#and they give it to the shitty cheap rate producers but then I end up dragged in to working on it anyways so they aren't saving any $

[wuxian-vs-wangji]

I have two extremely frustrating days of work ahead of me... An event I hate with a burning passion, so much so that they had to trick me into agreeing to work it, and then producing my show on top of all that...

So the theme of the next 2 days will be 'tension headaches'.

[gutsfics]

The Name Of The Game

Chapter One - Goodness

AO3 Link | Next Chapter (N/A) Fandom: Hollywood U Pairing: Thomas Hunt x Avalon Hammond (M!MC) Other Characters: Janey Hammond (F!OC) Length: 7,001 words Rating: Teen Warnings: Teacher/Student Relationship, Canon-Atypical Cursing, Smoking, Implied Sex, Referenced Canon-Typical Blackmail Notable Headcanons: Gay/Transmasculine Character (Thomas)

Series Summary: After being given a full ride to a prestigious film school by a mysterious benefactor, Avalon Hammond moves from Texas to California to try and make it big. Unfortunately, everything seems to go down hill incredibly quickly after an unintended one night stand with a professor before classes start.

Chapter Summary: Barely in LA for a week, Avalon gets invited to a masquerade ball the night before his classes start, where he meets a man. In-Game Quests Used: On The Hunt

A/N: With PB shutting down HWU, I figured it was about time I actually get this finished. I hope you enjoy!

“That’s the last one,” Avalon says with a sigh as he drops the box he’s holding onto the top of a stack. “I hope I remembered everything, I really don’t wanna call you up in a week, crying ‘cuz I left, I don’t know, my really good nonstick pan in Texas.”

“I think you mean my really good nonstick pan,” Janey retorts, glancing up from where she’s trying to assemble some Uskea furniture. “You want good cookware, you gotta buy it yourself.”

He scoffs. “I did buy it.”

“With money from our joint account when we were getting the essentials. And since that money was family money, the pan is staying in Texas with me and the girls. Besides, you and I both know that you’re not gonna eat anything that can’t be microwaved for at least your first semester.” 

“Stop projecting. I cook more than you do.”

She flicks a spare screw at him. “Anyway,” she says, overenunceating on purpose, “Since you’re done bringing shit in, you wanna help me with this?”

“Not particularly, no.”

She gives him a withering stare.

“But that don’t mean I won’t,” he says with a sigh, kneeling next to her and picking up the instructions. “Which one is this? The coffee table? Arkelstorp?”

“Bookshelf. Lo- lommarp, I think? Gotta keep your thousand dollar textbooks on display somewhere, why not on some shitty cheap furniture? Hand me that screwdriver.”

“Oh, gross, I forgot about textbooks.” He scrunches his nose. “What does an art school even need textbooks for? Tuition is already crazy high on it’s own.”

“Ain’t you getting a free ride?”

“I mean, yeah, but I wouldn't be needing someone else to pay if it weren’t so fucking expensive. If you hadn’t talked me into doing this, I’d still be at home, taking care of the girls.” He pauses, shifting his attention to the shelf for a few seconds, and then quietly says, “Ain’t too late to back out now, is it?” 

Janey sighs and puts down the shelf part, shuffling in place to turn to Avalon. She gently puts a hand on his shoulder. “Listen, I know you miss them. I miss them, too, and I’m going back home in a few days. But I also know that doing this is important to you. You’ve loved acting and making movies since we were kids, and now you have the opportunity to get trained by professionals for free.”

“I don’t know if it’s free, really. It really seemed like he only offered to pay because he’s expecting something down the line.”

“I mean you don’t have to pay money, dumbass. He probably just wants you for a movie he’s producing eventually, or something. Or maybe he wants to be your sugar daddy and this was the only way he could get you to accept.” She turns back to the half-finished shelf. “Either way, I know this is something you want to do. You, getting your class list all figured out- that was the happiest I’ve seen you doing anything for yourself in a while. Dawn and Lily can’t be the only things that make you happy; it’s not fair to them.”

“I know, I just… Can’t I find something in Texas, closer to home?”

“Give it til the end of the semester, alright? You can’t quit before you even start. Besides,” She bumps his shoulder with her own. “Maybe you’ll find a hot guy who treats you right. One you’re confident could make a good stepdad to the girls.”

Avalon blushes and shakes his head. “Absolutely not! That’s not why I’m here!”

“What, you saying you don’t want to bone down with some cute Californian boy?” Janey jabs his side a few times.

“I didn’t say I wasn’t going to fuck, I just-!” He sighs. “What guy is gonna want some ex-hooker, who’s married with two kids, and is just now going to college? And not just any college, but a fucking film school, even though he’s pushing forty? Even with my wife being a lesbian, that still drastically narrows my already small dating pool.” He waves his hand dismissively. “It’ll probably be best if I just stick to the occasional random hookup to get me through the year, sexually. And that’s if I can find someone here who’s not scared off by me being… well, you know.” He gestures at himself.

Janey gives him an odd look, tipping her head to the side and scrunching her nose. "What, a giant? Or a bear? I thought twinks love bears. Besides, there have been men who have paid a shitton of money just to be with you for a single night, you don’t gotta worry about people not finding you attractive.”

“That was my job, Janey. They had to pay me for that.”

“Yeah, but they chose to be your clients. You weren’t the only gigolo in Gillespie County- they could have gone to someone else. But they didn’t.”

“I don’t think my clients are a good example of people finding me attractive. A few of them were into some gross, messed up shit.” He shudders. “Not the kind of people I’d want to be in a relationship with.”

“The world is big, Ava. Surely there’s a guy out there who thinks you’re sexy and is only into the things you enjoy doing. But, if you don’t wanna look for a guy for yourself, you can always find a girl for me.” She stands up, lifting the shelf as she goes. “Now, where do you want this?”

“Over here, I think.” He gets up as well, helping her move the shelf into place. “Hm.” He tips his head to the side. “It’ll look better once we get the rest of the room set up.” He starts sliding some boxes onto the shelves to make more room. “Arkelstorp next. The coffee table.”

Janey nods and begins opening the box, but before they can begin assembling, there is a knock at the door. “Who do you think that is?”

“New neighbor saying hello, or maybe some missionaries here to offer moving assistance in exchange for us attending church with them on Sunday.” Avalon shrugs. “Only one way to find out.” He tucks some stray hair back into his ponytail and heads for the front door.

Only to find no one there. He leans out, looking up and down the street. “...Huh. Okay.” He turns to go back inside, but a paper- folded and sealed with wax, taped to the door- catches his eye. He grabs it and heads back to Janey.

“Whatcha got there?”

“Letter. I think it’s from the guy who’s funding me. “The Benefactor” or whatever the fuck he’s calling himself.” 

“What’s it say?”

“Hold your horses, I’m getting to that.” He snaps the fancy wax seal and unfolds the paper. A ticket, less than a third the size of the paper it was folded in, flutters to the ground as Avalon reads quietly. “Huh. There’s some kinda… charity masquerade ball function thing he wants me to go to. Says it’ll be a good way to get a foot in the door for my career.”

“Ooh, fun! When is it?”

“Um, um, uuuuum…” he picks up the ticket he dropped and inspects it. “Next week. The Sunday before classes start.”

“Damn. Same day I leave.”

“I’m still gonna be able to take you to the airport.”

“Maybe I wanted to go, too.”

“Only one ticket, babe. But he did say you’ll be in first class on your way home, so I’m not gonna be having all the fun.”

“Ooh, first class, what fun. Especially when flying makes you sick.” She wiggles her fingers at him. “You’ll tell me about it after, right?”

“Of course. I love nothing more than making fun of weird rich people with you. But for now,” he puts the letter and ticket on the bookshelf and gestures at the coffee table they were about to assemble. “Shitty furniture.

-

The rest of the week passes by fairly quickly, with Avalon and Janey sightseeing and hitting up Rodeo Drive to find him a suit for the masquerade.

When Sunday rolls around, and Avalon and Janey arrive at the part of the airport they were told to be for her flight back to Texas, they’re whisked off to one of LAX’s private suites.

“Shit,” Avalon says, turning around the room after the airport employee leaves. “I mean seriously, what the shit. All this and we won’t even be here for more that, what, an hour or two? Rich people are insane.”

Janey laughs and drops her bag on one of the armchairs, then flops down on the daybed. “I’m not disagreeing with you, but you need to lie down with me. This fuckin’ thing is way more comfortable than the bed in your place.”

“I don’t doubt that. Move over.” Avalon moves some of the throw pillows off the bed, then stretches out next to her. “Shit. I think I gotta live here now.”

They share a laugh, then Janey gets back up, poking around the minibar.

Avalon leans over to rifle through a platter of single serving snacks set up on the coffee table. “Honestly, I do not believe in the slightest that all of this is actually free like that guy said. They’ve gotta be, like, keeping track of everything we touch and planning to charge us for every little thing out of place.”

“Well, it ain’t like we ourselves are paying for this. Thank you, Mister Benniefactor, whoever the fuck you are,” Janey says as she pours a craft beer into two cups, toasting to nothing as she hands one cup to Avalon. She lounges back down and they sip their beers in a comfortable silence.

Then, as Avalon opens a bag of raisins and offers her a handful, Janey breaks the silence. “Christ, we’re getting old.” Then she pours a fistfull of raisins into her mouth.

Avalon snorts. “What makes you say that?”

“Us, ten years ago? We would have fucking partied if we had been given a room like this. And here we sit, sharing a beer and eating fucking raisins.”

“Hey, now. Raisins are fucking good. Besides, this is just the pre-party. Once the hookers and my coke guy show up, things will really get going.”

“Wow, a single week in Hollywood and you already have a coke guy? A little early in your career to be going off the deep end, isn’t it?”

Avalon laughs and flicks a raisin at Janey, who catches it after it bounces off her arm but before it hits the bed. “How about this- we get the party started by popping open some bubbly, and then we call the girls? I wanna have at least one phone call with them a day until I’m back in Texas.”

“By bubbly you mean Lacrox, right?”

“Yeah, I don’t wanna be getting wasted in front of the girls. That’s just bad parenting.”

Janey nods in agreement, then tosses him a Lacroix, which he uses to water down what’s left of his beer.

“Christ, you’re insane,” Janey states, watching him. “You’ll fit in good.”

“Fuck, yeah, I will,” he responds. “Okay, no more cussing. Fuck, crap, shit, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Starting now.” He pulls his phone out and dials Janey’s parents.

The conversation with their daughters wasn’t that long, but it was sweet. The girls excitedly told their parents about their day, and the crafts they had made with Abuela Maria, Avalon’s mother, and that they missed them both very much, and that while they were excited their momma was coming home, they wished their daddy was coming home too.

Avalon did his best not to cry hearing that. Instead he promised that he would visit as often as he could, on long weekends and holidays.

They finally hang up when Janey’s father announces it was about time they start getting ready to go, as the time it took to get to the airport Janey would be arriving at would take about the same amount of time her flight would be.

“Hey, before I gotta go, there’s something I have to give you,” Janey says, breaking the silence that fell between them and searching through her carry on. “Fuck, I thought I just had it. I can’t have lost it already.”

“What’s up?” Avalon asks, propping himself up on his elbow. “I should probably be the one giving you something, considering you are my lovely wife whom I am abandoning with the kids for a life of luxury.”

“I think for that to be true, I have to take you to court and make you pay exorbitant fees in child support. Ah, here it is.” She pulls a sleek little box with a ribbon tied around it out of the front pocket of her bag. She settles back down next to him, crossing her legs under herself, and hands him the box.

“What’s this?”

“Open it and you’ll find out.”

“Ah. I thought you might say that.” Avalon tugs the ribbon off the box, then slides the lid off.

Inside is a simple gold chain necklace.

Janey reaches over and takes Avalon’s left hand, sliding the wedding band off his finger. “I know you Avalon. I know the kind of person you are. I know what this ring means to you. I’m not gonna tell you not to wear it, but I think you should wear it around your neck instead of on your finger.”

Avalon looks at the chain in his hands, then at his best friend- his wife- and the golden band she held in her own hands. “...What? Why don’t you want me to wear the ring?”

She shrugs a shoulder. “I mean, you’ve said it yourself. Hollywood is gonna be our fresh start. I think it might be best if we go into that fresh start as best friends instead of husband and wife.” She puts a hand up when Avalon opens his mouth. “Before you say anything, we don’t have to get divorced until you graduate. Those marriage benefits are way too helpful to just drop cuz you’re going off to college. Might help us through it, anyway.”

“Are- are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. I wouldn’t have bought that necklace if I wasn’t.” She takes the necklace from him, placing it around his neck. “Besides, you can’t land a hot twunk if he thinks you’re hitched.”

“I already said--!”

Janey snorts and laughs, interrupting him. “Jesus, I’m fucking joking. But for reals though,” she places a hand on his shoulder. “I hope you get laid. You’ve been way too pent up.”

Avalon frowns at her. “You’re making me want to not give you your gift.”

“Agk, no don’t do that! I’m sorry!”

“Alright, if you promise you’re done being a jackass-”

“Swear to god, I am!”

“Okay.” Avalon reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small box.

His gift was in no way as meaningful as hers was, but her face lights up the moment she opens the box and she excitedly swaps her lightning bold stud earrings out for the worm-on-a-strings.

“Oh, these-” she gives her head a little shake, and the fuzzy worms whip and wiggle around wildly- “these are fucking fantastic. I love ‘em!” She pulls Avalon into a hug.

“I fucking knew you would.” He grins, hugging her back.

After a moment, he buries his face against her shoulder. “‘M gonna miss you.”

“Aw, you big sap. I’m gonna miss you, too.”

They hold each other until the airport employee knocks on the door. “Your plane is boarding, ma’am.”

Avalon holds her tighter, not ready to let her go just yet. “You and the girls will be alright?”

“Of course, Ava. Your mom and my parents are there to help me when I can’t handle being a parent by myself.”

“Right…”

There’s another knock at the door. “Ma’am?”

“I think this is the part where you let go of me now.”

“Sorry, I just-” Avalon pulls away. “You’ve been in my life every day for the past eighteen years. I can’t just… Let you go.”

“You’re not letting me go. I’ll still be around, I just won’t be… around, around. Just for a little while. You can still visit home on holidays, or I can bring the girls here.”

Avalon nods, wiping the tears off his cheeks. “Janey, I-- I love you.”

“I love you too, Avalon.” Janey stands up, pulling Avalon to his feet with her. “You’re gonna fucking kill it here in Hollywood. I know you will.”

He grins at her, eyes still misty. “And you’re gonna fucking kill it being a third grade teacher, like always.”

“Hell yeah I will!” She grins back and pats him on the shoulder. “Break a leg, cowboy. I got a flight to catch.”

-

Avalon slips a Phantom-style mask over his face. It was dark brown and gold, and shared the same curly pattern as was embroidered onto his suit in the same colors. He smooths a hand over his hair and straightens his clothes one last time before heading into the crowded ballroom. He stays close to the edge of the room, unsure of what to do and suddenly very aware of how alone and out of his element he is.

He tugs slightly at the hem of his jacket, feeling very out of place compared to the standard black and white tuxedos all the other men wore.

Without thinking, he makes his way to the bar and orders a whiskey on the rocks, giving the bartender a smile. Once the drink is in hand, he leans against the bar, nodding politely at another man standing at the bar as he turns out to face the room.

He sips his drink in silence, surveying the crowd. He doesn’t realize the other man has gotten closer until he speaks up.

“Forgive me if I’m being too forward, but I must admit I have been trying to figure out who you are since you arrived.” The stranger’s voice is deep, and, while it isn’t exactly warm, it certainly warms Avalon. For a brief second, his eyes travel down Avalon’s body, but he quickly pulls his gaze back to his face.

Avalon suppresses a shiver and smiles cheekily at the other man. “Good luck with that, I ain’t-- I’m not exactly well known. I mean, unless you’ve ever been to the southernmost part of Texas…” He trails off and shrugs.

“I can’t say that I have.”

“If that’s the case, I’m Avalon.”

“Hm.” He furrowed his brow and looked away, thinking for a moment. “A... peculiar name, for a peculiar man. Fitting.”

“Peculiar, huh? Should I be offended or flattered?”

“You are the only man in the room not wearing a plain black suit.” He turns back to Avalon. “To be quite frank, it is rather… refreshing, to say the least.”

Avalon smirks and leans a little closer to the other man. “You know, if you’re going to flirt, I’d at least like to know your name.”

“Flirt? I--” The man cuts himself off, frowning slightly. “...I suppose I was flirting, wasn’t I?”

Avalon laughs, covering his mouth and nose with his free hand. “I’m only teasing. Flirting ain’t-- isn’t really something you can do unintentionally. But you know…” he lets his gaze slowly travel down the other man’s body (god, he’s wearing that suit well) and bites his lip. “I wouldn’t mind if it was intentional.”

“Oh-” The man’s face flushes and he turns away, taking a sip of his drink.

There’s a pause, and Avalon curses himself internally.

The man looks back at Avalon. “I’m Thomas.”

Avalon can’t help but grin as relief washes over him. “Well, Thomas, it’s nice to meet you.”

Thomas nods. “Likewise.”

For a few moments, the two men stand silently next to each other, sipping their drinks and watching the crowd. 

And then Thomas speaks up again. “Would you like to dance?”

Avalon blinks, looking at his drinking companion. “What?”

“You seem to be watching the dance floor rather closely. Would you like to join them?”

“Ah, no- er, well, possibly? I would, if this weren’t the first time I’ve ever been to an event like this, or maybe if we wouldn’t be the only two men dancing together...”

“That does put a damper on things.” Thomas takes another sip and looks back out across the room.

Avalon shifts his attention back to the dance floor. Even if he had an appropriate dance partner, it wasn’t like he could dance like this. Couples twirled together in time with the music, a graceful waltz that seemed almost choreographed.

The last time he had danced even slightly similar to this, his daughter Lily stood on his feet, giggling as he spun her around the living room, barely in rhythm.

Just thinking about it made his heart ache.

With the uncomfortable, unintentional clink! of teeth on ice, Avalon is jolted from his thoughts as he realizes he has finished his drink. He returns the empty glass to the bar, shaking his head when the bartender offers him a refill.

Thomas finishes his own drink, and then, after a beat, turns back to Avalon. “Come with me,” he says, offering his hand.

“Oh! Okay…” Avalon hesitates, then takes him by the hand.

Thomas leads him around the edge of the room and through a set of glass doors to a balcony. Once outside, he turns to face Avalon, still holding his hand. “Do you want to lead, or shall I?”

“I don’t know how to dance like this…”

Thomas nods once, wrapping an arm around Avalon’s waist. “Just put your hand on my shoulder and follow my lead.”

Avalon does as he’s told, and the two men begin to dance, keeping in time with the music they could hear muffled through the door. Something about his close proximity with Thomas made him flustered, and he kept glancing down at his feet to make sure he wasn’t tripping over himself or Thomas.

“Look at me.” Thomas says, his voice firm but gentle. “It’s easier if you don’t focus on your feet. Relax.”

Avalon lifts his gaze, looking into Thomas’ eyes.

Thomas opens his mouth as if to say something, but then closes it again.

The song ends all too soon, and the two men let go of each other.

“That was… nice. Thank you for bringing me out here.” Avalon sighs and leans against the railing of the balcony. “You mind if I smoke while we’re here?”

“Not at all.”

Avalon nods and takes a half-finished pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, placing one between his lips before searching for his lighter. “Shit, did I even--” he mutters to himself.

Wordlessly, Thomas takes out his own lighter and holds it out for Avalon, flicking it to life. Avalon looks at the flame, then at Thomas with a small smile before leaning down. As Thomas lights his cigarette, Avalon gazes into his face. 

Thomas was an attractive man. This Avalon already knew, even without seeing beneath the black and silver mask he was wearing. But looking at him so closely, so intimately, got Avalon’s heart thumping. 

Thomas’ skin was clear, and he had a sharp jaw, with high cheekbones and kissable lips. But his most striking features were his eyes. They were almond shaped, with just a bare hint of crows feet at the corners, and- Avalon didn’t know how he hadn’t noticed this before- they were two different colors. His left eye was a striking blue, and his right a deep, rich brown, both perfectly complimented by the midnight blue of his suit.

He was entirely mesmerizing.

Thomas smirks- god, Avalon wanted to kiss those lips- and pulls the lighter away. “Careful now,” he chides, “Or you’ll burn the whole thing away before getting a single puff.”

“Sorry, it’s just…” Avalon found himself leaning in slightly, the cigarette dangling from his lips. “You have such beautiful eyes…”

Thomas’ face flushes, and for just a second he seems thrown off, but he quickly composes himself. “The same can be said about yours…” Thomas leans in as well. “May I--”

But before he can finish his question, the balcony doors swing open and a few partygoers step out, laughing and chatting. They both straighten up quickly.

Thomas tips his head, gesturing to farther down the balcony where they would have a little more privacy. Avalon nods, and for the second time that night, Thomas takes him by the hand and leads him away.

When they end up nestled together- standing shoulder to shoulder, looking out at Los Angeles from between two potted plants, Avalon realizes that his cigarette has gone out. This time, Thomas just presses the lighter into his hand.

“I’m trying to quit,” Avalon says as he lights back up.

“Oh? How’s that going for you?”

“I mean, I smoke less than I used to. I’m just kind of… picking up a bit because I’ve got a lot going on right now. You know how it is.” He gestures vaguely with the cigarette, drawing abstract shapes with the trail of smoke. “Moving is stressful. I gotta cope with leaving everything behind somehow. Especially because I’m alone in a city where I know basically no one.”

“You know me,” Thomas states, cocking his head.

Avalon lets out a small laugh and smiles at him. “Yeah. I know you.” He bumps his shoulder against Thomas’. He takes a deep draw from the cigarette and sighs. “But… It’s hard. Having to leave what I know. My Home… My family…”

“Do you have a good relationship with your family?”

“What are you, a therapist?”

“Just curious.”

“You know what they say about curiosity and cats.”

“If I remember correctly, satisfaction brings it back.”

Avalon gives another half-laugh. “Shit. You got me there. I guess I can tell you, if you really want to know about ‘em.”

“I want to know about you. I get the feeling this is important to you.”

“You could say that. I mean, how you’re raised does play a pretty important role in who you are as a person. It ain’t- err, isn’t, really interesting though. Pretty fuckin’ bog standard upbringing here. Parents divorced when I was a kid, Dad got less and less time for me an’ my brother as he started replacing us with a new family. Mom moved us to the middle of fucking nowhere to cope with Dad leaving. My brother stopped talking to us as soon as he left for college, and now my relationship with my mom is pretty strained because she wanted me to stay in Texas and live my life how she saw fit.” He takes another puff from the cigarette. “You know, the normal amount of fucked up childhood.”

Thomas nods. “But they’re family, so you miss them?”

“Eh, yes and no. Like I said, I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it weren’t for them, but that doesn’t mean I have’ta like any of them. It’s really my best friend I miss. I consider her more of my family than most of my flesh and blood. I’m gonna move her out here once I get my career going.”

“Oh.” Thomas goes quiet for a second before asking, “What… exactly… is your relationship with her?”

“We grew up together and were close enough that our parents just kind of… assumed, you know? And what were two queer kids in a town like that gonna do, other than pretend? It wasn’t supposed to last past high school, but I kinda feel like… this lie is easier to live with than the truth, at least back in our hometown.”

“And Hollywood is supposed to be your fresh start?”

“Yeah. I may not love her in the way a man is ‘supposed’ to love a woman, but I care about her a lot. So I came here to try and get a better life for us, one where we can still be there for each other, but we don’t have to pretend to be something we’re not.” Avalon shakes his head. “Sorry, I know this is kind of a lot of information to just dump on someone I just met. ‘Hey, I’m in a fake relationship with a lesbian, wanna have gay sex?’” He rubs his face and lights up a second cigarette, handing Thomas his lighter back when he’s done. “God, I’ve been talking for too long. Sorry.”

“I don’t mind. I asked because I wanted to know.” Thomas touches Avalon’s arm gently. “It helps that you have a very pleasant way of speaking.”

“What, fuckin’... cussing every five seconds? That’s pleasant to you?”

Thomas laughs- and god, what a laugh. “I can assure you that you haven’t cursed that much.”

“Well I’m glad to know I ain’t- am not making a fool of myself in front of a nice city boy such as yourself.” Avalon smiles, then rubs the back of his neck. “I want to know something about you, though.”

“Do you want me to tell you about my own family?”

“It doesn’t have to be that. Just… something you feel like I should know about you. What makes Thomas tick?”

“Hm.” Thomas plucks the half-smoked cigarette from Avalon’s lips and takes a slow drag off of it, then places it back in Avalon’s mouth, fingers lingering against his lips for only a second too long.

Avalon short circuits.

Thomas turns his head away to blow the smoke out, then nonchalantly states, “I used to be a director. I’ve made some movies, been nominated for a few awards. I even won a couple.”

"Wow, that’s pretty impressive," Avalon says, trying to keep his cool from the indirect kiss they just shared. "But what do you mean, used to be? You don't seem any older than me, you can’t be retired already." 

Thomas sighs, lowering his head. "To put it simply, I was blackmailed."

"Shit... can I ask what happened?" 

He nods, staring solemnly at the twinkling lights of the city. "There was... a man. An old friend of mine. I wouldn't say he was my... partner, but I can’t deny that there was something between us." He pauses, rolling the lighter between his fingers. "He was part of this... boys’ club, you could call it. He wanted me to join-- a bunch of actors, directors, and producers. They would help each other, but snub everyone who wasn’t in their little club. I couldn't stand to be a part of it, so I refused." 

"Let me guess, he didn’t like it?" 

"Not one bit." He shook his head, then laughed sourly. "He said that if I didn't join, he would out me. The way he would have described it… it would have ended my career instantly, mostly due to certain implications he would have pushed. So, I had his two options: either join his club, and help to ruin an art form I hold so incredibly dearly- or continue trying to make movies by myself, only to have my life and my relationships ruined alongside my career." 

"God, that's horrible," Avalon breathes. "I don't know how anyone could be so cruel as to take something as important as coming out away from someone, much less in such a disastrous way." 

"Some people just like to make others suffer." Thomas turns back to Avalon, and Avalon realizes just how close he had gotten to him. He straightens himself. "But no matter the crossroads, there is always a third option. As much as it pained me, I retired quietly and he, thankfully, left me alone. I teach now. Even if I can't make films myself, I have found solace in being able to pass my knowledge onto others."

"Do you enjoy teaching?" 

"Well… I must admit, some of my students make it... difficult. But yes. I do... enjoy it. Sometimes."

“Do you ever wish you could go back to making movies?”

Thomas sighs and turns his back on the city, resting his elbows on the rail and looking up at the starless sky. “Constantly. It’s so… simple. All I need to do is just let go of what he’s holding over me and the power there will be gone.”

“But it’s not as easy as it sounds.”

“No. It’s like you said, there is safety in the false familiar.”

“Right…”

The two men stand together, silently sharing the rest of the cigarette for a few moments before Thomas speaks up again. “Thank you.”

Avalon blinks and looks at him. “What for?”

“For talking, for listening. I’ve never… told anyone about that before.” He shakes his head slightly. “I don’t know what it is about you that’s made me trust you so easily. I don’t know how to describe it, but there is something almost… familiar about you. Comforting.” He sighs quietly and murmurs, “I think there’s something wrong with me tonight.”

Avalon can’t help but let out a small laugh. “What, you don’t normally bare your soul to near strangers?”

For just a moment, the corners of Thomas’ mouth curl up. “I don’t normally do anything with strangers. There might be something in the air.”

“Do you mean the smog, or the light pollution?”

Thomas doesn’t exactly laugh, but he does smile a bit more. “That, too.” He turns his head slightly, looking at Avalon. He lets out a quiet sigh.

“Something on your mind?”

“I’d like to kiss you,” he responds all too quickly. Then he covers his mouth and looks away. “...I don’t know where that came from.”

Avalon can feel his face flush, and he reaches out and gently touches Thomas’ arm, drawing his gaze back to him. “It’s okay. I’d like it, too.”

“You… would?” Thomas leans a little closer.

Avalon leans in as well. “I would.”

Thomas places his hands on Avalon’s shoulders and gently tugs him down to reach him. Avalon wraps his arm around Thomas, pulling him closer. He places his other hand lightly against the back of Thomas’ head.

His lips were just as soft as they looked.

Before they break away from each other, Thomas’ hand ends up cupping Avalon’s jaw, gently stroking Avalon’s chin with his thumb. When they part, he moves his thumb to Avalon’s bottom lip.

“Goodness,” Avalon breathes, his lip rubbing against Thomas’ thumb. His fingers toy with the strings of Thomas’ mask. “Could I take this off? You can take mine off as well.”

“Of course.” Thomas moves his hand to the back of Avalon’s head, loosening the string on his mask.

The breath catches in Avalon’s chest as for the first time tonight, Thomas’ face comes fully into view. He already knew that Thomas was handsome, but… goodness. That was all he could think. Goodness. Goodness.

“Goodness,” He murmurs again.

“Disappointed?”

He grins, leaning his head against Thomas’ hand, which had found its way back to his cheek.. “Not in the slightest. Are you?”

Thomas shakes his head and gives him a quick smile. Then his expression changes to one more troubled.

“Are you alri--”

“I’m trans.”

“...What?”

“Forgive me, I-” Thomas pulls away, shaking his head. “I really didn’t know how else to say it, but I figured I should tell you in case it changed your answer.”

“My answer to what?”

“Would you like to leave with me?” He asks, simply.

Avalon frowns, confused. “Of course I would, but I don’t understand what you being trans has to do with--”

Thomas gives him a very pointed look, eyebrow raised.

“Oooh,” He bites his lip and looks away before nodding. “It doesn’t change my answer- or how I feel about you- at all, but it is nice to know beforehand.” He looks back at Thomas, giving him an easy smile. “Thank you for trusting me with that. I won’t disappoint you.”

“I’ll hold you to that.”

-

The next morning comes oh so gentle. The sheets were soft, the early sun was soft, his lover was soft.

Avalon reaches out to Thomas’ still sleeping form, gently brushing his hair off of his forehead.

Thomas makes a small noise, burying his face in the pillow and hugging it close for a few seconds before turning back to Avalon, his eyes half open, annoyed, at first, but it quickly dissolves into something softer. Warmer. “Mmh?”

“Sorry, did I wake you?” Avalon asks, quietly.

“Yes.” Thomas tries to push his expression back into one of displeasure, but it doesn’t stick. “Unfortunately, I can’t say I mind it.” He moves closer to Avalon, who catches him in his arms and holds him tight. “It’s… been a while… since I last shared a bed with someone.” His fingers gently drift over the flower tattoo on Avalon’s chest. Right over his heart. “It’s nice to not wake up alone, for a change.”

“Oh?”

He shrugs. “I’ve often found other people to be… inefficient when it comes to getting what I needed.”

“And how did I do?”

Thomas leans back slightly to look Avalon in the face. “Well. I’m still here, aren’t I? I think that alone should be a good assessment of what I thought of last night.”

“Would you have left in the middle of it if it was bad?”

“I’ve done it before.”

Avalon can’t help but laugh. “I’m glad you’re still here, then.”

Thomas hums quietly in agreement before placing a hand on Avalon’s cheek and leading him down for a deep, passionate kiss.

It isn’t until an alarm on Avalon’s phone goes off that they finally untangle themselves from each other. He half stumbles out of bed, trying to get to his pants to shut it off. “Oh, shit, is it that late already? I gotta get going…” He looks at Thomas, face down in bed with a pillow over his head. “I hate to do this to you…”

“No, I have somewhere I need to be as well,” Thomas says, peeking out from under the pillow. “I--” He pauses, searching for the right words. “Will I see you again?”

“If that’s what you want, I can give you a call and we can meet up again once my schedule settles down.” He reaches over and brushes his fingers through Thomas’ hair.

Thomas leans into the touch. “I’d like that. Give me your phone.”

Avalon nods. “Give me a moment, I just…” He taps at his phone, trying to find where the contacts are held. “Sorry, it’s a bit new, I ain’t-- I’m not used to the touch screen yet…”

“Let me.” Thomas takes the phone from Avalon’s hand. He starts to search through the apps, but freezes with his finger hovering above the screen.

“Something wrong?”

“I-” He shakes the startled look off his face. “No.” He quickly navigates to the contacts list and punches in his number before handing the phone back.

Avalon leans down and kisses Thomas gently as he takes his phone. “I’ll call you as soon as I can.” He glances at the clock, the smile fading from his lips. “God, I’m so sorry, but I really gotta go.” He pulls away, tugging his clothes back on before heading for the door. He pauses, his hand on the doorknob. He glances over his shoulder at Thomas, who was putting his own clothes on. “Thank you for last night. I really enjoyed all of it, not just where it ended.”

Thomas glances over and nods once. He wasn’t smiling, but there was something soft in his gaze, curious almost. “Good luck. With your career. This town can be… difficult to navigate. Stand your ground and you will find your place.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Thank you. Again.” He opens the door. “I hope we get to see each other again real soon. Goodbye, Thomas.”

-

Avalon didn’t have much time to get ready for the day before his first class started. If he hadn’t been wearing a suit the night before, he would have gone straight to the campus from the hotel, but unfortunately he had to make a quick detour home to change.

Thanks to his pit stop, he arrives to his first class of the day a bit later than he anticipated-- right along side the majority of his classmates.

Avalon was fully unprepared to find that the lecture hall was actually an opulent auditorium, one more fitting a theater than a college if only it weren’t for the tables between every row of seating.

Young students mill about, chatting as they find seats with their friends, some bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready for the morning, while others seemed to be on second and third cups of coffee. 

Avalon moves down the side of the theater, finding a seat near the stage.

Three rows in front of him and a bit to his left, a man he assumes to be the professor of the class sits at a proper desk plunked down in the middle of the row of seats, rifling through papers in his briefcase.

There was something almost familiar about the way the man moves, but from where Avalon sits he couldn’t be too sure. Besides, as far as Avalon knew, white men with dark hair and brown eyes were fairly common in Hollywood. He could think of a few actors off the top of his head that matched that description-- maybe not by name, but he knew the characters they played.

After a few minutes, as the last few students find their seats, the professor gets up from his desk and climbs the stage. The lights dim slightly and the chatter quiets as he takes his place at center stage. He clears his throat, looking out at the auditorium. His gaze glosses across Avalon before snapping right back to him, making direct eye contact. One brown eye, and one blue, he notices.

“Oh, fuck me,” Avalon mutters under his breath.

And judging by the way Thomas’ jaw moves, he quietly says the same.

----

Tags

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Title of the next chapter - And Everything Goes Wrong, Incredibly Quickly

[ask-a-vetblr]

Hi vets! Can you please give me a veterinary perspective on "factory farms" [and if they deserve the negative reputation they get]?

vet-and-wild here.

Yes and no. I mean, everyone may have different opinions but here’s mine as a former farm laborer and Animal Science grad. Sorry this will be long, I have a whole lot of thoughts on this. “Factory farm” is honestly kind of a scary buzzword people use to describe any large farm, but a lot of times it’s just used as a blanket term for large scale farming rather than being owned by a company. The overwhelming majority of US farms are still family owned. Some of the really big farms have the newest technology to decrease their environmental impact and increase animal welfare (i.e. methane digesters, robotic milkers, etc) and end up being more efficient per pound of product produced. Some small farms have a handful of messy, stinky cows that only get seen by a vet when they’re already super sick. I’ve seen both. I’ve also seen small hobby farms where animals are treated like royalty and large scale farms that are messy and inefficient. BUT, doing anything large scale tends to lead to welfare issues (for both humans and animals) and sustainability issues. The state of animal agriculture in this country is a hot mess. Farmers have to produce massive quantities of cheap product to make a living. The problem isn’t that farmers are some evil animal haters that want to poison the planet, it’s that they literally can’t make a living without mass scale production. That needs to change. It’s bad for the farmers, their animals, and the environment. So go after legislators and corporations that allow this to happen, not poor farm laborers.

Animal welfare, particularly for production animals, was a huge part of my degree focus so that’s the area I’m most familiar with. There are obviously a whole bunch of other comments that can be made about environmental impact and human welfare conditions, but I’ll let someone who knows more than me talk about it. As part of my degree, veterinary training, animal welfare studies, and job experience, I’ve been on a lot of farms. Swine, poultry, dairy, beef, meat goat, dairy goat, meat sheep, dairy sheep, mink (fur), and camelid. I’ve been to organic, backyard, research, feedlots, tie-stall, free-stall, large scale, petting zoos, heritage breed, and every kind of imaginable in between privately owned farm. Even vegan farm animal sanctuaries. I’ve been in meat processing plants and have seen first hand what the processes is. So I’ve seen a lot. And you know what? They all have pros and cons. Back when I was in undergrad we were using the Five Freedoms of animal welfare to assess animals. The Five Freedoms are freedom from hunger and thirst, freedom from fear and distress, freedom to express natural behaviors, freedom from pain/injury/disease, and freedom from discomfort. Farms of any scale can meet those requirements, or fail horribly. Personally, I think confinement housing fails horribly, and that’s a practice generally associated with large scale farming. There are actual benefits (i.e. less inter-animal aggression, tailored nutrition, easier monitoring), but you very much take away freedom to express natural behavior and I would argue freedom from discomfort as well. And you know what? I try to be objective, but my personal feelings are that an animal should have enough room to turn around and not stand in their own waste. I don’t think that should be controversial. Animal agriculture is (for the most part) failing horribly with enrichment and ability to express natural behaviors, and that happens to be very important to me as an animal owner so I know I project that onto agriculture. Some species industries are better than others (i.e. dairy), while some are so far behind (i.e. poultry and swine). I’m not vegan or vegetarian. I don’t have a problem with eating meat, but I think the system needs drastic improvements.

People honestly tend to focus on issues that are not really big issues because showing videos of an animal not being knocked insensible before slaughter is much more gut wrenching than a pig without enrichment. But you know what? There are multiple behavioral and welfare issues with pigs not being provided adequate stimulation, including increased tail chewing (which is why pigs are tail docked), aggression, and stereotypic behaviors. Whereas the rate of successful 1st time stunning in processing plants is actually extremely high, and needs to be to pass inspections. PETA shows a video of dead piglets and it makes people outraged, but the issue isn’t animal abuse, it’s poor biosecurity that caused an outbreak of porcine epidemic diarrhea virus that has a near 100% mortality rate for young pigs. That is a real example. People should be upset. They should be upset that biosecurity protocols weren’t followed. But again, a video of a transport truck not being properly sanitized doesn’t really make for a good animal rights video. Public pressure is of course important for change, but people need to actually take the time to learn about what’s really an issue. Y’all can debate whether or not eating meat is ethical, but that’s not the question here, and it ignores the bigger picture. The fact is, there are animals alive right now and that will be born in the future that are harmed by a shitty system. Personally I’d rather focus on relevant welfare issues to improve their lives rather than comparing factory farming to genocide or whatever scare tactics animal rights groups are using nowadays.

Ferox here.

Following on from that note, comparing animal agriculture to genocide is a particular pet hate of mine. Genocide aims to kill and therefore eliminate a specific group of people, which animal agriculture has caused the populations of domestic animals to boom in far greater numbers than their wild counterparts. The goals are literally opposite.

As vet-and-wild was saying, using a blanket term like ‘factory farm’ isn’t super helpful when discussing animal welfare as it’s specific practices within each enterprise that need to be considered, eg dry sow stalls, debeaking, etc. Generally it’s animal density which concerns me, as the more animals you pack in together the more stress behaviours you see and the less natural behaviours, and chickens and pigs get the worst of this. But it’s hard to make a choice as a consumer purchasing food as you can’t backtrack that food from the supermarket to its origin easily so I can see why the discussion is often boiled down to ‘factory farm vs free range’ even if it’s really more nuanced than that.

[mst3kproject]

The Alien Dead

I'm starting to think I need a tag for swamp hillbillies, because there are an awful lot of those in terrible movies and I have no idea why. This particular entry was produced and directed by Fred Olen Ray, who never made anything that ended up on MST3K but almost everything he's worked on sounds like it should have been, including Dinosaur Island, The Brain Leeches, and Bad Girls from Mars. The nearest thing it has to a star is Buster Crabbe, who was really big in the 30's and 40's when he was Tarzan and Flash Gordon in a bunch of serials.  The Alien Dead is cheap, shitty, and amateurish, and Pearl would have cackled like the madwoman she is as she ordered Brain Guy to send it up.

Somewhere in the dankest, stickiest depths of Florida, alligators, dogs, and people alike are being devoured by a mysterious swamp monster.  Local weirdo Emmett Michaels has a theory about bio-weapons and giant mutant opossums, while asshole Sheriff Kowalski puts out a bounty on what he believes to be a man-eating alligator... but the movie is called The Alien Dead, so the audience already knows it's space zombies.  Sure enough, ambitious reporter Tom Corman (yes, I'm pretty sure that's a deliberate 'tribute') and his girlfriend Shawn discover the terrible truth.  When a houseboat on the swamp was struck by a meteor, the partygoers on board rose again as indestructible blood-drinking monsters!

Variety is the spice of life.  I hate this movie almost as much as I hated Curse of the Voodoo, but at least I hate it for different reasons.  Curse of Voodoo was competently made but deeply offensive.  The Alien Dead is fairly innocuous in its subject matter but it is terrible. Every frame of it exudes Larry Buchanan-like levels of Nobody Gave A Shit.

Everything about this film feels half-assed, and some bits rate only like a twelfth of an ass, if that.  Buster Crabbe is the only person in The Alien Dead who might remotely be called an actor, but his character is the same lazy small-town sheriff from every cheap monster movie ever made.  He refuses to believe anything unusual is going on even when it's right in front of him, and ultimately contributes nothing to either guide or hinder Tom and Shawn.  Everybody else is absolutely dire, reciting their lines with less conviction than the average tiktoker. At least part of this is Fred Olen Ray's fault, since things like blocking are basically nonexistent.

A certain amount of it also falls to the script, which doesn't give anybody much to work with.  There are three characters who might have had something that counts as a personality.  Tom the reporter could have been a man desperate for something to write about besides wildlife wandering up Main Street and the occasional arrest of a drunk. Shawn could have been a young woman dreaming of a bigger world than this little hick town in the swamp.  Her father Emmett could have been a man tragically damaged by both war and peace.  The first two are ruined by the actors, who never manage to give any sort of urgency or depth to their stories, and the third is ruined by the script, which treats PTSD as a joke.

The thing with Emmett's confused memories of the war is actually very puzzling.  He refers to it as 'the big one' and claims to have personally prevented the use of bioweapons in the Great War... but he's nowhere near old enough to have been in World War I.  Is this supposed to be a delusion?  Is he remembering a previous reincarnation?  None of the other characters remark on the incongruity, even when they're professing disbelief in his stories, so I'm forced to conclude that it was just really, really bad casting.  Also, he shot down that plane full of experimental weapons over the swamps of Florida?  I could check, but I feel like there weren't a lot of air battles over Florida in WWI.

The rest of the characters are ciphers nobody gave a shit about, including the actors playing them.  There's a screechy old lady who threatens to beat her husband with a frying pan if he doesn't do his chores.  I think this is supposed to be funny, and then he gets eaten by zombies and she gets impaled on a pitchfork.  There's a girl at a bar who leaves her loser boyfriend, gets killed, and turns up again later as a zombie.  The only notable thing about her is that she's wearing a knitted tank top that has the word 'yes' on the front and 'no' on the back, spelled out in yarnovers.  There's a fat, bearded cop who is much more interested in watching women skinnydipping than in enforcing the law, and who is only in this movie because Fred Olen Ray wanted an excuse to film some tiddies.

So the director didn't care, the writers didn't care, the casting director didn't care, and the actors didn't care.  What else?  Well, the foley people definitely didn't care.  There are several places in the movie where sounds like footsteps or typewriter keys are dubbed in but don't even begin to match up with what we're actually seeing on the screen.  Whoever was responsible for the predictably shittastic day-for-night certainly didn't care.

The special effects and makeup people didn't care, either.  The meteor falling is represented by a birthday cake sparkler filmed against a black backdrop.  People in their death throes spit up red gelatin. The zombies are all different, ranging from one guy with a giant veiny head to one who's supposed to have an eyeball popping out to a lady who's just got some really dramatic contouring.  All of these have gray-green makeup slapped on their hands and faces, but not their arms or chests despite most being dressed in ragged clothing that leaves these areas easily visible.  The movie can't even decide how tough they are.  They appear to be immune to gunfire, but there's a bit where a woman kills one with a comb.

The biggest moment of just not caring in the entire movie, however, is the ending, where Tom and Shawn float off down the river on a boat, and... that's it.  They haven't made it to safety and the zombie problem is certainly not solved.  There's no sense of a conclusion or even of a 'gotcha' ending, the movie just stops in its tracks.  It's like they hit a desired length, and then everybody went, “guess that'll do, let's hit the pub.”

A movie like this is not even enjoyable to fans of schlock, because it's so desperately obvious that nobody was really enthusiastic about any aspect of it.  When you've got something like Teenagers from Outer Space, you can tell that everybody was trying their best even if their best wasn't actually very good.  In things like Larry Buchanan movies or The Alien Dead, the entire cast and crew are just here in the hopes of picking up a paycheque and are doing the bare minimum to achieve that.  They don't care about entertaining me, and I am not entertained.

Now on to the questions that matter: why are there so many movies about swamp hillbillies?

I think part of it may have to do with the fact that such people live in isolated areas where it's difficult to summon help.  Another part is probably the swamp itself.  Swamps seem very primordial and inhospitable to us, because we don't know what's under the muddy water.  It might be shallow enough to wade in, it might be deep enough to swallow us up.  We associate swamps with the prehistoric, and with decay.  A swamp isn't really a lake, but it's not land, either, and that makes it a liminal space, where anything is possible.

The people themselves are sometimes used as additional monsters, and sometimes as jokes.  In the first category we have specimens like Crenshaw from Boggy Creek II, where this cantankerous and well-armed man is treated as a dangerous and unpredictable creature of the wilderness.  Living so far from what we usually consider civilization, swamp people are portrayed as on the edge of sliding back into barbarism.  This is insulting and also kind of racist, as it's the same sort of reasoning that leads to isolated communities of non-white people being painted as savages or cannibals in other movies.

For the second, rural white people are one of the few remaining groups that it's culturally acceptable to make fun of, and a lot of these movies cheerfully portray them as stupid, inbred bumpkins.  MST3K was guilty of this and I've done quite a bit of it myself.  In this movie we have a joke where Shawn serves Tom dinner and he thinks it's delicious until she lets him know it's roast opossum.  All these characters are drunk, rude, uneducated, and badly-dressed.  It means we don't care too much when they die, the better to enjoy the spectacle of the deaths... but it's also not really funny.  A joke really ought to have a punchline, whereas this movie just points and goes, “look at the dumb hicks.”

Does this mean I have to stop hating on swamp hillbilly movies?  No, it doesn't – things like Squirm and Creature from Black Lake are still terrible in all kinds of unrelated ways.  But this is at least one kind thing I can say about The Alien Dead: it made me examine some of my personal prejudices and perhaps offered me a chance for growth.  Maybe in the future I'll be a little kinder to the white trash of the world...

… but probably not.  See you next time.

[tsukiida]

pining — bakugou katsuki

— info :: bakugou x gn!reader ; sfw ; slight angst & humour ; 3.13k words.

— contents :: quirkless reader ; bakugou’s pov ; one-sided attraction ; bakugou being bakugou ; well-meaning wingmen bakusquad.

— synopsis :: katsuki hates the way you make him feel.

— note :: this is my first time writing bnha, let alone bakugou, I hope I do it justice… if you read this, thank you, I hope you like it! :)

katsuki swears he hates you.

to be honest, he’d rather hate you, than feel like… this about you.

he’s convinced you’re messing with him. your quirk must make it so, because there’s no other reason why he feels his body heat up, his heart beat quicker somewhere deep in his chest, every time he thinks of you. you’re definitely doing it on purpose.

it’s that damned shopping trip to blame.

the girls had dragged everyone out to have some bonding time, which is the shittiest excuse katsuki has ever heard for splurging and buying pretty dessert that clogs up arteries. he’d have skipped out on it, but raccoon eyes begged kirishima, who in turn begged katsuki.

that’s another thing that pisses him off; remembering exactly how the other boy had convinced him. really, he couldn’t give less of a shit about something like romance, but of course the extras are going out of their mind about how popular they are with their preferred gender, and of course they had to drag him into it.

no, he doesn’t care at all, but it hurts his ego pride to entertain the idea that he might not be #1 at something even as petty as that.

hell, he doesn’t even care about being #1, as long as he’s doing better than deku.

but he’s not blind. cheeks is obsessed with the green haired idiot, her heart probably having a taste of her own quirk and shooting off into the universe fluttering madly every time she looks at him.

it’s like the world is out to get him, because not only did he have to accompany all the losers to their stupid trip, but he also had to, under duress, with that goal in mind? really? grade schoolers, the whole lot of them.

what he hates most about the whole thing is you, though.

and you’re doing exactly the things he hates.

ever since you stumbled across deku during that trip, tapped him on the shoulder and smiled at him, it’s like you punched katsuki in the gut. he can’t forget the way you’d looked so meek, but still somehow comfortable around deku, and he’d be damned if he doesn’t hate that.

and for the life of him, he can’t recall ever seeing you during his days in middle school. you claimed that you’d been classmates with deku – and by extension, katsuki – for an entire year, and deku sure seems to recognise you. but katsuki doesn’t. deku lights up like a stupid bulb, but katsuki does not.

he hadn’t needed to know details about any of the dumb extras that had infested middle school, more so any of them who didn’t already seem to know that he is the best. that must’ve been why he didn’t know you. there weren’t too many people who didn’t believe in his worth, but the ones who didn’t… they weren’t special enough for him to remember. they could never prove him wrong, after all. they were nothing.

but you.

he hates you. he strongly dislikes you. he can’t stand you.

and you seem to love that shitty deku.

no, it’s not the same kind of emotion that uraraka holds for him.

you absolutely adore that girl too, and she treats you nicely enough despite the wary look in her eyes initially, when she thought she was being subtle while hovering around deku.

no, katsuki hasn’t been observing. especially not because he’s interested. he is literally just looking out for himself, because he doesn’t want to be blindsided just because he wasn’t careful of some scheming pest.

the pest in question being you.

you’re already wreaking havoc on his mind, full of nothing but thoughts of you, other than being #1. he would never give up on that, no matter how much you make his heart pound and palms sweat.

you’re kinda helpful for his quirk, actually, and that’s the only reason he hasn’t already blasted you off into nothingness. the accelerated heart rate does wonders for him. but he doesn’t want to credit you either for something he could achieve with his own hard work.

he can definitely credit you for being the most annoying idiot that he knows, though. your quirk is painful, because late at night when he’s alone, he’s hit by images of your face. you hang out so much with his classmates now, he can’t help it. he can’t even sleep peacefully, because when he does fall asleep, his often dreamless nights are swapped out for stupid sequences produced by his subconscious involving you, because of your silly little quirk that you think katsuki is unaware of.

it gets worse.

he finds out you’re quirkless.

he storms up to you when he’s had enough. not only do you go to a school quite near theirs, but you also always have time to meet up, and isn’t that super convenient for whatever grand scheme you’ve concocted in order to try and take down bakugou katsuki.

it’s a half-growled and half-whispered, threat-filled one-sided conversation between him and you when he asks you to stop whatever you’re trying to do. you, being the infuriating person that you are, just tilt your head and stare at him in confusion. in the name of all might, that should not make his heart skip a beat, because he doesn’t have any intention of using his quirk right now. he just wants you to stop using yours. that’s all he’s there for.

but then you just shrug slightly, that damned nervous smile plastered on your face that you’ve barely been showing anymore, now that you’re comfortable with the extras. you shake your head when he asks you, as nicely as he can, to stop whatever messed up thing you like doing to him.

“this your way of trying to win against me? you can’t,” he grits through his teeth, fingers itching to create little explosions. he’s not going to show his off when asking you to call yours off. he won’t—

you tell him you have no idea what he’s talking about, because you’re as quirkless as they come.

with all the strength that he can muster within himself to not have an outburst, he asks you to repeat yourself.

you do. “i’m quirkless.”

in the end, he can’t help himself, and sets off a series of minute explosions that have you hopping back, out of his arm’s reach. as if he’d harm you with them, he thinks while glaring at you.

katsuki would like to say that he got over it quickly, but it takes a while, truthfully. at first he can’t wrap his mind around the fact that you’re quirkless, because then every thought of you that’s haunted him the past few months is without explanation.

you being quirkless literally opens up so many other questions. if you’re quirkless, then who’s to blame for everything happening to him? is it someone else at fault? are you just stupid and oblivious and unaware of your own quirk? did it manifest late? did someone grant it to you? there are so many questions, and things are still the same, if not worse. he barely thinks of anything else.

at least he can write it off in the name of being better at defending himself from stray quirks affecting him.

he hates it, but he asks kirishima, very subtly, if he’s heard of anyone whose quirk has the effects katsuki hates suffering from. the stupid redhead simply looks him dead in the eye and says that it sounds like the case of a bad crush quirk, something out of cheap romance novels which might be quite dangerous in practice, before proceeding to ask katsuki why he’s curious about it. bless his stupid soul, sometimes, because he completely buys the lie katsuki feeds him.

he didn’t want to have to convince kirishima that he doesn’t have a crush. because he doesn’t want to even entertain the idea of having a crush on stupid little you.

especially when you barely even give him the time of day anymore.

well, you’ve never really been the closest to him, nor does he want that, thank you very much! but it seems like the only time you and him ever had a proper conversation was when he asked you about your quirk, and that too ended badly, with barely any words exchanged. but at least you used to smile at him. not that he liked it or anything, but it was better than you giving him the cold shoulder.

are the extras actually more interesting to you than katsuki is? he’s a little miffed if that’s the case. but whenever he talks, you hear him, sometimes even respond to him, so perhaps it’s not a matter of ignoring him.

it’s just one thing you do.

you avoid his eyes.

it’s subtle enough that no one else notices, and the first few times he sees you look away when your eyes meet his, his breath catches in his throat and he’s almost too shocked to breathe in.

he knows that he’s not done anything to warrant that reaction from you. perhaps you’re simply realising after a long time that he’s the one you should be paying attention to, rather than all the extras. and perhaps it’s easier for you to pay attention to him with your ears rather than your eyes. he can understand that. your eyes seem to have that effect on him too; it’s entirely possible that this way is easier for you to focus on him.

maybe he makes you nervous.

there are so many maybes, but that thought still makes a grin tug at his lips, seeing which kirishima almost gets nervous. yeah, he’s getting cocky.

but that’s fine. he doesn’t plan on approaching you yet.

after all, if you’re into him, you should be brave enough to tell him.

…

honestly, it’s completely the electric eel’s fault. really, it’s 100% his fault because he thinks it’s fun to talk about stupid shit around katsuki. stupid shit like you possibly having a crush on deku, even though all signs say otherwise.

katsuki was willing to overlook that, but then raccoon eyes decided to encourage that hypothesis, and soon the idiots around him were talking in hushed whispers about deku’s supposed fanclub. such a situation definitely warranted katsuki blowing up their asses during training.

katsuki hates training with deku with a burning passion, but such a situation also warranted going up to him and demanding that he train with katsuki. if only he’d had enough mind to notice that the class was ending. if only he’d not run his mouth—

“they’ll never even look at you.”

deku doesn’t know shit about what katsuki just said, looking at him like he grew another head – which pisses him off even more – but kirishima and the rest of them know—

they know that katsuki is still hung up over that stupid conversation from days back, and they also know something’s up, and katsuki hates himself for being an idiot.

they corner him, as impossible as that sounds. katsuki would’ve blasted them off into outer space but they literally pile up onto him, clinging and refusing to let go of him even when he threatens to beat their ass again. curse sero’s tape.

katsuki would like to say that he fends them all off and throws them off his case. unfortunately, that does not happen. they find out a few things that day. thankfully, the only things they do find out are: you really get on katsuki’s nerves, and you also have a silly little crush on him.

“for real? are you sure?” ashido asks, eyebrows knit together like it’s something particularly unbelievable, and kaminari nods along uncertainly.

katsuki scoffs. “no other reason why they can’t look me in the eye.”

“i mean, you are kinda scary…” sero starts, but one glare from the scary person in question has him trailing off.

kirishima politely provides, “he’s manly!” and the conversation ends there.

…

oh, but the scheming doesn’t end.

kaminari is a bloody idiot, and encouraged by the equally idiotic sero, both of them come up with various scenarios wherein you and katsuki could stumble into each other, completely coincidentally, as if katsuki can’t hear them gossiping right behind him.

he ends up having to intervene when they get increasingly creative, which only means disaster in katsuki’s book.

“i’ll just wait.” he simply shrugs, watching the idiots get confused.

“fun to watch them squirm when they think they’re being subtle,” he offers further, and kirishima gives him a disapproving look, mumbling something about sadists.

“bakugou,” ashido stares at him critically, opening and shutting her mouth many times before eventually asking, “do you like them?”

after several more explosions, katsuki’s heart beating too fast in his chest, the sweat beading at his temples written off as part of his quirk, he’s able to dispel the idea from her mind.

he’ll never like someone like you.

and he’s still wary of you in the secret corner of his mind, not sure why he reacts the way he does to you. he’s not stupid, he knows what a crush is and how it works, but he really can’t see himself being attracted to you at all.

it has to be something someone concocted to get him weak, but they’re not going to succeed.

even if not having your eyes on him pisses him off more, making him feel irrational and prone to dangerous stunts and outbursts. even if not seeing you around much makes him feel like there’s not much to show off to. even if he really doesn’t feel like there’s anything worth showing off when he spies poor little you hanging around his classmates, quirkless and gentle.

gross.

…

katsuki hates being wrong.

katsuki hates knowing he’s wrong.

katsuki barely ever is wrong.

but when he is, he messes up completely.

if he were to possess the ability to correct one thing, he’d just lock up the idiots who call themselves his friends, and not let them near you.

they notice your little mannerisms too, of course they do when katsuki himself told them that you like him. they notice that you don’t meet his eyes and prefer staying away from him, but still respond to him whenever he talks. they notice that you don’t seem to fear him like some people do; almost as if you’re comfortable with him.

and they also notice things he wishes they didn’t notice, like the way his skin reddens imperceptibly when he sees you, and the way he makes an effort to not blast things up too much in your vicinity.

(it’s not really much use anymore, unfortunately.)

it’s definitely kaminari who is to blame; he always is for everything. katsuki doesn’t need any more reason to want to absolutely pummel him, because with the tape idiot’s encouragement, he bounces up to you one day and asks the dreaded question.

“what do you think of bakugou?” the blond asks, grinning from ear to ear as if he’s done something wonderful, but the way your eyebrow creases in confusion makes katsuki’s heart skip a beat. erratic. he doesn’t know what to make of the expression on your face. and no, he’s not waiting for your response, dammit. he’s 100% busy ignoring everyone. he can’t let you know all of his attention is on him, especially when you’re about to turn your head to look in his direction.

“he’s okay,” the words eventually leave your mouth, and he almost snorts. just okay? are you stupid, or just pretending to be? he knows your vocabulary is bigger than that.

“don’t you…” kaminari leans in dramatically, and katsuki has to strain his ears to hear—

“don’t you like him?”

well, hell. guess someone missed the tact memo.

that’s fine, though, katsuki’s okay with that. maybe letting you shyly avoid him isn’t the best course of action when you refuse to make a move.

you let out a non-committal noise, prompting another round of questions. the way you further get confused and respond with questions of your own makes something nag at the back of katsuki’s mind.

there’s something steadily sinking, and said sinking feeling grows the longer you talk to the electric idiot. by this point, katsuki has realised he’s missing something, but he’s still confident that it’s nothing he can’t overlook at this crucial moment when you spill the beans.

“my dear, sweet y/n, don’t you like bakugou?!” kaminari finally exclaims, possibly frustrated, and katsuki internally wheezes. he’s preoccupied with what you’ll say next, so laughing at the idiot’s expense takes a back seat.

he has to hand it to you; you’re really hard to crack, and it’s almost annoying. katsuki’s tempted to just burst his way over to you and demand a clear confession.

the answer isn’t something he’s expecting.

“not that he’s not, y’know, nice and all,” you babble, clearly stalling. you exhale at the same time as katsuki inhaling, and he holds his breath, waiting for the shoe to drop. really, maybe kaminari isn’t so bad if he can actually weasel the truth out of you with his stupid self.

“it’s just… he’s kind of scary. i try not to get in his way.”

kaminari seems just as stumped as katsuki feels in that moment.

“but… the way you act around him…”

well said, pikachu.

“oh.” that single word feels a bit like a gunshot. “oh, oh, i see. oh, no.” you need to stop saying ‘oh’ so many times, as if that changes anything.

“i’m sure he’s a good guy, but nope, i’m not interested in him romantically. i only act so awkward around him because that’s exactly how he makes me feel. i don’t even know him that well.”

can you stop twisting the knife?

“bakugou noticed,” kaminari mumbles, loud enough that katsuki hears. the words sound like they’re laced with pity. katsuki hates it, but what he hates more is how the idiot’s voice lowers to a whisper to say something to you that he really can’t hear from the distance.

katsuki also hates how your lips part and understanding dawns on your face.

he hates how your eyes meet his, head-on, because he completely forgot to look busy and has been gawking at you for the past few minutes. he hates how your eyes widen before a wary expression crosses your face.

katsuki hates the way you make him feel.

“is that what he’s passing it off as?” you ask, loud enough that he can hear. you’re not making an effort to lower your voice either.

kaminari does not respond to you, and you let out a short laugh, no doubt incredulous.

katsuki feels something within himself snap.

he leaves the room.

— note :: feedback is appreciated! :) I like this open ending because there’s a lot that can happen with it, let me know if anyone wants to see more of this! thanks for reading! :) ETA: if you’re interested in a continuation, you can read “honey”! :)

[katsukikitten]

Irritated 4

A/N lol opps I wrote another part I hope you all enjoy this while it lasts. Tehe (insert evil face here)

Bakugou swipes at the steamy mirror wishing his shower could have been hotter.

Hot enough to burn his skin and bring him back to reality. He tongues his cheek as he stares at his reflection. Thinking of the chopsticks, of admitting to thousands of people that he actually LOVED your shitty coffee order that he drank to spite you.

And of your soft body pressed against his as you reached for his wallet. Sure he had pinned you and you had pinned him plenty of times in real anger fueled fist fights.

But that's exactly what they were. Tension come to a head and released the only way the two of you knew how. Talking with a fist was much more honest and effective than any word uttered.

So why were you clinging to him when you came back from the bathroom, sans cup that you needed soooo badly. Why were you wearing such shifty eyes so suddenly when you were fine before? And why were you holding yourself back at the restaurant? Did the waiter dare say something to you? Look at your chest too long? If he had why did you just let it go?

But most importantly why did Bakugou care?

He gives his reflection a grimace before walking into the dimly lit bedroom. Clicking his tongue when he sees your pillow placed on the bed, he rolls his eyes at how the security guard placed it.

Lewd side up with your suit ripped in the stupidest places to reveal more.

He would rip it right down the middle, fucking the zipper up so you couldn't hide from him before deleicatly, so agonizingly slow, sliding it down those broad shoulders to reveal those fat tits.

Wait what the hell was he thinking? Explosions pop on steady fingers as he thinks of destroying the stupid thing.

But then how would he torture you with it?

He shoves it off the bed before rooting around his bag for a pair of black boxer briefs. The kind that hug his ass and thighs nicely, leaving little to imagination on his size.

Movement catches his eye from the balcony and he presses himself into the shadows as best he can. The cool, textured wall further agitates the itch in his hands to ignite. He moves towards the door as he makes out a figure sitting in one of the cheap chairs on HIS balcony.

He bares his teeth as your ill will echoes through his head.

*"I hope you get stalked."*

Was that why you were constantly looking over your shoulder?

Right now it doesn't matter. He is thankful the figure cannot see him as he approaches the glass sliding door. He flings it open, hand erupting in pops causing the figure to jump and turn with lightning speed before floating mid air.

Eyes glowing faintly as they are fixated on his shirtless body.

It takes him milliseconds to figure out it is you.

You clad in hardly anything, your belly button ring catches the light pulling him back to the here and now. Reminding him that you might be displaying your ass for the world.

And not showing your ass with your damn attitude like you normally did. He grips onto your arm tightly pulling you harshly into his chest.

You want to yell but again the faint smell of buttery sugar and spices causing the bubbling anger to stop rising.

"Baka some fans know this is our hotel." He growls, squeezing you for a moment, "The internet can see your ass when *you* post it. Not when some random beta's try taking grainy pictures of it."

You don't say anything as you sink into his touch for a moment because in those quickly ticking seconds you feel normal....safe.

"What are you doing on my balcony?" He asks darkly and you push him away, slipping past his arms and into his hotel room.

"Let's watch a movie Kaachan!" You sing song, offering the best smile you can as you avoid the topic, "Deku was already asleep."

The lie leaves your lips with ease and he does not notice. Although you do notice his slight blush and he does notice your negligence to answer his question.

You plop on the couch curling into the corner as if you nether of you were half dressed as he sits furthest from you that he can. Flipping through the channels waiting for you to whine to stop and when you don't he steals a glance at you.

You're staring at the TV but it looks more to him as if you're staring through it. Nails digging into the couch as he watches everything within a foot radius around you float centimeters above their surface.

What the fuck was bothering you so badly?

A thump at your door and voices outside startle you and the items come crashing down, your cheeks burn.

"Oi. What the fuck are they doing outside?" Bakugou snarls as he goes to stand. You grab for his wrist looking up at him with pleading eyes.

Eyes that he meets with slits before ripping his hand free.

"If we're gonna watch a movie its gonna be quiet in the fucking hall. Now you pick little one." He snarls tossing the remote onto the cushion that was between you two. You hastily grab for it muting the TV as the plastic rectagle in your hand groans from the pressure of your vice grip.

Bakugou opens the door without a second thought despite his lack of clothes. He spots a man with green eyes staring at your door until the numbers burn into his retinas.

Bakugou doesnt miss him deactivating his quirk although the man thinks he is keeping it hidden by angling his body just so. Red eyes watch pale flesh pulling back into itsself forming a solid hand once more.

"Oi, what are you doing?" His voice comes out dark and for a second the green eyed man looks a little less deranged and a little more scared.

Bakugou studies his face, committing the slope of his nose, the width of his eyes, and the small scar on his upper lip to memory and wondering if he's seen it before.

And where he had seen it before? A villain database? A B rated wanted poster?

No he clearly couldn't use his quirk well enough to keep it hidden and his quirk seemed more creepy than harmful.

Still Katsuki did not like him standing in front of your door with eyes that gleamed in the dull light of the hall. Katuki grips the door jamb, the wood whines from the force as he tries to keep himself in check.

"Are you fucking deaf? What are you doing here?"

The man blinks rapidly before offering a smile that looks off. His lips twitching as if he cannot do it properly.

"Have you seen Tejina? I want to give her this. She left it." He says as he rummages through his bag further putting Katsuki on edge. He let's the adrenaline heat his skin as sweat begins to form in his palm, waiting and willing to combust on command.

The man produces a pastel purple cup, with a relaxed Aizawa in an oversized knit sweater holding a sleepy cat. Their expressions eerily similar with MOOD in bold capitalized letters. Scalet eyes narrow, so she had bought it.

Why leave it? Was this guy there?

Bakugou snatches the cup, teeth bared as he speaks again. Who was this asshole?

"I'll give it to her. Now leave before I put you in the hospital. Got it?" Malice radiates off the ash blonde in waves as he thinks of this creep getting to close to you.

Suddenly his demeanor changes as he holds eye contact with Katsuki.

"That's not how a hero should speak." You hear the phrase from the couch causing your blood to run cold. This could be it. This could be game over for Bakugou's career like it almost was for you just a short while ago.

Explosions litter Katsuki's skin as his voice dips so low your stomach clenches with worry.

With fear.

"I don't give a fuck how a hero should speak. I just know how one should act. Now stop hovering around her fucking door before the coroner comes to haul your ass out of here."

"You talk as if she is yours." The man seemingly unphased by Bakugou's most deadly tone.

"So what if she is fucking mine?" Some how an even deadly tone slips out, more violent explosions appear on his skin as he steps into the hall. This time the man swallows thickly, eyes darting as if torn.

Torn between the love he has for you and the hatred he has for this Ground Zero who had his meat head paws sullen your angelic skin. He turns on his heel without a word as he makes his way for the stairwell.

Your heart thuds in your chest as Bakugou returns.

"Your cup." He growls, giving you a pointed look as he sets it on the coffee table.

"T..th.." You clear your throat, "Thank you Bakugou."

He watches from his end of the couch with his head in his hand before hissing out.

"The sooner you pick a movie. The sooner you can get the fuck out."

Bakugou speaks to you like this all time.

So why does it feel like he took a knife to your chest just now. As if he pushed it hilt deep, your breathing hitches. Still you nod as you flip through some channels before finding an old movie from your childhood.

One you used to watch with your grandmother. Comfort slowly fills your chest and you relax into the couch.

That is until you hear thumping, stomping feet and an obnoxious amount of noise before drunken laughing rings out.

You shake without realizing it as if you were a dog hiding in a corner, so unused to people and your master was throwing a party on the forth of July.

Your movement catches blood red eyes. Deft eyes that know that your movements are from fear, yet he still pulls the comforter off of the bed.

"Wha..what are you...?"

"You're cold dumbass." He growls, pulling you onto the cushion next to him fluffing the blanket for the two of you. He pulls it to your shoulders and tucks it this way and that so it does not move before he covers his lap. Resting his jaw onto a bored hand.

You stare, astounded as you look at this much more complicated man than you thought before his eyes dart to you out of the corner of his eye.

"Movie is that way baka." Before a mischievously cocky smirk pulls at his lips, "That is unless you cant keep your eyes off of me in all my glory."

Your cheeks flush before you HMPH as loud as and as dramatic as you can

"Fucking as if!" You hiss. Crossing your arms as you go back to the movie.

With each passing of familiar scene exhaustion begins to weigh heavy on your body.

Your eye lids especially, reminding you of how heavy your head is. You slump, uncaring of your posture as you lean your head against a sculpted but surprisingly soft shoulder.

Bakugou glares at you, quickly slowing his irritated OI! that was clawing up his throat when he sees how relaxed you look.

How *cute* you look. Tucking your feet and really snuggling into him feigning watching the movie as you fight sleep. He sighs, admitting defeat that somethings he cannot fight. Deku's words ring in his head before he bares his teeth.

*"...Shes had a long day."*

And it shows as you fall victim to sleep a lot faster than he thought you would. He leaves you for the remainder of the movie before gently scooping you up, your protest with a groan while your arms give you away. Wrapping tightly around him causing his heart to beat irraticlly, especially so when you nuzzle into his neck with a smile.

He brings you to the bed, comforter and all, lying you down gently. He figured the two of you could switch rooms or at the very least he could take the couch but there was just one little problem.

You wouldn't fucking let go. Even as strong arms pushed against yours you wouldn't budge. He is about to use lethal force until a subtle glow settles over his arms and your hands. Your eyes flutter open just a bit and when he meets them he feels as if his heart was ripped out of his chest. An odd weight settles in his stomach as he drinks you in.

Your eyes are so...so sad looking, as tears begin to well in them even in your mostly asleep state, your plump lips pulled southward in an undying frown.

"Stay." You whisper so lowly he could barely hear you. He scoffs, opening his mouth to retort and tell you that you're half asleep and must be dreaming of an ex. That is until you repeat yourself to him. Voice cracking

"Please stay Katsuki."

His heart races as his cheeks BURN. No one has ever said his name so tenderly before. Sure he has had plenty of past lovers and one nightstands but not a soul has come close to the reaction he has had to your three word sentence.

And who is he to deny a woman in need? A strong woman that is clearly having a very rare, vulnerable moment. A moment she is trusting him with. You are trusting him with.

He sucks his teeth and even half asleep you know he is going to stay. You're more reassured by his decision as he keeps one hand on your bare skin at all times as he whispers complaints, fixing the blanket you are "hogging for kami's sake" as you fade in and out. All before that strong arm wraps around you and pulls your back to his chest.

You sigh, letting sleep fully blanket you as buttery sugar and spices lulls you into a deep sleep.

My loves as per your request @casterixe @ha-tep

@thenezuko

thenezuko tumblr wont let me tag you love :(

[nooneandeveryone]

Regarding SSI and my personal experiences with it.

My benefits are on the high end ($750/mo it was 780 but they lowered it. Like assholes.). But that is not enough to live off of alone, unless you are extremely lucky. For example, the running rent rate in my nowheresville Michigan is $700/mo. Yeah. So that's 50 bucks to cover: groceries, phone/internet, electric bill, toiletries. Oh yeah, and that rent rate will give you a shitty apartment. As in, built in the 60s and never maintained.

For my own situation, I bought a house before I was on disability. Obviously said house is not paid off. Oh, and I got it super cheap because... here's the fun part. I live down the block from a Superfund site. Don't know what a Superfund is? Oh boy. It's a contaminated area that is uninhabitable by humans!! YAY! The superfund site is being cleaned up and might actually be EPA approved in '25. Oh, oh oh, want to know the punchline???????? I likely got the majority of my disabilities due to the contamination and the 1973 "packaging error" that put polybrominated biphenyl in cattle feed. Which in turn contaminated the milk the cows produced. The fun thing about PBB, it's stored in fat and has a half life of 80 years :D That is to say, I was not alive in '73, but my mom was. Any PBB within her was passed to me because she breast fed me. There's still on-going studies about how royally PBBs have fucked us. This is my super long winded way to say.... I got my house cheap because no one wants to live here. And that's why my house payments are $192. awesome.

Now back to SSI, so I lucked out and have a nice small-ish house payment but that still leaves: electric bill, water bill, heating/cooling bill, trash pick-up, phone/internet, groceries, toiletries, cat/dog food and everything related to pet ownership. I didn't even mention paying off debts. Without giving the exact numbers I can tell you, we squeak by. And some months we don't. Jordan is a free-lance illustrator, his income varies from month to month. A good month he gets $700, a bad month he gets $50. The mechanism of our survival is full of luck and blatant tragedy(dead family members). It was extremely fortunate that Jordan's inheritance came before I was on SSI and we used it for the house's downpayment. The rest paid off debt. So by the time I got my SSI our bank accounts were well under 3k combined.

So what happens if you go over the 2k or 3k ceiling? WELL, depending on how long you're over the limit, you'll have to pay back an ENTIRE MONTH of benefits. If you're over that amount for more than one month, you have to pay them back, the entire thing, each month you are over the limit. They will doc your benefits if you cannot pay them back. So, that's fun.

Before Covid, I had a very small part time job that brought in just under 65 dollars. But there was a couple months I brought in $80-100. Oh yes, I needed to pay them back for every dollar I went over $65. One month I went over by a dollar. Yes, they wanted that dollar back.

The absolute only bright side(aside from the benefit payments), I have full-ish medical coverage. I can continue to see my specialists and afford my medications. I am on a lot of medications. I've had to pay out of pocket for them before and it racked up a nice $800 a month. Isn't that fun. Incidentally that's why I even have most of my debt in the first place. I once paid 2k on meds due to an emergency.

So, yeah, I'm glad I don't have to pay for that anymore but that doesn't redeem the current system. It's a bandaid on an open chest wound.

[robron-til-the-end-of-time]

I have no faith in these producers any more. They have disappointed time & time again with serious social issues turning them into offensive plots. Even Ryan's exit which I thought was brilliant at the time has turned out to be a cheap stunt with an illogical, hasty, "Aaron moves on" follow up. Everything all the time is set up for something more and nothing comes of it in the end. They are lost, going down random SL alleys hoping something would stick. Yes, I am very bitter about Aaron 😜

Buckle in for a long answer!! 

Basically I disagree with you completely!! I think their bigger issue is that they push their issue based stories one step too far. They also don’t have as many issue based stories as other producers have had, so it’s more noticeable. 

Vic’s rape. Up until the extra throw of the dice with Luke/Wendy, it was fine. Really. Vic was inconsistent, but point to me a time she isn’t. Yes, people were mad as hell that Vic didn’t get justice, but the rape was handled incredibly realistically. SADLY, but it was. Vic would never have got a conviction and rape cases going to court in the UK has the lowest recorded rate at the moment. It IS realistic as much as that sucks. But they pushed it far too far since Robert had gone.

Robron. Robert got a thoroughly good, thoroughly deserved exit for a well rounded character, with the ship at the heart of it all. I didn’t expect that. Not with a return possible, I thought we’d only get that if they killed Robert off. But we did. Liam’s moved on from Bernice incredibly quickly, and Aaron hasn’t. While I disagree with most of the fandom about Aaron’s motivations, it’s still very clear he isn’t over Robert. You’re also assuming Aaron will come back “fine” from Scotland, where I’m not so sure he will tbh. Maybe less self destructive, but not fine.

I really like how this team handle exits tbh. Graham, Robert, Bernice and Faith fit their characters very well. Franks actual exit was great, the aftermath sucked. Again, showing they sometimes push their stories that one step too far. I like how this team handle the day to day and the community feel. I don’t like that they seem to be one or two big stories light on any given day.

I also am hedging my bets that only one of the producers is bad. We tend to have a bad shitty 6 weeks once every 4 to 5 months under this team, and I’m wondering if only one producer is in charge of that time period.

Also, if you’re waiting for a producer who does everything you like? Give up now!! You’ll never get one!

[vateacancameos]

Chapters: 1/1 Words: 3165 Fandom: Good Omens (TV) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens) Characters: Aziraphale (Good Omens), Crowley (Good Omens) Additional Tags: Christmas, Fluff, Winter, Post-Canon, angels and demons being soft, Asexual Relationship, overly sweet angels giving their demons the best christmas they can, Christmas Decorations, Snow Series: Part 3 of Ineffable Seasons Summary:

Aziraphale wants to give Crowley a happy first Christmas in their new cottage. He has to perform a few tricks to make sure it happens.

A continuation of the seasons series, but can be read independently.

Excerpt:

It starts in early November with the arrival of Christmas decorations in stores. Aziraphale and Crowley have been looking for a few pieces of furniture to round out their décor in the retirement cottage they’d recently acquired in the South Downs. You’d think that with the number of books and plants they have between the two of them, they don’t really need much else, but Crowley insists that their new home needs accent pieces to look “classy,” and Aziraphale insists they buy things like proper home owners rather than miracling them up, so they’ve spent the better part of two weeks visiting antique shops, finally ending up at a store called the White Company that’s leaving Aziraphale more than a little uneasy. Too little color, not enough dust. Thankfully Crowley pronounces everything too cheap, so they’re heading for the exit when they stumble across the Christmas display.

Crowley gets that gleeful look of his that’s so big, Aziraphale doesn’t need to see behind his shades to recognize it. His grin is slow and sly, ticking up a little higher on one side in that way that always makes Aziraphale’s chest feel warm. He’s happy that Crowley allows himself to show his feelings a little more these days, even if they’re still hidden behind dark lenses when they’re in public.

Still, he feels the need to tease, since he’s been hearing nothing but teasing about over-enjoying seasons from Crowley for all of autumn. Turnabout is fair play, and he’s been waiting a month for this.

“Look at that, Crowley! The shopkeepers have started your favorite holiday even earlier this year. Isn’t that nice?”[1]

[1] If you were there, you’d hear just how sarcastic he sounds. Because he is a little bit of a bastard after all.

Crowley wipes the cheerful grin from his face and tries (and fails) to produce a sneer. “Shoppers being annoyed by too cheerful displays, annoying music, and reminders of how shitty everyone’s own lives are? Of course I think that Christmas—at least the modern capitalist version—is the best time of the year.”

Aziraphale smiles but says nothing. He’s been hanging around his demon for the past two thousand years, so he knows the truth: Crowley adores Christmas, and not for the terrible capitalist trappings. He gets dewy-eyed every time he hears “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and he lights up like a child at every light display. Not to mention, Aziraphale surprised him at his flat a few winters ago and heard him quoting the Christmas episode of that show about the funny, sweet old ladies. It was the most adorable thing he’d ever heard. He’s never mentioned that thought to Crowley, though.

He doesn’t buy any Christmas decorations as they leave the store, but he starts brainstorming on ways to give Crowley the best Christmas ever.

[fanatical-san]

So I’ve started the Victuuri fic, called Love Me, Hate Me (And I’ll Crumble), to accompany @crimson-chains‘ absolute god-send of a Mafia AU. The stunning artwork has really helped me produce a little something, whether the writing has turned out shitty, or otherwise.

The blurb! -  Trouble between Mafia boss Nikiforov and gang leader JJ has been brewing, and Yuuri knows that it's his duty to discover the identity of and capture Nikiforov. The streets of Italy may never see peace otherwise, and innocent people could be harmed. He particularly wants to protect the charming Victor Plisetsky, who he fell for after saving him from JJ's group. Victor has been told, time and time again, that seducing a cop, of all people, is a tricky business. But anything for his Yuuri, right? And besides, he's got bigger problems to deal with. Like that JJ, who's a constant thorn in his side. He can manage keeping his identity secret and getting rid of JJ. He's a Mafia boss, after all.

@crimson-chains (it’s still jokesequaljoker, I just changed my URL), you are insanely talented, so thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to write this, and I hope you like it - I can’t wait to continue <3

Alternatively, read the first chapter under the cut!

If this is their attempt at an ambush, then Victor is sorely disappointed. It takes him a glance to work out that two men are hidden behind the dumpsters in an attempt to be discreet.

It’s novice, almost; the gradient of the concrete by the right wall of the alleyway is significantly less worn than that on the left side; something must’ve prevented the concrete on the right from eroding (i.e. the dumpster). They can’t’ve expected Victor not to notice, could they?

And besides, having two dumpsters in the far corner is the worst possible idea. No self-respecting shop owner would waste time walking to dumpsters all the way down there when they could bin waste where the path turns off into the alley. Thus, the dumpsters must have been moved together in order to lend enough space for two men (one man could fit behind one dumpster) to hide.

Victor looks at the dumpster directly, and flicks his hair to one side.

“Well, gentlemen? Are you going to introduce yourselves?” No response. “Now, now-” Victor strolls up to the dumpster and pushes them apart with the perfect force, revealing two huddled men (as he’d suspected). “-are we going to have to have a little chat?”

The men yell, and clamber up, launching themselves at Victor. A simple swipe deflects their first three blows. It’s when the second one tries (and fails) to deliver an uppercut that Victor realises: these men aren’t soladato at all.

Victor should be insulted. The rank of the man who throws (and misses) yet another poorly timed punch is an associate; both ambushers are little more than cugines, and consequently mediocre in their attacks, at best. And their attempt at an ambush? Abysmal. He should’ve known. But for JJ to send people who aren’t even properly initiated? Victor thinks that this must be a new low, even for that stuck up Canadian.

And it’s as he’s about to rough them up a little that he hears it; police sirens. The polizia are near – he can’t be seen on the offensive. So he practically has to move his jaw so that the second man can actually hit him, but it impacts harder than he expects. The man’s spurred on by his blow, and attempts a kick, which scrapes Victor’s side. He needs to defend himself, but he has to be cautious. As he tries to calculate the best compromise, the first guy comes up behind him and-

Shit. He’s losing control of the situation.

*

The sirens are obnoxiously loud, and extremely unnecessary, in Yuuri’s opinion. They might as well announce ‘hey, this is the fucking police, if you’re shifty, get the hell out’ through a megaphone, for all the help it’s doing. How are they meant to catch criminals when they’re giving them a headstart?

Seems those two idiots don’t get it though, Yuuri thinks, as he notices two men blatantly beating up another man. Yuuri can’t exactly see who it is, but the man doesn’t seem to be fighting back. Yuuri’s got help him out, and quick. He swerves the car to the curb and jumps out, striding towards the fight.

“This is the police,” he says in Italian (he doubts these guys know English), “stop – now.”

Turns out they aren’t complete fools; they yelp and scramble away. Yuuri should go after them, but he needs to check the citizen is okay first, so he crouches down and-

Woah. He’s stunning.

Yuuri immediately pushes the thought out of his mind and clears his throat.

“Are you okay, sir?” The man looks at him properly, and Yuuri sees the blood smeared across his face from a bloody nose that he needs to apply pressure to. He rummages through his coat pocket and pulls out a blue handkerchief (it’s the only thing he’s got, currently; it’s going to have to do), holding it out for the man to take.

However, he’s met with a slightly dazed stare, before the man mutters something…in Russian? Is he foreign? Yuuri thinks he hears the word ‘angel’, but that makes no sense in this context, so his Russian must be too rusty to make out the words.

“Sir???”

The man, who’s propped up on his elbows, is actually dressed pretty smartly. An expensive suit jacket slips off his shoulders (he’s got really well-defined collarbones, Yuuri notices as he takes in the man’s loose collar), and the tie does not look cheap, either. All in all, the man seems dishevelled, but there seems to be an air of importance about him.

Yuuri should definitely take a moment to make sure he’s going to be okay. Besides, the assaulters are most likely out of reach for now…right?

*

So what if Victor is known to over plan? Being prepared is never a bad thing, and Victor must admit that strategizing over how to get his lovely cop to fall for him for only six hours or so was very disciplined of him.  

He thinks back to last night, where he’d nursed his limoncello liquor (Sorrento, of course) as thoughts swirled about his mind.

How should I seduce him? he’d pondered. Because that was his goal, after all. Rationality had flown his mind when he’d first seen the handsome cop (and he was aware, somewhere in his love-befuddled head, that getting a cop into bed was reckless. But he didn’t have to worry about that for now); all Victor knew was that he wanted him. And what Victor he wanted, he got.

But the cop had genuinely seemed sweet, too. Victor had been surprised to discover that the physical attraction was only half the appeal for him. He had this urge to get to know the cop better…meaning, of course, that Victor was in love (no matter who told him he was out of his mind).

In the end, it was simple; he’d return the blue handkerchief (adorable), and ask the beautiful man to dinner (in English; Victor could tell that Italian didn’t come very naturally to the cop, and judging by what he’d heard, the man was probably an English speaker to some degree).

However, standing outside the police station, Victor can’t help but feel ever-so-slightly anxious. There’s no time for nerves though; he glimpses the cop coming out of the building and immediately steps in with a sultry gaze and a confident tone.

“Hello,” he says smoothly, producing the handkerchief. “Thank you for your handkerchief yesterday. I’d like to treat you to dinner to show my gratitude.” Perfect, all according to plan. Now all that’s left is for the cop to say yes, fall head over heels, and then they can get to-

“Oh, I’m sorry, did you say something?” he replies, taking out a single earphone. Earphones. He’s wearing earphones? Oh shit. Victor must look really dumb now (and he’s thanking the lord that he at least got the language right – the reply was in English), and now he’s gotta start again but he can’t just reset oh god-

“I!” Victor begins. Okay, okay, he just needs to say thank you…is that what he said before? “Yesterday you helped me so…um-” No, no, no, he’s stuttering! What was he saying again? Fuck it; dinner. Ask about dinner. “please let me buy you dinner!”

The cop looks at him with the most puzzled expression (and still manages to look delectable), to the extent where the phrase ‘ground, swallow me up’ suddenly becomes very relevant for Victor.

“Oh,” the cop says, and Victor’s heart skips a beat. Could he still…? “You don’t have to. I’m always happy to help.” Then, quieter: “It’s my job, after all.”

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no! At this rate, they’ll be saying goodbye in a second, parting ways never to speak again, and thus inevitably killing Victor’s poor heart. He has to save this!

“I insist!” It comes out obnoxious and blunt, but at least it’s something. The cop falters.

“Okay – uh,” he begins, and Victor seriously fears that he’s ruined his chances. “Can I get your name?”

His name? Oh. Oh.

Victor feels like such an imbecile. His name – the cop doesn’t even know his name! Well, that’s easy enough.

“Ah, sorry, how rude of me!” he says courteously. “My name is Victor.” He can’t tell the cop his surname, of course, as wonderful as the man may seem. Victor isn’t completely stupid.

“Okay, Victor!” And isn’t it just a stab through the heart to hear those dreamy tones say his name so softly? He wants to make it his ringtone, just to hear that voice say his name again (and he can’t help but imagine that voice saying his name in completely different – and leagues more pleasurable – situation…). “I’m Yuuri Katsuki!”

The blonde Yuri won’t like that, but then again, he doesn’t like anything, so perhaps that’s not too bad (and besides, this name is different, elongated. He likes it). Yuuri Katsuki. Japanese, perhaps. It fits him. Victor smiles, and on impulse, reaches for Yuuri’s hand.

“Then…” he says in an almost whisper, kissing Yuuri’s soft hand briefly, “Allow me to take care of you this evening, Yuuri…”

He looks up, notices Yuuri’s shocked blush, and blanches.

Oh, god. Has he messed it up again? Already? Was that too much? He’s smiling, so that’s fine, right? Victor has to believe it.

In hindsight, this may be a little harder than expected…but his angelic cop has said yes to him, and Victor’s determined to seduce him to the best of his abilities.

[camgirlsurvivalguide]

FAKE HAIR DON’T CARE - The what’s what of hair extensions

Come one, come all! It’s the Camgirl Survival Dummies Guide to putting someone else’s severed hair on your head and pretending it’s your own! I was asked by a few people recently to give advice on hair extensions (since I have some experience) and I decided to write up a big old post here for anyone who wants to take a peek at it. 

The best person to talk to about hair extensions is, first and foremost, your stylist. Not all hair types work with extensions. Extensions can and do damage your natural hair, depending on the method you choose, and choosing to DIY any of these methods can cause damage, to your natural hair or to the extensions you buy. Extensions are expensive, and there is almost no way around that. They’re also a fucking pain in the ass, if I’m being honest, but damn do I look and feel twelve thousand times cuter when I’ve got my great big bad hair on - so here are my tips and tricks to making the most out of using someone else’s hair as your own.

GENERAL EXTENSION ADVICE

- Be gentle. Use a soft brush and work tangles from the bottom gently up toward the weft. Remember kiddies: the hair doesn’t grow back after you rip it out, like it does on your own head. Each fucking strand probably costs you like five cents, so treat your extensions like the gold they truly are, and they’ll last you longer.

- Wash sparingly. If you use a non-permanent extension method, this is great, because you can just take them out when you shower, but if you’re using a permanent method ... dry shampoo now is your best friend. Do not scrub permanent extensions near the root/scalp. Don’t blow dry or apply heat near the bonds/near the root/scalp. Use heat tools sparingly. 

- OIL. Your natural hair produces natural oil, which is why your roots look healthy shiny and the ends of your hair look like a shitty split end desert. Your extensions can’t produce oil for themselves, so you’ll need to add oil for them. Always use heat protecting spray before styling your extensions, use a leave in conditioner when you do wash them (in the case of clip ins) or once in a while with your permanent extensions, and be sure to add an oil (like Moroccan or argan) to the length of your extensions to keep them looking natural. 

- Medium length hair woes are usually what cause us to go get extensions, but are also subsequently the worst length of hair to try to hide using extensions. Search “how to blend short hair with extensions” for tutorial ideas on how you can get your hair to look a little more convincing. 

TYPES OF EXTENSIONS 

CLIP INS PROS: Cheaper, longer-lasting, DIY-able CONS: More time consuming, cheapest looking WORKS BEST ON: already long, relatively full hair AVERAGE YEARLY COST: $300ish

Ah, clip-ins. Everyone and their dog had a set at some point in high school, and they looked just as shitty as they felt: dry, thin, and very obviously not growing out of the tops of our own heads. Clip ins can look awful, and they can look pretty damn good - it just depends on how much work you’re willing to put in.

I wear clip ins for a few reasons. First, I’m cheap and I like to do things myself, and clip ins let me experiment. I dye them myself, and (since they just ... clip ... in) I put them in and take them out whenever I want, so I’m not paying a professional their professional rate to help me with them. Second, my hair is naturally quite oily, and I go to the gym 5 days a week, which means I wash my hair a lot, and that’s not wise with more permanent types of extensions. Being able to put in clip-ins only when I want to works for my lifestyle, since I find myself not wanting full, crazy luxurious hair probably 75% of the time. Lastly, for the past year my hair has been a pastel colour, and for anyone with crazy colour hair, you know as well as I do that it fades fast. Being able to dye my natural hair and my extensions myself at my house was the cheapest and most reasonable method for me to have extensions that matched my hair. 

My advice with clip ins is to do it properly: get a good set of extensions, and when you first receive them, go to a salon to have them coloured to match your hair and cut to blend with your style. It’s good to go a little heavy in terms of weight (the fuller the better) because it’s easier to blend more hair than it is to try to blend a thinner set.

TAPE INS PROS: Mid-range price wise, absolutely beautiful, semi-DIY CONS: High maintenance, limited style options WORKS BEST ON: thin/fine hair, jaw length or longer AVERAGE YEARLY COST: $2500+

Long story short, tape in extensions fucking rock. They look amazing. They add length and volume without the clunky bulk at the root that clip ins cause, they blend seamlessly with your natural hair at most hair lengths, and they’re relatively low hassle because once they’re installed, they stay installed for 6 to 8 weeks. The hair can be used for up to 6 months (as long as you take good care of them), too, which means you’ll get 3 or so installs on any given set of hair. It’s also a relatively inexpensive method in terms of install price: my girl put them in for $100, and would remove them for $100 (putting fresh tapes on and the whole nine yards). I loved my tape ins. I really did.

The reasons I got them removed were cost and effort. Sure, they looked fucking fantastic, and when my full time job and only responsibility was to get cute and get on cam once a day, it was something that blended into my lifestyle pretty well. But now that I’m a student with a gym routine, the whole diva hair thing is a lot lower down on my list of priorities, and styling all that hair every day takes time. The biggest bummer with tape ins is that you can’t wear your hair up in a ponytail or a bun because of how the tapes lie. Not even that it would look bad (which it does) but it’s kind of painful if you try, in my opinion. I had to schedule hair appointments every 7 weeks like clockwork and that got expensive pretty quickly. 

Let’s do the math: $200 every 1.5 months = $1600 in installation (not including colour, cut or tipping the stylist). The hair itself cost me between $400 and $600, which I had to do twice a year at minimum, so that’s roughly another $1000 ... that’s $2600+ per year, just in hair and install (again, not including colour and cut and tip, which is a whole other ballpark). They looked amazing, and I don’t regret having them, but for me, it was a limited-timeframe sort of option.

I managed to cut costs somewhat, though. I found that I could remove the extensions myself at home using a tape extension remover I found online for cheap (which was more or less just a blend of coconut oil and rubbing alcohol), and I would usually dye my extensions and my hair from the same box dye at home, too - so when I went to the stylist, I was only asking her to install and cut to blend them. Still, tape in hair is expensive, and you run the risk of ruining them if you DIY. I know there are tons of YouTube tutorials on how to put in your own tape hair extensions but I tried like 40 fucking times and screwed them up each and every time, and so did my girlfriend who tried to help me with it, so ... yeah. Not really DIY-able all the way. 

BEADED/SEW IN WEAVE PROS: Cheap, DIY if you have a patient friend CONS: Heavy, painful, hard on your natural hair WORKS BEST ON: Very thick, full/coarse hair AVERAGE YEARLY COST: $300+ DIY, $1000+ (???) professional 

My best friend has a lion’s mane for hair: super full, crazy thick, super gorgeous. Unfortunately, she fried the living fuck out of it with bleach one day and lost almost all the length she had. Tape ins weren’t an option because in order to have enough hair, she’d have to buy like 4x what a regular person would put in, so the cost just didn’t make sense. Clip ins were fine but she wanted to be able to go to sleep and wake up and still have long hair - so, I watched a couple tutorials on YouTube about beaded weaves, ordered a lil kit off amazon, and viola! We had our own weave salon up and running in my living room.

I don’t have much advice on these, because it really was a pretty hodge-podge DIY sort of situation. We took clip-in extensions, clamped beads to her natural hair and then sewed the wefts to the little beads, which would take me 2 or 3 hours, and we’d do this once every 6 weeks or so. It’s hard to explain and you definitely couldn’t do it alone, but if you’re one of these people with short but super thick hair, it would do you good to look up this process and see if you could convince a friend to help you out. 

KERATIN BONDED EXTENSIONS PROS: Very natural looking, super style-able, practically invisible  CONS: expensive, time consuming, not DIY at all, hard on natural hair, one-time use hair only WORKS BEST ON: very fine/thinning hair  AVERAGE YEARLY COST: ??? it’s expensive as fuck I just know that

I’m pretty sure these are the extensions that Paris Hilton used to advertise. In summary, they’re fucking expensive, but they look exactly like your own hair and they work amazingly for individuals with hair so fine/thinning that tape in extensions would show through. The installation requires really special, intensive training to pull off, so stylists who offer this service usually charge through the roof for it - and you can only use the hair once, since the hair is in tiny strands with tiny bits of keratin as adhesive, that they install using tiny tweezers or something like that. A friend of mine had these and absolutely loved them, but they were very expensive and very time consuming, not to mention very delicate: she had to be super easy on her hair, particularly as the bonds got older with age. 

MICRO BEAD EXTENSIONS / “Dream Catchers” PROS: Super fucking nice. The nicest. The nicest ones you can get.  CONS: Super fucking expensive. The most expensive. The most expensive ones you can get. WORKS BEST ON: Most average hair types - fine to regular to thick, but not thinnest/thickest AVERAGE YEARLY COSTS: probably kajillions. I’ve heard horror stories.

So these are the Rolls Royce of extensions, from what I’ve been told. They essentially combine the techniques of a beaded wave and the keratin bond to create thick individual strands that can add a ton of length in a super natural looking way. I wanted these pretty bad but just couldn’t justify the price. I *think* they can be re-used, too, but I’m not totally sure - I’ve never had them myself, nor do I know anyone well enough to have asked them if they just collect the strands of hair that fall out of their heads or if they throw them out. It’s a weird, kinda personal thing to ask, if you think about it.

EXTENSION Q&A

Q: Where do I buy good hair extensions? A: I bought mine from a store in a mall (bad idea) and from my hair stylist (sort of good idea, sort of bad idea). I’ve heard tons of great things from online sellers like Bellami Hair, but I personally like to touch and see the hair I’m spending hundreds of dollars on in person before I buy it. Call me old fashioned, I guess. My girlfriend bought her hair from Sally’s (clip ins and beaded weave) and they looked great, too. 

Q: What about Amazon? A: If it’s cheap, it’s going to look cheap. Extensions aren’t cheap because they’re an over the top luxury sort of item, so if you’re not willing to pay the price, I argue that it’s not worth it to do them at all. This is coming from someone who literally tried to DIY fix my own tattoo one time because I didn’t want to pay someone to do it. I get it. I’m cheap, too. But extensions don’t work well cheaply done.

Q: I’m not really good with styling my hair. Are hair extensions hard to make look good? A: Yeah, they are - but they’re also an amazing way to force yourself to get good at styling. I sucked at styling my hair before I got tape ins. I didn’t know how to curl or braid, no joke - and now I can do a whole bunch of stuff, because having extensions forced me to learn how to make them look good. They do require work. It’s not like you’ll wake up every day with movie star looking hair - you’ll have enough hair to make into movie star hair, but you still have to actually style it to that point. 

[alexanderwrites]

Top of the Flops - Cursed (2005)

A brief introduction: I watch a lot of movies, and specifically, I watch a lot of terrible movies. On purpose. Perhaps it was growing up on Adam Sandler movies that did it, but I am naturally drawn to the mistakes of cinema. Making friends that are equally as obsessed with the annals of acrid cinema helped encourage my plight, as did the great podcast, How did this Get Made? I’ve learned to embrace my love of the hot garbage, yet all my terrible film watching tended to just fall into a well deep inside my brain where it’d remain, only to occasionally crawl back out and force me to admit: “Oh shit, I think i’ve seen that”. And so, with this feature, I will attempt to look these movies dead in the eye and say “.....alright then”. These films won’t necessarily be the traditional flop, but they will exist in one of three categories (or hopefully, all three): Financial Flop, Critical Flop, or Flop inside my own Heart. And we start with a movie that swipes at those three categories with a badly animated paw and succeeds at being all of them.

Budget: $38m

Gross: $29.6m

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 16%

When you think about something being cursed, sure, you might think of someone bitten by a Hollywood Werewolf. Or, you might think of a film that is produced by Bob and Harvey Weinstein, the unsurpassed ineffectual tinkerers of Hollywood Movies. Cursed has a lot of curses, but it is hard to find one more damning than that of the Weinstein curse, which put this movie through years of production hell while they desperately attempted to lower the rating and stuff it full of stars so that people would actually go and see it. They failed wildly. Pandering is the bread and butter of Horror Cinema of the mid-2000s (let us not forget that Paris Hilton starred in the House of Wax remake that year) and boy does this film come off as a parent trying to access your love by accessing your CD collection (shit, ‘CD collection’? Sorry, this film has put me into 2005 mode, when I actually owned CDs by some of the bands in this soundtrack).

How pander-ific does it get? The film opens with a Bowling for Soup concert. Y’know, the guys who sang Girl all the Bad Guys Want? Yeah, them. Whether or not they were a voice of a generation, this film skews pretty young, and in case you were worried that they’re just aiming for the kids who ride skateboards, worry no more: the singer Mya is at the concert. Yes, the singer Mya. And the strangest thing is, the singer Mya doesn’t sing at all. Which is what, if anything, she was known for. It is entirely possible she showed up to the production, Wes Craven didn’t recognise her and instead cast her as “girl who flirts and therefore gets violently killed”. And later, the trifecta of “WHY ARE THEY THERE” musicians is complete when Lance Bass has a wordless cameo. Oh Bass, you truly were the Alfred Hitchcock of cameos! (Alfred Hitchcock was also the Alfred Hitchcock of cameos, as well as the Alfred Hitchcock of Alfred Hitchcocks). 

Aside from Christina Ricci and Jesse Eisenberg leading the cast, (who no teen on earth cared about in 2005), the film’s attempt to celebrit-ise the cast list is, erm...weird? There’s Shannon Elizabeth (who was 5 years past being popular), Joshua Jackson (who was 10 years past being popular) and Scott Baio (who was literally never popular). As Bart once pointed out: “What’s a Chachi?”. And, if it had been released ten years later, the film could’ve had something on their hands with this cameo...

It’s odd that the film should be such a cynical Hollywood cheap-fest because writer Kevin Williamson (scribe of classics like Scream and...not classics like I Know What You Did Last Summer) is quite the meta lover, and is excitedly peppers the script with lots of digs at Hollywood. They’re not good digs: Jesse Eisenberg suggests that as the werewolf is from Hollywood, it might have breast implants, an image that’s so stupid, yet so viscerally disgusting, that I wish Eisenberg had never opened his bastard mouth to say it. Williamson is not much of a satirist outside of Scream, but you get the feeling he thinks he is. “I’m gonna make fun of dumb old Hollywood whilst making a film that is the most clear cut example of dumb old Hollywood. Haha! Take that, me!”.

The film has promise in its names: Wes Craven behind the camera and Rick Baker on makeup, but in reducing the film’s certificate, The Weinstein’s rid the movie of almost any of that great Baker body horror makeup, and any of that Craven intelligence. I can’t blame it all on them: the scariest thing about it is how horrifically directed it is: it looks like a TV Movie, and I genuinely would not surprised if Craven was napping through 80% of filming. And it’s an odd decision to rely so heavily on cheap looking CGI when Baker is around - it’s like they said “Great, we’ve got Rick Baker on board! Now, lets lock him in that cupboard over there for two years”. Because this film literally took over two years to make. A film taking a long time, a film having reshoots, and a film having rewrites, are three signs your film is in trouble. Cursed has all three of those. I mean, did it really sound promising when Men in Black 3′s rewrites were going so badly that they got Will Smith on board to help out? It damn well didn’t, and we ended up with a film with lines like “I will pimp-slap the shiznit out of you”. In 2012. 

You can tell Cursed was filmed over gigantic periods of time, which would explain why nobody in the film appears to give a shit about anything that’s happening. Ricci, Eisenberg and Jackson seem so entirely bored and quite honestly, sleepy, that it’s baffling that Wes didn’t say ‘Hey can we try that once more but this time not shitty?’. Not that he cared too much - how do you direct a film from someone’s else’s script for nearly THREE years and still care? How do you maintain a solid and consistent directing style over three years? The answer is: you don’t. 

I can not blame the bad performances. The script is so dire and laughable that caring about it requires energy which could be better spent on things such as making some lunch or clearing out your junk mail folders. I mean, what could Ricci possibly see in her character Ellie? She’s a talk show producer which never plays into her story, and after she and her brother are attacked by an LA Werewolf, what exciting changes in her occur? What emotional developments does she have to grapple with? Well for a starter, she wears a new shirt to work. It’s the most nondescript shirt imaginable, and yet it causes her co-worker to tell her she looks “Saucy”. Did I mention that this movie has no idea how people talk or act? She does so little else, except sniff the odd bit of blood, and worry that her brooding boyfriend, Joshua Jackson, isn’t happy with her. His story isn’t much better, the crux of his arc in the first half is “He loves to fuck so much, but can he learn to cut back on all the fucking?”. Oh, and he has a club to open, which is a bizarre Madame Tussauds of horror movie mannequins, but also Cher and Xena, and also a house of mirrors, and also a DJ. And Lance Bass attends the opening. It feels like the weirdest and laziest shoehorn of “Hey here’s some horror movie imagery so we can tie our movie to much better horror movies!”, and the twist is so predictable that I wrote in my notes “If Joshua Jackson doesn’t turn out to be a werewolf I will eat my own hands.”. 

         IF ONLY there was some framing to give me a hint! Darn it!

Meanwhile, Jesse Eisenberg plays Jimmy, who knows he is turning into a werewolf because he went on “internet search” and typed in the words “Werewolf L.A”. He doesn’t seem very bothered, though. As soon as they get home from their initial attack (during which Shannon Elizabeth is in a fiery car wreck and then dragged off to her death), he says, with casual indifference “Well. G’night”. After he saw a woman killed. And after they were attacked by a gigantic wolf. Nobody seems to care about anything that is happening, but why should they? Jimmy’s werewolf transformation is only marginally more exciting than Ellie’s, because he gets the Spiderman 3 style hair makeover (although this is spiky rather than floppy) and he can now suplex his bully. 

Ellie’s transformation means she can catch a fly in her bare hand, y’know, just as werewolves are always doing. The film seems to forget that they’re actually supposed to be werewolves because they never actually turn into werewolves, and it never seems to affect their lives too badly. The traditional impetus for werewolves’ story arc is that they want to stop becoming a werewolves because they don’t want to kill people. That isn’t even hinted at with either Ellie or Jimmy - they never even try to kill anyone, they never fully transform, and the most dangerous Ellie gets is when she yells “Don’t start with me!” at a producer who doesn’t want Scott Baio to be bumped for Carrot Top. Seriously. A moment that is supposed to showcase Ellie’s newfound animal fury involves a conversation about Carrot Top and Scott Baio. For most of the film she doesn’t really believe she’s a werewolf, which gives us a contender for worst line of 2005: “Everybody’s cursed. It’s called life”. Her story is thoroughly underwritten, meanwhile you wish Jimmy’s story was not written at all.

Because he’s Jesse Eisenberg, he gets bullied by someone who throws homophobic slurs at him even though, as Jimmy repeatedly reminds us, he’s not gay. Poor straight kid! That must be tough, being straight! Some of these insults include “Your dog is gay too!”, and “You ass wimp wad”. But it’s okay, because it turns out the bully is gay! And not only that, but he turns up on Jimmy’s front porch and tries to kiss him, which leads to another of the worst/best lines of the film: “i’m not gay....i’m a werewolf”. The nonchalant way he just reveals that information is ridiculous, and is another demonstration of the way that nobody seems to care very much about anything in this movie. The film doesn’t seem to care very much about its set pieces either, one of which happens moments after the porch scene. The family dog for no apparent reason is a werewolf now, too! A vague, fuzzily CGI’d ball of brown that throws itself through windows!

                                   “Ahh!! It’s an....onion bhaji?”

Meanwhile, Joshua Jackson’s secret kind of just falls out, as if Kevin Williamson was like “Oh RIGHT, there has to be an antagonist”. Joshua Jackson is a werewolf after all, and this draws the action towards the opening of his club, where Jimmy’s bully joins them for some reason, and proceeds to get knocked out instantly, a state in which he remains for the entire duration of the scene. 

  “My dying wish is that I one day star in a superhero show that is beloved for      one season and then the most hated thing on TV for the second season”

The great TV writer John Swartzwelder was known for using “for some reason” in his scripts, which worked beautifully for a solid, absurd joke. But Cursed is a supposed horror film that takes “for some reason” and bases its entire third act on it. Why are they all here at this club? Why is Judy Greer turning into a werewolf now? And why, by any stretch of the imagination, did the writers think that, after having her looks insulted, it’d be a good idea to have the Greerwolf do this:

Yes, Judy Greer is the last-minute big bad wolf, but to what end? Where was all the build up to that? What is her motivation? And how much longer if there left of this film? She gives an expository dump about how much she hates women and thus wants to eat her, and it carries about as much weight as the fly that Ellie caught earlier (callbacks!). The big fight between Greerwolf and Jimmy & Ellie feels totally unearned, and they don’t even use any of their Werewolf abilities. I mean, sure, it’s a fun sight seeing Jesse Eisenberg charging at Greerwolf with a sword and shouting “yyAAAH YAAAAAAAH”, but the scene ends without Ellie and Jimmy doing anything impressive at all, and instead a bunch of cops just shooting her to death. It’s not very clever or satisfying. At least she got to crack a few lines before her time was up, including “Showtime. Isn’t that what they say?”. Uhh...yeah I guess? Good one? The film cannot seem to make up its mind on what any of the characters think or want, and so Joshua Jackson goes from good, to bad, to good and back to bad again, and not for one second does the disinterest on his face let up.

      “I’m a fuckin wolf and uh, i’m gonna eat you now I guess. Or not. Wes!?”

The final set piece, which limps along after what feels like a 20 minute film (which is actually 100 minutes) occurs after 3 acts which involve zero emotional development, and zero cool werewolf moments. Surely now is the time for our protagonist, Ellie, to have both? Nah! Instead she slowly sort-of turns into a werewolf, by getting lumpy skin and big teeth. She never fully transforms (“It happens slowly at first” says Jackson, meaning “we don’t have the budget for a full transformation”) and doesn’t even get to overpower Joshua Jackson, which would’ve at least given her some agency and closure. That task is left to Jimmy who crawls around on the ceiling for a bit, (another classic werewolf attribute??) before eventually stopping Jackson with a shovel and a....cake serving knife. A cake serving knife that you see a lot of in the film, because apparently cake serving knives are really cool props to have as a sort of Chekhov’s Cake Server?

            “Teenagers LOVE cake servers, right” - Kevin Williamson

Jimmy saves Ellie with the help of the cake server, and once Jackson is down, Ellie at the very least she gets to smash Jackson’s head off, and his body burns. Kitchen RUINED. She doesn’t even seem upset that she’s had to smash her supposed love’s head clean off his body. And mere moments after this, Jimmy’s crush comes to the door having found their were-dog, and conveniently knowing that a) it’s his dog and b) where he lives. They have a kiss and walk off, with his bully in attendance because apparently he doesn’t have a family of his own. They all got over that evening pretty fast. After tearing a werewolf’s head off and having your sister nearly killed, would you not want to hang out for a bit longer? Just have a bit of a night in? Instead, it’s a casual “Well that’s done then, bye!”. And there’s his arc. He’s made a friend, got a girlfriend, and saved his sister. And what was Ellie’s arc? She wears a new shirt, has her life nearly ended several times, has her house ruined, and then, as Jimmy fucks off with his mates, she closes the film with the line “I’m just gonna stay here and clean”. Seriously. That’s her resolution. That’s how she ends the film. Bloodied, miserable, alone, and cleaning up the gore in her kitchen. I can’t wait for Cursed 2 to see if she managed to successfully hoover up all that werewolf fur!! 

It’s a real failure of a film in every regard. It does lean towards trying to be fun rather than trying to be scary, but couldn’t it have tried to be even a bit spooky? Could the jump scares have not been so endless and predictable. I mean, ten points for anyone who can guess where the jump scare is coming from in this scene:

Yes, a cuckoo clock is about as scary as it gets. I could tolerate the lack of care put into the story and the characters if the action and horror were there, but they really aren’t. There is nothing tense, well crafted or smart in the film. It’s baffling to think this is the guy who made Scream and A Nightmare on Elm Street, because this doesn’t just feel like it was directed by someone having an off day, it feels like it was directed by someone whose only experience is directing episodes of MTV’s Cribs. It doesn’t attempt to subvert, improve or even just successfully repeat the werewolf formula, instead it just throws random iconography from those movies at you with Dashboard Confessional songs playing loudly enough to distract you from this terrible film with an even more terrible soundtrack. Terrible, and yet I did have fun with it. It actually benefits from being flimsy and light as air, and as dreadful as it gets, I did appreciate it not taking itself too seriously. There are enough unintentionally funny and simply bizarre moments to make it an enjoyable watch, and it’s not the most hatable of films. It could almost have had a charm, if it wasn’t really, really, extremely bad. 

Worth a hate watch?: Yes

Worst/best line: “I’m not gay....i’m a werewolf”

Worst film of 2005?: Son of the Mask, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, Doom, XXX 2, The Pacifier and Bewitched all came out in 2005, so no. Cursed might be a bad film from a bad year, but it is not the worst. Rob Schneider knows very well which film is the worst of 2005. 

[ethekitchenator]

Some thoughts...

Alright, I’ve given this a couple of days, mostly because I’ve been upset and angry over the whole thing (and still am) but am more reasonable in moving to talk about it.

This contains Supernatural spoilers, so, just be aware.  It is also quite long (I’m a writer okay?  It’s expected).

Now, I want to start this by saying that season 12 has probably been the most disappointing season so far.  This season felt as if it was rushed and as if the writers had no idea where they were going with it and trying to fill in bits and pieces as they went.  Not only that, but it felt as if the writers didn’t know, or even try to know their characters at all.  Sam and Dean, maybe, but Castiel and Crowley, definitely not.  I honestly don’t know how they’ve gone so wrong.

Between the BMOL storyline and the Lucifer’s baby storyline, in my opinion, the season has been nothing short of a joke, with maybe one or two good episodes.  Both storylines could’ve provided so much potential, and in all honesty, could’ve very easily combined into one very good storyline.  

The BMOL people, were mostly just arseholes that had no character development (except Mick who deserved a lot more than what he got) and, in all honesty, were just damned frustrating.  I don’t believe, ever, that Sam and Dean would’ve ever worked with them, especially with what happened at the start of the season, I don’t care what was offered, I don’t think it would’ve happened.  Those first few episodes were enough to show that BMOL had no interest in fixing things.  They just wanted control.  They wanted to prove that they were better.  They wanted to just destroy virtually everything that the boys had ever done.

So it was frustrating when the boys worked with them.

Now, the Lucifer storyline, this has to be the one that really upset me the most.  If you had asked me after season 5/6, I would’ve easily agreed that he was a very underutilised villain and that they got rid of him way too early.  I was excited when he was back for season 11, and while slightly disappointed that it was Misha playing the role (don’t get me wrong, he did amazing), it was still decently handled.  This season though, this season has truly been nothing short of a joke.  I don’t think I’ve ever sat through more of a frustrating storyline and seen nothing but a weird conglomeration of his character that craps on the others for no particular reason except and ‘oh, it’s his character’ ideal.

I didn’t expect it to get worse.

Now, Lucifer becoming the President, at first I was a little stunned and then very curious about where they could take this.  I mean, they could’ve gone down the road of Lucifer showing the world what existed, would’ve brought the two storylines easily together as well as brought in a lot of conflict for the mains (I’m not saying it should’ve gone like that, but it was a path they could’ve gone down).  But then, my god, then they went down Lucifer having a baby.  I mean, first, yeah, I was interested, I wanted to know where it was going and what they were going to do with it.  The nephilim concept was something that was always brought up but never really used.

But then it began to be used to just shit all over other characters.

Mostly, of course, Crowley.  Now, I will admit, I’m a huge fan of Crowley, I think he is one of the most complicated characters on the show and that he brings a characterisation that it needs to keep going.  The way that he was treated this season though, was nothing short of a joke.  It doesn’t take much to see that the writers wanted to completely ignore the way the character works and acts and just went the worst possible options so that they could solely try and write him out of the show.

Sadly, I think it’s worked.

I’ll get back to that in a moment.

As we got towards the end of the season, I sat there in sheer shock as I watched the writing seem to get worse, and it made me furious as both a fan and writer that they would dare to treat the show and characters this way.  I kept watching simply because I am a fan of the show, have been for a while, but it was with great trepidation that I watched the finale.

Episode 22 actually resolved things pretty nicely for the BMOL storyline.  It had some good elements and good moments that made it feel like a decent resolution.

Then we got to episode 23.

I just...I couldn’t really believe what I was watching.  Out of everything, I was not expecting them to suddenly bring in an alternate universe, and from that moment on (among other things) I think I pretty much decided I was done with the show.  It shows desperation in writing, especially when they had so many other options available to go with.  An alternate universe.  I was sitting there in stunned, furious silence, because, in all honesty, it’s utter bullshit and nothing but a cheap excuse for writing, and I honestly don’t think I can watch an entire season where that is going to be the plotline, not even to mention the weird manbaby (which again, nothing but poor writing) that is supposedly more powerful than anything we’ve seen before (apart from Chuck and Amara).

If there’s one thing that kills a show (unless a part of the original storyline) it’s an alternate universe, especially one that is clearly going to just be an excuse to try and bring back some old characters.  Bobby’s return was, I’m sorry if you disagree, nothing short of cheap.  The Bobby in this universe could’ve easily been brought back, after all, we never saw what the angels did to him.  It was never gone back to.  Just another plot hole in the massive slew that just keeps growing bigger.  I would’ve happier if the rumours/discussion of it being purgatory were true, I think it would’ve worked out so much better for them and still opened up cause for them to bring back characters.

Okay, now let’s go into the character deaths.  Supernatural has always been a show that is known for killing of characters, but the mains aren’t ones that stay dead.  Now, this season in general has been piss poor in the handling character deaths, I think the only one that was handled well was Ketch (although I have a theory that he’s not dead, despite not really liking his character).

I was furious over Rowena and Eileen’s deaths.

Something that Supernatural lacks is a regular, strong, female character.  Jody and Claire are awesome and could easily be used more, but they aren’t regular, and in fact, I was almost expecting them to die too the way the season was going.  But Rowena and Eileen...

Eileen was brilliant character when they first introduced her, she was a good balance for Sam and Dean and I was quite sad when they didn’t keep using her.  When she was brought in again, I was happy, but then, as most character this season, she was only, and I literally mean ONLY, brought in to kill her.  That’s not how you treat a character.  THAT’S NOT HOW YOU TREAT A CHARACTER.

Then, Rowena.  The perfect clash with Crowley, with a brilliant possible storyline.  To disrespect her the way they did, killing her off screen and to advance the shitty manbaby storyline, was just disgusting.  I completely agreed when Crowley stated that he thought he would be the one to kill her, as much as I believe he wouldn’t have done it, it would’ve been the only thing that felt possibly right.  But no, she’d ignored most of the season, and the writers couldn’t be fucked in trying to find a way of fitting her comfortably back in.

Okay, now, I know I’ve mentioned Crowley already, I’m still not done, but let me get to Castiel first.  Again, he was someone that was written so poorly this season, that I was getting frustrated.  Castiel, next to Crowley, is one of my favourite characters, but I was beginning to hate seeing him on screen.  I grew tired of seeing him like that.  Now, his death was expected, as was Crowley’s, but in all seriousness, why the hell would Castiel go back through the portal?  It didn’t achieve anything, it was a completely pointless venture that only served one purpose.

To overshadow Crowley’s death.

I honestly don’t think the writers/producers/directors/whoever understand how important a character Crowley was/is to the show, and to treat it so badly, instantly overshadowing his death with the death of one of the most loved characters show was just wrong.  Now, I was upset when Castiel died, I was, but it’s already been clearly said he’ll be back.  They’ve made the mistake of killing him off before and it killed ratings, so Castiel was never in danger of dying permanently.

But Crowley is a different story.

He’s been treated so badly this season that I pretty much knew it was coming.  I knew what the writers were leading up to and it just made me start to hate the show.  I know that, as a writer, you are expected to treat your characters cruelly at some point, it’s one of the many ways you can get character progression, but I know, that you never, never, treat them poorly to the point that you lose their characterisation and personality.  Crowley, at the end, became nothing.  He was purposefully abused by Lucifer, I mean, that dancing and face pulling was fucking ridiculous and uncalled for and the plot made no sense as to how that suddenly happened.  I mean, to have him working with the BMOL was bad enough, giving them a Hell Hound (I mean, seriously?) was awful, no matter what interest there was in England.  But then, for the rest of what happened...it all showed how little the creators think that Crowley means to the show.

Now, I’m still under the belief that Crowley isn’t dead.  A part from the lack of body at the end, there are other reasons I have for knowing that Crowley isn’t dead.  What gives me concern, are the posts from Mark Sheppard and further posts onwards.  By the sounds of it, he really is quitting the show the show this time round, and in all honesty, I wouldn’t blame him.  From what I’ve heard, it’s not just his character that they have been disrespecting, but him too, and no one deserves that treatment.  If it truly is over, then I wish him all the best, as does all his fans, because he really has brought something special to the show, something that will be irreplaceable.  It was a balance that the show needed and I honestly think that it will suffer greatly without him there, to the point that it will most likely kill it entirely.

For a show that has been running so long, I would expect better, but I think this season has proved that they are incapable of keeping it going.  They don’t care about the storyline, they have no idea where they are going with it, they don’t understand the characters and I honestly don’t think they really care about the fans.  It’s such a sad thing to see a show I’ve loved, that means so much to me, so much to a lot of us, go this way, but I’m not sure that there’s going to be a way out of it.

It’s something that is sadly wrong with the TV industry (I won’t go too much into it) but with writers, their roles aren’t set.  This means that multiple writers have control over a show’s story and it’s characters.  There may be a couple of key writers, but this does not change the fact that almost every episode, at varying points across a season, are written by different people.  It means that the creative control isn’t as strong as it should be.  As someone that is writing two of my own tv shows, I know how important this is, and it terrifies me that if they ever go into production, that I will lose that control and it will get out of hand in a way that’s irreparable.  In all honesty, I think that the only thing that will save Supernatural is a fresh look on it with a small team of writers.  It’s been made clear that the current ones can’t handle it.  Even as I say this, that I’m ready to stop watching the show because of everything that has happened and the direction it’s going, if I was offered to write on it, I would take it in a heart beat.  Not only because it’s my dream career, but because I love these characters and would do everything in my power to my make sure that they are treated accordingly, as I do with my own characters.

I’m still so sad and angry about all this, and I honestly don’t think it will go away anytime soon.  I could definitely go on more about Crowley, but I think the fandom is angry enough over that my point get’s across.  Sorry that this has been so long, and thank you if you read it all, but I just needed to say all this to get it off my chest, even if it doesn’t fix anything.

[distillerynetwork]

Why I Think Moonshine Stills Could Save the World.

by jonathan zajac August 09, 2016

The copper distillers my dad taught me to build could save the world. It is my opinion that every house in the world needs to own one of my units. The reason being that these units are a tool for survival. It would be a shame to be left unprepared. My copper stills are for more than just moonshine. The still could actually save your life. Imagine if a tanker truck crashed into your reservoir, unleashing 20,000 gallons of some shitty acid into your drinking water. Does this sound like something that would never happen? Well, it did a couple years ago in west Virginia so I’m not going to risk it. http://www.ecowatch.com/300-000-west-virginians-told-not-to-drink-water-after-coal-chemical-sp-1881848914.html Im not going to fool around when it comes to protecting myself and my friends and family. The still is worth its weight in gold, which at today’s market value is roughly $457,000. I would say that sounds about right.

I want to make a difference in this world, and I honestly think that if I offer the public our stills for cheap prices, enough people will start making their own gas which will reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Our prices may be cheap, but that is because we mass produce them all. These stills are in no way “cheap”. We use only the highest quality craftsman and the highest quality materials to ensure our customers are always satisfied.

Back in the day, almost every house had a copper distiller. People used them to make their own antiseptics to clean their own wounds. The rampant use of stills nationwide actually dramatically reduced the mortality rate due to the easy access of antiseptics to kill infections and diseases. You seriously can’t make this stuff up, in fact, George Washington had a still. Hell, he probably used hemp to make the damn mash!!! I’m telling you, the powers at be do not want everyone to own a moonshine still. The big corporations need us to be reliant upon them in more ways than we can even understand. I need everyone to understand that owning a moonshine still is like owning a tool. This is not the “bong” of alcohol. Well, I guess it kind of is. But, Moonshine IS Ethanol Gas. Ethanol Gas can heat your home, fuel your vehicle among other things…. Ethanol can also power a rocket.

The list goes on and on, we have sold these to 90-year-old grandmothers who want to use it to make their own marinades’. We have sold it to veterans who are bored and want a new hobby. We have sold these to 21-year-old college dorm room brewers. The market is massive, and we are ALL IN. I enjoy hearing from our customers and the excitement and journey they embark on while teaching them self the art of distillation. Mother nature is a beast isn’t she? Distillation is magnificent if you really think about it. You take a liquid, and put it over heat, heat it to the right temp and bam, you have separation. It really is a wonderful thing, it’s almost like ANYONE can do it.

We are so convinced that every house in the world needs one of these, that we mass produce around 250 every year before the winter in anticipation of strong demand. The Distillery Network Inc. has an authority in the business unlike any other company out there. WE are the ones building these things with our own hands in our own shop in America. Don’t be fooled by the imitators. We got so sick of seeing copycat designs that we went ahead and fully invested in a new design. We came out with the Flame-Flow ™ Patent Pending Copper Moonshine Still. The Flames actually go up and through the still. Now, no one will be able to copy us, and we will be the only place to get an original Flame-Flow™ Copper Distiller.

The Flame-Flow™ was built with efficiency in mind. We were able to reduce the initial heat up process by more than half! We were able to reduce scorching of the mash which gives you a smoother tasting liquor. We were also able to make it easier to control the temperature of the copper moonshine still. The Flame-Flow™ saves your time (see chart), and money by reducing your propane expenses. The Flame-Flow™ is being dubbed “The most innovative thing that has happened to distilling in 200 years” I don’t know if that’s true or not, I am just happy to be able to offer it to the world.

Now, imagine a world full of Flame-Flow™ Copper Moonshine Stills running day and night. Yes, it may be true that the world would be pretty buzzed constantly. But, collectively, we would be a very happy buzzed where we would all be free from paying for expensive bottles of liquor, expensive gallons of gas, expensive bottles of water, etc. Do you know how much perfume costs now-a-days? Well, a copper moonshine still can create essential oils and fragrances on the cheap. The capabilities are endless when owning a copper moonshine still from The Distillery Network Inc.

Popcorn Sutton Said “Jesus turned water into wine, so I turned it into liquor”. There is a reason it is possible for us to “make our own” stuff. We are a self-reliant species. There are seriously towns in our country where it is illegal to collect rain water. Owning a gun and owning a moonshine can hold the same value of measure in terms of protecting our freedom. It is just as important to protect our right to bear a moonshine still in our own home on our own property as it is to protect our right to bear arms and protect ourselves and loved ones. We are living in a time of red tape and regulations. The last thing we need is the man telling us that it is illegal for us to own a water purification device. We ALL NEED A COPPER DISTILLER, don’t wait too long. If you do, It could end up being too late.

Before the revenuers come for us all like they did during the whiskey rebellion many years ago, grab yourself a copper moonshine still built by the best. You will be glad you did, if you don’t, you will be stuck drinking the dirty city water in a FEMA camp this next natural disaster. Be prepared, make your own gas and save your life.

The Distillery Network Inc.

Jonathan Zajac

1-603-997-6786

[lizziecq-blog]

i won’t let you go

the other day saw the release of an album that has likely flown under the radar of most people i know, but to me represents the culmination of something ancient and ambiguous, whose precise contours will likely take much more time to sound*.

If We Ever Live Forever by Longwave

historically, longwave are one of the least-remembered members of the so-called “class of 2001,” which was one of those vanishingly rare moments in music history where a bunch of bands in NYC got popular at the same time and thereby, for a time, held the rudder of popular rock music. this was the same moment that introduced us to interpol, les savy fav, and even the national, alongside a swath of much less memorable swoosh-gaze fluff like the exit, i love you but i’ve chosen darkness, etc. within a couple of years this moment had expanded and germinated into the “post-punk revival,” which in true punk fashion was capitalized on most enduringly by the brits, and blessed us with bands like the futureheads and field music while cursing us with boneheaded dross like franz ferdinand.

of course we’re ignoring the biggest driver of this wave: the strokes. is this it dropped that year (on rough trade, of course), and apparently it was so good that brandon flowers felt forced to rewrite what was to become the killers’ hot fuss from scratch. nice work boys! “mr. brightside” is still pretty good!

coming to the point: while longwave technically can’t be grouped in with the class of ‘01 (their debut had dropped the year before, and their major label “breakthru,” such as it was, had to wait until 2003), they had enough sonically in common with interpol and their derivatives to earn a spot on the dais; and at any rate, they were such good bros with the strokes that the latter invited them to open their first UK tour, which is what finally convinced the majors to give longwave a shot.

this is about where i come in. having joined my first band around the time is this it had hit - i’ve got my story about the first time i heard it just like everyone else** - i absolutely devoured it, along with the rest of the family. even at age 11 i was jaded enough not to credit the whole “saviours of rock ‘n’ roll” thing the critics had been trying to pin on them (also on the hives, and the vines, and the white stripes, and... man, rock ‘n’ roll is really just a gasping beached fish we’ve been spritzing with water every now and again for the last 40 years or so, huh?), but still it was hard to resist the lure of a bunch of drug-addled sex robots chugging straight eights into fake subway tunnels painted onto brick walls - like everyone else, i wanted dry, lazy, mechanistic beats, and i wanted them now. incidentally, this being the heyday of MTV2, this was the last time i can remember purposefully turning on the tv in the hopes that i might stumble onto the strokes playing something or other.

well, almost. because it was one of those times, maybe a year later, that i saw for the only time an ad for an album called the strangest things by a different new york band called longwave. 

the ad must have only been about 15 seconds, and i remember little of what it contained other than it was probably a bare sample of some of the band’s trademark atmospherics underneath the band’s name being repeated a few times. i couldn’t tell you what made me interested in it based on that, other than i was hungry for identity and i had access to kazaa, so now that i had heard of it there was no good reason not to give it a try. 

so i got on kazaa and the first thing i found was this:

not that it’s too surprising considering i was 12, but i hadn’t even considered anything beyond power chords by that point (my family had recently driven all the way to new york to see a reformed television play; i slept thru it) - and this was an entire song that didn’t use chords at all - i suppose it sounds a bit dated now, but this was an entire song that depended on textural variation rather than harmonic motion to define its structure, and how the hell were they even making those sounds to begin with? 

i bought the album: the strangest things. i still remember feeling my bedroom rock and scatter my bones when the first track hit:

i researched them on the allmusic guide; mackenzie wilson described one song as “just as charming as ride’s ‘vapour trail’” - who were ride? pitchfork was less enthusiastic, lamenting that producer dave fridmann, with such distinguished credits to his name as the flaming lips and mercury rev, would stoop to making something so bland - but who were they? 

this last piece was key as a matter of fact. there was no one i could get to muster as much enthusiasm for this sound as i could. my older brother, my only musical collaborator at that time, was positively venomous toward them, as he was with basically everything i liked that i had found on my own. but for my part i was done with power chords - i wanted to play this new thing i had found called “shoegaze.” and if my brother wouldn’t do it with me, well, i had just borrowed a cheap 4-track and orphaned delay pedal from my dad - it was time to strike out on my own. i picked up the guitar, started writing my own songs, and named my band day sleeper, peevishly dodging REM comparisons for about the next ten years:

and so: longwave, for all their virtues and shortcomings, were officially My First Indie Rock Band. i’ve extemporized at length about what i love so much about them elsewhere, but to paraphrase a good friend of mine who may have been my only convert across all this time, it’s not easy to be this simple and still be true. 

the real story i wanted to tell, however, is this one:

i grew up in the boston area, and the first time i got the chance to see longwave play live was when they played at tt the bear’s in cambridge (now sadly defunct, but i have a whole other trove of stories about being nurtured by this sweet little club). i was 14, and couldn’t get into the club by myself; thankfully my stepmom was able to convince my dad to get off his ass and take me down there, and even more thankfully, tt’s knew us both well enough to let me in the club (with X’s on my hands, obviously) as long as i stuck by my dad and didn’t try any funny business at the bar. i didn’t, but with my age i made a pretty strong impression on a very friendly (and very drunk) couple standing up front with me - i’m not sure how, but i’m certain they spread some kind of aura of protection around me that night, even if they mostly just gave the band a hard time for not playing any of their older songs***.

the show was stellar - they even made fun of the aforementioned i love you but i’ve chosen darkness, whom i had missed anyway - and fucking loud. and since this was tt’s, after the set the band stepped off the stage to talk to the audience. and my drunken friends introduced me, perhaps more loudly than the bar staff would have liked, as a 14-year-old.

and i talked to steve, their singer, and the first thing he asked me was if i played music.

i got to tell him all about how i had found his band, how it had inspired me to make music on my own, and without irony, tell him i had named my band after one of his songs. he spoke to me as an equal, promised to listen to my music, and actually fucking followed up. on myspace, no less! he even remembered my name, and spelled it right in his message!

point being, a new longwave record in 2019, long after the band’s commercial fortunes rather whimperingly flared out - this is, in fact, their second reunion album - is a big deal, at least for me. its very existence has implications that reach thru my ambitions straight into my identity, all of my ideas about what makes music important outside of the shitty capitalist structures it’s forced to accommodate, and inside them for that matter. all of my ideas about how music should be appreciated that often seem so opposed to how it is. not to mention how i feel about the standard metrics for success in our world, and how ultimately cynical and meaningless they are. 

because now, nearly 20 years on, the wider world has largely forgotten longwave, and is unlikely to be dented by them anew in 2019. but i like to think they they and i have been sustaining ourselves all this time on that same little trickle of meaning their music brought into the world all that time ago, and beyond that, neither of us need a reason to keep going now. everywhere you turn there’s always something there - that’s enough for us.

*the first song on longwave’s last album secrets are sinister was called “sirens in the deep sea.” get it? heh

**it was the video for “last nite” on MTV2, obviously. but the thing i remember striking me the most about it was that it was clearly an unsimulated live performance - the drummer knocks over one of his mics near the end, and you can hear the difference. fuck good charlotte - this is punk rock.

***a few weeks before, the band’s rhythm section had abruptly quit on them with no explanation offered. they had some new guys with them who messed up a fair bit - but this actually thrilled me at the time, because i got to feel like i knew the songs better than anyone by being able to identify the mistakes.

[captain-spookycandycollecti-blog]

Buying my first car - which one should I choose?

"Buying my first car - which one should I choose?

Buying my first car - which one should I choose?

BEST ANSWER:  Try this site where you can compare quotes: : http://averageinsurancecost.xyz/index.html?src=tumblr 

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Buying my first car - which one should I choose?

Buying my first car - which one should I choose?

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i have just applied for my license and i am going to get a 50cc moped (WK Wasp 50). i was looking around for the price of full comprehensive insurance and the cheapest is around 650... is this cheap? please advise me on any cheap firms thanks!

Car accident with no insurance?

I was stopped at a red light behind two cars. Both cars started to go and so did I the next thing I knew I had hit the car in front of me. The car in front of me hit the car in front of him. We all pulled over my car isnt to bad but I drive a suburban, the car in front of me was a smaller car so his looked a little worse. Nobody was hurt, and all cars were drivable, so we decided to not call the police we just all exchanged information. After we had finished and they left I immediately called my insurance lady to let her know what happened. I am not super clear on this next part, we have been going back and forth with our insurance since that call and will continue to fight it. When I called the insurance lady she said I wasnt covered. She said that they had received the last payment much later than it was due (not sure how because it was mailed the same time as always) but because of that our insurance had been cancelled. A couple of weeks ago they had chased our check, she said we were reinstated as of yesterday (the day of the accident) but because it was the same day they werent liable to pay the damages. We are going to keep fighting them because I dont think its fair. Even if they decide that they wont pay we can afford to just pay for the damages to the rear end of the car in front of us, because know matter what happened I am at fault for following to close. We cant afford to pay out of our pocket also for his front end and the rear end of the first car. Shouldnt those damages be covered by the car I hit because he was obviously following to close to the car in front of him? Im a little freaked out with all this, this is the first accident I have ever been in and we have always had insurance, so we thought. The insurance company did say they mailed us a cancellation notice but if they did we have never received one.""

What are my rights? re: car insurance?

I'm a bit short of money at the moment, so on the 31st January i phoned my car insurance company and asked them to suspend my insurance. They told me the direct debit request for February had been sent on the 29th January, which they couldn't stop, and would be taken from my bank account on the 1st February and i would later bee refunded that amount. Today i received a letter in the post telling me they would hold the payment and use it when i continue the policy or use it towards a cancellation fee if I don't unsuspend the policy. The policy ends in June! The reason i cancelled is because im on benefits and just don't have the money to afford this right now. Anything i can do?""

Next step after finding out your being kicked from auto insurance?

My boyfriend was on his parents policy with Met life and has been in 2 MINOR accidents in the last year and they told his dad either my boyfriend goes or everyone under that policy goes and they didn't tell us until a few days ago. Here's the kicker, he will be off the policy the end of the week. Will this make it harder for us to get him insured? How can a car incarnate company do this? He can't work without driving there and he can't drive there without car insurance. I don't know what to do. I currently have State Farm with my parents, would they let us open our own thing together even though we are not even technically engaged yet?""

Classic Car Insurance for Young Drivers?

Always been a fan of Old Minis. Always been in the family. Uncle has had various Mini projects. I've read so many different things about classic car insurance. I'm 17 Years old, recently passed. I've heard that you get get classic car insurance at this age for close to and under 1000. I may not be driving until i turn 18. Won't be driving much. Odd weekend's and to Sixth form a few late days when i can't get a lift off my parent. My Sixth form has it's own car park and the car will be parked on the drive. Just wondering how true the claims are of the cars being cheaper to insure. If so which companies should i go about contacting, and is it best via website or phoning them. Also i would be looking at any Mini, would prefer a 1275 GT. However realise this would cost more. Not bothered about having a Mini 850 or a normal Mini 1000, as i know the Special Eds will cost more.""

Cheapest car insurance???

what is the best place to get the cheapest car insurance???

Am I paying too much for auto insurance?

Right now, I am using Amica, I am paying $265.30 a month for a 2010 toyotal carolla, I am a brand new driver (like as of yesterday) so I know these factors pay into my insurance rates. This is full coverage. This was the lowest I could find... Geico was at 712 per month! and an agent said the lowest was 344 that she found... I guess I am lucky that I found Amica at the rate I have but I just want to make sure...""

Is there such a thing as divorce insurance?

My parents are getting a divorce and, since it's California, the courts favor the female. Even though my mom and dad earn about the same money, my dad has to pay this huge amount to my mom for child support because she got more time with my younger brother. He's 12 and he told the mediator that he would rather live my dad full time, but the court gave my mom more time and made her the custodial parent. How old do you have to be to tell the court which parent you want to live with all the time? Also, just like there is medical insurance, has anyone ever heard of divorce insurance? It would kick in if you're ever stuck with child or spousal support. I haven't found anything on the internet yet.""

Why is my car insurance quote so high?

I have been to CompareTheMarket for a quote on car insurance, and the cheapest quote was around 5,000 for a car that costs 250. Why is my quote so high? I'm a first time driver living in an area with a fairly high crime rate. After changing the address to my girlfriends the quote came down to 2,000. This is still way too much considering the cost of the car! Is there any way to bring the insurance cost down? I wont be able to afford to drive at this rate.""

Car Insurance for Male Teen?

-I'm a 17 year old boy -My parents have nearly clean records. i don't think my dad's been in an accident for 10 years (knock on wood) -im probably gonna drive an acura integra g-sr 2 door coupe anywhere from 1995-2000 not sure what year yet. ab

Business insurance for cleaning business?

me and my friend want to start our own small cleaning business as a contractor and agencies who gonna get us work asking for insurance can anyone tell how much will it cost me and what do i need to get insured as we have general cleaning equipments, car and steam clean machine only. earning very less initially so cant afford much. please guide us. thanks""

Insurance rates????

my insurance is way too high...I have insurance with a nationwide company....and I have to have full coverage because I'm financing the vehicle. My question is..where can I go to find some cheaper insurance? I heard that smaller companies around where you live usually offer cheaper rates? Is this true?

About how much would my auto insurance be? (First-time driver)?

I'm budgeting getting a car and insurance and I don't know how much it would be. It will be my first time driving/having a car or license. So no record of anything, but I'd be a newbie. It'll be in the state of Pennsylvania and it will probably be a pre-owned small car.""

Buying my first car - which one should I choose?

Buying my first car - which one should I choose?

Can I drive someone else's car without insurance?

I am getting my license soon (if i pass the road test) can i drive someone else's car without having any insurance in Rhode Island ?

How to handle a partial month of health insurance?

I currently am paying for a family health insurance plan with Oxford. The premium is $800 a month, due on the first of the month for that month's coverage, with a grace period of about 30 days. I am switching from a contracting position (where I pay my own insurance) to an employment position (with a very nice health plan) on 9/7/10. What I want to avoid is paying $800 to my current insurance company when I only need 7 days worth of coverage. I also want to avoid a lapse in coverage. Do I not pay anything until the 7th, when my new insurance plan kicks in, and them call them and tell them I am cancelling and only want to pay from the 1st through 7th? Or do I pay the full $800 and hope I will get a pro-rated refund? Thanks in advance!""

Need help with car & insurance (Just starting out)?

So I am 18 and want to move out of my mother's house because of reasons I shouldn't mention. Not because I am some spoiled teen looking to do what ever I want. But are you willing to help me? My question is: How do I get my liecense with out limited insurance or a car? How do I get insurance without a liecense or a car? How do I get a car without a liecense or insurance? This is the vicous cicle D: How can a new adult jump out into the world when my mother isn't willing to help me? I have a stable income. I just need some advice.

Anyone in pennsylvania know of an affordable dental plan that covers everything?

Does anyone have good dental insurance for a fair monthly price? I need something that covers crowns root canals check ups fillings and xrays. I don't really know where to start. ...show more

Does anyone know an insurance company that offers cheap/free SR-22's for license ?

need it to keep my lic. valid. ASAP... help please!

I live in SC and I need to get my own Insurance Policy to buy a car. ( I'm 17) Can I get coverage alone?

My Parents don't want to add me to their insurance because we have several vehicles already and adding another car and a teenager will cause their insurance to be even more outrageous. Can I get my own insurance policy without effecting my parents at all? (With their permission of course.)

How much will insurance cost for a 16 year old on a Mustang GT?

I work and I wanted to know how much will it cost we are currently on progressive insurance.

Car insurance costs more than car!?

So i got a 2001 Acura EL premium with 148k a week ago and i was quoted for $387 a month/4644 a year for a car that i got for $4100. I live in Toronto and i know it costs more for insurance but its ridiculous when it costs more than actual worth of the car. Should i try sell the car or keep it as i need it for school and work?

Whats the cheepest car on insurance for a 17 year old and how much?

whats the cheepest car on insurance for a 17 year old and how much

""Rover car 1996 and 1989ford transit van, one insurance?""

how much for comprehensive 1years Insurance for 40year's no claims, now aged 66years old.""

Would my father's insurance go up if...?

If I were to buy a car under my name and insure it under my name, would my dad's insurance rates rise because I live at the same address?""

What is the CHEAPEST car insurance for a21 year old?

Im buy a car and i would like to no if anybody no what, would my insurances be""

Is Car Insurance quotes race-specific?

Where I live the 'minority races' and immigrants I asked how much car insurance they are paying because mine seemed steep were paying very little compared to me for the equivalent car - even though theyre new drivers. I have a clean licence since 1987. Are they less likely to have accidents? I dont believe this some of them only their God is keeping them from having accident. Or is to charge them too much being racist so we have to pay more insurance for them?

Will my first speeding ticket affect insurance?

I live in Ontario and received a speeding ticket for 95 km/h in a 80km/h zone, just over $50 and no loss of demerit points. It's my first speeding ticket, is this going to affect my insurance rates?""

Insurance when you first pass your test! WHO IS THE CHEAPEST?

I am looking to insure a citrone C2 1.1 and wonder who the cheapest place is? That question aside, Who is the cheapest to get insured with when you first pass your test? I am 18, Just passed. Steve""

Do group health insurance plans provide for covering costs of auto insurance?

Do group health insurance plans provide for covering costs of auto insurance?

What is the minimum required age to get an insurance liscense in California.?

To get a license to sell life insurance in the state of California.

What is a good looking and cheap running car for a 17 year old british man hoping to pass soon?

i would prefer a hatchback but dont actually mind lol...need it too look good, be cheap to run and cheap on insurance""

Around how much is it for insurance for a 16 yr old male in MO?

im 16 now and i was wondering what is a good estimate for how much insurance is for me and yes i know the car and provider affects the amount.

How much is insurance for an 18 year old?

Who lives in Kentucky and wants to find a car that's cheap but will get him around without breaking down. Know what I mean? He has $2,100 out of college money to help pay until January. Then he gets more o.o So what do you think? What should my friend do?""

Moped insurance UK for 16 yr old ?

does anyone know of a insurance company that will insure a 16yr old for a gilera dna 50 cheap. thanks

Cheap insurance for a sixteen year old girl on suzuki 124cc maurder?

living in limerick ireland

NEED cheap car insurance for 18 year old east london!?

Please please do not say your going to have to pay 4k+ or something stupid, All my mates found car insurances for under 3k!""

Car loans and insurance?

Okay, I recently took out a loan for a car, and I got liability only on the car. The bank just contacted me saying they need proof of insurance. When I take it in, and they realize that it is liability insurance only, what will they do? Because, I heard you need premium insurance when you buy a car with a loan. So am I gonna have to go premium or what will happen? I have a 1990 Nisasn 240sx. My bank is Great Plains Federal Credit Union. My insurance is American Family Insurance.""

What is the average monthly car insurance payment for a 29 yr old male in illinois?

Full auto coverage,and have only had one speeding ticket in my life.""

Buying my first car - which one should I choose?

Buying my first car - which one should I choose?

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