#bc a similar thing happened to speech when i was a freshman: we got a new speech coach

[boag]

Help I just discovered that the high school I went to has a whole wikipedia page . Reading this is literally like…. nauseating . They make it sound great but in reality it is literally such a dark-sided, evil place…. I only attended for three semesters before dropping out of school altogether and was very truant, but in the little time I spent at this school I witnessed an entire race war that culminated in numerous physical assaults and a LOT of unchecked hate speech. We also narrowly avoided school shootings so many times during the first half of my freshman year that my fellow students organized a sit in where we all just skipped our classes and sat on the floor in the commons where we usually ate lunch and just like held up signs respectfully requesting that none of our classmates bring guns to school with the intention of harming us 😭

Also I remember that the school got sued right after I dropped out by one of my classmates’ parents who had pulled him out of school bc he was suffering relentless bullying and racial harassment every single day and he kept going to the School-Based Youth Services office (a program at the school with the purpose of providing students and their families with free counseling. They were also the people you were supposed to go to if u wanted to report bullying or anything like that) and the staff members there would literally just refuse to do anything to help him with it (I remember reading smth abt this when it was happening that contained a quote from one of these counselors that went something like “stop reporting things to us, it just makes our jobs harder”). Idk what happened with the lawsuit but when the story broke I did email the kid’s family’s lawyer and offered to contribute to the case if they wanted more testimonies or whatever bc I had a lot of VERY similar things happen to me at that school…

Anyways in conclusion this Wikipedia article is BULLSHIT for depicting this school so positively and not mentioning any of the countless scandals and legal troubles anywhere… and also I think I would actually rather die than ever step foot in that building again and I am still so glad I dropped out when I did 😭

[hua-fei-hua]

Extra Notes: Music of the Moment Ch. 5

chapter can be read on ao3 or ff.net

i chose wouldn’t it be nice by the beach boys bc i liked the idea of kaminari wishing for a time when all the work was done and he n jirou could just be together lol

and also bc i see him as this ridiculous, daydreamy, almost hopeless romantic kind of guy at times, and so i can see him just sighing “wouldn’t it be nice if everything just solved itself for me”

poor sero. this chapter is just the beginning of his existence in what i like to call the “knows jack shit circle”

it is also lonely in the “knows jack shit circle” bc he is its only member

the comment from kiri abt how if they tried to pencil in sero they’d be waiting until winter break is foreshadowing

the baritones n trombones were combined into one section when i was in band, and they were jokingly called the “baribones”

less relevant, but when i was in eighth grade, i once actually walked about a mile up and down hills with a friend w/a baritone case bc the band director locked the cabinets before anyone could put their instruments away lol. i was a choir kid at the time, but anyway yeah i know how much a baritone in its case weighs. (even if most of the weight is just the case ugh)

more under the cut~

our practice rooms were very very good at muffling shit to the outside world (aka the band room), but very very bad at muffling shit to the neighbors. when i hung out in practice rooms for lunch, i could often hear the neighbors practicing very clearly, if they were practicing at all

it’s not a super important detail, and there’s only one point i can think of that would make it maybe a little bit relevant

this is the only au i will (hopefully) ever write where m*neta is even implied to exist. this was bc the whole “WHY DON’T YOU JUST TELL THEM???” plot hole needed to be fixed bc my sister is a communications major and now my default response to any situation is talking about it

however, just bc it was to fix a glaring plot hole doesn’t mean i have to like or appreciate his inclusion >:C

talking in practice rooms during will be a trend present in the fic. why? bc most of my important talks happened in practice rooms during lunch

this chapter was actually meant to be a bit of a ~montage~ of just kaminari and kirishima’s adventures in trying to confirm jirou as kaminari’s soulmate

that’s why the segments were all a little short and had timeskips between all of them

this won’t be the last montage chapter, although i will admit that this one went on longer than i expected. i considered including the homecoming pep rally as the last segment here, but decided against it in the end.

i don’t know if other bands do the band council thing or not, but we definitely do. maybe it’s a residual effect of us being considered a club

anyway, what this means is that once a week, the drum majors, “executive council” (i.e. the pres, vp, secretary, and treasurer), the section leaders, as well as the interclub council (icc) rep, a uniform manager, and three first year reps got together w/the band director every wednesday during lunch

when i was a junior, before the previous BD retired, everyone was kicked out of the band room (unless it was raining that day (cali bitch kids remember) or you personally promised the BD to be practicing veeeery very quietly) and they had their council meetings. 

when i was a senior, i was part of council for about three months as percussion rep due to some major political drama involving one of my close friends (the band president, also in percussion), her friend the vice president (who had his own can of worms backstory baggage i don’t have time to get into now), and the major struggle against the new band director to be heard and taken seriously. 

i’m serious when i say this was intense as fuck, and like i mentioned in my notes for chapter three, it’s what inspired the background subplot w/fuwa-senpai

anyway, people were just allowed in and out of the band room during those council meetings and it was a god damn mess, so i think you guys get why i based band council off the well-oiled machine i’d observed in my junior year

most of the kids in this au are learning japanese in school bc like. heritage, obviously

it’s not super uncommon, for there to be language barriers (of varying degrees) btwn kids and their parents where i come from, at least among the asian population. most kids speak varying degrees of cantonese w/varying amounts of correctness. some have their parents speak to them in the parents’ native language and the kids respond in english. some are fully bilingual, just illiterate. 

side note, i was both lucky and unlucky to be biracial. lucky, bc i have a well-educated native english speaker as one parent, and so i had an advantage going into school. i was hella privileged in learning. unlucky, bc i had no need to pick up on mandarin bc both my parents are fluent bilinguals and would speak to my sister and i in english (and to each other in mandarin)

basically, in my experience, being a first gen often means losing your parents’ native language, and that’s not something i’m going to just ignore in this fic. to a certain extent, this fic is just transforming my high school life into art. you can frankly get a very good idea of what my high school life was like by reading this fic.

anyway, basically what i’m saying here is that this is why basically all the kids are taking japanese in this au. some are in ap bc they skipped the first year as freshmen, some are in their third year (japanese 5/6) bc they started from the bottom. 

i don’t know at what point i’d seen the headcanon that kirishima was raised by a lesbian couple, but i’m super on-board w/it

idk why i decided they’d be specifically viet in this au, but i guess a bit of it would be an excuse to follow my gut feeling that kirishima would take spanish in this au, since he doesn’t have as much of a language barrier w/his parents

anyway yeah it’s not even plot relevant just a fun detail i decided to put in

they have an 8ball in their discord server in this au bc my friends and i have an 8ball in our discord server, and that 8ball predicted my entire drama around almost having a fake boyfriend in my senior year so like. yeah

we use that 8ball to make life decisions sometimes.

the bot was called NekoBot, by the way, and it also used the n! prefix like in the fic, but we recently kicked that bot out for insolence and got a new, more certifiably Cultured(tm) 8ball

i actually have a bunch of dumb discord headcanons to go with this au. they’re really dumb but man if they’re not fun

the reason i picked careless whisper specifically for kaminari to play here is not only a reference to the fic summary. 

we had a flute player in band who figured out how to play careless whisper (and later, megalovania) by ear on his flute, which inspired both the summary and bit going on in this chapter

mina shouting “FUCK yeah” is actually the first time i’ve let any of the characters swear.

i like to think that aizawa calling her out on her language implies that he knows everything that’s going on but just chooses to stay out of it

it’s like in chapter four when he clearly can tell that smth’s bothering jirou, but chooses not to press the issue and trust in her ability

i do not recommend doing that to anyone in a jirou-type situation tho. go for it in a kaminari-type situation, bc that’s just dumb teenagers being dumb teenagers, but a hands-off approach isn’t the best one in all situations imo

wow okay this was actually a lot more notes than i was expecting lol. got any reactions or further questions? send ‘em to my askbox!!

next chapter will be out next friday~

[littlehungrywarrior]

there’s a lot of things about me that are fucking absurd and really cool, so when ppl ask me to tell them about myself, i break em out immediately (”my family heirloom is a severed head named oswald,” “I can see disney studios from my house,” etc) 

but just bc im bored and I feel like it, here’s some stuff about me that I dont think I’ve ever really talked about? not secrets, but just...mundane things that I don’t really ever say in favor of Ice Breaker™-type things 

I have a profound respect for mail services. When I was 7-8 years old, we watched a documentary in class about how the postal system works, its history, and about the various jobs involved. It was an extremely formative experience for me. I don’t send a lot of things over snailmail and so I’m not really sure how to express my respect and support but it’s definitely there. Unfortunately, I’ve yet to play the FallOut game where you’re a mail carrier, but I wanna... I wanna. 

Though I’ll claim to the ends of the earth that sports confuse me, I am a huge speed-running enthusiast. One hobby/interest/self-esteem exercise I have is that I really like to learn jargon/lingo involved with...anything, really. So I started watching speedruns to pick up the lingo and I just...became infatuated. I’m no expert but I’m %100 into it for more than the lingo at this point; I’ve long since got that covered. One of my favorite parts is golf-clapping along with other fans when something cool/impressive happens. 

I can’t sleep without a hat on. A beanie, specifically. When I was, like...5 or something, I was terrified of vampires, and for some reason I thought vampires bit the skull and not the neck. So I pulled my blankets up over my head at night. My parents thought this was dangerous (I might suffocate) so they gave me a hat to protect myself with. I’ve long since outgrown my fear of vampires (and learnt that they don’t typically bite skulls) but I’ve associated hats with nighttime safety for so long that I can’t fall asleep without one. In the event that I don’t have one, I can wear underwear on my head to suffice...and I think I wore a stuffed animal once somehow but idk. 

I’ve had my SPiN in genetics for so long that 5-year-old me used to infodump strangers at the grocery store. When I asked where babies come from, my dad got me a picture book written for kids specifically to answer that question. We still have it; my brothers used it, too. It starts by explaining pollination and then extends the same concepts to dogs and then humans. Most of the information is on pregnancy and fetuses rather than sex, and cell development immediately caught my fascination. I asked my parents for more information about this and they gave me some more microbiology stuff. Combine that with my animal obsession + budding interest in heredity and you’ve got a tiny obnoxious geneticist who wouldn’t stop telling random people in line at the grocery store about how chromosomes are passed on through haploid cells. Dad got real smug about it, it was fantastic. 

On a similar note (and I have no memory of how this actually happened), I more or less learnt to read spontaneously? All at once? Again, I have no clear memory of this until the part where I can read... My parents read to me every night but I never was able to do it myself. I had a huge library built into the wall at perfect me-height for reading. One morning, the summer I turned 5, I (according to legend) walked up to my parents, got their attention, said “I’m going to read now,” and then (this part I do remember) sat down and read every single book in that library over the course of two or three days. Super rough estimate, but it was somewhere between 70-200 books, with a variety of target ages ranging from 3 to 10-11. No chapter books, all pictures, but the second I was finished I wanted more books. My mom took me to the store to buy more and insisted I get a chapter book since I’d burnt through the picture books so fast. And that’s where I got my first Warriors book. 

That was not the last time I read an entire library. In 7th grade, a friend of mine and I both had sex ed previously and so were allowed to skip that year’s sex ed on the condition that we spent that class in the school library. And together, we read the entire thing. Only what was on the shelves, though; nothing in the back. Actually, at one point on the last day, we’d already read every book in the place and we were bored, so we pulled some books out of the back to look at and none of them caught our interest. One of them was the first Hunger Games book WAY before it got popular. We’d never heard of it, both read the first 2 pages, didn’t like it at all, and put it back. You should’ve seen our faces when it suddenly blew up into a huge thing. The sad thing is, I remember a lot of books that I enjoyed but can’t find now because I can’t remember any specific titles or characters. We sped through everything to finish it all and didn’t really take a lot of time to absorb details so a lot of them are lost to the vague, hazy back of my memory. Still looking for that manga where the ninja kid...stops an evil scientist from...some kind of virtual world machine. There’s a piranha tank? And then the bad guy...gets sniped by a helicopter and falls off the roof, or something? Also there was a manga version of Maximum Ride, which I only remember by name because 2 chapters in it suddenly hit me that this was a comic version of a text-novel my mom was reading at the same time. I bought a handful of books from that library at the end of the year and still have them. 

I’ve only been in one play but something fucking sweet happened during production. I was Malvolio in Twelfth Night because, and I quote my drama teacher (who had known me for 8-ish years at that point and also who was smirking her ass off when she said this), “You’ll see why when you read the play.” She was not wrong and to this day that smug fuckin grin gives me life. Anyway, I was Malvolio, and you know that “Some have greatness thrust upon them” speech that everyone’s so inspired by? That speech is a fucking prank pulled on this asshole and it’s about bangin’. So the scene is that I dramatically read this “””love letter””” I’ve received and then run off to go embarrass myself. The speech is LONG and so I asked if I can just...actually have it written on the letter. And she said yes! So I wrote it down with intent of reading it off the letter. But opening night, the actress who was to place the letter grabbed the wrong paper and so I got just a blank sheet. Guess fucking what? We’d re-choreographed that scene so many times the night before that I slammed that shit anyway, word-for-fucking-word. And I was never mad at my friend for grabbing the wrong paper, so I say this in jest, but her punishment for grabbing the wrong paper is that the entire cast/production team did not hear the end of my pride for the entire week. For a timeframe reference, I was 12. 

When I was a kid I had a horse named Emmy. She was a rental horse. Actually, I think she was a pony? The way the rental worked was that she lived in a barn with a bunch of other horses. Her owners were a small business who gave riding lessons, but instead of just riding each session, one of the horses was “yours” (assigned by age, height, and temperament, not picked by the kid) to take care of while you were there and ride consistently every session. Essentially, she was only my pet when I was on the property. I can still ride but I’ve gotten rusty and I can’t do anything above a trot for more than a few seconds. Both times I’ve jumped have been accidents, once on Emmy and once on mom’s current horse, Meteor. I’ve fallen only once, and it was off Emmy. Mom’s going to be getting a gigantic thoroughbred soon and I’m both terrified and excited to ride this very large boy. 

I talk about this in person but not online because...why would it ever come up online?? I have worn the same style of red jacket every single time I leave the house since I was a pre-teen. It’s to the point where people will only recognize me if I’m wearing it. I had a friend in high school who was/is a really cool guy, we were seniors and we’d been close friends since freshman year. I had my jacket tied around my waist because of the heat. The school had two campuses a block apart and I was walking from one to the other to get something. Friend was walking from the other to the one, so we passed each other. Wordlessly. No wave, nothing. I was tired, it was hot, I didn’t really think anything of it. Then suddenly, a foot behind me, he freezes dead in his tracks and says my name with some kind of stricken shock. He had no idea it was me. At all. Keep in mind: my jacket? Tied around my waist. Not even off, just around my waist. Since then I’ve used this jacket thing to my advantage. Sparingly, I can take it off to sneak around. It’s like I’m invisible to people I know unless I say something and they hear my voice. It’s incredible. 

Going back to speed running, way before I knew that it was a thing at all, I taught myself to speedrun two games: The Lion King (PS2, not the impossibly hard one) and Putt Putt Saves The Zoo. As they were unofficial speedruns that I didn’t really call anything and just kinda did when I was bored, I never timed the latter, and I only timed the former once using my mom’s kitchen timer. It was a rough estimate since sometimes I paused and forgot to hit play for a few seconds, or I needed to pause but didn’t for a few seconds, and the timer only counted full minutes anyway, but I still remember the time: 35 minutes. I keep meaning to go back and re-teach myself to speedrun it, perhaps more professionally, and time it with more accuracy. I still remember all the strats but I can’t pull them off with as much fluidity as I could when I was still in practice. I also can, when watching both Lion King 1 and 2, still point out with frame-perfect accuracy exactly when a scene starts that was a cutscene in that game. 

wow writing this was fun and I kinda wanna do it again. ok 

[yahoo-the-dagger-blog]

Ball-mania has struck the humble Lithuanian town where LiAngelo, LaMelo will play

Some BC Vytautas fans donned homemade Big Baller Brand shirts for their game on Saturday. (Jaunius Mališauskas)

Two weeks before LiAngelo and LaMelo Ball are scheduled to arrive in Prienai, Lithuania, one of the town’s most popular restaurants has already begun preparing to make them feel welcome.

A scrolling electronic sign above Tango Pizza’s front door flashes the message, “PRIENAI GOT BALLS!!!” An American flag now accompanies the Lithuanian one that already hung above the bartop. Owner Jaunius Mališauskas is even considering mounting some Ball family memorabilia on the walls, cordoning off a VIP table for LiAngelo and LaMelo and adding some of their favorite American dishes to the menu.

“At first nobody could believe this is happening, but now, everyone is talking about it and a lot of the people are excited,” Mališauskas said. “If my 63-year-old mother is talking about the Ball family, it must be a top topic in Prienai, trust me on this.”

Since last week’s announcement that LaVar Ball’s two younger sons have signed with BC Vytautas for the rest of the basketball season, the town of Prienai has been abuzz about their imminent arrival. Two globally famous teenagers don’t often visit Prienai, a humble 10,000-person town in the south of Lithuania surrounded by miles of scenic rivers, lakes and forest.

Last Saturday, at the first BC Vytautas home game since LiAngelo and LaMelo signed, the team’s play-by-play announcer sang a song welcoming the Balls to Lithuania and several fans showed up in plain white T-shirts with the BBB logo of the Big Baller Brand scribbled across the front in black ink. Tickets for the Ball brothers’ first scheduled games next month sold so quickly last week that BC Vytautas has since decided to more than double the price.

The media coverage has also been jaw-dropping for a little-known town not used to having the eyes of the basketball world on it. Not only did every major Lithuanian outlet cover the story for the first two or three days after the Ball brothers signed, prominent news organizations from across the United States and Europe have also descended on Prienai to try to learn more about the far-flung outpost where LiAngelo and LaMelo will make their professional debuts.

“We are happy that Prienai and Lithuania have had so much coverage this week, maybe even more than your President,” Alvydas Vaicekauskas, the mayor of Prienai, wrote via email. “It’s like a Christmas gift for Prienai because we couldn’t have thought of a better and more affordable way of advertising.”

An aerial photo of the town of Prienai from a hot-air balloon. (Simona Vaicekauskaite)

While many people in basketball-mad Lithuania were aware of the Ball family before news broke that LiAngelo and LaMelo were coming, the hubbub must be terribly confusing for those just learning about them for the first time. After all, it’s not easy to explain how LaVar Ball has so quickly evolved from the loud-mouthed patriarch of a Southern California basketball family to launching his own shoe-apparel company, starring in a reality TV series and goading the likes of Michael Jordan, LeBron James and President Donald Trump into public feuds.

LaVar’s far-fetched goal is for LiAngelo and LaMelo to someday join older brother Lonzo with the Los Angeles Lakers, but his meddling has forced the younger Balls to follow an atypical, obstacle-laden path.

LiAngelo parted ways with UCLA earlier this month after LaVar became frustrated with the length of the suspension the freshman guard was serving for shoplifting in China. LaMelo left Chino Hills High School a few months ago to be home-schooled because LaVar no longer got along with the school’s new basketball coach. LaVar had been looking for an overseas pro team willing to try to develop his younger sons when BC Vytautas came calling.

The man who spearheaded BC Vytautas’ pursuit of LiAngelo and LaMelo Ball was the team’s 21-year-old communications director. Erikas Kirvelaitis learned that the Balls’ agent had been rebuffed by a bigger, more successful Lithuanian team and wondered if LiAngelo and LaMelo might consider coming to BC Vytautas instead.

Without the knowledge of any of his bosses, Kirvelaitis sent an unsolicited Twitter direct message to agent Harrison Gaines posing the idea. To Kirvelaitis’ surprise, Gaines quickly got back to him and expressed interest in learning more.

“When I first heard the rumors they might sign with another Lithuanian team, I thought we needed to take advantage of this opportunity,” Kirvelaitis said. “I thought, ‘Why not us? Why couldn’t our team have the Ball brothers on its roster?'”

The next step in Kirvelaitis’ pursuit was persuading team officials that signing the Ball brothers was a good idea, no easy feat since it’s unlikely either LiAngelo, 19, or LaMelo, 16, will be able to help BC Vytautas win games in the Lithuanian League this season. NBA scouts familiar with LiAngelo considered him a mid-major level college prospect had UCLA not taken him as part of a package deal with his brothers. LaMelo has the potential to play high-level professional basketball someday, but scouts believe he is nowhere near ready to play against grown men right now with his current slender build.

What Kirvelaitis emphasized was that a financially struggling team like BC Vytautas needed to consider the attention signing the Ball brothers would bring. LaMelo’s 3.1 million Instagram followers are a couple hundred thousand more than the entire population of Lithuania. If adding LaMelo and LiAngelo could attract new fans and sponsors, it could help elevate BC Vytautas in the future regardless of whether the brothers were capable of making an impact on the court.

“Here in Lithuania, teams have a win-first mentality, so it’s kind of tough to convince the team to sign two young players who maybe don’t give anything to the team yet basketball-wise,” Kirvelaitis said. “But I felt this was a gamble we needed to take part in. After all the speeches and the conversations within the club, we decided to try and see how it works.”

When BC Vytautas staffers spoke further with Gaines, they learned that guaranteed playing time was more important to the Ball family than money. The team laid out a plan for LiAngelo and LaMelo to play right away for BC Vytautas in the lesser-competitive Baltic League against lower-level teams from Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus and other surrounding countries. If the Ball brothers fared better than expected in those games, then the team would consider giving them an opportunity to play against higher-level Lithuanian League opponents.

Those terms must have been amenable to the Ball family because the deal was done within a week. The contracts run through the end of the Lithuanian season in June, however, both sides have the option of opting out after a month.

“Of course we want them to help on the court,” said Vilius Vaitkevičius, sports director at BC Vytautas. “Basketball is the most important thing. Also if their popularity will make fans love basketball more and come to the arena to watch more games, then that is good for us too.”

BC Vytautas already landed one new sponsor immediately after signing LiAngelo and LaMelo and has had discussions with a couple others. The club is expecting the Ball brothers to arrive on Jan. 4 and to potentially make their debut on Jan. 9 in a Baltic League game against BC Tsmoki-Minsk of Belarus.

While the signing of LiAngelo and LaMelo has brought BC Vytautas the attention it craves, some of the coverage in the international media hasn’t painted Prienai in the best light. Americans who previously played in Lithuania have predicted the Ball brothers will experience massive culture shock trading sun-splashed California for a snow-covered town with little to do. BC Vytautas officials have actually had to alleviate concerns from reporters about whether Prienai has television or high-speed internet.

The coverage inspired one Lithuanian basketball fan to shoot a parody video last week welcoming the Ball family to Prienai. Kaunas resident Vytautas Mikaitis posed as a tour operator in the video and poked fun at the town’s lack of high-end stores, familiar restaurants or English speakers.

“People in Lithuania think of Americans as living in these magical places, L.A. or New York or whatever, but I’ve been to the United States 15 times and the places most people live are quite similar to here,” Mikaitis said. “In the United States, most of the people who saw the video realized it was a very good joke. In Lithuania, some people would come up to me and tell me, ‘Good video. Good video.’ Others would tell me, ‘Why would you show how bad it is here? You’re going to scare the Ball family away.'”

But while some in Prienai don’t appreciate their hometown being portrayed as Siberia, most are very enthusiastic about the arrival of the Ball brothers and the attention it has brought. Mališauskas is hopeful Tango Pizza will become a destination not just for the Ball brothers but for tourists hoping to catch a glimpse of them.

“We are surprised by the amount of international attention our town and BC Vytautas gets, but we love it,” Mališauskas said. “We invite everyone to come and visit us!”

– – – – – – –

Jeff Eisenberg is a college basketball writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at daggerblog@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!

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