabeth Frye) ~ I read this in highschool and it ended up in every book I own. (Genuinely. It's in my art book of all places).

Caged Bird (Maya Angelou) ~ I just love this poem tbh.

Poems my friends enjoyed:

The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock (T.S.Eliot) - "the poem gay, kids" is the note I have at the bottom of my notes on that poem.

Poetry (Marianne Moore) -- it's a poem about hating poetry.

Mary Szybist's Incarnadine -- this is an anthology I did not enjoy but my friends did.

🌸books🌸

Thriller(s):

Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn)-- even if you've watched the movie or know spoilers, this book is a treat. It is so well done.

The Cry (Helen Fitzgerald) -- it's only small (307 pages!) But if you're interested in original work vs TV adaptation I highly recommend watching the 4 part mini series and reading the book, it's interesting how the two approach Joanna (I'm inclined more towards TV Joanna).

History based dystopian(s):

The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood) -- i had to make sure I was in a good headspace to read this (it has some very heavy topics and I would NEVER tell anyone they had to read it, it made me very uncomfortable) but I am grateful i did.

The Natural Way of Things (Charlotte Wood) -- is a modern day take on Women's Prisons or "reformation centres" those places for ""troubled girls"" (y'know, they had sex, lock them away) very arty but very good and makes you think!!

Queer Young Adult:

Amelia Westlake Was Never Here (Erin Gough) -- two lesbians take down homophobic, racist and sex offending teachers via an allias in the school paper and accidentally fall in love.

Her Royal Highness (Rachel Hawkins) -- falling in love with royalty at a Scottish boarding school only it's lesbian.

~Queer~:

To be taught, if fortunate (Becky Chambers) -- novella!! 134 pages!! an astronaut sends back her final letter to earth, not knowing if anyone survived. Incredibly diverse, has everything. (A pansexual MC and a trans biologist and an understanding the whole ship is poly?? So good)

Red, White & Royal Blue (Casey McQuinston) -- the president's son falls in love with the prince of England. Has quite explicit smut sometimes, wouldn't recommend reading anywhere someone can read over you shoulder.

Fantasy:

Stardust (Neil Gaiman) -- again, another one that isn't spoiled by knowing the movie or the book. Both stand alone perfectly.

Four Dead Queens (Astrid Scholte) -- this book was incredible. It's got a bad rep on goodreads because two of the dead Queens are queer (not a spoiler) but it's genuinely a good book (i, a queer, say so) and pulls off its plot twists effortlessly and always has you looking in the wrong direction.

Children's fantasy:

Strangeworlds Travel Agency (L.D. Lapinski) -- 11 year old girl and her new 18 year old friend pretend they're in Doctor Who via suitcases and there's a bunch of canonical queers.

Nevermoor (Jessica Townsend) -- you gotta fight through that first 200 pages (it works really hard at NOT being Harry Potter) and then it comes into itself. Townsend was also very quick to speak out against Rowling (also evident in source material that constantly has people pulled up for being mean, and calls out human rights violations, also Queer characters).

YA Fantasy:

The Medoran Chronicles (Lynette Noni) -- 5 book fantasy series featuring female protagonist. I only read them last year, they're brilliant. First book kind of reads like Harry Potter fanfic but it does not continue in that direction.

Authors i would just recommend in general:

Patrick Ness

John Flanagan

Lynette Noni

If you're looking for something more visual:

Illuminae (Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff) -- it's a compilation of ship blue prints, emails, chat logs, classified files, debrief interviews, transcripts and security footage. Such a good book.

Favourite text(s) I studied:

Dracula (Bram Stoker) -- my best friend bought me a collectors edition for my birthday because I ruined my first edition when I read it at the Gardens and it started raining.

Animals People (indra sinha) -- a fictionalised account of the Bhopal Disaster, meant to draw attention towards it.

Swallow the Air (Tara June Winch) -- May sets out the find her Aboriginal identity while her family falls apart after her mothers death.

[olicitysecretsanta]

Convergence

For @swiftletinthecloud 

Hello! We have never met or spoken before, but I am so happy to have you as my giftee because now we have! I was so happy about your response to my anon ask about what kinds of fic you like, because so many of your interests are also mine. It was actually a problem because I had too many interesting ideas for fic that were inspired by your suggestions. Now I just have more fic to write, I guess. 

Anyway, I decided to write this idea for you because it was the SHORTEST of all the ideas I had. You can see how well that turned out. What is below is 2 out of 3 total chapters. The last chapter still needs editing, so your gift will be fully complete when I post this to AO3. Until then, please enjoy these first two chapters of season 1 alternate canon!

Much love, @allimariexf

Title: Convergence

Warnings: No warnings apply

Relationship: Oliver Queen/Felicity Smoak

Tags: Arrow season 1, alternate canon AU, episode tag 1x21 (The Undertaking)

Chapter 1

Oliver Queen moved like a panther through the underground casino, a sleek and beautiful predator at home among the understated opulence. His eyes strayed around the room, a careless smirk masking his close assessment of the security.

Two pit bosses, a floorman, and six armed guards, two of which flanked a hallway that must lead to Dominic Alonzo’s office. If he was going to get in there, he needed to come up with a distraction.

His mind went back to the document he’d found saved on his computer. Like all the previous messages he’d gotten over the past seven months, it took the form of a simple text file, saved prominently on the desktop of his computer in the foundry.

December 12, 2012: Harold Backman deposits $2 million to Cayman Fidelity on behalf of Dominic Alonzo, known kidnapper.

Also December 12: Walter Steele goes missing.

Coincidence? I don’t think so. 

I know I normally don’t agree with your “shoot first, ask questions later” policy, but I’m willing to give you a pass on Alonzo. He seems like just the kind of low-life someone would pay to kidnap Mr. Steele. How many arrows do you think you’d need to put in Alonzo before he gave up Mr. Steele’s location - probably a lot, right?

Never mind, forget I said that. Alonzo’s private records are offline - likely stored in his office in his base of operations, an underground casino with basically its own private army. Not the best odds, even for you. But I have a plan that doesn’t involve arrows or any other pointy objects, so sit tight and I’ll contact you tomorrow. 

The corners of his lips lifted at the memory. The anonymous hacker who’d been helping him certainly had a way with words, and in their months together she’d often surprised him with her uncannily insightful observations. But if she honestly thought he’d sit back and wait when they finally had a solid lead on finding Walter, maybe she didn’t know him as well as he sometimes suspected. Not when Walter had been missing for almost five months and the likelihood of him being found alive decreased every day. Not with the recorded evidence John Diggle had collected that seemed to confirm his mother had something to do with Walter’s disappearance - and that it was all connected to the List. 

Oliver was tired of waiting for answers. This was something he could do. It just so happened that this time, he needed a bespoke suit of Italian wool, rather than green leather in order to do it.

Eyes tracking the movement of the guards, Oliver positioned himself at a well-situated roulette table. Several wealthy patrons crowded around the dealer, including an elegant brunette who instantly met his gaze. 

“You’re Oliver Queen,” she purred, reaching out with graceful fingers to draw him toward her. Slipping easily into the role, he let his eyes travel down her body as she trailed her hand down his arm. 

Choosing not to answer with words, he winked and held out his dice for her to blow on. It was enough to maintain the part he was playing, and in another life he would have taken her up on the unspoken invitation written in every line of her body. But as his eyes slid down her lithe frame, he barely saw her. Instead, he was seeking something else, some spark of her. 

Huli jing. 

His anonymous hacker ally. 

His thoughts turned to her, as they had increasingly done over the past several months. Who was she, in her normal life? Where was she, what was she doing? When he mingled among the residents of Starling City by day, could she be right next to him, without either of them realizing it? Like always, the possibility sent a thrill of excitement through him.

Part of him was acutely aware that it was futile, even ridiculous, to entertain those thoughts, but as long as they only existed on the fringes of his mind, he indulged them. His life was his mission, and there was no room for anything else, but there was no harm in letting his mind play with the idea of her in his downtime. Not when there was no chance they could ever meet. So when he put in his appearances at Verdant, when he met up with Thea at her favorite cafe, when he picked up his mom from Queen consolidated, he allowed himself to wonder. And if his eyes caught on long red hair, a charming smile, or a long length of exposed thigh, he’d mentally compare the woman in front of him with his mental picture of her. But none of them ever had her unique, undefinable spark. And somehow, by comparison, every woman he saw seemed somehow less because they were not her.

She had contacted him for the first time seven months ago, though “contacted” hardly felt like the right term. He’d arrived at the foundry and booted up his computer one night only to find the entire system had been upgraded, and simple text document saved to the desktop:

I’m truly stunned that no one managed to trace the redistribution of Adam Hunt’s funds back to you. No one else, I mean. 

Now that I mention it, I’m even more surprised you managed to steal that $40 million in the first place. Your system looks like it’s from the 80s.

(And not the good part of the 80s, like Madonna and legwarmers, to be clear.) I maybe spruced things up a little bit while I was in there. Seeing a network that poorly set up hurts me in my soul. Seriously it was like you left a crying infant on my doorstep, except it was like a 30 year old baby and it wasn’t my doorstep, because I was the one who kind of broke into your house. But my point is, you have a severely neglected computer setup, and I guess my maternal instinct kicked in. So to speak.

Oliver had barely finished reading the note before he’d ransacked the bunker, searching for evidence of a breach. When he found none, he read the note several more times, seeking hidden clues as to what the infiltrator knew, what they wanted. The program he used to take Adam Hunt’s money was something he’d taken from ARGUS, and no one should have been able to track it. Deeply alarmed, he read the note again and again. Not until the sixth time did he finally consider the playful tone of the note might be sincere, and only then did it occur to him that there might not be a threat buried in the message at all.  

He remained on heightened alert for several days after that, but only on principle. The improvements she’d made (and she was a she, he was sure) to his system made his ARGUS programs run faster, and while using compromised equipment was normally a risk he would never take, his gut told him there was no danger. For reasons he didn’t examine, he found himself rereading the note, until he had it memorized word for word. 

When he didn’t hear from her for three weeks, he told himself the sense of disappointment he felt was only because lingering questions felt too much like unfinished business. Not because he was intrigued by the hacker. Not because her note had made him smile the way no one had since he’d returned from the island. 

He was starting to think of the incident as an amusing, but ultimately harmless one-time stunt when one night, after an afternoon of failing to get data off of Floyd Lawton’s computer and an evening taking his frustration out on a slum lord, he returned to the foundry and discovered a large data dump open on his computer - along with another note. 

Blueprints to the Exchange Building, where the Unidac Industries auction is scheduled to take place. Gonna be a pretty target-rich environment. For the person who is trying to eliminate bidders in the auction via assassination, I mean. Which, to be clear, someone IS trying to do, according to the SCPD’s unreleased records. Anyway, do with this information as you wish. (Not “as you wish,” as in code for “I love you.” Obviously, I don’t even know you. Though from the captured video footage of you, I can say with confidence that you can really wear a pair of leather pants. Anyway, speaking of Westley, the papers are calling you “the vigilante” or “the hood,” but maybe you should consider adopting Dread Pirate Roberts. A name that inspires fear, so that you don’t have to do so much arrowing in order to get your point across. You should consider it. Good luck with the auction.

Oliver huffed out his nose, struck by her abrupt topic changes and her particular, rambly way of putting things before it even occurred to him to wonder how she’d managed to pull any information off Lawton’s damaged laptop. Or question whether she had any ulterior motive in doing so.

It was unusual for him to trust anyone so quickly, especially someone he knew virtually nothing about. But somehow, he did, and when her tip about Lawton proved sound, he found he wasn’t surprised at all. 

After that he began to seek out her help, adopting her habit of communicating via text document saved to his computer. With each tip she left him, she proved herself invaluable to bringing down another of the city’s worst offenders. He could tell that she was brave, fearless even, and before he knew it, they had developed a rapport. And while it wasn’t exactly a partnership, it worked. 

If I’m the the Dread Pirate Roberts, who are you? He asked finally, against the advice of the inner voice that cautioned him that the more he knew about her, the harder it would be to one day give her up.

But in answer, all she said was, You can call me Huli jing.

The Dark Archer, Ted Gaynor, Count Vertigo, Ken Williams, and the list went on. The notes came more frequently, and Oliver found himself looking forward to them, the first thing he’d check for every night. Even having never been there, she filled the dark, dank foundry basement with a bright presence that was just as tangible as John Diggle’s reliable support. 

What do you think keeps these bad guys up at night? Probably not worrying about that one time they accidentally stared at a man for two full minutes while they were busy trying to figure out what the Cylons’ plan really was. They said they had “a Plan,” like capital P PLAN, you know? Anyway, despite what that guy probably thought, I was NOT creeping on him. But to my point, now that I think of it these criminals probably just close their eyes and get a full 8 hours every night. Sometimes it really sucks to have a conscience.

As the months wore on, he learned that she wielded a formidable intelligence, a sharp sense of humor, an unerring sense of justice, and, somehow, an unshakeable confidence in his mission. In him. She became a voice in his head that he couldn’t tune out. And he found, more and more, that he didn’t want to.

Anyway, while I’m at it, did you ever think about not killing some of these thugs? Look, I get it - they’re taking shots at you and you’re just trying to stay alive, but on the other hand, they’re just hired guns and you’re…you know. You. All I’m saying is, with your aim - which I have seen evidence of, so please don’t start with the false modesty - you could just as easily be shooting these guys in the hand or leg or something, you know? Anyway. Just a thought.

Before he realized it, she had come to haunt his thoughts. When he was wrestling with a problem, he found himself playing out imaginary conversations with her, unerringly channeling her firm conviction and steady support. 

He didn’t even know what she looked like, but he couldn’t get her out of his head. Sometimes he thought he was half in love with her. No; that was ridiculous. It was the fantasy, the not knowing, that fascinated him. The idea that she could be anyone. He told himself didn’t want to know who she really was, because there was no way the reality could live up to the fantasy he’d built up in his mind.

A rough voice, intentionally pitched to grab his attention, cut into his reverie. “Is that Oliver Queen?” 

“No, couldn’t be,” came a loud, theatrical reply, drawing closer toward him. 

“Why not?” the first voice asked from somewhere right behind him. Oliver turned his head to present the speakers with a careless smirk.

“Because Oliver Queen wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like this,” the second man sneered, pressing a gun against his back.

The gun cocked. “Well then I guess he has a death wish.”

So much for blending in, he thought as they dragged him toward the back hallway.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Felicity stilled her frantic movements to free herself from the ties that were cutting into her wrists as the door abruptly opened and a man was pushed inside. She tried not to gape as her captor stepped in behind him and roughly zip-tied his hands behind his back, exactly as he had done to Felicity not ten minutes before. 

Despite her situation, she couldn’t stop the flow of words that spilled out of her mouth when she saw who had joined her. “Oh, great. It’s you.” The newcomer whipped his head up and she locked gazes with a pair of striking blue eyes. 

Strangely, the first thought that crossed her mind was that if she had known her curiosity about the hood was going to lead to crossing paths with Oliver Queen, she would never have tried to solve the mystery of Adam Hunt’s $40 million in the first place.

Though to be fair, her interest in the Hood pre-dated the article that mentioned Hunt’s missing money, so she couldn’t entirely blame her entanglement with the vigilante on her compulsive need to unravel knotty mysteries. And it wasn’t just the allure of a dark and brooding man who could pull off leather, either. Something about his single-minded dedication and passion, at the risk to his own freedom and safety, was simply irresistible. 

It was curiosity that first led her to him. Maybe boredom. Her job was monotonous and unchallenging, something she’d sought out after her brief brush with hacktivism had backfired so spectacularly. When she first read about the Hood, she dismissed him as some whacko loose canon. But she followed the story - and the police reports - for lack of anything better to do. But when she read that Adam Hunt claimed the Hood had stolen $40 million, Felicity was intrigued. A crazy person couldn’t - wouldn’t - pull something like that off. So she hacked into Hunt’s accounts, following the trail back to a program that emptied the money and redistributed it to Hunt’s victims. It was shockingly easy, like following a flashing neon sign, and she was legitimately stunned that the police hadn’t managed to do the same. They also had no idea that the missing money had been returned to its rightful owners. On impulse, she erased the digital evidence. 

She could have left it at that, but the mystery was too compelling. She told herself she just wanted to make sure she hadn’t just enabled a psycho or terrorist to do even more psychotic and terrifying things, but the truth was, the fact that he’d quietly returned Hunt’s victims’ money to them cast him in an entirely unexpected light. She needed to know more.

She found that his system was alarmingly, disturbingly unprotected. And primitive. Really, it wasn’t even tolerable for the tiny amount of poking around and passive monitoring that she planned to do. Which is why she discreetly updated speed and capacity as much as she could without added hardware, then added a few dozen security protocols, because anything less was begging the police to come find him. 

Then she established several monitoring programs and alerts, and waited. Just a few weeks later, she got an alert that an unprotected device had been plugged in - a quick remote in revealed that it was one of those Tuff laptops, with a damaged system. It was clear that the Hood hadn’t been able to access the drive, but Felicity was curious, so she remotely cloned the data and opened it on her own system. When she discovered the blueprints of the Exchange Building on the drive, she remembered that the Unidac auction was shortly going to be held there, which naturally reminded her of recent news that one of bidders, James Holder of Holder Group, had recently been murdered. Which naturally then led to a little bit of unsanctioned poking around the SCPD’s internal files, and before she knew it the she found herself composing a message to the Hood before she’d even consciously decided to get involved.

After all, she didn’t actually want to be involved. She was just an IT girl, and she intended to keep a low profile. But the possibility that she could help prevent another murder weighed on her conscience, so she left a message pointing him in the right direction, hoping her suspicions were false. 

When she heard about the shooting at the auction, she poured herself a glass of wine - well, a bottle, really - and gave herself a talk. It wasn’t that she wasn’t glad she’d helped prevent an even greater catastrophe, because she was. It was just that the reality of the situation finally hit her, and she was faced with a choice.

Get involved, take a stance, use her powers in the real world again? She’d been down this road, she’d seen what her interference was capable of. She’d played with fire and hadn’t just gotten burned; she’d burned down her entire world - and Cooper’s. 

But the Hood wasn’t Cooper. He wasn’t innocent. He wasn’t naive to the forces he was playing with. She wasn’t sure what he was. He’d killed, and he would kill again, she was sure. 

But as much as she couldn’t condone the killing, she also couldn’t ignore the good that he’d done, and she realized she already didn’t have a choice. Something was happening in her city, the signs were all around her, and choosing to do nothing would only make her complicit. 

From then on, she kept tabs on the Hood’s activities, always leaving documents on his desktop explaining, briefly, what he needed to know. It wasn’t long until he began leaving notes of his own.

Through unspoken agreement, they never asked each other personal questions, but between the lines, she gained a sense of the man he was. Compassionate. Loyal. Selfless.  

When Oliver Queen was arrested as the suspected Hood, Felicity instantly dismissed the idea. She knew about the arresting officer’s personal grudge against Oliver Queen, which explained why he pursued him like a dog with a bone. But Felicity knew it was impossible; she knew what kind of person Oliver Queen was, and there was no overlap with the kind of person the vigilante was.

Aside from that, she purposely avoided speculating about who the Hood could be. If she had wanted to know, she could have found out easily enough, but she didn’t want to know. She told herself it didn’t matter; that the work he was doing was what was important. She didn’t want to put a face to the hood, because then she would begin to worry about him.

More than she already did, that is. Despite not knowing his name, she felt a connection with him that sometimes felt stronger for their mutual anonymity. His notes were always brief, especially compared to hers, but she learned to read what he didn’t say. And when he was repeatedly crucified in the media while his quietly heroic actions went unnoticed, he never complained, never faltered in his mission. He never even acknowledged the subtle tones of praise layered into her notes. She would almost suspect him of being a robot if it weren’t for the clear passion that underscored every action.

So when Walter Steele gave her the notebook that turned out to be filled with names that correlated with the criminals the vigilante was confronting, she didn’t say anything. There was too much she still didn’t know about the notebook to risk jeopardizing their relationship over it. Because if there was one thing she did know, it was that she trusted him. 

When Mr. Steele went missing, however, she had to break her silence. Without giving away details that could expose her own identity, she presented him with digital evidence of Moira Queen’s involvement of the events that likely got her husband kidnapped, and asked him for help. 

Which was how she now found herself in this hideously decorated criminal lair staring into the supremely beautiful face of Oliver Queen.

Chapter 2

“Oh great. It’s you.”

Oliver looked up at the sarcastic words being spoken by a stunning blonde. Even as he was roughly manhandled, his hands being zip-tied behind his back, he couldn’t help but be a little offended at her tone. “Excuse me?” Beautiful women treating him like some kind of disease was something he’d never experienced before, and while he wasn’t the same person he used to be, he had to admit his ego took a hit.

She stared at him silently, eyes flashing with undisguised contempt, until after Dominic Alonzo’s minion had left the room.

“Oliver Queen?” she finally answered distastefully, tilting her head at him in an exaggerated motion, as if his name was explanation enough. “Entitled billionaire and general asshole?” 

Her stomach swooped as his eyes searched her face. Disturbingly, and contrary to the cool attitude she was projecting, Felicity found his presence a little overwhelming, not quite matching the plastic and glossy picture presented by the tabloids. Rather than being some kind of smarmy Trust Fund Ken, in person he was exquisitely human. Felicity had always suspected she was immune to the appeal of a man in a suit, but on him, the tapered line from broad shoulder to narrow waist suggested an essential masculinity that awoke a deeply primal response she’d never experienced before. In contrast to the brutal strength of his body, his eyes were startlingly expressive; his chiseled jaw was complemented by soft, sensual lips. In short, he was utterly, unfairly beautiful in a way that affected her immediately, physically, and urgently. 

“Wow, okay,” Oliver scoffed, unaware of her internal struggle. “Most people lead with ‘Are you okay, Mr. Queen?’ ‘How did you survive all those years alone, Mr. Queen?’ ‘What does it feel like to be the only survivor in an accident that killed your father, Mr. Queen?’” He spoke harshly, wielding the crude words like a club. While he usually found the subject too intrusive to mention to anyone, let alone complete strangers, something about this woman’s fiery disdain was really getting under his skin, and extreme measures were called for.

Felicity smiled insincerely, holding on to her irritation like a shield from the confusing wave of sympathy that, along with his sheer attractiveness, threatened to undo her. This man slept with his girlfriend’s sister, she firmly reminded herself. “Well, I’m sorry, but my concern didn’t really seem necessary, given the fact that you seem utterly unaffected by what you went through. I caught your appearance at the opening of Queen Consolidated’s Applied Sciences building,” she added witheringly. “You seemed perfectly okay. Or at least as okay as you ever were.” 

Oliver crossed his arms, bothered by her words even though the image she described was the exact public persona he’d been purposefully crafting. For reasons he couldn’t explain, he couldn’t stand the idea that this woman found him so completely and vehemently offensive. Shaking his head, he tried a different tack. “Have we met before? Have I done something to offend you?” There was something compelling and almost familiar about her, but he was pretty sure he would remember if they’d met.

She scoffed dismissively. “No, definitely not.”

“Well, you sure have a lot of opinions about me for someone who doesn’t know me.” His eyes ran over her again, trying to figure out why she seemed so familiar. She was undeniably beautiful, with delicate features animated by a streak of passion that was not characteristic of the type of woman he’d have gone for before the island.

“Oh, I know all about you, Oliver Queen. If it’s on the internet, I can find it. Not -” her eyes flew to the ceiling as she turned pink, “not that I’ve looked into you!” Her sudden lack of composure was completely unexpected and disarming, and Oliver was intrigued and charmed by the new side of Felicity it revealed. And, if he was being honest, gratified by the suggestion that maybe she was not as immune to him as he originally thought. “It’s just that I work for your company,” she continued, straightening her shoulders and meeting his eyes again as sarcasm crept back into her tone, “and it’s a little hard to avoid hearing about all your little…adventures and mishaps.” 

“Hmm,” he answered, covering the dismay he felt at hearing her refer to his past actions when he suddenly, illogically, wanted her to know that he wasn’t that person anymore. “You work for Queen Consolidated?”

“Yeah, I do.” She pinned him with a fierce look. “But don’t go getting any weird ideas. I don’t work for you.” 

Felicity rolled her eyes to illustrate how distasteful she found that idea, and to cover up the effect his nearness was having on her. This was Oliver Queen, Frat Boy Extraordinaire, Professional Heartbreaker. She should not be flattered by any interest he showed to her. Anyway, he was probably just talking to her because there was no one else to talk to, as they were both literally imprisoned together. Speaking of, she needed to stop being distracted by Oliver Queen’s whole overwhelmingness, and start figuring out a way out of her handcuffs so she could carry out her plan to infiltrate Dominic Alonzo’s computer. She was lucky that when they caught her counting cards they brought her here, at least. Though she would have preferred that she hadn’t gotten caught at all, so she could have found her way here without the zip-tie cuffs, as she had planned. But dammit, she was new to this. She didn’t know anything about going undercover in an underground casino. As evidenced by the very great misfortune of finding herself trapped with Oliver Queen, of all people. Well, at least his presence solved one problem. “So anyway, how is it that Oliver Queen ends up handcuffed in the back of an underground casino?” she asked, deliberately toning down her attitude in the hopes that he’d prove cooperative.

“I could ask you the same thing, Miss…” he trailed off in question, a clear indication that she should fill in her name, as he tried to figure out how to respond. 

The truth was certainly not an option. Even if he could trust her with his secret - and for some inexplicable reason, he did feel generally inclined to trust her - doing so would put her at risk. He couldn’t even tell her a half-truth. Sure, the whole city at this point knew that his step-father was missing, possibly kidnapped, probably dead, but there was no good reason why Oliver Queen would be investigating that. Or that he should have figured out that Alonzo was the person who had him kidnapped. 

Felicity met his eyes warily, aware that she didn’t have an acceptable explanation for being there either, and they came to a silent agreement not to press each other for information. For now. “Felicity Smoak,” she supplied.

He smiled. She stared back, refusing to be charmed, even though she detected a hint of dimple.

Needing to get him to stop smiling at her, because she was much more susceptible than she wanted him to know, she hastened on, “It’s good that you’re here, actually, because you can help me.” 

Oliver raised his eyebrows. “Help you?” Help her do what? He didn’t expect his co-hostage to have any sort of plan; rather, he was busy trying to figure out how he could convince her to stay calm, and possibly hide in a closet, while he dislocated his thumb, got out of the zip-ties, searched through the office, and then called the police to come rescue them. 

It wasn’t an ideal plan; he considered all the variables, all the things that could go wrong. Getting made definitely hadn’t been part of his plan. He’d hoped to sneak in the back without being noticed, not get thrown there with the attention of Alonzo and his thugs. And Felicity proved an even bigger problem. While he could easily hold himself back and take a beating if necessary, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to do the same if they threatened her; and if it came to a fight, he wasn’t sure how he was going to preserve his secret. 

“Help me get out of these zip-ties,” Felicity answered, taking a deliberate step toward Oliver. Her heart was pounding at what she was about to suggest, but she schooled her expression to appear nonchalant, annoyed by the necessity, even. Not flustered. And definitely, definitely not turned on by the prospect. She took a deep breath. “I need you to get the knife out of my bra.” 

Oliver blinked. No words could have been more unexpected coming from her mouth. “What?” 

She rolled her eyes to distract from the fact that she was blushing. Eyes firmly locked on the ceiling, she elaborated, “There is a pocketknife in my bra and we can use it to cut our binds.”

Oliver stared at her in wonder, steadfastly ignoring the primal thrill that ran through him at her suggestion. It seemed he had severely underestimated Felicity Smoak. His mind was racing with questions, but the one that he blurted out was “Why do you have a pocketknife in your bra?”

“Mr. Queen!” she flared, exasperated nerves causing her to meet his gaze. “Do you want to get out of here or not?”

Oliver’s mind was suddenly reeling with images of what she was proposing. In an instinctual stalling tactic, he said the first words that came to him. “Mr. Queen was my father.”

Felicity gaped at him.

Oliver shook his head at himself, saying nothing as he attempted to get his head on straight. He considered her plan rationally. Aside from the question of why it was so important to Felicity that she get out of her cuffs, and the mystery of what she planned to do once she was free of them, the fact of the matter was that going along with her plan would free him to search the office without having to dislocate his thumb. Deciding to continue their no-questions truce, he nodded. “Okay. But…,” he trailed off, throat dry as he looked looking down into unexpectedly near wide blue eyes.

Felicity was pretty sure they were both imagining what he was about to do. “Yeah,” she exhaled, suddenly very aware of the cadence of his breaths, his intoxicatingly masculine scent. Throughout the course of their discussion, he had moved closer to her, and now his expressive eyes fixed on her, waiting. “You won’t be able to see what you’re doing, but if you’re standing, I can kneel behind you and you can kind of…feel around.” 

Oliver’s eyes widened as she spoke, her matter-of-fact words making the situation more real. More shocking. It wasn’t that he hadn’t done more with women he’d known for less time in much less dire circumstances, but something about touching Felicity in these circumstances felt wrong, like a violation, and he suddenly, irrationally found himself wanting to get to know her first, and to tell her about himself, about the real him.  He briefly reconsidered his original plan of dislocating his thumb. 

Mortified by Oliver’s reaction to her words, Felicity tried to cut the tension. “I mean, I know it’s not ideal, but I figure it’s gotta be better than the alternative.”

Caught up, Oliver automatically asked, “What’s the alternative?”

Her eyes dropped involuntarily to his lips and she swayed a little toward him as she whispered, “Using your mouth.” But when her eyes flicked up to meet his, neither of them were laughing. 

Oliver’s mouth fell open in surprise, his gaze dropping to the deep vee of her bodice, before dragging back up to her face. The action pulled him even closer toward her, and a rush of heat washed over him as he fully took her in for the first time. The red chiffon dress clung to her curves, outlining a deeply feminine, lush  body. She was a study in contradictions, watching him through darkly-lashed eyes that were somehow both innocent and knowing; her face lightly dusted with freckles that contrasted alluringly with a sinfully soft mouth. She watched him with dilated pupils and parted lips, and his cock twitched in response. 

But then reality crashed back in on him as she interrupted, “Not that I’m suggesting anything! I’m not coming on to you or anything.”

Oliver blinked, trying to regain control by reminding himself where they were and why. Catching her gaze, he nodded in an attempt to reassure her. Hoping that she didn’t pick up on just how affected he himself was. 

Felicity took a deep, centering breath. It didn’t make any sense that Oliver Queen was having this effect on her. He was just some shallow billionaire, a douchebag womanizer. None of it made any sense. When he looked at her, it was like he saw her. And as much as she told herself it was impossible, it looked as if he wanted her. No. She had to be projecting. And she didn’t want him to want her, anyway. Sure, he was gorgeous. So, so masculine and touchable he smelled so good, with an essential manliness that was softened by those eyes…but no. He was still Oliver Queen, and the fact that she was so attracted to him only explained why so many women had given in to his appeal, despite the long list of reasons to avoid him. She might have judged those women in the past, but now she could not. 

She squared her shoulders, trying to clear the attraction from her mind and prepare for what had to happen next. “So, okay?” She chanced a look in his direction, not quite meeting his eyes. 

Oliver nodded, and Felicity took refuge in remembering her mission. After all, she was here to help the Hood, and she could not have her sudden weakness to very handsome men - or rather, one specific very handsome man - getting in the way of that. 

“All right, just turn a little to your right,” she directed hoarsely, nodding encouragingly as he complied. “Okay, stop there. I’ll position myself so you should be able to locate the knife relatively easily.” She lowered herself to the ground behind him as she was speaking, her voice only slightly wavering with the awareness that Oliver Queen was about to feel her up. “It’s on the left side,” she rambled, masking her response to the feeling of his surprisingly rough fingers dipping below her bodice, carrying on as if this were normal, as if she were directing someone to the library, as if Oliver Queen’s very large hands weren’t currently sliding along the sides of her breasts…her words tapered off and she bit her bottom lip, concentrating on not moaning out loud because oh god, his fingers brushed against her nipple and her body responded as if he was tugging on a string tied directly to her thrumming core. 

Oliver squeezed his eyes shut, trying to be quick, methodical, and clinical, but he had felt enough breasts in his life to know that Felicity Smoak’s were a rarity. As much as he tried to stay on task,he found himself getting distracted, unable to stop the picture that drifted through his mind. Perfect breasts, not large, but extremely full; firm but very soft, with tight nipples that his fingertips couldn’t help brushing over repeatedly as he wedged his large hand into the tight space of her bodice. Tight, very sensitive nipples, he corrected unhelpfully, judging by the way she gasped softly in response to his inadvertent touches. As her voice trailed off, he remained aware of the soft catching of her breath, and even with his back to her, he he felt completely in tune with her, much more intimately than if they had only been having sex. Finally, his fingers touched upon warm metal, and even though the entire encounter lasted less than fifteen seconds, he was out of breath as he withdrew the pocketknife and turned to meet her eyes. His dick was rock hard, and the look she returned him said she was equally affected. 

She was staring up at him, speechless, so he took the lead, flipping open the knife and directing her in a soft voice, “Turn around. I’ll cut your ties.”

Felicity nodded silently, turning so that they were back to back and trusting that he wouldn’t cut her as he twisted around to line her zip-ties up with the blade. “Okay,” he told her when the knife was in position, “try an up and down sawing motion,” and they easily and wordlessly fell into a rhythm that quickly parted the plastic around her wrists. 

“Oh thank god,” she exhaled as her hands came free. She instantly started rubbing her wrists, then silently turned to take the knife. 

Oliver felt her warm hand close around his wrists, steadying him as she positioned the blade against his ties. He took a steadying breath as she freed him. “I probably shouldn’t do this,” she commented, “since my plan is to maintain the illusion that we’re still tied up and that would be easier to do if you actually were still tied up, but I have to admit that I’ll feel safer if your hands are free.” With a final tug, the plastic came apart, but she didn’t release his hands immediately. Inexplicably, her words inflated him with a disproportionate sense of pride and purpose. He liked that she felt safe with him, that even without knowing his alternate identity, and despite her pre-existing opinion of Oliver Queen, she somehow trusted him. He was struck with an acute desire to be worthy of that trust, and a deep yearning to prove to her that it was not misplaced. 

After a long moment, Felicity dropped his hands, taking large step backward in a move designed to decrease the tension. Truthfully, she was a little impressed by Oliver Queen. He was a lot more gentle, sensitive, and thoughtful than she would have thought.  She had expected him to be obnoxious, entitled, and immature, the type of person who, finding himself in this situation, would either panic or make a joke of the whole thing. Either way, she’d have expected him to be throwing his money around trying to save himself, not quietly and calmly following her lead. And no way would she have predicted he was capable of being so respectful of her body. Probably more respectful of her body than she was being of his. Not that she had forced him to feel her up…but she’d be lying if she said she hadn’t enjoyed it. Fleetingly, she wondered if it counted as sexual harassment to get turned on when a man was merely trying to locate a knife in your bra so you could escape a kidnapping situation. 

For his part, Oliver’s admiration for Felicity was growing exponentially. She was much more resourceful and level headed than he would have expected anyone to be in her situation. From the moment she opened her mouth, she’d already proven herself smarter and more sensible than most people in his experience - she had a cautious,  strategic manner that he was unused to in other people. 

“So now what?” he asked, caught up in the intelligence in her eyes, the mystery of her presence. Even though he was the one with a plan and she was technically just an inconvenience, he momentarily set that aside because he just wanted to know. He wanted to know what she was planning to do. He wanted to know her. “You mentioned you have a plan, one that requires your hands be free,” he prodded, hoping she would fill in some pieces of the puzzle.

“That’s for me to know,” she countered playfully, holding his gaze as she reached into her bra, pulling something else out, “and you to find out.”

His eyes widened and dropped to her chest before snapping back up, unsure if she meant anything by it. Again, it was the last thing he expected. And again, it set his heart racing. 

“Or, I mean, not to find out. There will be no finding out, from you. Just stay there and look pretty.” Her eyes grew rounder. “Not that you’re pretty, it’s just an expression. Just sit there.” She backed away until she ran into the desk, and then she dropped to the ground and started feeling around underneath it.

He watched her with amused eyes, interested in her actions and utterly captivated by her. “I’m not pretty?” he pressed, curious to know how she would react.

Her head popped up from the other side of the desk, sending him an exasperated look. “No! I mean, yes! Very pretty like, really very attractive, objectively speaking I mean, I’m not coming on to you. It’s science; you’re scientifically pretty.” Her head disappeared again beneath the desk.

Oliver stood up, drawn to her, until he was leaning over the desk looking down at her ass protruding from under the desk. “Scientifically pretty?”

Felicity visibly startled, then took a deep breath, then carefully, and with as much dignity as possible, crawled backwards and rose out from under the desk, smoothing down her hair. She arched her brow at him. “Don’t tell me you’re one of these anti-science climate change denier people.”

Oliver guffawed, unable to come up with a fitting response. She was unlike anyone he’d ever come across. Instead of answering, he watched as she sat herself at the desk and instantly penetrated the password protection, diving with singular focus directly into the files on Alonzo’s computer. “What are you doing?” he asked after a moment, fascinated by her actions. He knew time was precious, that he should be taking the opportunity to riffle through drawers, search filing cabinets, etc., but rather than pursue his mission, he couldn’t help but pull at the loose thread that was Felicity Smoak. 

She lifted distracted eyes to him, giving the distinct impression that he had yanked her out of a very deep concentration, despite the fact that it had only been twenty seconds since she’d sat down. He expected her to crack another joke, but instead she blinked and said seriously, “It’s better you don’t know,” before returning her attention to the computer. 

Surprised, Oliver slipped off the desk he’d been casually leaning against, the hair raising on the back of his neck; her words were like a warning, almost ominous. Who was she? Why was she here? What was she involved in? Habits shaped over the past five years forced him to question her motives: honest people rarely found themselves involved with guys like Dominic Alonzo; he had to consider that Felicity might not be as innocent as she seemed; he had to wonder if she might even be on the list. But as soon as the thought surfaced, he dismissed it. His five years away had also taught him to trust his instincts, and every single part of him was shouting at him to trust her. 

“Okay,” she announced a few seconds later, “I need you to come here and keep an eye on this feed.” 

Oliver stepped up beside her to where she was pointing at CCTV footage in a corner of the computer monitor. “What is that?”

“Security feed, showing the corridor just outside. This way we can know ahead of time if anyone’s coming.” Her eyes returned to the screen, where she was still methodically searching through the computer’s files.

“Felicity,” Oliver said firmly, coming to a decision even as his eyes obediently remained glued on the feed. 

“Hmm?”

Oliver took a deep breath, his racing mind rapidly drawing conclusions that he couldn’t quite believe were true. But every objection he came up with was easily disproved; rather, every detail about her only seemed to confirm the picture that was forming in his mind. 

Huli jing.

“Felicity,” he repeated, and this time the name felt familiar on his tongue, like he had been saying it his whole life, like he had been born to say it. “You need to tell me why you’re here.” 

He knew. There was no denying it; when she spoke, it was with the voice he’d been hearing in his head for seven months. When she smiled, it was with the unique humor that had amused him like nothing else had been able to do since returning from the island. And when she looked at him, it was with eyes that perceived all the things he didn’t say. It was her. But he needed to hear her say it.

“Oliver, look,” she began, unexpectedly turning to meet his eyes. He was nearly flattened by the look of sincere regret and conviction in her eyes. “I’m sorry about before, what I said.”

His eyebrows draw together in confusion. 

“When I said you hadn’t changed. I was wrong. The person the tabloids make you out to be - that’s not who you are. And I’m sorry I misjudged you.”

Oliver’s lips parted in surprise. “That’s not -”

“No, it is necessary,” she pressed, misunderstanding what he was going to say. “I made assumptions, and they were completely unfair.” Over his protests, she continued, “I don’t know what you did out there to piss off the casino bosses, but I’m really sorry you’re caught up in this. Please,” she emphasized, “just believe me when I tell you that the less you know, the safer you’ll be.” She reached out a hand but started to pull it back before it made contact with his chest, and he caught it between his own before she could fully withdraw.

“Felicity.” He fixed her with a steady, knowing look, and he heard her breath catch, and felt her pulse pick up under his fingers. “I need to ask you something.”

Felicity’s eyes widened at his sudden, inexplicable intensity and focus. She had no idea Oliver Queen was capable of such depth and sincerity. His large hands were cradling her, his thumb soothing over her wrist, and she had long ago surrendered to that penetrating look in his eyes. “What?” she breathed, not knowing what Oliver Queen could tell her that required so much intensity and passion, but suddenly very much wanting to find out.

His words were the last thing she expected to hear. “Are you here because of the Hood?”

Her stomach dropped. “What?”

Before he could respond, he caught sight of someone on the security feed walking up the hallway. “Someone’s coming!”

She turned to the feed, then instantly went to the computer and, with a blur of hands on the keyboard, logged off and put the monitor to sleep. There was no time for anything else, so without thinking any further, Oliver reached around her body, pressing her wrists together behind her in an approximation of being handcuffed, secured his own hands behind his back, then pressed his mouth to hers in an urgent kiss.  

Felicity gasped in surprise, and he instinctively used the opportunity to deepen the kiss, coaxing her lips open, his tongue seeking hers. After a stunned moment, she responded with ardor, the passion exploding like a match to dry tinder. 

Kissing her was like putting the last piece of the puzzle in place. 

For seven months, he had been drawn to the woman with intriguingly contradictory parts: a dizzyingly sharp partner who amused and irritated and charmed and inspired him. 

For seven months, the more space he allowed her in his mission, the wider the empty hole that only she could fill had become in his life. He hadn’t allowed himself to acknowledge it, but meeting her face to face meant he could no longer deny how he felt about her.  He had been drawn to her since he saw her, his body seeking any excuse to touch hers. Everything about her provoked and challenged and called to him; her passion, her intelligence, her humor, her bravery, and the glimpses of vulnerability. 

She was the woman he’d been waiting for, and if the way she was responding to him was any indication, she’d been waiting for him too. 

He bore down on her, covering her with his body, and it was everything he could do to keep his hands behind his back. The need to touch her is like electricity in his veins, and he forgot everything but the urgent need to be close to her.  

“What’s going on?” The voice broke into the moment like a bucket of cold water. 

Oliver’s lips released Felicity’s reluctantly, and she met his eyes as she pulled back. Her pupils were nearly black, her lips parted and swollen, and the sight sent a jolt through his body to his already throbbing dick. 

“Oliver Queen, you really can’t control yourself, can you?” asked Dominic Alonzo, striding into the room. “I’d almost be impressed if you weren’t such a pain in my ass.”

Oliver glanced once more at Felicity, and the last thought he had before turning his attention to Alonzo was that she looked utterly shell-shocked.

…to be continued…

[cillianmurphy]

32, 36 & 47 :~)

32 - What is your favorite tool/adjustment layer in Photoshop

I love curves and selective colour!! also the mask tool can be a lifesaver!

36 - Do you gif with something specific in mind or do you just wing it

I like to have something specific in mind, it’s just the way I am but sometimes I will wing it

47 - Any advice for novice gif makers/people who want to start making gifs

read tutorials and do it for yourself, not for notes. I know the ratio is so discouraging atm but in the end, make edits because you want to and are motivated to. Experiment a lot, don’t feel like you need to make your gifs look like what you standardly see on this website. Who cares if your gifs are oversaturated, too bright or dark or whatever, its your gif and if you like it, then that is what counts. Do it for yourself, not for others. 

Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Heck I used to gif on my phone and what helped me get used to photoshop when I got my laptop last year was asking around and reading tutorials and experimenting a LOT. It was a lot of trial and error. Also, I know that some people cannot afford photoshop and stuff but if you want to make gifs, use ezgif and photopea, its a free alternative to photoshop online and it is super good. 

I would recommend keeping them under 3mb, 4mb at the most. I know tumblr updated the limit but gifs get compressed and the quality reduction is noticeable, so i would recommend keeping them under 3mb because then they will not be compressed, 4mb at the absolute most for ok quality still and a slightly longer or bigger gif. 

tldr, do what you like. Make your gifs any way you want and ask for help if you need or want it because most people are definitely willing to help. If you want to ask me, just dm me, they’re always open! :) good luck!!!! (one thing, upload them via desktop not mobile app, bc otherwise its formatted as a text post and they won’t show up well)

send me questions for gif makers!

[nightwatchman6455]

GPO Abuse and You

I recently took the Red Team Tactics course through SpecterOps (which is a great course and I highly recommend everyone take it if given the opportunity) and one of the topics that the instructors touched on briefly was abusing Group Policy Objects (GPOs) to exploit a domain. While I had known about Group Policy (and even used it for network reconnaissance while on target) I had never thought about using them as a lateral movement technique. So I started digging.

Talking to fellow Red Teamers made me realize that use of GPOs to laterally pivot through networks isn’t anything new, but I was somewhat disheartened by how others used this technique. From the small (very small, admittedly) sample of people I discussed this with, it appears the common technique is to RDP onto a domain controller or use the Group Policy plugin for Microsoft Management Console (MMC) in order to manipulate GPOs. The problem with these techniques is they either require domain admin credentials (in the case of RDP) or a proxy connection into the network (in the case of utilizing MMC). If you already have clear-text domain admin credentials, then utilizing GPOs for lateral movement is a moot point. Just get the hashes you need through DCSync and laterally move to your target through other means. On a different note, utilizing a proxy connection into the network to use MMC can result in more network traffic that can get you caught by defenders.

Which leads me to the question I wanted to answer. Is it possible to manipulate GPOs via command-line (without RDP or MMC)? So I started doing research. In the post below, I will discuss what I discovered about using GPOs for exploitation purposes. Additionally, I figured I would talk a little bit about what GPOs actually do and what they look like (for those who, like me, might not know). A lot of this information is pulled from Andy Robbin’s (wald0) GPO post and Will Schroeder’s (harmj0y) similar GPO post. If you already know this, I would recommend just skipping on down to the fun part about abusing these policies!

An Introduction to GPOs

GPOs are one of the mechanisms used to manage large Windows enterprise networks. They allow admins to push out system changes to groups of devices on a network. Admins will decide exactly what changes they want to make to a group of devices, create the GPO, and then apply the GPO to an organization unit, or OU. This is typically all done either on the actual domain controller for a network (through the Group Policy Management Console) or from another system on the network through the use of Microsoft Management Console (with the Group Policy Management plug-in).

So what exactly can you do with GPOs? The proverbial sky seems to be the limit. Do you want to add local users to a group of computers? There’s a GPO for that. Do you want to change power settings for all laptops connected to your domain? There’s a GPO for that. Do you want to add a startup or shutdown script to certain computers? There is a GPO for that. Do you want to add or remove specific registry keys or values? Well, there’s a GPO for that too.

So what do GPOs actually look like? As mentioned above, they can be created through the Group Policy Management Console on domain controllers or with the plug-in for Microsoft Management Console. Once they are created, they are viewable in Active Directory under the grouppolicycontainer objectclass. This can be done using either a tool like PowerView/SharpView or using the Windows tool DSQuery.

Each GPO in a domain will have three distinguishing attributes: a display name, a name, and an objectguid. The display name, assigned at creation, is a human-readable name for the GPO, a name is the actual “name” of the GPO (yeah, confusing), and the objectguid is a globally unique parameter for identifying the GPO in the domain. Additionally, each GPO has a few other attributes which help us to understand more about what they do (since display names can often be unclear). The attributes I want to focus on are gpcFilePath, gpcMachineExtensionNames, gpcUserExtensionNames, and versionnumber. The gpcFilePath attributepoints to where the GPO files exist on disk. This location is in the SYSVOL directory/share. The gpcMachineExtensionNames and gpcUserExtensionNames are GUID-esque extensions which appear when GPOs are configured to do certain things, such as scheduled tasks (a handy list of these GUIDs can be found here). The versionnumber attribute is an integer which increments every time that there is a change in the GPO. This attribute is critical for computers knowing when there are changes in a GPO.

Another important attribute to mention when talking about GPOs is the gplink field. This isn’t a field you’ll find when looking at a GPO in Active Directory, but instead when you look at OUs in the network. The gplink will tell you what GPOs are applied to an OU. Since multiple GPOs can be applied to the same OU, you will find all GPOs listed in one field. The order they are in appears to be, in my experience, based on the order that they are applied to the OU (based on priority) when a system reaches out for policy updates.

As mentioned above with the gpcFilePath, each GPO also has a presence on the file system of the domain controller. In the SYSVOL share there is a policies folder which contains a folder for each GPO, sorted by GUIDs. You can find these policy folders remotely at \\<domain>\sysvol\<domain>\policies or locally on the domain controller at C:\Windows\SYSVOL\SYSVOL\<domain>\Policies. Within these folders are any files necessary for the configuration changes which the GPO is set to apply. If there are necessary scripts for the GPO, those are in here. If there is a registry change to apply through the GPO, there will be a registry.pol file located in these folders.

Abusing GPOs for Fun and Profit

So what is the “so-what” factor of GPOs? Why should we as Red Teamers care about using them? Well, like everything else in a Windows network, GPOs can be misconfigured and that misconfiguration opens up a whole range of possibilities for us. And this is the part that got me excited to write this and where I did a ton of research into how GPOs are applied in a network. What if we as Red Teamers could target GPOs as a means of expanding our access or gaining SYSTEM-access on targets we didn’t previously have SYSTEM-access on? All before domain compromise!? One of the cool things about enumerating GPOs is stumbling upon a GPO that can be edited by users other than domain admins. Windows allows admins to assign permissions to GPOs in a similar fashion to files and directories.

In the above picture we have what looks like fairly hardened delegation of GPO editing privileges. Your typical domain admins and enterprise admins can make changes, but no one else. On the other hand, below you’ll see that a random user has privileges with another GPO...

As seen above, other user accounts and service accounts could be granted the permission to edit a specific GPO. There are two easy ways to enumerate these permissions. The first, and simplest, is using the windows executable icacls.exe. You can point icacls.exe at the folder in SYSVOL related to the GPO in question and see the permissions assigned to that GPO. Below is the icacls.exe result for a GPO in my home test network (which conveniently has this normaluser guy added in!).

The other easy way of enumerating GPO permissions is en masse using BloodHound. One of the cool things which BloodHound spits out after running is GPO information and what users have permissions to edit those GPOs. This is a great way of figuring out the road from a user account that you have credentials for all the way to domain compromise. Just be careful, it can generate a LOT of network traffic. I won’t be going into detail about how to use BloodHound here, but be sure to check out the BloodHound wiki if you have any questions about it  (located here).

With this information, how exactly can we manipulate GPOs for expanding our access (and is it possible to do this via the command-line)? The answer I came up with took the form of a tool written in C# which allows a user to query for necessary information on a GPO and then use that information to set certain attributes in Active Directory, allowing a user to abuse the GPO. Since this is the first tool I have written, I wanted to give it a fun name: METRONOME (get it? C#? Music? Metronomes?). I decided to focus my efforts for the time being on two techniques for expansion of access using GPOs and this tool: adding scheduled tasks to a computer and adding users to a local administrator group.

Leveraging Scheduled Tasks for GPOs   

Scheduled tasks exist as a configuration change in GPOs under both Computer and User configuration changes under Preferences and Control Panel Settings. When added as a configuration change, three things are added to the GPO. First, a unique extension name ([{AADCED64-746C-4633-A97C-D61349046527}{CAB54552-DEEA-4691-817E-ED4A4D1AFC72}]) is added to the gpcMachineExtensionNames field (or gpcUserExtensionNames field) in Active Directory and the versionnumber field is incremented to show a change. In the file system for the GPO, the XML for the scheduled task will also appear in the <policy>\Machine\Preferences\Scheduled Task folder as the file ScheduledTask.xml. Multiple tasks can be added per GPO, but only one XML file will be present (with the multiple scheduled tasks being wrapped in this file).

If you are targeting a GPO which does not apply any scheduled tasks, there are a few things that need to be done. First, the gpcMachineExtensionNames field in Active Directory needs to be updated with the unique extension name above and the versionnumber field needs to be incremented so machines know there is a change in the GPO. Both of these changes can be done with METRONOME. First, you use the tool to query the existing attributes and then use these existing attributes to add the unique extension name and increment the version number.

Once the Active Directory attributes are changed, the scheduled task XML needs to be added to the scheduled task folder on the SYSVOL share. This is where the GPO will look for any scheduled task XML when updating configurations applied. These XMLs can either be setting tasks on a schedule or they can be used to apply an immediate task to the host. Additionally, these tasks can be targeted via hostname (DNS or NetBIOS) or IP address. This is useful if you are trying to laterally pivot to a specific host or if you simply want to limit the effect your task might have on a network (i.e. if the GPO is applied to an OU that contains thousands of hosts).

With these pieces in place, the only thing left to do is wait. Unless changed (via GPO) workstations and servers on a network will check for updates to GPOs every 90 to 120 minutes (domain controllers update every 5 minutes). If you are feeling impatient and are trying to affect change on the computer you are currently on, you can also run GPUPDATE /FORCE. This can be run as a normal user and will force the host to check for GPO updates and apply any changes.

When you are finished with the scheduled task, clean up is straight forward. METRONOMEl can be used to set the Active Directory attributes back to their original state and then you simply need to remove the task XML which you added to the policy folder. Keep in mind though that you will also have to remove the task from every computer to which the GPO was applied. This is why using targeted tasks is useful. If you are concerned with clean up it can be difficult to clean up all hosts that the GPO applies to (especially if that OU the GPO applies to is large or stretches across multiple OUs).

If the GPO you are targeting already applies a task, then all you need to do is slip your task into the task XML file which already exists in the policy folders. Since the GPO is already configured to push out a scheduled task, there is no need to update the gpcMachineExtensionsName field, only the versionnumber field (which METRONOME can do). Once you update that you just wait for the GPO to update on its own or run the GPUPDATE executable to force an update. Once you are finished, all you need to do is delete the task out of the task XML file. Below is a great example simply slipping in your task. You’ll see that the third task in this XML is my “malicious” task (so creative) running as SYSTEM on all hosts in an OU (since I don’t target any specific hosts).

I wanted to try this with an actual backdoor instead of just using the task to kick off calc.exe or notepad.exe, so I booted up a Kali VM and dusted off my Empire listeners. The task embedded in the policy handles both the arguments flag as well as a blob of Powershell encoded characters, resulting in a SYSTEM-level callback from a user-level callback within my test network!

First all I had to do was add in the PowerShell blob into the task like so...

...and then wait for it to update. After the computer reached out for updates, it looks like it was applied!...

...And now we just need to wait for the task to kick off and....

...VOILA! Look at that lovely SYSTEM callback!

Adding Users to a Local Administrators Group

Adding users to a local admin group appeared to be pretty simple. Once again, the option to add users to local groups exists under both User and Computer preferences in the Control Panel options. I figured initially that it would be a simple matter of adding an extension name to the proper Active Directory field and incrementing the versionnumber after adding the proper XML file. It turns out that if a GPO is already doing this, there will be a policy collision and the policies will be applied by priority. Since only domain admins can modify this priority, the GPOs which I edited always lost this conflict in my research. So what do we do? Thankfully, it is actually simpler than I initially thought.

There exists ANOTHER way to add users to a local administrators group through GPOs. It is a configuration option in the Administration preferences. Instead of adding a user to the local administrators group, you reset the local administrators group and add all new users to it through this interface. In order to do this without the GUI, you simply drop a file titled GptTmpl.inf into the <policy>\Machine\Microsoft\Windows NT\SecEdit folder in the SYSVOL directory. This file follows a pretty simple format. Simply add the objectsids for all users/groups that you want added to the local administrators group. With the help of tools like PowerView/SharpView/DSQuery, it is easy to find the objectsids for not only account you need added to the group, but also the objectsids for all the other groups currently being applied through any other GPOs.

With this information, simply plug in these objectsids, set the file in the folder mentioned above with the same name, and use METRONOME to update the version number of the GPO you are targeting. As with the scheduled tasks, either wait and be patient or force the system to update its policies. Clean up is easy. Just delete the file and reset the version number. A word of caution though, there is no way to target this policy within the OU (similar to tasks). Whatever user you apply to the local administrators group will be added on all systems within the OU that the GPO applies to.

Now that certain users are in the local administrators group, I think we can figure out what to do next...

Parting Thoughts

As mentioned above, the culmination of this research is the GPOEdit tool which I wrote in C#. If you wish to use this tool, feel free to download the .cs file from my github located here. The code can be compiled with csc.exe, no need for Visual Studio. Included in this repository are two task template XML files (one for filtering by hostname and the other for filtering by IP address) and then also the GptTmpl.inf file necessary for manipulating local administrator groups. Again, feel free to use them. Just make sure to put in the right IP addresses and hostnames!

As a side note, while I was putting this post together (it took me way too long to type this out), Petros Koutroumpis over at MWR Labs put out an incredibly verbose tool, SharpGPOAbuse, which also abuses misconfigured GPOs. The tool can be found on their github with more information on its use on their website. It looks like it is still an ongoing project, which is awesome!

GPOs have turned out to be a potentially valuable means of moving through a domain. With my research I only looked into using them to push out scheduled tasks and local administrator changes, but judging from the list of configuration options in the GPMC, this is only scratching the surface. There will be more research on my end on how these can be leveraged for nefarious purposes and I will be sure to post them here!. Those firewall changes look particularly interesting....

[kobemoorfestivals]

Final Podcast Outcome

Evaluation:

Here is my final podcast with trailer.

(Note: If you cannot see the video or YouTube link, the podcast can be found on YouTube at "Kobrandom" I'll also put a link at the bottom of this post.)

The podcast overall went well. The audio gathered was balanced pretty well, there were nearly no moments of silence and Zak and I had a quite good chemistry as we new the topic we were speaking of. I captured the audio using the professional microphones, mixer and software within the radio room of the college. Using all that I learned over the past few weeks, I was able to do this without any assistance or extra help and I feel the final product was a success.  

Before I began recording however, I created two separate but similar podcast sheets explaining the basis of what I wanted to talk about, possible questions I could ask, the expected length of the podcast, podcast name ideas and other things. I also filled out an "Outline for my podcast" sheet found via the internet, to finite the details of what I wanted with my podcast. Below is an image of that sheet:

Furthermore, after I had captured and exported the audio. I began to edit it on my laptop using premiere pro. I used Premiere primarily because I am the most efficient on it than other editing software. In retrospect, It may have been better to use audio editing software like Audacity. Nevertheless, I was able to edit my audio fine on premiere. There was only a single word I had to edit out, despite being inoffensive, it was not appropriate for college. I used the basic cutting tool to do this and made sure It was unnoticeable.

After cutting and manipulating the audio to a standard I was happy with. I started to work on my podcast logo of which I planned to have in the centre of the screen. I used Photoshop CS6 as always and began by creating a document designed for web purposes. This was a setting you could select when creating a new Photoshop file. With the document created, I changed the background to black using the quick command 'alt + backspace' however I had to also make sure my primary colour was set to black and not white.

With the canvas now black. I selected the 'Type tool' found on the left hand tool menu or by simply pressing 'T' for Type/Text. I then began to type out the text required. Which was 'The Isometric Podcast' the word 'The' was typed on a separate layer however. When typing I made sure the colour was set to white, and the font was set to 'Digital Tech' previously used in another aspect of my project. Found on Dafont.

After typing the text I made sure to centre it, with the word 'The' above the main text to the left a little. Once positioned, I then created a red box using the square shape tool. I made sure the colour was set to red and not white or black and moved it so the 'Isometric Podcast' text would be in the centre of the box, with 'The' on the red outline of the box. As the red square I just created was solid red, I changed the fill to about 0% to just keep the outline. Then went into the properties of the box and added a 'Stroke' to make the outline thicker and more noticeable. Finally as I did not want 'The' to be on a red outline, I selected the eraser tool and holding shift I erased the parts of the outline I did not want.

Now with the basic logo made, of which I thought looked much better than the first iteration I made and showed in a prior post, I then deleted the black background. Of which was mainly there as a template so I could see what my logo would look like on a black backdrop. And saved the file as a PNG as opposed to a JPEG.

With the logo made and saved, I imported it into my premiere pro project, Where I then started to play with different effects in an attempt to make an intro. Before adding any effects, I created an Adjustment layer. Similar to last time. With an Adjustment Layer created, I put it on my timeline. I mainly used the 'Ripple' effect similar to my trailer as it created a nice wave effect. I of course had to tamper with several settings to get it as I wanted. As well as adding effects, I used key frame to animate the logo. I use the small stopwatch next to position and moved the logo out of frame. This is so when the intro is done, the logo would move from the screen. Now, after finalizing my intro's animation and effects, I started to look for appropriate music.

Originally, I was going to create my own track. However I didn't have enough access to the software and wasn't very familiar with making music. With the time restraints also it wouldn't have been possible. Or at least I wouldn't have been happy with anything I could've made.

Nonetheless, I used the same website I got the music for my trailer 'Free Music Archive' and I input the tag 'Gaming' to try and find all game related tunes. I came across a few, but the one I decided to go for was called "Epic Champ" by L'homme Manete.

Moving forward, after making the quick intro sequence, I started to work on the main podcast. For the visuals, I had the same logo centred but static with a brick wall background of which I found online. I changed the opacity of the wall backdrop to around 80% as I felt it looked cleaner when it was slightly darkened. I also used a faint cloud effect to add some atmosphere to the podcast visual. The cloud effect was a sapphire plugin. This means that It wasn't apart of Premiere pro originally. So, as the podcast revolves around video games, I input some gameplay of a major game 'Apex Legends' this is because we talk about it within the podcast and because it's the number one trending game currently. I captured the gameplay via my PlayStation.

In conclusion, I feel that my podcast was a marginal success. The audio was near on perfect, the conversation had a nice flow, I had next to no issues when editing besides it taking time and I was able to successfully upload onto YouTube.   

YouTube link: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8-B8E5tbik

[soaimagines]

Heartbeats

Request: Imagine your old man Happy has a gun shout wound to the chest. You’re a trauma doctor and while trying to save him he flat lines three times.

Pairing: Happy Lowman x Reader

Warnings: Mentions of gun shot wounds?

Authors Note: I have absolutely no experience or knowledge in medical procedures so I’m sorry if there are inaccuracies or mistakes in this. And please excuse the formatting on this, I’m posting it via mobile and it fucked my layout 😭 I’ll edit it once I’m on my laptop! Hope you guys like it, let me know! Ps. Do people still use pagers?! Lol

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

You stabbed a piece of lettuce with your fork as you scrolled through your phone aimlessly. You were eight hours into a twelve hour shift and this was the first break you’d had. Being a trauma doctor was demanding and your department had been short staffed today. Finally there had been a break in the constant flow of patients and you had managed to sneak off to the staff room for a ten minute salad and coffee break. Happy had sent you a text this morning and you hadn’t had a chance to open it. You smiled as you read the message and quickly typed back. It had been five hours since he’d sent the first text and you knew he would be worried that you hadn’t responded yet. He didn’t love your career. He liked aspects of it, sure. He liked that you loved it and he liked that it kept you busy, but that was also the main reason he didn’t like it. When you were busy your job came first, and he always panicked when he didn’t get an immediate response from you. But it made you happy and you weren’t exactly stoked with his lifestyle choices either. You would never change him, you didn’t want to, but you hated the danger and the risk involved in what he did. But you compromised and for the last two years you had made it work. Your love for Happy far outweighed any hangups you had about his club, and vice versa. And as much as you hated to admit, his band of misfit bikers was pretty damn loveable. You sipped at your coffee. It was far too hot to really be enjoyable but you weren’t sure when you’d get another chance to have one so you sacrificed your tongue for burning and swallowed.

Beep beep!

The pager on your hip rang out, signalling an incoming ambulance and you quickly stood. You tossed your rubbish into the trash and quickly downed the rest of your coffee before dashing out of the room.

-•-

“What do we got?”

You asked as you rushed out to meet the paramedics. They wheeled the trolley towards you, the red and blue lights of the ambulance flashing behind them.

“Hispanic male, Gun shot wound to the chest.”

You nodded and grabbed hold of the trolley, ready to wheel them into the emergency ward. Only when you glanced down at the patient you froze.

No. No, no, no.

This was it. Your worst nightmare, happening right in front of you. The only thing you had been worried about for the last two years was unfolding before you and your heart was ripped from your chest. His eyes were closed, his skin paler than usual and his bloodstained white tshirt had been ripped open, exposing his tattooed chest and bullet wound.

“Oh my god.” You whispered.

The paramedics stared at you and you took only a second to gather yourself. There was no time for hysterics. He needed you.

“Happy? Can you hear me?”

He groaned in response and you took that as a good sign. His hands were red with his own blood and they laid across his torso. You needed to stop the bleeding. Find the bullet, remove it. Stabilise. Close. That’s it. You can do this. You told yourself. You’ve done it before. This was your job. This was just a patient. This was no different. Right?

Wrong. This was different.

This wasn’t just a gun shot wound. It wasn’t just a patient. It was the man you loved, the love of your life, dying in front of you.

“What’s his status?” You asked, your voice coming out stronger than expected. As the paramedics listed his vitals off you went into business mode.

You had to set your emotions aside.

You had to do this.

You had to save him.

-•-

“Clear!” You yelled and slammed the paddles down on his chest. His body jumped and you waited to hear that beep.

That beep that would make everything better, because it couldn’t get any worse. You immediately placed your hands in the centre of his chest and started pumping. You closed your eyes, trying desperately to escape the nightmare unfolding in front of you.

“(Y/N) this is the third time he’s flat lined. You need to call it.”

“No!” You yelled.

The palms of your hands pounded against his chest and you barely noticed the tear rolling down your cheek. You barked an order at a nurse to charge the crash cart and you grabbed hold of the paddles.

“Clear!” You placed them on his chest and his body jolted.

Nothing.

“Don’t you dare, Happy!” You said.

You took a deep breath and began the cycle again. 30 pumps. That’s it. On the fourteenth you heard it. The beep of the monitor signalling his heart beat and you stifled a sob. Drew pulled you away from the bed and you collapsed against him, sobs taking over your body.

“Happy!” You fought against him and he let you go.

You leant against the bed, your hands stroking Happys peaceful face.

“Cmon, (Y/N).”

“I’m not leaving him!” You snapped.

-•-

Happy squinted as his eyes opened, the harsh bright light making it hard to adjust. Slowly the room came into focus and he studied the unfamiliar setting. He tried to sit up but a pain ripped through his chest. His hand felt weighed down and he glanced down. He recognised your hair immediately and he watched you sleeping against his side, your head resting on the side of the bed and your arm draped over his torso. He shifted his arm gently. The movement woke you and you bolted upright.

“Happy!”

You leapt out of your chair and hovered over him.

“Oh Happy!” You broke into sobs, suddenly overwhelmed by the lights events.

He reached up and pulled the mask from his face. “Baby,”

Hearing his raspy voice only made you sob harder. You leant over him and smothered his face with kisses. His forehead, his cheeks, his chin his brows. You kissed every inch of his face and you kissed his warm lips. He lifted his hand and reached for you. You pressed your forehead against his and his hand cupped your face. His thumb gently wiped away your tears that continued to flow and when you pulled back you could see his eyes glistening too

“I thought I lost you.” You sobbed. “I did.”

Happy ran his thumb over your lips.He had never been an emotional guy. He kept his feeling s to himself but seeing this raw emotion in your eyes, the thought of leaving you, it resonated with him and he didn’t fight the tears forming in his eyes.

“You saved me.”

You nodded.

“Baby I’m sorry.”

You laughed and shook your head. “I don’t care, Happy. I don’t care about anything. You’re all that matters and your here.”

Happy smiled and pulled you in for another tear filled kiss. “I’m here, baby. I’m not going anywhere.”

[cherrypixelbun]

RAMBLE: Booting a portable DOS collection, the pros and cons

Quite a while ago I posted screenshots of a bootable FreeDOS USB stick that I have with a collection of games installed. Like I mentioned in my initial Twitter post about it, I was inspired to do it by Lazy Game Reviews, who made a video where he had a full install on a high-end PC. After that I had an idea. “What if I could run my DOS games from anywhere, not just on a single PC." I got a USB stick, and went to work finding a portable solution.

What I did was not a full installation of FreeDOS. Instead I used a program called Rufus for making bootable USB sticks. Normally you’re supposed to give it the ISO of whatever OS you wish to boot but it gives you MS-DOS and FreeDOS as built in options. While I could have gone all in with actual MS-DOS, FreeDOS has better compatibility with modern hardware. FreeDOS also has a USB installer available on their website, but it’s just that. An installer for putting the operating system onto a hard drive. When installed via Rufus, you don’t get the full packages that you can download from the FreeDOS website. Instead you get just the kernel, the very bare essential thing needed to boot the operating system. While this works good enough for a lot of games, quite a few of them require extra memory of some kind. DOS on it’s own only uses 640k of RAM, even if you have 4GB on your system. After manually creating and editing my own CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT (the two important system settings files), all my DOS stick boots at startup is HIMEMX (For that extended memory), CuteMouse (A wonderful generic mouse driver), and 4DOS (An enhanced command line interface). In retrospect I probably could have extracted a full setup from a virtual machine, but what I have now is functional. This so far works with just about everything I’ve thrown at it, aside from games with CPU speed issues, but this was a problem even when DOS was relevant and not a modern incompatibility.

I’ve tested this USB stick on a handful of computer setups to see how much compatibility varied. The first was my personal desktop. It’s got an AMD FX-4350, an Nvidia 750Ti, and 8GB of RAM. The second was my HP Spectre x360 laptop. The third was a salvaged embedded all-in-one PC that was originally part of a fancy restaurant cash register. It has an Intel Celeron 420, no GPU, and 2GB of RAM. I use it pretty much as a DOS gaming machine with Xubuntu on the hard drive for the pitiful amount of Linux and Windows games (via Wine) that it could run as well as downloading/moving games without having to use my main desktop. Each computer booted into DOS just fine.

First, I should address the issues that were present among all three computers. The first and what is probably a dealbreaker for a lot of people. The sound, or lack thereof. While modern video displays are just as capable of running FreeDOS as ones from decades ago, none of the sound devices in any of the computers I tried had compatible drivers. The only sound I could get was from the “PC Speaker”. A simple device that can play simple square-wave tones and not much else. Sure a clever developer could get some decent sound effects and music but for the most part all you get from it are beeps and boops. Back in the day this was an actual loudspeaker in IBM compatible PCs, but most beepers these days are tiny piezoelectric beepers. While it still works, it doesn’t produce as good of sound quality. The DSS MP3 player was impressive in DOSBox, but on my home computer you had to really try and pick out the music as the poor little buzzer struggled to play pretty much anything from the new wave pop of XTC to the heavy metal of Aria. There is the OPL2LPT that I could plug into the all-in-one for some FM synth music but it’s expensive and would only be used on one machine. I don’t mind the beeping however, I’d rather have that rather than no sound at all.

Video is a better story, but still one with caveats. The first thing to note is that newer Nvidia cards don’t seem to play too well with CGA and EGA graphical modes. While the HP laptop and the all-in-one had no issue displaying those outdated visual standards, my 750ti gave everything a green tint. Some text modes, like when trying to play PC-Man or Paratrooper had invisible text. LGR also ran into this issue in his video so it is something with Nvidia GPUs. While disappointing, I can’t really fault Nvidia for not playing well with graphics modes that aren’t used by modern computers. This second quirk is more of a nitpick than anything serious. This “problem” is the aspect ratio. While you can set most monitors and TVs to correct aspect ratios, this could potentially cause issues with the more “unusual” video modes. I wouldn’t know firsthand with DOS, but I usually handle aspect ratios on the driver-side of things because my monitor can be weird about some resolutions even when using Windows 7. Of course DOS doesn’t do this in software, so whatever you’re running gets stretched to the aspect ratio of the display. It’s a pet peeve of mine to see 4:3 stretched but it’s not a dealbreaker. If you’re lucky, some 3D games like Car & Driver let you adjust the aspect ratio or set a custom resolution.

So putting aside those limitations, what can you play on this USB stick? Here’s a list of the things I’ve got on here and run with no issue:

Doom I & II

The Oregon Trail 2nd Edition

Silpheed

Super Street Fighter II

Retro City Rampage 486

Sim City 2000

Arkanoid 1&2

Jazz Jackrabbit

Paku Paku

Rise of the Triad

Shadow President

Ancient Domains of Mystery (The free version, which still gets updated but lacks features from the paid release. Said paid release only supports modern PCs AFAIK)

Tales of Middle Earth (2.0, Maj’Eyal is only for modern PCs)

Golden Axe

PC-Man

Paratrooper

Alley Cat

robotloveskitten

Catacomb 3D (original)

Softdisk Catacomb Trilogy

ChampProgramming games

Wolfenstein 3D

Duke Nukem 3D

A lot of much older DOS games have their speed tied to the CPU so are completely unplayable on modern PCs, hence why it’s mostly 90′s games on there. Your mileage still varies, but it’s nowhere as much of a crapshoot as trying to play something from 1983. Overall, I’m happy with the results. It boots fast and without having to run another OS underneath like DOSBox means that I don’t have to worry about a game struggling on my new space age machines. I recommend anyone who has a spare USB stick try the same thing. It’s easy, doesn’t take up much space on the stick, and probably will run on your machine just fine.

[ixvyupdates]

Podcast459: Highlights from OETC 2018

This podcast features three different recordings from the 2018 Ohio Educational Technology Conference, which was held in Columbus, Ohio, February 12-14, 2018. The first is an interview with high school students who have learned how to create interactive games using Scratch software. They also have created DIY game controllers using the MakeyMakey and supplies like tin foil, cardboard, alligator clips, play dough, and bananas. The second interview is with high school senior Arthur Bodenschatz, who is part of the broadcast journalism team in North Canton City Schools, Ohio. Arthur and his classmates use an amazing “mobile storyteller” converted RV to conduct professional quality interviews at events like the Ohio educational technology conference. The third interview is Arthur’s interview of me at OETC, in which he asked me about my reasons for becoming a teacher and technology director, the pace of technological change in our society, and a few other topics. Two of these three recordings are also available as videos on YouTube and Vimeo, which are linked in the podcast shownotes. In addition to these three recordings, a few reflections on some additional highlights of OETC 2018 are included. These focus on Eric Curts’ (@ericcurts) 3 hour workshop “Write Right with Google Tools: Improving Writing in all Subjects,” Todd Beard’s (@teacherbeard) session on Minecraft for Education, and Apple Education’s workshop on updates to iOS 11. Please refer to the podcast shownotes for links to referenced resources, as well as a raft of Wes’ tweets from OETC 2018 sharing additional tips and links from sessions. (Since Storify is going offline and doesn’t support the creation of new Twitter archives, this blog post will hopefully serve that function to archive these learning takeaways.

Shownotes:

Subscribe to Moving at the Speed of Creativity Podcasts

Follow Wes Fryer on Twitter: @wfryer

The EdTech Situation Room Podcast (@edtechSR)

Eric Curts on Twitter: @ericcurts

Generate random student writing prompts with emojis!” (using a Google Sheet and script) by @ericcurts

Google Drawings for Graphic Organizers by @ericcurts

Rhyme Finder Google Add-On via @ericcurts

Read & Write for Google Chrome (extension and free/paid service)

Language Tool Add-on for Google Chrome via @ericcurts

Highlight The Music – Google Docs add-on via @ericcurts

Writeful (Thesaurus Google Extension) via @ericcurts

Addressing student cheating in Google Apps by @ericcurts

Hour webinar by @ericcurts: “Fantastic Feedback Tools for Google Docs”

Sample comment banks for writing feedback by @timbowers33 via @ericcurts

Recommended touch-screen enabled Chrome laptop: Acer Chromebook Spin 11 via @ericcurts

Playback a Google Doc’s revision history with the free extension “Draftback” via @ericcurts

Create basic/simple student writing / project rubrics with WriQ Google Add-On via @ericcurts

Create more customized writing project rubrics “Orange Slice Teacher Rubric Add-on for Docs” via @ericcurts

Todd Beard on Twitter: @teacherbeard

Video: OETC 2018: The Casady School- Dr Wesley Fryer

Video: The Mobile Storyteller of North Canton City Schools, Ohio

  So excited to be attending @ericcurts’ #OETC18 workshop this morning “Write Right with Google Tools: Improving Writing in all Subjects” in person/F2F! https://t.co/n0iBEiHO53 #googleEDU pic.twitter.com/rZoHdMVQQ1

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

"Generate random student writing prompts with emojis!" (using a Google Sheet and script) by @ericcurts #OETC18 https://t.co/25i1shinKx

(randomly grabs adjectives and nouns, puts them together & shows 20 at a time)

cc @sfryer @_MFreeland @emerson_glen #googleEDU #CasadyLearns

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

What a great tool to use when creating "5 photo stories" with students & teachers! How many emoji's do you want: 2, 3, 4 or 5? (Google Sheet script) https://t.co/25i1shinKx

h/t @ericcurts #OETC18 #DigitalStorytelling #create2learn #googleEDU cc @cogdog

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

What a great use of Google Drawings for a collaborative compare and contrast planning documents with students! h/t @ericcurts #OETC18https://t.co/9yRqyzgmh9

cc @sfryer @_MFreeland #create2learn #OklaEd #nwp #CasadyLearns pic.twitter.com/KvHdwW30r9

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

"You can share a Google Drive document / file with up to 200 named people, and synchronously collaborate with up to 50 people"

via @ericcurts #OETC18 #googleEDU

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Google has changed "revision history" to "version history" in Drive documents now

via @ericcurts #OETC18 #googleEDU

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Litmus test of "tech-savvy" = "willingness to click"

by @alicekeeler via @ericcurts #OETC18 #edtech #clever

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

The "research" tool in Google Docs is now the "explore" tool h/t @ericcurts #OETC18

Good post by @DitchThatTxtbk highlighting features: https://t.co/SsyX37FArO#googleEDU #edtech

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

great resource by @ericcurts: "Google Drawings for Graphic Organizers" https://t.co/9yRqyzgmh9 #OETC18 #googleEDU #edtech pic.twitter.com/yx3M6iHuez

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

.@sfryer For an upcoming poetry unit your students will do: Rhyme Finder Google Add-On https://t.co/RnMN7e6BDE (Highlight a word, and it suggests rhyming words. How cool is this?!) #OETC18 #googleEDU #writing #CasadyLearns #OklaEd

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Self-Editing papers: Consider using text to speech tools like "Read&Write for Google Chrome" by @texthelp https://t.co/fxzTnsSZXx to help students with proofreading. It makes a big difference to hear "someone else" ready back your own words! via @ericcurts #OETC18 #googleEDU

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

super-helpful Google tool #googleEDU clarification from @ericcurts: "Google Add-Ons get installed INSIDE a specific Google Drive file/document. Google Extensions are installed and available within your Chrome browser for all docs / files" #OETC18

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Really powerful for proofreading: "LanguageTool add-on for Docs" https://t.co/020LzGOKvX

via @ericcurts #OETC18 #googleEDU

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Visually analyze your essay / paper to see patterns and outliers in your sentence length. POWERFUL! Highlight The Music – Google Docs add-on https://t.co/FS0GEmI7tB via @ericcurts #OETC18 #googleEDU #writing #CasadyLearns

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Recommended Thesaurus add-on for Google Chrome: @Writefullapp https://t.co/BqWj7iqGXs via @ericcurts #OETC18 #googleEDU

cc @sfryer @_MFreeland @emerson_glen #CasadyLearns #OklaEd

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Writefull Thesaurus: A Google Docs add-on that uses AI to give you synonyms! ? https://t.co/aIWfpDBpUu pic.twitter.com/1DO4EurREP

— Product Hunt (@ProductHunt) April 20, 2017

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Excellent blog post by @ericcurts: "Addressing student cheating in Google Apps" https://t.co/UjyQkHDzSj #OETC18 #googleEDU

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Would be a super after-school #CasadyLearns video-powered workshop for MD: "Fantastic Feedback Tools for Google Docs" (1 hour) by @ericcurts https://t.co/P3Ibh0AW1a #googleEDU #OETC18

cc @BiggestMeow @joshbottomly @emerson_glen

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

#WOW (all writing teachers please take note…)

Sample comment banks for writing feedback by @timbowers33 via @ericcurts #OETC18 #googleEDU https://t.co/lUdWyQahVH

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Fantastic demo by @ericcurts today at #OETC18 on how teachers can integrate Google Keep lists (of writing comments / feedback or stickers) and readily use / copy/paste those into student Google Docs! (with a s/o to @i3algebra) https://t.co/crwpPhaxzx #googleEDU

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

I like this language by @ericcurts, responding to a question about when we let students use powerful tools to assist in their writing… Similar to teaching problem solving AFTER learning multiplication, using a calculator:

"Now we're using the technology to step higher" #OETC18

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

#oetc18 Recommended touch-screen enabled Chrome laptop: Acer Chromebook Spin 11 https://t.co/wOsoMjNo0t via @ericcurts #CasadyLearns cc @emerson_glen @BlackDogOKC @techsavvyteach #edtechSR

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

#GreatTip for student writing:

Google Docs "version history" now lets you rename different iterations… can be very helpful when different writing milestones are reached. Like different draft versions, steps in the writing process. via @ericcurts #OETC18 #googleEDU

cc @sfryer

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Use the free Google Chrome extension "DraftBack" https://t.co/HIQbjO8ut8 to replay a Google Doc as a video and show how content was contributed / edited (doesn't work in Drawings, Sheets, etc however – just Docs) via @ericcurts #OETC18 #googleEDU #edtechSR

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Fantastic Google Docs Add-On for creating simple project rubrics: WriQ by @texthelp https://t.co/NvnF6466Ar via @ericcurts #OETC18 #googleEDU #edtechSR #CasadyLearns #PBL #pblchat

cc @sfryer

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Attending #OETC18 this week? Don't miss @ericcurts! I attended his morning workshop on Google Writing Tools – It was AMAZING! Chock full of so many practical suggestions, tools, apps & strategies #WOW All of Eric's session details & resources are linked on https://t.co/4UaqlkwZy0

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Looking to create a more customized writing project rubric with Google Docs? Check out "Orange Slice Teacher Rubric Add-on for Docs" https://t.co/0NQVJWyNdj via @ericcurts #OETC18 #googleEDU #edtech #CasadyLearns #edtechSR #OklaEd #nwp

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

"When students create for the WORLD, they make it GOOD. When many students create for a teacher / for an assignment, they make it GOOD ENOUGH." by @rushtonh

via @ericcurts #OETC18

(Another reason @sfryer & I need to publish a book for @digishare!)

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

What a treat to meet the amazing @ericcurts in person at #OETC18 and also attend his three-hour workshop on Google writing tools! https://t.co/n0iBEiHO53 #edtech #googleEDU pic.twitter.com/UlZqsg5A70

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

new post: Inspired by Ohio Student Interactive @Scratch Games https://t.co/8s0q7QDrkp #oetc18 #STEM #STEAM #coding pic.twitter.com/eRlIa1inpF

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

I updated my presentation handouts page with links to slides from today's #OETC18 keynote "Sparking ? Conversations about Digital Citizenship" and other recent #DigCit parent talks https://t.co/aQgUTfWMkw #InternetSafety #security #ScreenTime #wellness

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

#OETC18 Ways to continue the conversation and keep learning together: https://t.co/3T8rN56m4U #DigCit #edtech pic.twitter.com/mAq0KHmOrm

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Great #oetc18 dinner with @schinker and @mr_rcollins

s/o to @cheryloakes50 @edtechtalk & @k12online pic.twitter.com/9FnArqZbil

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 14, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Slides and links to referenced resources for my Feb 14th #OETC18 breakout session "Security, Privacy, and Digital Citizenship" (and Feb 13th keynote on sparking #DigCit conversations) are available on https://t.co/qPlmZaLQRr pic.twitter.com/jLe1GcfEFz

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 14, 2018

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Now attending @teacherbeard's #OETC18 #OETC2018 session "Intro & Part 2 of #Minecraft Education Edition" #STEM #STEAM (Todd is a teacher in Flint, Michigan specializing in #STEAM)

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 14, 2018

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[VIDEO] by @TeacherBeard: Teaching Personal Finance, Checkbooks, and Life Choices https://t.co/0KNlo9sNdx #oetc18 #oetc2018

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 14, 2018

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Hearing @TeacherBeard share his story of starting to use #Minecraft in 2010 in an after-school program!

"Start w small goals, & start playing. Build a small city. Leverage competition which can complement the collaborative aspects… Lots of teachable moments"#OETM18 #OETM2018

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 14, 2018

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"Each of our islands in #Minecraft [after-school program] developed their own bill of rights – priceless conversations. Wool was very scarce & became super valuable." [super economics discussions] by @TeacherBeard #OETC18 #OETC2018

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 14, 2018

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Learning about @msphilanthropic and #YouthSpark from @TeacherBeard in Ohio – great work on #coding with disadvantaged students #OETM18 #OETM2018

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 14, 2018

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Remember #Minecraft is more than just mining! Great #oetc18 stories and project examples for High schoolers too by @TeacherBeard

“We are always moving from failing to sailing in my classroom”

“Consider starting conversations about Minecraft with Digital Citizenship” #DigCit pic.twitter.com/hcZfQxrgFN

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 14, 2018

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"Encourage students to create visual performances of understanding within #Minecraft. Have it be an acceptable way to demonstrate knowledge" by @TeacherBeard #OETC18 #STEM

cc @emerson_glen @sfryer

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 14, 2018

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"Meet students where they live. The majority of our students are connected to some kind of video game. A passion for learning is there, they are just not learning what we normally expect." by @teacherbeard #OETC18 #OETC2018 #STEM #STEAM

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 14, 2018

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Love ?? these ideas about why we need to use #Minecraft with our students by @TeacherBeard #OETC18 #oetc2018 https://t.co/fSOSgHvmK1 pic.twitter.com/AxHoWqlMDI

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 14, 2018

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"Play is our brain's favorite way of learning" by Diane Ackerman via @teacherbeard #OETC18 #OETC2018

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 14, 2018

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Reasons to consider purchasing (annual license per student) for @Minecraft Education Edition via @TeacherBeard #oetc18 #oetc2018 pic.twitter.com/7Q6DD9HAM5

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 14, 2018

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"Chalkboards" are new signs in Minecraft EE which lets you include live links, including YouTube videos, which students can view without leaving the Minecraft environment via @teacherbeard

Also "fixed inventory" is new on the Minecraft player hotbar #OETC18 #OETC2018

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 14, 2018

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I published an audio-only version of my #OETC18 #OETC2018 presentation today "Security, Privacy, and Digital Citizenship" to YouTube: https://t.co/s3FnIPO82A #DigCit

(Recorded on an iPad with "Voice Record Pro" (a free app) & published with the iOS YouTube app)

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 14, 2018

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At the "What's new w iPad & iOS 11" #OETC18 session, they are sharing the 3D virtual reality app "JigSpace" https://t.co/9lFj23P2rk

See attached image for the description. Now you can just explore 3D models created by others, but "coming soon" is the ability to create your own! pic.twitter.com/dYeNuCuy9k

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 14, 2018

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I'm excited to announce the entirely unofficial winner of this year's #oetc2018 #OETC18 "most amazing conference tweeter" is @JChanter22! Way to document, amplify, and positively share conference learning Jamie! Keep it up! ?

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 14, 2018

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We use Vectr (free) app. Students can design on chromebook and then send over to Tinkercad for 3D printing. https://t.co/T1qzmG3592 For the lithophanes (pics), we use https://t.co/yHB0emXWex Some info:https://t.co/MiUXS8EaFX

— Vicki Turner (@VTurner8) February 13, 2018

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new post: The Mobile Storyteller of North Canton City Schools, Ohio https://t.co/yaJMzYxolH #edtech #oetc18 #oetc2018 (includes 2 min 11 sec video!) pic.twitter.com/PLmLqtdpBE

— Wesley Fryer ??? (@wfryer) February 15, 2018

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“Wes Fryer and Eric Curts at OETC 2018” (CC BY 2.0) by Wesley Fryer

Did you know Wes has published several eBooks and “eBook singles?” 1 of them is available free! Check them out!

Do you use a smartphone or tablet? Subscribe to Wes’ free magazine “iReading” on Flipboard!

If you’re trying to listen to a podcast episode and it’s not working, check this status page. (Wes is migrating his podcasts to Amazon S3 for hosting.) Remember to follow Wesley Fryer on Twitter (@wfryer), Facebook and Google+. Also “like” Wesley’s Facebook pages for “Speed of Creativity Learning” and his eBook, “Playing with Media.” Don’t miss Wesley’s latest technology integration project, “Mapping Media to the Curriculum.”

Podcast459: Highlights from OETC 2018 syndicated from https://sapsnkraguide.wordpress.com

[plogan721]

It is almost time (Planner setup)

Disclaimer: P. Lynne Designs is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.

Today, I want to talk about time.  I know, boring subject, but there is a purpose for this topic.  I am not going to talk about time too much on this post, except for when it comes to setting up your planner.

How much time do we really have?

Photo by P.Lynne Designs (c) 2019

We all know what time is and how valuable it is in a day.  I feel that if I have a lot of time on my hands, I am not being productive when I watch a video or playing a game on my tablet. I like to be productive, as I am sure many of you do.  I am not saying don’t play games or watch videos.  Find a set time in the day/night to do that sort of thing.  This is part of your scheduling.  I do not write it down in my planner, but I make a conscious effort to note that in my head. 

Experts say that went you go to bed each night, turn off the screens.  What does that mean?  It simply means turn off your computer, turn off your phones and tablets, and do not play the television all night.  If you cannot do that, at least put them in the next room.  If you put them in the next room, you now have to physically get up to answer any texts or comments on your posts on Facebook, for example.  I know if I have to do that, I do not want to get up, so, I save it for the next morning.

For instance, I turn off my phone.  Not because the experts say that I have to, but I have a phone that constantly needs charging.  It is a Samsung Note 4 and on its last lap around the mobile bin. I will get into my issues with my phone at a later time and hopefully, I can change my phone soon. Next, there is my desktop computer.  I keep it on all the time, except when Windows 10 updates without my knowledge, and it automatically turns off the computer.  I have the computer downstairs because where I really want my computer, which is in the next room, my nephew and his girlfriend are living there until they can find an apartment.  My laptop is powered down for the moment and in my backpack for when I want to work in my room or decide to go to a coffee shop or the library to work. Those are examples of turning off the screens.

I have a flaw that I am working on.

One problem that I still have is my Ipad.  I carry it to bed with me.  I look at my messages, play games, read articles, and watch YouTube videos.  This is a bad example of turning off the screens.  When I don’t do these things that I mentioned, I find myself walking over to my Ipad, unlocking it, and just let the light from the screen put me to sleep.  It is my 5 minute night light, which I am trying to correct right now.

My tips for scheduling:

In addition to powering down your screens, which is more of a “how to get a restful night of sleep” than “How to schedule” tip.  I have these other tips:

Get a good planner. 

I have I ready mentioned in Part 1 of Planning for Beginners 2020 Edition, steps for buying that first planner if you do not already have one.  I have watched plenty of YouTube videos prior to writing that post, to make sure that I was pointing the reader in the right direction.  This is sort of part 2, and I apologize for not writing a proper post for this second part.  What I have learned from my experiences and watching those videos is get a planner that is right for you and how you plan. 

Photo by Pixabay

No two people can have the exact type of planning and planners.  I have mentioned that I have 4 different planners.  One is for my business, for my personal life, for my budget, and I am trying out bullet journaling, after a failed attempt of it for 2019.  The planners are all from Erin Condren, but I am open to trying new ones.  This is the brand I have chosen for me.  There is also the Happy Planner, Moleskine, The Simplified planner, Mead has a planner, Emily Ley, and Carpe Diem, to name a few thousand.  It seems that everyone has a planner to sell.

Have a “Think Tank” session. 

Choose a day to think about what you want to do and accomplish for 2020.  You do not have to take the whole day, but take a good chuck out of your say to set up your system and your schedule.  Place standing dates and dates (such as doctor’s appointment) that were scheduled in 2019 and place them in your planner. 

So, decorate or not decorate it according to your tastes.  Make a schedule that you are comfortable with.  I have 4 planners, and I am fine with that concept.  I know others who have 8 or 5.  There are some people who stick with one paper planner and have a digital planner. Do what makes you happy. 

Take ideas from people and make them your own.  You do not have to make an exact copy of their setup.  Before you begin, ask yourself, how can I make this work for me?  Use a scratch piece of paper, and write out a budget on what you are willing to spend and what you can spend.  Next, draw or write out your sections, such as Home, Business, Budget, and personal.

If you can, have a separate budget book. 

Yes, that is what the Erin Condren Monthly deluxe planner is for with me.  This is not a new concept.  I adopted this technique from Shay McMillian, AKA Shay Budgets.  What I like about this planner is that there are notebook pages inside of each monthly section, where you can write down your notes, your income, your expenses, your sinking funds (I am still learning about those), and your financial goals.  You do not have to go all out like me.  I am testing this system for the first time.  What was not working for me was using Excel for a budget, and placing it in my main planner.

Business/Work Planner

Also if you can, have a separate business planner (or work planner if you still have a corporate job).  When I planned out My Ambiance Life and decided to talk about business ventures, I did not realize that I had a whole audience of readers who were both entrepreneurs and corporate workers, or corporate workers ONLY.  So this tip is for you too.  Many times, for example, we often find ourselves not only placing appointments in our personal planners dental appointments for our children, but that “all-inclusive” staff meeting from XYZ company, or meeting with a client, who wants to do 14 fittings of a wedding dress that she is not sure of in the first place into that planner.  Why not have a separate planner?  Even better if you can leave on at the office and carry the other one around. 

Photo by Pixabay

Not feeling the need to have to carry one around.  Does pocket-size mean anything or using your phone as a digital planner?  That is why I carry my Ipad.  I put all my dates in there

5. Putting it all together.

Find a way to coordinate your system.  Make a conscious effort to look at it every day.  Decorate if you want to.  I know of some people who go wild with the decorating and some who take on a minimalist approach to it.  I am in the middle.  If I feel like it, I will decorate it.  I do not make a habit of it.  I like stickers, which goes back to my days of making scrapbooks. 

I would love to hear your thoughts on the subject of setting up a planner.  Place them in the comments section.

Related Articles

Planning for Beginners the 2020 addition part 1

How to set up a Planner 

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AgeMatch Review June 2019

AgeMatch Review June 2019

Dating internet site for those who are into age space dating

Plenty of features readily available for standard users

Functions for community relationship can be obtained

Has strict security and fake prevention measures

People usually do not appear to be that active

The internet site is very distinctively bland

Signing Up: 3.5/5 Making Contact: 4.0/5 Profile Quality: 3.5/5 App: 3.5/5 Real Lifestyle Review: 4.0/5

Our Review

AgeMatch is just an accepted spot that celebrates love inclined as we grow older huge difference. It’s a medium where older guys are absolve to date more youthful ladies, and older women can be absolve to fulfill more youthful males. This type of dating is more popularly known as “age gap dating.”

The website was launched in 2001, which makes it one of many dating internet site pioneers that provide solutions geared towards those people who are enthusiastic about age space relationship. Since its conception, it’s aided form enduring, intimate relationships and https://myukrainianbride.net friendships. This has a big account pool with more than one million users around the globe.

Then this site might help you find one if you are looking for someone more mature or younger than you. It really is a place that is safe individuals of various many years in order to connect and fall in love. The working platform isn’t just created for those people who are looking for their perfect matches, but in addition for people who want one thing casual and enjoyable.

Member Framework

Gender percentage is significantly evenly distributed

Greater part of the users are older males

Many people are searching for severe relationships

Most of the populace is through the united states of america

The target that is main are those enthusiastic about age space dating

Your website claims to function as the leading age space dating website, with more than one million registered members worldwide. Most of the known users come from the usa of America, getting back together significantly more than 1 / 2 of your website’s populace.

The sex circulation is very good with a two is always to three feminine to ratio that is male. Your website is filled up with older and founded guys that are interested in severe relationships. These males are shopping for more youthful women that can truly add an excitement that is little their everyday lives.

In the population that is female here be seemingly more young women that have an interest in age space relationship. The majority of the ladies who join AgeMatch are the ones who’re 18-34 years of age, to locate an adult guy.

Age Circulation

18-24

25-34

35-44

45-54

55+

Registering

Effortless signup process

It is possible to register via Facebook

E-mail verification required

Takes just at most of the five minutes to accomplish

Fundamental information needed

Signing as much as AgeMatch is easy and quick. It will require for the most part five full minutes to help you complete starting your bank account. Your website provides two other ways to register. You may either register manually or simply connect your Facebook account into the web web web web site.

Within the process that is manual you need to offer some necessary data and an operating email for validation. On it will be linked to your AgeMatch profile if you choose to link your Facebook account, all the essential information you have.

Whenever registering, you must prepare an unique username since your website doesn’t utilize individuals names for recognition. You can even upload a profile photo in the final end associated with the procedure.

Making Contact

Initiating contact is for premium users

Provides ways that are various community conversation

It is possible to deliver winks without having any cost

Build a listing of your favorite users for free

A chat is had by the site function

AgeMatch is promoting various ways to speak to other people. They will have features that fit both communication that is personal community relationship.

Your website is very like a social media website where people can like individuals pictures, touch upon statuses, and so many more. Moreover it provides a medium where individuals are able to show their thoughts and have concerns towards the community, like blog sites and discussion boards. These features are free for everybody to make use of aside from account kind.

For a far more way that is personal of, you can easily elect to deliver winks, include visitors to favorites, or deliver personal messages. If you are a member that is standard you can’t deliver communications to individuals who didn’t contact you first. It is possible to just answer communications you have obtained.

Profile Quality

Pages of all users are quite detail by detail

You will find enjoyable concerns you are able to respond to anytime

It is possible to edit your profile information

You can easily upload personal and photos that are public

Web web Site safety suspends dubious records

The profile informative data on AgeMatch is very detail by detail. It gives a broad concept of a|idea that is general of user’s fundamental information, appearance, history, lifestyle, as well as others.

Greater part of industries you are free to finish are multiple-choice items where you have only to pick the clear answer that best matches your viewpoint. About yourself, you can give more personal details on the “About Me” section if you want to tell more. You are able to elaborate regarding the match that is ideal on “About my match/friend” section.

Your website has many fast questions you can answer anytime you want. These concerns are simply tiny extra information about yourself; a lot of them are answerable by yes or no. Your profile part may also add a comparison that is side-by-side of facts about yourself as well as your match details.

Watching pages, doing your profile, and uploading photos are free. several types of pictures you are able to upload: personal plus . Personal pictures is only able to be accessed by those known users you give authorization to. On top of that, it is possible to just see other individuals’s personal pictures if he or she has grant you access to it.

Remember that your website constantly checks profiles. Any act that is suspicious breach for the web web site policy can lead to a merchant account suspension system.

The application is able to down load

Available on Bing Enjoy and also the Apple App shop

Comparable user interface with desktop variation

All site features are available in the application

The application possesses user interface that is good

The AgeMatch software is available to down load at no cost on GooglePlay together with Appstore. It offers the functions available on the site, such as the features that are special. Its practical and appropriate for any screen size, also it doesn’t just take that much room on your unit.

The application possesses user that is good that is just like the desktop variation, rendering it very easy to scroll and flick through record of web site users. The software is really a alternative that is good those that usually do not their laptop computers or desktop, those who’s lifestyle are often on the run.

Real World Review

You do not understand just exactly how much delight this website has offered me personally. I’ve lost the passion for my entire life early in our relationship, and because then, We have actually been troubles that are having a new one. I’ve for ages been quite drawn to someone younger I was hesitant to court one than me, but. Primarily I can pamper because I am looking for a serious relationship and not just someone. like to begin a relationship with a person who simply has cash as her motives. I would like you to definitely be because I can provide for her with me because she loves me and not. To cut a long story short, I got a free account on AgeMatch, met the absolute most great girl in the world. She has the smile that is sweetest plus the purest heart, an unusual treasure. We have been venturing out for quite some right time now, which is going very well. I might happen still alone if I experiencedn’t tried this web site away. Because of that, I’m able to state that the premium registration had been really worth every penny. – Engineer (43)

Design and Usability

AgeMatch has design that is basic folks of any age can certainly realize. Its program is a mixture of both old and brand brand brand brand new designs, depending on which page . Your website makes use of a serious complete large amount of texts for tabs and menu choices. It will utilize some icons too, however it is often labeled along with its function or name. This is certainly significantly a thing that is good due to the fact they even offer their solution to older audiences.

The website utilizes white whilst the main color with a few accents of blue on its tabs and menu club. The texts utilized are mostly in black colored, rendering it readable. All pages and posts on the website are arranged nicely, plus it won’t have a complete large amount of pop-up adverts that may disturb your browsing.

AgeMatch Expenses and Costs

Create Blog Sites

View other members’ profile

Join discussion boards

Respond to communications and chats

Forward wink

Include visitors to favorites

Access users’ first date some ideas

Fundamental search filters

Include photos that are public

Include photos that are private

Check out the latest tasks

discuss pages, pictures, and blogs

Answer questions on discussion boards

Like pictures and articles

Usage of “Why don’t we Meet” function

Initiate talk and communications

React to users’ first date a few ideas

Check a person replies to communications

Check lists that are online

Advanced search filters

See whom viewed and favorited your profile

See who liked your picture

Hide others from search engine results

Include notes that are personal pages

Browse anonymously

Highlight profile

View appropriate matches and reverse matches

Priority consumer care

Duration / Credits / Coins Costs per month Premium that is total / Month / Month

Is AgeMatch costly or low priced?

In comparison to other providers AgeMatch is typical.

https://www.nemkurutma.com/agematch-review-june-2019-53/

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Marten Eden by Jack United kingdom.It is a report in regards to individual who performed his very best to turn into a considerably better human being yet the a person he liked showed up to not ever be worthy of these endeavours. Around the technique for progress, you can observe that consumers with you are position also when you are continuing to move forward. Now you ask , whether or not this was truly worth turning out to be smart. Thedifficult opportunities which were produced by Jack Londonare perfectly mentioned within this biography.

Lord of flies by William Golding.We read numerous instances the experiences around a mankind or several consumers stuck on some tropical isle devoid of society. The creator is meant to present young boys and girls away from society and assess their tendencies. It showed up that kids are far more vicious and aggressive then people including a minor adventure turns into a headache.

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Look and feel – summarize. On this occasion you must require a several thing and attempt to discuss it as a in-depth because you can which include its form, volume, colouring, intent and so forth. It will permit you to make use of know-how in reality. New terms could be invaluable just for this online game.

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The post Internet Proofreading Program: Appreciate Informative Course of action appeared first on Guest Blogging Platform for Jewelry & Fashion.

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Internet Proofreading Program: Appreciate Informative Course of action

Internet Proofreading Program: Appreciate Informative Course of action

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Three or more Comrades by Erich Maria Remarque.It is not easy to review this fresh and say what this fresh is centered on. To start with, it can be about relationship and absolutely love. It focuses on some mental health complications of posting Initially Planet Conflict period of time. A variety of reflections and remarkable incidents that can be shown in your own remembrance. By the use of quick daily happenings,this writer attempts to indicate the how unrespectable lifespan is usually.

Marten Eden by Jack United kingdom.It is a report in regards to individual who performed his very best to turn into a considerably better human being yet the a person he liked showed up to not ever be worthy of these endeavours. Around the technique for progress, you can observe that consumers with you are position also when you are continuing to move forward. Now you ask , whether or not this was truly worth turning out to be smart. Thedifficult opportunities which were produced by Jack Londonare perfectly mentioned within this biography.

Lord of flies by William Golding.We read numerous instances the experiences around a mankind or several consumers stuck on some tropical isle devoid of society. The creator is meant to present young boys and girls away from society and assess their tendencies. It showed up that kids are far more vicious and aggressive then people including a minor adventure turns into a headache.

3) Enjoying way.

There are various video game titles that will assist you to know English language usually as well as terms you encountered by to kill a mockingbird essay topics pdf using two earlier approaches. For people with some mates remarkable in The english language without or with The english language ability, you can actually look for their aid. A handful of strange functions in the 2000s which might be helpful for youhttp://findwritingservice.com/blog page/top rated-considerable-functions-of-2000s.

Notes.This video game is pretty effortless and you could quite easily achieve it by themselves. In the first place, it is advisable to have a bright page of old fashioned paper and work into a variety of components. In one facet take note of anything or maybe manifestation you desire to master, on the opposite side post description or concept of that one. Find the credit card and looking through a description aim to do you know what message might it be.

Seem put in writing. Have your note pad and go walking available your house and strive to convert the things you notice, also the most basic models. There are many handy written text available for you as your studio might be stuffed with appealing information you didnt think about.

Look and feel – summarize. On this occasion you must require a several thing and attempt to discuss it as a in-depth because you can which include its form, volume, colouring, intent and so forth. It will permit you to make use of know-how in reality. New terms could be invaluable just for this online game.

That is you cannot assume all the ways of considerably approaches to research project The english language, but those are the basic handiest and fulfilling kinds. This is often a period that you should make progress and discover your tricks to master The english language. Just about the most expertise one has, the more often difficult procedures will probably be. Fail to worried to try out your ways. The most beneficial methods to eradicate sadness is set in our essayhttp://findwritingservice.com/web site/depressive disorders-its-control-and-way-to-manage-with-it.

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The post Internet Proofreading Program: Appreciate Informative Course of action appeared first on Guest Blogging Platform for Jewelry & Fashion.

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How Lawyers Work: Mary Juetten, Persistent Advocate for Change and Online Shopping Maven

In this week’s edition of How Lawyers Work, we hear from Mary Juetten. Mary is the CEO of Traklight and the managing director of Evolve Law in Bellingham, Washington.

You can follow Mary on both LinkedIn and Twitter.

What’s your elevator pitch?

I don’t practice law—yet (more on that in 2018). Instead, out of law school, I created software that helps small businesses self-identify risk and intellectual property; it doubles as lead generation for companies or issue-spotting for lawyers. Along the way, I created the Evolve Law community to accelerate the pace of change within the legal industry. In my spare time, I write and consult on practice management, law reform, and small business issues.

What apps or tools are essential to your daily workflow?

To run two companies as well as write books and consult, I need mad project organization. These are some of the tools I use daily to do just that:

Google Apps. (1) Google Docs – I use this for project lists and collaboration (cannot live without this); (2) Google Calendar; and of course, (3) Gmail – I use my email to organize myself and work towards inbox zero (I panic if it’s over 50).

Slack. It’s much better than email. I now use it to run Evolve Law with Above the Law.

iPhone on T-mobile. The hotspot allows me to work anywhere in all 3 countries I travel to including my kid in Canada, my homes in the U.S., and my husband’s work in Mexico.

iPhone apps. (1) Notes – I have written entire blog posts during a car or plane ride; (2) Dragon – It’s come a long way and great to dictate for books or blogs; (3) Kindle (unlimited) – It keeps me sane in long lines and while traveling.

Asana. However, If I practiced or worked with more than one person, I would use Trello as it is more visual.

Post-its, colored pens, and legal pads. I not only run all my businesses with these basics, but I also use them in our household (the kids all lived in the house into their twenties; it’s basic but it works).

Whiteboards. When I write, I use these for storyboards. When we had a Traklight office, we painted the walls with whiteboard paint, and I would do that in a heartbeat for any office.

Google Home. I can play peaceful piano music from Spotify to work by—soothing but not distracting.

What does your workspace look like?

Click to view slideshow.

Which one? I am a nomad with three residences, plus I can work on the airport floor if necessary or traveling in the car. I carry post-its and colored pens with me at all times and have whiteboards in all three places. They say sitting is the new smoking so I move around during the day from table to countertop, etc. When I leave one place, I take pictures of the lists, post-its, and whiteboards to go to the next stop.

How do you keep track of your calendars and deadlines?

Google Calendar. It’s on my laptop and phone and accessible anywhere. I calendar all my tasks as appointments and create repeating calendar invites. Each week, I create a master to-do list on an old-fashioned yellow pad—one for each of my companies and writing projects. I also have large lined Post-its for daily tasks and regular Post-it notes for reminders. Lastly, I print out my daily calendar and am delighted to cross off tasks.

What is your coffee service setup?

I only drink coffee until noon. If I am lucky enough to be in the same city as my husband, he brings me coffee in bed. I will drink green tea, but my go-to is coffee with almond milk and I like the regular grind and drip. We have some complicated machines in our houses that I do not use!

What is one thing that you listen to, read, or watch that everyone should?

I read and watch to escape. I’m not sure anyone shares my obsession with Criminal Minds or now, Mindhunter. But I think everyone should listen to music every day.

What is your favorite local place to network or work solo?

Our cabin deck in Washington for solo work. Networking is something that I do for a living so I have no favorite city or place for that!

What are three things you do without fail every day?

Click to view slideshow.

(1) Text my family; (2) Write; (3) Be thankful

Who else would you like to see answer these questions?

Juliet Peters. (Editor’s note: We made Juliet answer these questions a couple months back!)

How Lawyers Work: Mary Juetten, Persistent Advocate for Change and Online Shopping Maven was originally published on Lawyerist.com.

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