#anyway this is why a lot of people roll their eyes at modern activists

[lacewise]

Look… if you’re going to be dedicated to activism that comes with dedicating yourself to educating yourself and your community… which Malcolm X pretty infamously found out (and fulfilling that part of the job may have been the cause of his assassination)

If you can’t take that seriously, people aren’t going to take your activism seriously. And maybe activism isn’t for you! And that’s okay!

[sciralta]

Rising Tides: (Probably) A Surface Level Understanding

I was gonna start this off by saying considering it’s only the first few chapters, I’m going to give Pixelberry the benefit of doubt when it comes to speculation on what this book’s going to be like. Having said that, knowing that apparently one of the MTFL writers was a part of this and the fact that this is Pixelberry, I am absolutely not going to give them that benefit.

I have the sneaking suspicion that Rising Tides is going to do that thing that companies love where you continually act like it’s the average joe’s fault for climate change because he drives to work, instead of addressing the global pressure made by the fossil fuels industry to have total reliance on them. Or like how a lot of politicians like Australia’s PM, Scott Morrison, pretty much refuses to invest in renewable energy because he’s basically bought and paid for by fossil fuels and acknowledging that his party’s donors are killing our planet might make their dying businesses sad :(. Remember, it’s those least responsible for climate change that are the most affected by it.

Pictured above; Australia’s coal-fondler-in-chief

But that’s just me ranting about my dipshit Prime Minister; let’s talk about writing!

So Rising Tides was part of a game jam and was written in like, a month, and baby does it show! This is the most clunky, forced writing I have ever seen in a Choices story—and fucken hell is that an achievement. Generally in other stories from PB if the story is bad the actual writing is more or less ‘fine’. Such is not the case with RT. This story reads less like a smooth ski down a snowy mountain and more like you fell off the top of that mountain and crashed against every boulder on the whole way down. We are immediately faced with this:

...which feels less like an organic thing a character would say and more like the writers spent 10 minutes googling vehicle emission data and were damn sure they were gonna make you know that they did. If you follow the advice of this post, you will actually die of liver failure. Happy drinking.

Our inciting incident is an ecological disaster—a mass die-off of marine life in the waters surrounding the town. Mass fish die-offs are usually caused by oxygen depletion in the water. The hypoxic event can be caused by things like drought, algal blooms, high temperatures and thermal pollution. We haven’t heard anything about drought or high temperatures, and it doesn’t appear to be an algal bloom; so everyone should immediately start looking at any factories in the area. Oh, what do you know! We’ve got a national corporation that started right here in the town by the name of Monteverde! Their CEO or whatever talks at the meeting a lot about how resilient the town is, and how proud his company would be to help the people through this disaster. Forget the die-off, Monteverde is officially the fishiest thing in this town!

Just before the town meeting, we are introduced to the caricature of villainy that is Principal Strickler—a name which demonstrates about as much nuance as you can expect from Pixelberry at this point, and probably the rest of this book. You see, he hates us because.... reasons? idk Pixelberry just needed an antagonistic force in the story just go with it. It honestly feels like a lot of the dialogue so far in this book was put in as a placeholder and the writers said “we’ll clean it up once we start editing, just move on!” and they just... never did.

We also meet Mel, a character who seems to be taking on the role of that one delicious daddy from Big Sky Country of being way too into conspiracy theories. Don’t touch her zucchinis. We’ve seen her sprite many a time before this series, but I still maintain that her sprite needs more chunky jewellery like in that one Adam Ellis comic.

In other news:

Both of our parents are alive and we’re not adopted, which is a shock because it is as dangerous to be a birth parent to a Choices MC as it is to be a birth parent to a D&D player character.

Hot Person #1 comes to our rescue from Strickler, because we really need to prove just how great of a person they are.

Town hall happens and no one will listen to our sister.

We have a best friend! Unfortunately they work for Monteverde; so unless they’re cool with exposing company crimes, they’re probably not gonna be our friend for much longer.

The clean up is pretty shoddily organised, and it’s clear that Monteverde is really in it for publicity (wow never saw that coming)

We almost drown but then we’re saved by Hot Person #2; and that’s pretty much anything of note.

To PB’s credit, the book does appear to look at the way young activists are totally disregarded by adults, but the writing is just so yikes that you can’t help but roll your eyes. They seem to maybe be featuring the climate grief that is rapidly growing amongst younger people, but we’ll have to wait and see if Pixelberry will actually explicitly show this.

Anyway, my guess is we’ll probably later find out that the ecological disaster in RT was caused directly by Monteverde—to the shock of absolutely no one—and that’s why they’re doing the whole publicity run with the fish clean up. If you spent a shit ton of diamonds there’ll probably be an opportunity to make the company see justice, but if you didn’t? Tough luck sweatie, because even in a scenario that could literally be about corporate greed PB would never drop their pay-to-win attitude.

So there’s my thoughts, thots. Look, I wasn’t expecting this to be a modern classic, but come on bro, was there even a first draft when you wrote the book? Very interested to see if the writers of Rising Tides will show a deeper understanding of the cause and effects behind climate change and the ecological impacts of human activity, or if it’s all surface-level.

(I wouldn’t hold my breath.)

[cyabae]

Bedtime Stories Against the World - Day 8

Day 8: Time travel | Fate

Words: 1023

Haha, this series features so much modern AU but after yesterday’s angst some fluff felt like a good choice. This is my 8th story for @kakaobiweek2019

>> AO3! <<

Kakashi had never romantic enough to believe in fate. Sure, every action had an outcome corresponding to it which was a fairly simple phenomenon. One thing led to another, and there was nothing too mysterious about it.

However, Obito seemed to challenge some of the beliefs Kakashi had taken for granted.

Their relationship was based on many little coincidences. The chances of them two meeting had been practically zero since Kakashi was a mere teacher whilst Obito was…

Well, he didn’t talk much about his profession. He didn’t have a specific job, he did projects. 

There was a low budget theater production which kept him busy along with several protests against Konoha’s human rights violations.

Kakashi wasn’t too fond of them either but his spirit was a homebody instead of an activist which was why he never intended to get involved with rebellious freaks. He had just heard that one of his students had some relatives working with a water puppetry show.

The school didn’t provide too much money for field trips but Kakashi had promised his class that a field trip was going to happen.

After all, none of the students had failed the previous course. Desperate times called for desperate measures – and relative discounts.

This is where life had gotten weird.

Kakashi had ignored all the warning signs from the shady, abandoned cinema to the posters on the hallway. He’d also tried to ignore the fact that one of his students was behaving worse than ever.

But thinking back, some kids weren’t able to stay still for longer than a few minutes.

During the first half of the performance, two things had become apparent.

It’d taken six lines to figure out that Akatsuki Free Productions was very, very biased against the Konoha government and that their show wasn’t suitable for the state school students.

Kakashi had been thinking about the explanation to cover for his mistake when the second problem had emerged. One of his students – the trouble making one – had gone missing in the blink of an eye.

A sense of dread had filled Kakashi when he’d realized that the theater production could hold him accountable for possible damages.

The theater production had seemed pretty shady, and Kakashi hadn’t planned to deal with any suspicious people.  

That’s why Kakashi had stood up and walked past the seats, ignoring the confused looks of his well-behaved students.

Once he’d searched the empty hallways, he’d seen a flash of an orange coat without being able to catch the troublemaker.

He’d ended up searching the backstage. He could’ve sworn that he saw the familiar orange flash right before bumping into someone.

And that’s how Kakashi met Obito. Needless to say, this encounter hadn’t gone particularly well.

Actually, they’d cussed at each other for a solid minute before Obito had asked what was a visitor doing in the area anyway. After Kakashi had gathered up what had been left of his pride, he’d told the reason and gained a very sour look.

He’d found the missing lamb eventually, though. The boy had been trying on some weird masks in the bathroom.

What had been the boy’s reasoning for this? Kakashi couldn’t tell.

He’d congratulated himself for preventing the worst disaster and encouraged his student to leave the stolen masks there.

Life had a weird sense of humor.

Late at that night, Kakashi had noticed that his keys were missing. He’d been ready to head home after going through a big pile of essays.

The keys weren’t found in the school building.

Kakashi had realized that keys did fall out of people’s pockets when they bumped into grumpy assholes.

Akatsuki Free Production wasn’t exactly a legal organization.

They didn’t share their contact information.

Kakashi’s only choice had been to go back to the theater building, hoping for the best.

Coincidentally, Obito had heard Kakashi’s frustrated knocks on the front door. He claimed that he’d had some sort of brain malfunction which was the only reason why he had opened the door.

Obito didn’t seem to regret this decision. He’d actually helped Kakashi with the searching – to get rid of him faster, of course – and they’d exchanged a few words during the process.

The keys had been found but after the incident, they’d kept pumping into each other everywhere, often times very literally.

The amount of those regularly irregular occurrences had gotten frustrating.

Looking back, it seemed that the universe wanted them to tolerate one another.

Kakashi had decided to prove himself that there was no such thing as fate. Asking Obito out for a drink had seemed like a perfect plan.

That had happened during the previous full moon but the moon had come and gone, and now it was waxing.

And the date night went on.

Technically they’d left Kakashi’s house many times by now but Obito never went back to his place. They didn’t count the time when Obito had fetched some basic items and extra clothes.

Kakashi turned the shower off. He stepped out, grabbed a towel and wrapped it around his waist.

Obito had just brushed his teeth. He looked absolutely gorgeous standing in front of the mirror, wearing nothing but a black pair of boxers. Kakashi pressed a tiny kiss on the nape of his neck as he circled his arms around the man.

“We could have another round?” Kakashi mumbled against Obito’s shoulder, leaving a trail of kisses there.

“You’re such a pervert,” Obito informed but a tiny moan escaped his lips as Kakashi gave his round ass a gentle, grateful rub. It’d been through a lot.

“Is that a problem?” Kakashi asked with the most angelic tone he could muster. He was pretty happy with it even though he could see through the mirror that Obito was rolling his eyes.

Obito muttered something about Kakashi being all of his problems before turning around and pulling Kakashi into a long, passionate kiss. Maybe it was true, maybe they were each other’s worst problems and now life wanted them to solve one another.

If this was the case, Kakashi was more than happy to be romantic enough to believe in fate.

[kjack89]

The Way I Am, Pt. 3/4

I’ve gotten it back to four parts. Literally no one will be excited about this but me, but there we are. Preemptive apology if there are more typos than usual in here -- my computer was being super glichy while I was writing this.

Penelope AU, ExR modern AU with some magic mixed in.

Read part 1 here and part 2 here.

Musichetta leaned against the bar, smiling at Grantaire with something close to sympathy in her eyes. “How are you doing this morning, champ?” she asked.

Grantaire squinted up at her, his eyes ringed with exhaustion and heartbreak. “I thought you went home,” he managed, propping his chin up with his hand.

“I did,” Musichetta said, raising an eyebrow at him. “I slept for eight blissful hours, fixed breakfast for Bossuet and Joly and kissed them both goodbye.” She nodded at the half-full pint of beer in front of Grantaire. “You need a refill?”

Grantaire shook his head slowly, trying desperately to think of where the last eight and then some hours had gone. The only thing he had to show for it was a half-doodled sketch of a handsome blond man on the napkin next to his beer -- half-finished, because he hadn’t drawn a nose. “I don’t know,” he muttered. “I think I should go home.”

At the other end of the bar, an older gentleman chortled. “He’s still got beer,” he said dismissively. “He’s not going anywhere.”

All Musichetta had to do was narrow her eyes at the gentleman for him to fall silent and turn away. She looked back at Grantaire. “So what’ll it be?” she asked. “More beer, or are you going home?”

Wordlessly, Grantaire picked up his beer, drained it, and stood, shrugging into his coat as he left the Musain, his mind far from the bar and in a mansion across town. He’d love to say it was some kind of moment of clarity, of realization that he couldn’t keep wasting his life like this. It wasn’t.

But it might just be the start of something.

Enjolras pulled the red scarf he had found in his dad’s coat pocket tighter around his nose and mouth and looked both ways before darting across the street toward the bar whose neon lights proclaimed the Café Musain. He cautiously opened the door and looked inside. The dark-haired bartender looked over at him, pausing from where she was wiping off the counter. “Well, come in, love, we don’t bite.”

“Not unless you want us to, anyway,” a curly-haired man sitting at the bar called, winking at Enjolras in a way that he assumed was meant to be sexual but was more funny than anything.

The man sitting next to him sighed and adjusted his glasses. “Christ, Courfeyrac, don’t scare the poor guy. Not everyone finds your humor as compelling as you think they do.”

The curly-haired man, Courfeyrac, waved a dismissive hand and patted the bar stool on the other side of him, beaming at Enjolras. “Well in that case, come sit by me and I’ll buy you a drink to make up for my inappropriate sexual advances.”

Almost against his better judgment, Enjolras crossed the bar and sat down next to Courfeyrac, who offered him a hand to shake. “I’m Courfeyrac and this is Combeferre,” he said, gesturing to the bespectacled man next to him. “What are you drinking?”

“Um, can I get a beer on tap?” Enjolras asked, a little hesitantly.

“Sweetheart, you can have anything you want,” Courfeyrac said, fluttering his eyelashes at him and gesturing at the bartender.

Combeferre rolled his eyes. “For Christ’s sake. One of these days, someone’s going to haul off and deck you one, and I won’t do anything but laugh.”

The bartender set a beer down in front of Enjolras. “Ignore them,” she told Enjolras with a winning smile. “They’re always like this, at least, they are when they’re not busy trying to overthrow the government. Can I get you anything else?”

“Um, yeah,” Enjolras said, glancing down at the beer. “Can I get a straw?”

For a moment, the bartender looked taken aback, but then she grabbed a straw off the counter and popped it into the beer. “There you are. If you need anything else, just holler. My name’s Musichetta.”

She sauntered off to take care of another customer and Enjolras turned to Courfeyrac and raised his beer in a toast. “Thanks,” he said, before slipping the straw under his scarf and taking a sip.

“So, are you hiding from the law or just hiding a bad nose job?” Courfeyrac asked, propping his chin on his hand as he smiled winningly at Grantaire.

Combeferre elbowed him in the ribs. “You can’t just ask someone if they’ve had a nose job,” he hissed.

Courfeyrac scowled at him. “I thought I wasn’t supposed to ask someone why they were white!” he protested. “No one ever mentioned anything about nose jobs.”

Enjolras snorted. “It’s fine,” he reassured Combeferre. “And yeah, I suppose you could say it’s a bad nose job, for lack of anything better to call it.” He took another sip of beer. “So what did Musichetta mean, when you’re not busy trying to overthrow the government?”

Combeferre and Courfeyrac exchanged glances. “We’re what you might call, disturbers of the peace,” Courfeyrac said glibly, raising his martini in a salute.

“No justice, no peace,” Combeferre muttered darkly. “We started a political activist organization when we were in university, and we’ve been trying to grow it ever since. We led the hunger march last year in the park--”

“--And the sit-in in the mayor’s office,” Courfeyrac added helpfully.

“Right, and now we’re trying to organize some kind of rally or protest or something in regards to the latest police murders,” Combeferre said. “City Hall thinks they can cover it up, but we won’t let them. We’re just...not sure how best to address it.”

He shrugged and took a sip of wine, while Enjolras leaned forward, his eyes alight with a fervor he hadn’t felt in years. “It’s fucking bullshit,” he said passionately. “And I don’t see why you can’t just take to the streets and tell it like it is -- fuck the pigs!”

Courfeyrac grinned slowly. “I knew I was going to like you.” He raised his glass for a toast. “Fuck the pigs!”

“Fuck the pigs!” Enjolras and Combeferre said in unison, clinking their glasses against Courfeyrac’s.

Courfeyrac drained his martini and beamed at Enjolras. “Of course, when you’re marching with us, shouting, ‘fuck the pigs’, people will understand you a lot better without this scarf muffling everything you say.”

Before Enjolras could even figure out what he was doing, Courfeyrac leaned forward and tugged the scarf away from Enjolras’s face, his hand falling away when he saw what was underneath. “Oh, shit,” he said, eyes wide. “That is a bad nose job.”

Enjolras flushed and quickly pulled the scarf up, but the damage was already done. Both Combeferre and Courfeyrac were staring at him, and Enjolras looked away, mentally bracing for them to run away like the rest of everyone who had seen him. Instead, Combeferre just raised his eyebrows and took another sip of wine. “Well, that face plus the message ‘fuck the pigs’ is pretty much guaranteed to get out picture in the paper.”

Enjolras chanced a look up at them. “And that’s a...a good thing?” he asked hesitantly.

Courfeyrac grinned at him. “It’d be more publicity than we’ve gotten in the past four years.” Slowly, he reached out again for Enjolras’s scarf, this time pausing until Enjolras nodded his permission slowly. “See, that’s better,” he said, pulling the scarf away once more. “And this way, you can drink your beer without a straw, because we have a friend who would absolutely kill you if he saw you drinking beer with a straw.”

Enjolras smiled slightly. “So...fuck the pigs?”

Combeferre and Courfeyrac both smiled in return. “Fuck the pigs.”

“Your paper, madame,” the butler said, offering Enjolras’s mother the newspaper folded on a silver platter.

“Thank you, Porter,” she said, grabbing the paper and unfolding it. Her eyes widened as she gaped at the headline which read, ‘Pig Protests Pigs’, splashed above a huge picture of Enjolras, snout shown for all to see, shouting in the face of a horrified policeman.

She promptly fainted, the newspaper fluttering to the ground next to her.

Across town, Grantaire stared down at the newspaper, his mouth hanging slightly open in shock before slowly curving into a smile. He stood and stretched before slowly crossing the room to the blank canvas propped on the easel in the corner. He picked up a paintbrush and tapped his chin thoughtfully, eyeing the canvas as if he knew exactly what he wanted to paint.

In the Musain, Enjolras was trying his best to hide behind his glass of beer, but it was to no avail. Total strangers kept coming up to congratulate him, or introduce themselves or just to gawk. Combeferre and Courfeyrac ran interference as much as they could, eventually dragging Enjolras to the back room of the bar. “Do you see how many people showed up?” Courfeyrac asked Combeferre, hanging onto Enjolras’s arm as they pushed through the crowd.

Enjolras rubbed the back of his neck embarrassedly. “Sorry about all this,” he muttered, but Combeferre cut him off.

“No, no, it’s a good thing,” Combeferre assured him with a smile. “We’re always trying to get more people involved with Les Amis, and sure, some are probably just here to stare like a bunch of creeps--” He shot a nasty look at a girl who had just slopped her drink all over herself and was openly oggling Enjolras. “--But we may actually get through to the rest, and that’s the important thing.”

A few minutes later, as Enjolras stood up in front of the assembled group to give the speech he had spent all day preparing on his vision about next steps for Les Amis, as he gazed out at the sea of people who were staring at him for the first time in his life not in revulsion but with interest and excitement and even, in some cases, affection, Enjolras couldn’t help but feel that maybe Combeferre was right.

After the meeting, Enjolras made his way through the crowd to lean against the bar, gesturing Musichetta over. “Can I just get a glass of water?” he shouted over the crowd.

“If you keep bringing this many customers in, you can have anything you want,” Musichetta called back, sliding a glass of water over to him.

Enjolras grinned at her in thanks and turned to head back to the back room, stopping in his tracks when he saw Grantaire standing in front of him, his hands in his pockets and a cautious smile on his face. “So you made it to the Café Musain,” Grantaire said, and Enjolras’s hand tightened on his glass of water as he barely controlled the urge to throw it in his face. “And you look...you look really good. Really happy.”

Enjolras lifted his chin slightly. “Thanks,” he said, his voice cold. “I am.”

The words ‘no thanks to you’ hung unspoken between them, and Grantaire flushed slightly, dropping his gaze to the ground. “I just...I wanted to let you know that you inspired me. Doing what you did, taking off on your own, turning your back on everything expected of you -- it made me want to be better.”

“I have to go,” Enjolras said, almost numbly, and he pushed past Grantaire, not seeing the look of hurt that flashed across Grantaire’s face as he watched Enjolras walk away.

But Combeferre noticed, his smile fading as he watched Enjolras make his way back to him and Courfeyrac. “What was that about?” he asked.

Courfeyrac followed the line of Combeferre’s sight but completely missed Grantaire, seeing only an atractive woman standing near him. “Someone sexy want to date you?” he asked cheerfully. “The perils of fame, my friend.”

Enjolras laughed, though it was without humor. “It’s nothing,” he said, brushing it off. “I’m just...I’m not really ready. To date, I mean.”

“Well, why not?” Courfeyrac asked. “All these people, there must be at least someone who catches your eye.”

Enjolras just shook his head and avoided meeting Courfeyrac’s gaze. “Actually, seeing as how I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to get on of the exact kind of people that I hate to marry me…” He trailed off, having already filled Combeferre and Courfeyrac in on the overview of his life, and Courfeyrac sighed.

“I know, I know, and I realize it must have been very hard for you, what with all the rich and handsome men throwing themselves at you,” Courfeyrac said, aiming for a joke.

But Enjolras didn’t smile. “Well, it was made a lot easier by all of them fleeing the moment they saw my face,” Enjolras said dryly.

That shut Courfeyrac up, and Combeferre, who was ever so slightly more perceptive of the two, asked quietly, “All of them?”

“Well, all but one,” Enjolras admitted. “And I thought…” He trailed off. “Well, it doesn’t matter what I thought.”

Courfeyrac perked up. “So just so I’m remembering this correctly, you need to marry a blue blood to get your inheritance and break the curse, right?” Enjolras shrugged and nodded. “Well, listen. I may know a way to make that happen.”

“How?” Enjolras asked skeptically, and Combeferre frowned and echoed, “Yeah, how?”

“My former roommate, Courfeyrac said, a little smugly. “Monsieur Marius Pontmercy. Grandson of a baron. And owes me a hell of a favor.”