#anyway i heard the fallout show was not terrible

[ellipsea]

i put all this work into getting a little network attached storage synology and setting up a plex server with automatic media detection and a qbittorrent container with built-in VPN credentials (WHICH WAS VERY HARD) and then i'll see some media that just came out on some subscription streaming service that i don't have and go huh. wish i could watch that. oh well

[bridenore]

Author rec : Oflights

Oflights is one of my favorite authors. Here are a few recs, listed in alphabetical order.

all the western stars by @oflights [78k]

Draco is a Seer who has been struck with terrible, uncontrollable visions of the deaths of everyone around him, triggered by touch. He retreats to an Unplottable Black family cottage to research his condition and fix it. Things are going relatively well until Harry Potter shows up at the cottage with a furry condition of his own.

along each garden wall by @oflights [61k]

Draco has to have a baby (or have one on the way) at the time of his fast-approaching 35th birthday, or he's going to lose his home to his vile cousin. Harry offers to help, but their complex past—even beyond Hogwarts—prompts Draco to set out on a long journey of friendship, kittens, gardens, motorbike rides, and more.

Close Behind by @oflights [134k]

To rescue Draco from the Underworld, Harry has to look forward. Unfortunately, Draco has to look back.

Cool About It by @oflights [134k]

Harry is so excited for his first date with Draco. But what follows isn't so much a date as it is an all-night odyssey including a malevolent lift, a Gringotts heist, a Sleeping Curse, a trip to the kebab shop, a lack of dancing, a Muggle drug, a rooftop pool party, a black eye and, eventually, a sunrise over a Quidditch stadium.

find a new place to be from by @oflights [47k]

Something is wrong with Malfoy Manor, and it’s driven Draco into the Muggle world. Thankfully, Harry is now on the case. A story about houses that haunt you and homes built for two.

A Hundred Visions and Revisions by @oflights [11k]

Harry doesn’t really like remembering. As he’s grown older, he’s found that discovering or creating or even making things up are all much less painful than remembering.

if the bees know by @oflights [19k]

Scorpius’ playground is haunted, Harry specializes in helping ghosts pass on, and Draco just wants his son to be safe.

Make This Leap by @oflights [118k]

Harry owns a struggling restaurant which is running out of money, and his Head Chef has just handed in notice. He's at a bit of a loss as to what to do until Narcissa Malfoy presents an obvious solution: bring in Draco Malfoy as Chef and part owner. Harry does.

On Fingers Broken Long Ago by @oflights [85k+]

After a ten year absence, Harry returns to his old life in England to find Draco Malfoy at the center of it. A tale of rekindling old flames, unlikely inter-House alliances, angry Hufflepuffs, and medical mysteries ensues. Bound to Linger by @oflights [20k+] Sequel to On Fingers Broken Long Ago; Draco is campaigning for a board seat, Harry still hates Zacharias, and a dragon pox outbreak hits the second floor staff, so nobody has time for anything. Oh, and then there's maple syrup. Tunnel by @oflights [15k+] Sequel to On Fingers Broken Long Ago; see notes and warnings for more details. A history of loss makes Draco fear the future, even the golden one he sees with Harry.

The Star Splitter by @oflights [219k]

On a routine time travel assignment to the past, Draco stumbles upon 7-year-old Harry Potter and witnesses his neglect and mistreatment by the Dursleys. In the moment, there is only one solution, even if it goes against all his training as a Time Agent: he has to bring Harry back to the future with him. In which Draco burns his life down for the sake of his former school rival.

we have heard on high by @oflights [34k]

Reeling from the fallout of a bad breakup, Harry decides to find out who his soulmate is. The bad news: it’s Draco Malfoy. The good news: Malfoy doesn’t seem to know they’re soulmates. The worst news: Harry might be falling for him anyway.

I hope you enjoy these stories as much as I did!

[a-queer-seminarian]

kinda fascinating to be in a situation where I've had to call / online chat with insurance representatives during the whole UH CEO fallout. I have BCBS and maaaybe they're always this helpful but idk, they just seem so responsive and taking extra steps to help me out and it turns out the issue I'm having isn't even on their side, it's the dentist's! also their online chat is a real person??? I don't have to work around the AI before it finally transfers me??? Incredible

anyway turning this post into a psa to 1) ALWAYS check that your medical bills match what your insurance's Explanation of Benefits (EOB) reads (you do this by checking what amount your insurance says "patient owes" in the EOB and if your bill doesn't match that, your provider is overcharging you) and 2) DO NOT Get Your Dental Care At Great Expressions Holy Shit I'm Pissed

My wife and I went to the dentist in fall 2022 for the first time since the pandemic started, and the bills we both received were so high i've never gone again since then, because i don't wanna spend 500 bucks on a basic cleaning + X-rays. But my wife has continued to go twice a year cuz her teeth suck so the frequent check-up matters more for her.

And lordy, we've been naive lol. We've heard dental is expensive so we've just been resigned to the high costs; we also both have terrible executive functioning around all things financial and are woefully under-educated about how bills and insurance work — but the latest bill we got was just too damn much and I finally mustered up the spoons to figure shit out.

Aaaand it turns out that, while the dentist charged nearly one thousand dollars for her three fillings, the EOB shows we only owe $128. Buck. Wild.

So I've gone through every charge we've gotten over the years and they are all hundreds of dollars higher than the EOB. Great Expressions has been taking advantage of our ignorance and naivety to rob us for two fricking years.

If I understand what one insurance rep told me, since Great Expressions has a contract with BCBS they're supposed to charge us an in-network rate, which is far cheaper than out-of-network rates. Basically they send their proposed bill to our insurance, who send back a fraction of the money proposed as decided in the contract between them; insurance also tells the dentist the cost the dentist can then charge us.

But Great Expressions is pocketing the insurance money and then charging us the remainder of their original proposed cost instead of the contracted rate. So they're clearly aware that we are in-network, but still charging us like we're out-of-network. WTF

Anyway thank you BCBS reps who helped me figure all this out, incredible to actually have some non-AI customer service in this age lol. And everyone else please wish me luck as I make a chart of each dental bill we've gotten since 2022 versus what the EOB states — and then take it to the dental clinic in person because they are Not Helpful over the phone lemme tell you

The plan is to try to talk it out with them myself, and if I can't get them to listen to me I'm going to call an BCBS insurance rep while in the clinic with them so they can talk it over lmao. And if that doesn't get me the past years' charges back...idk if i can consult a lawyer or whatever but I'm gonna get this damn money back.

also we're going to get a new damn dentist. obviously

[beautifulpersonpeach]

What are your thoughts on hyuna seemingly announcing a relationship with someone connected with the burning sun scandal? My understanding is that, though he wasn't convicted of the worst crimes involved in burning sun, he admitted to watching some of the videos sent to him and would comment on them, but I also heard that he still performs around Korea sometimes. This is just bizarre to see from hyuna imo. (Apparently he also used to date goo hara, who was one of hyuna's friends. This isn't as yucky to me as it seems to be to some people, because I think mutual grief can be a uniting thing, and it's not unheard of for relationships to come from it even if it seems disrespectful from an outsider's perspective.)

***

When I first saw her post I had no real thoughts about it - while dating someone even tangentially involved in that nonsense is distasteful, her dating life is her business and I know neither Junhyung nor Hyuna personally - but I knew this news would inevitably lead to the next juicy bit for kpop stans to sensationalize and blow up into a scandal. There’s nothing k-pop stans love more than cancelling an idol or group. It’s a like a group project where everyone can get easy bonus participation marks on.

And sure enough, the minute someone posted her Instagram update on Twitter, it led to hundreds of thousands of tweets, blog posts, discussion topics on all platforms about how Hyuna manipulated her ‘fanbase of feminists’ and lovebombed Dawn into sabotaging his career; cynical declarations about how k-pop idols are most likely bad people (all that fame and fortune corrupts their morality) and it’s only a matter of time before they show their true colours; and Junghyun, for all his faults, has gone from someone who watched a molka video sent to him, to a rape apologist, a rapist, a convicted sex offender, a predator and so on.

It’s fine if people are disappointed she’s dating a creep, the problem is k-pop stans never really leave it at that. In HyunA’s case I’d noticed many of her stans have been upset with her for the last couple of years now, wondering the direction she’s taking post-P Nation and being mostly disappointed in her artistic output recently. And you can see it in the lacklustre response her music has gotten increasingly since then. Any sympathy she had from most of her fans evaporated when she and Dawn broke up. This business with Junhyung seems to me to be the final nail in the coffin, and a pretty good reason for people who were already falling out of love with her to finally write her off.

In reality, people do grow and it’s possible Junhyung learned something from that scandal and now is a better man. It’s possible their shared grief and history with GH bonded them over the years. It’s possible HyunA’s in a terrible place mentally right now and he’s providing healthy or unhealthy support. And it’s possible HyunA is simply a bad person who isn’t a ‘girl’s girl’, and has no qualms dating someone who still has predatory views about women. The beauty of k-pop stan logic is that it’s only the last possibility that’s assumed to be true. Coincidentally that’s also the only possibility that justifies the kind of reactions k-pop stans are prone to dishing out anyway.

A thought experiment I played with a few friends, was what the fallout would be if she announced she was dating Zico instead. Zico apparently didn’t watch any molka videos because there was no evidence he was sent any, but he knew Joonyoung and admitted to knowing about the ‘golden phone’ at the heart of the Burning Sun scandal. I wonder what the takes would be then if she made a dating announcement with Zico… but a part of me kinda already knows.

Anyway, a few of HyunA’s fansites have closed and some people on the k-side are just as upset as those on the I-side. Most other people on the k-side don’t care though. In fact, the understanding is that after Dawn and now Junhyung, it’s likely she dumps him within the year and moves on to someone else before long. Because rather than HyunA’s brand being ‘feminism’ as is wrongly assumed on the I-side, all she’s ever been consistent about is doing what she wants.

And I don’t think that’s going to change. All this backlash and outrage notwithstanding.

[breakerwhiskey]

008 - EIGHT

Please visit breakerwhiskey.com for more information or to send a message to Whiskey's radio. Breaker Whiskey is an Atypical Artists production created by Lauren Shippen. If you'd like to support the show, please visit patreon.com/breakerwhiskey.

Transcript under the cut. For more episodes, click here.

[click]

I spent last night looking at the map of West Virginia and trying to remember where exactly that doomsday cult was supposed to be. There’s three towns that sounded sort of familiar for some reason, so that’s what I’m doing today. I got up early and I’m gonna drive to each of these towns and see what’s what.

[click]

If there are other people out there, I bet a lot of these kinds of groups have sprung up. The one Harry had heard about was panicked about nuclear war—but who isn’t, right?

[click]

It used to scare me, the idea that just a handful of people in the world could wake up one day and decide to end the world. All it would take is for one country to decide to drop a bomb and then it’d all be over. It never seemed that far-fetched either—America already did it.

[click]

When we first realized that something was different—that something had gone wrong…we’d been hiding out in this little abandoned cabin deep in the Pennsylvania wilderness. And I couldn’t hunt for shit and Harry certainly didn’t come with survival skills, so things were starting to look a little bleak. We weren’t strangers to planning outings that require a certain amount of stealth, so it was decided—we’d make our way closer to a town and scope it out for supplies. But when we got there, there was no one. It was a ghost town. We figured maybe it was an old coal town or something that had gotten abandoned when a mine closed—you see some of those types of towns out West, but we didn’t see any reason that it couldn’t happen in Pennsylvania too. So we kept going. And it was the same thing in the next three towns.

[click]

Of course we thought that nuclear war had broken out. What else could we have thought? Everyone disappears overnight, leaving their cars parked on the street, leaving the lights on—some of them, anyway. The breakout of nuclear war didn’t explain everything, but it seemed like the only possible explanation.

[click]

Except…wouldn’t we have died long ago? Wouldn’t we have gotten sick? In my driving these last two weeks, I haven’t seen any evidence of a bombing or nuclear fallout.

So who was responsible then? Who made all the people disappear? Was it like it is with nuclear war—were there only a select few who had the terrible power to make that happen?

[click]

And if that’s the case, what the hell kind of button did they push?

[click]

[talesfromasnarkylisa]

Lacey: Chapter 23

Three minutes. That was all it took for Lacey to be the most vulnerable I had seen her before.

Lacey Hannah (08/28/23, 9:10 PM): Alright then. I’ve never been great at the art of socialization. I stutter in front of strangers, often have trouble understanding sarcasm, and I can’t make eye contact with randos or even friends sometimes to save my goddamn life. My aunt and uncle weren’t terrible. But they were too hands-off to directly teach those things to me, so I got shipped off to some behavioral correction shit every weekend until I was 12. I was thrown in with a bunch of boys with rather…interesting personalities, to say the least. 

Archer J (08/28/23, 9:12 PM): Were there any girls?

Lacey Hannah (08/28/23, 9:13 PM): No. The gender ratio was the least of our issues, anyways. It was the counselors that treated us like cheap modelling clay. Moldable, breakable, and brittle when abandoned. 

Archer J (08/28/23, 9:14 PM): Dang.

Lacey Hannah (08/28/23, 9:16 PM): I met a guy back when I was at the facility. I’ll call him Z. I think he had a crush on me - though I didn’t reciprocate. Honestly, he was probably the only person that gave a fuck about me there. One day, I was getting picked up from the place by my dad. I had been holding my urge to go to the washroom for several hours because the counselors gave us absolutely zero bathroom breaks during our sessions until pick-up time. I wasn't able to resist anymore, so I ran off to the washroom hallways. An isolated zone, it was the only place which wasn’t guarded by security cameras. On the way there, I bumped into Z. I guess he couldn’t hold either. We said hi to each other before he started to leave. Another guy from my session (T) saw us together. As I was about to go into the girls bathroom…T shoved me into the door. He pulled me back, I got thrown against the wall, and both my mouth and nose were suffocated the very next moment. I was barely able to hit the record button on my birthday camcorder before my hands were shoved back. Archer J (08/28/23, 9:19 PM): Were you…?

Lacey Hannah (08/28/23, 9:20 PM): If you were going to say “raped,” no. I was just badly bruised and knocked out for a couple weeks. But the fallout was what really got me. While T assaulted me, Z heard the noise in the background. He ran back and saw me tied up right there. He managed to punch the guy out of hitting me. I submitted the online incident report form. When we came back the next day, I showed the investigations team the footage I captured. They believed me…but they didn’t do a thing about it for the most stupid reason I’ve ever heard.

Archer J (08/28/23, 9:21 PM): What was it?

Lacey Hannah (08/28/23, 9:23 PM): He was dyslexic. And because he was rejected from every other facility his wealthy parents registered him into, they didn’t want to be sued for discrimination. Z was expelled permanently - with him punching T being thrown onto a newly created criminal record. I never saw Z again. 

Lacey Hannah (08/28/23, 9:24 PM) To this day, I wonder if I should have just gone to the washroom before I went to the sessions. Sure, I felt nothing then. But maybe none of this would have happened.

It was at this point where I honestly started to question my plans to ruin Lacey’s online dreams. It wasn’t just because I ran a risk of getting caught if I fucked it up. That was always in the back of my mind since day 1. 

Rather, a different feeling arose within me. Not necessarily the pang of guilt I felt for alienating my closest friends all those months ago or the rush of remorse which dawned on me once Betty cut me off. But for the first time, I saw her as more than just a random thorn on the side I wanted to prune.

It’s not like I wanted her around my circles. Yet…I didn’t want her to fail everywhere like I did before.

What if I could just take her out of the publications I wanted and maybe use her as anonymous inspiration for a book instead of going scorched earth?

September 1, 2023

Friday night meant that my workload for both university and Music Refined was a bit lighter. This was great, since it meant I could go out with Darian in the evening. 

Darian and I decided on going to the movie theater. We went to see a Guardians Of The Galaxy movie out of morbid curiosity. Neither of us have been particularly into Marvel. Tickets were on sale, which was great.

We were waiting in line for some popcorn when my phone buzzed in my pocket.

“Can you hold my spot for a little bit?” I asked Darian. “I need to take a phone call.”

“Sure!” Darian responded. “But be quick. We’re almost at the front of the line.”

I went off to an isolated corner to check the caller ID. It was none other than Inez. 

Thank God Darian isn’t seeing this, I thought to myself.

I accepted the call.

“Hello, James!” Inez greeted me.

“Hi,” I greeted her back.

“Can we do a video call?” Inez wondered.

I spent a brief moment wondering about this. On one hand, I was hanging out with her ex who got infatuated with me at one point in a movie theater. On the other hand, I already told her I’m straight and there was a good chance Darian never told her about his past feelings. Besides, this outing seemed like a fun thing to show her.

I turned on the video camera and shifted it to the barely visible game zone just outside of it. I then told her I was in an arcade - which was technically true, but I left out the important detail of this being an outing between my best friend and I.

Much to my relief, Inez fell for the ruse.

“That seems fun!” she noted. “What’s your favorite game there?”

Fuck, I internally panicked, I’ve barely seen this place.

I tried my damndest to remember exactly which games were in this arcade. It had been years since I had last been in it, and I knew for sure the lineup had changed a little. Ultimately, I came up with the most cliché of arcade games: Pac-Man.

All of a sudden, I got a ping.

Darian Stewart (Fri, Sep 1, 7:45 PM): You coming? I just got our popcorn, the movie's gonna start soon!

I instantly realized I had to go.

“Sorry,” I apologized to Inez, “but I really need to beat this lineup. Gotta go now.”

“That’s alright!” Inez exclaimed. “See ya!”

“Bye,” I ended the call.

(Wattpad version: https://www.wattpad.com/1514924307-lacey-chapter-23)

[codychristiantreasures]

little funny coming in here after the recent horny posts (real. and must i say that one picture with the emojis was HILARIOUS) but anyways

seafood and pasta fuck YESSS im sorry cody but between u and seafood pasta?? the door is right there. fucking love shrimp, scallops, and salmon especially dude. i'm SUCH a slut for some fancy seafood pasta any day.

mmm i'm getting back into reading after a year or two in a slump and it's literally just history books rn. other than that the only thing i got for u in terms of recs is lord of the rings lmao.

as for shows!! all of those r so real. fallout and arcane r both rlly good imo! two most recent ive watched that aren't on your list. the cinematics and storylines in both are something to behold imo. i've also heard yellowjackets is pretty good but i have yet to watch that one. third season apparently coming out on valentine's day tho! (shame i have an exam that very day 😔)

are the shows cody is in besides teen wolf any good?? i'm terrible at watching shows (haven't even finished teen wolf yet despite it being one of favs) so arcane and fallout were an atypical binge for me ngl. but ive been thinking about watching all american (and maybe even pretty little liars depending on how much of him is in there. also how old he was lmfao)

drinking tea rn but do you have any drinks u rlly like?? i'm a tea guy personally (...is this what getting to know people on dating apps is like?? wouldn't know, i'm aro lmao) i'm on like. my third cup today. irish tea, then some passion fruit tea? just. plain black tea rn idk. the label just said black tea. thinking about either raspberry or lavender chamomile next but idk. depends on if i want caffeine or not i suppose. but i digress

anyways i'm enjoying this little parasocial relationship that's bloomed. is this when i say i love you?

YESS! Seafood lovers! My quick and lazy dinner dish is a really good shrimp and scallop linguine. I’m not sure I love it more than Cody but it’s definitely up there.

I have to give fallout a watch. I have heard good things about it so I need to commit to it 🤣

I am a biiiig black tea drinker. I’ll have multiple a day. I have been making espresso in the mornings again too which I have been enjoying. Tea is my love though. I’ll drink any black tea. A herbal tea as your next cup is probably better than having another black tea but who am I to say, i’m just as bad 😂

Do I get to say I love you too?…