#especially since i spent the first several months that i played having no idea how the outfit designer worked

[the-punforgiven]

My brother pisses me the fuck off

[httpsserene]

ꜱɪɴɢɪɴɢ ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇ ꜱʜᴏᴡᴇʀ w/ ʟɴ4

📖ꜱᴜᴍᴍᴀʀʏ: lando’s usually well spent sunday off with his girlfriend is different this time around. you put off your everything shower and wash-day causing some edits to the usual routine. how the night ends, however, is 100% lando’s fault. 📖ᴄᴏɴᴛᴇɴᴛ ᴡᴀʀɴɪɴɢꜱ: fluff/borderline?crack(if u think im funny). one or two mentions of sex, not explicit at all. not edited to beta-read. 📖ᴡᴏʀᴅ ᴄᴏᴜɴᴛ: 2k words 📖ᴘᴀɪʀɪɴɢ: lando norris x black!fem!reader 📖ɢᴇɴʀᴇ: oneshot 📖ꜱᴏᴜɴᴅᴛʀᴀᴄᴋ: singing in the shower ~ becky g

ᴘʀᴇꜰᴀᴄᴇ: preface: hello! it’s late night or early morning for me, i guess, when i’m posting this. i was going to say this is my first rpf ever, but that’s a bold-faced lie ☠️but! it is my first f1 work! i hope you enjoy it! i’d love to have some f1 mutuals out here, if anyone wants <3. also requests are open, just come talk to me and ramble about anything, or any idea you have the f1 boys, i’d love to have some great anons and asks to fulfill. hope you enjoy it :)

it’s a rare sunday where you and lando are both home together. usually you two would take advantage of this and make the most out of it. you’d lay in bed late into the morning with an excessively cuddly boyfriend, cook a nice and healthy brunch together you cook, lando handles the soundtrack and vibes because he loses all coordination in the kitchen, play a co-op video game that you guys have been working your way through for a month, go out on a nice little dinner date, and have great sex before knocking out.

HOWEVER, this week you have kinda forgotten that you need to do your hair. originally you had an appointment that tuesday to get a silk press done with your usual hairstylist, but she canceled on you. once you got that “hey girly...” text you’d known there was no hope of rescheduling, for that week at least. so, you decided to do your own hair sometime later in the week, but your boyfriend was home for the first time after a triple-header, and was a terrible lovely distraction. you also had to work, unfortunately, you had to clean the flat, you had to eat, and you had to breathe—so understandably, you’ve ended up pushing your wash-day/hair-day and everything-shower to the last minute.

you apologized several times to lando during breakfast for your forgetfulness and wasting valuable “boyfriend-girlfriend time” as lando coined. but lando is lando—a sweetheart at his core—so he refused to accept your apologies with an “don’t apologize for something so minor, love,” and even offered to help you tackle the fight you end up almost losing every time…. vs. your hair. 

you kindly denied his assistance knowing damn well that if he was in the shower with you, your hair wouldn’t be done until late that night due to a different type of lando-distraction. you suggested that lando streamed while you were doing your shower and hair, and that you could still go out for dinner that evening. lando was pretty receptive to the idea, especially after he made sure that you were 100% okay with him not helping you do your hair (he usually does, you’ve got him trained pretty good; all he needs is the license at this point), and the fact that it’s been like 3 months since he last streamed.

lando posts that he’s streaming starting at noon, and after a brief make out against the sink post-dishwashing that leaves your lips swollen and head foggy, he goes to take a shower and start setting up his stream equipment. cursing lando’s smug-ass face as he walks away, you let him know that you're stepping out to the beauty supply store to get a few items before you start your little routine and that you might not see him before his stream starts. he does a 180, and rushes back to you from down the hallway to give you one more mind boggling kiss and with a smile says, “text me when you get there and when you’re back. i’ll have my phone on dnd but your messages are set to pass through it, so if you don’t want to be seen on stream today you don’t have to worry about it.” internally, you’re pretty sure your heart just imploded at the mindfulness this boy has—that your boyfriend has. somehow, it still surprises you how mature lando is for how silly he acts most of the time.

“you’re too sweet to me, lan.” you respond with a shy smile, “i probably won’t interrupt you today—i’ll let your delulu fans have custody, and deal with you!” lando throws his head back and does his usual demonic laugh, “hey! my fans are not that delusional, but i am afraid that you’re losing the custody battle!” he kisses you on the cheek, and with that you separate until later that day.

or so you thought. you knew lando’s super sweet behavior was too sus without him being his usual gremlin-self at least once.

when you get back from the beauty supply store (which should’ve been a fifteen-minute trip at most, turned into a near hour after the usual shenanigans you find yourself involved in buying things you don’t need), lando’s already started his stream. you text him letting him know you’re about to hop into the shower, and start heading to en-suite bathroom.

when you open the door, the mirror is slightly covered with remaining steam from lando’s shower, and you can see his clothes hanging half-inside the hamper. which is an improvement from being left on the floor—choose your battles, ladies. but as you move further into the bathroom, setting down your everything-shower supplies, changing into your silk robe and bonnet—you pick up on a lingering scent that should not be present.

your ninety-four fucking dollar scalp revival shampoo.

you’ve had that shampoo since you were seventeen, using it only when extremely necessary. you didn’t even pay for it, it was something your mom bought you as a pretty thoughtful and useful gift after you complained about your scalp suddenly getting super sensitive. it lasted through your senior year of grade school, all of university, and goddamn-it, two boyfriends!!! you let out a bit of an hysterical giggle (seek mental help, babe) and walk to the shower to grab the jar. the problem is: you know there was only probably one more usage left.

turning the cap off, your worst fears are confirmed...it’s…empty. with an anguished cry, you fall to your knees on the tiled floor—it’s like your childhood pet died. you gently set the jar down on the floor, and stare dazedly at the ceiling. what makes it worse is: you know that lando probably didn’t even use it properly. he most likely didn’t even let it sit for the mandatory 15 minutes that all girls do as an excuse to waste more time in the shower, he prob- he probably rinsed it out right after he massaged it in; that thought right there almost had you crying. oh, and what makes it even worse-r , what was a one-use sized amount for you was like, three for lando, so if he used it sparingly, you would’ve at least gotten to cherish it for the last time.

and with that, you rise from the floor, like some sort of re-animated monster—and with a twitching eye, start stomping to lando’s stream room. before you barge in, you remember what you're wearing: a black silk robe, matching bonnet, glasses, and your cute orange shark slides (lando bought them for you, he has a matching pair). you do the mental math of caring about this being on the internet for the rest of your life, but eventually the opportunity of terrorizing lando wins out over whatever a digital footprint is.

the door swings open, and with your shout of, “lando norris!” the pinging of his chat becomes rapid. lando looks wide-eyed at the camera and whispers, “oh fuck.” he half spins in his chair to look at you in the doorway, and is met with a flying shark slide to the neck. “oW! what did i do??” he cries out.

“you used the last of my ONE-HUNDRED DOLLAR shampoo, YOU THIEVING GREMLIN!!!” the chat notifications start cutting each other off with how fast they’re being sent.

“i didn’t use your shampoo??” he says with a bewildered look, clutching the shark slide to his chest. you seethe, “the fucking WOODEN JAR, that you didn’t even have the AUDACITY throw away, and left in the shower?!”

lando pauses, and makes an ‘a-ha’ sort of face goes, “oh, i thought that was conditioner.” you scream again and this time you don’t miss your mark. the remaining shark slide bonks him right on the forehead. “oW, again?!”

“I THOUGHT YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO HAVE GOOD REACTION TIME??!”

“yEAH?! WELL, i didn’t expect  MY GIRLFRIEND to ASSAULT ME with the shark slides that I bought HER!!”

“yEAH?! WELL, i didn’t expect MY BOYFRIEND to waste MY hair products!!”

lando cackles but surrenders, he reaches for you in the doorway and pulls you in between his legs with his hands gripping your hips. 

he pouts, “i’m sorry. i can buy you another batch, if you’d like. if you need it for your shower right now, i can pause the stream and run and go get for you, or get it delivered?” you sigh, looking at his wide blue eyes. you let him stew for a minute, trying to find it in you to remain mad. his thumbs start petting you gently while you think, and he leans his head forward to rest on your tummy.

you sigh again, hand coming up to play with the hairs at the nape of his neck, and cave, “nah..don’t even worry about it. i don’t even need to use it today, i just wanted to remind you to keep your nosy-ass away from my hair products.” he nods against your abdomen, you start to pull away, and he does the same. you lean down and give him a brief peck on the cheek, and turn to exit the room. 

“oh!” you exclaim now in the doorway, one hand on the doorknob, “i love you, even though you steal all my shit.”

lando giggles, cheeks turning a light pink, “i love you, princess,” the simp dripping out of every pore in his body. you point at him, “this is actually a mutually beneficial situation! now, for date night you can take me to the store to buy hair products,” lando’s smile drops, “don’t worry we can get some for you too, curly boy!” lando doesn’t even try to fight it once he sees the borderline manic grin on your face, just begging him to test you one more time. he accepts his face, “yes, love. i can’t wait for tonight, princess.”

he turns back to his stream when the door closes all the way and shakes his head. he claps his hands once, ready to get back into it, but you burst in again,

“and when i get out of that damn shower in an hour—you’re sure as hell gonna help blow dry and flat iron this shit! it’s silk press season, lando norris, we cannot be caught slacking!” you slam the door shut, and leave.

lando just blinks at the camera, mouth slightly open like that one pikachu meme. he briefly reads the chat, trying to recover, and looks at all of the chatters pick on him like he just got called to the dean’s office. some messages start to roll in about him having to end the stream.

he waits to hear the bedroom door shut, and a few more seconds for the shower to start running before he pseudo-whispers into the mic, “don’t worry, chat! she may have said an hour, but we actually have more like three. it’s her ‘everything-shower’, no-way she’ll finish that quickly. she needs an hour just to sing and dance in there before she starts actually doing anything.”

he starts to open a lobby in cod, sending invites to a few of the boys online and his phone starts vibrating on the desk. the chat starts to go wild again, recognizing its the ringtone he set for your messages. his face drops again when he opens your text thread, “oh my god, chat. she heard me, i forgot she pulls up the stream for background noise. i’m screwed.”

yninstagram • 2hrs ago

liked by landonorris, ybfsinstagram, and 123,978 others

yninstagram hairstylist did his thing for silk press season 👅

tagged landonorris

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landonorris can’t even see our faces but you can’t tell we’re both pretty

➥yninstagram pretty gyal takeover

➥user bro 😭 i can’t even call this sassy

➥user he’s just keeping it real with y’all

landonorris i’ll always take care of you like a princess

➥landonorris and one day very soon, forever treat you like a queen

➥ynistagram lan ☹️🥺

➥user proposal hint?!!!

➥user it’s a 4ever thing y’all wouldn’t understand 🥱

➥user i do 🙄 y/n comes home one day every two years and takes care of our eight children

➥user bitch—LMFAOOO

user not her gatekeeping the stylist 😤 not very girl’s girl of her

➥yninstagram he’s booked out for the foreseeable future sorry babe

➥user oh uh. that’s completely understandable. he doesn’t take walk in’s ? 😃

landonorris • 3hrs ago

liked by yninstagram, maxfewtrell, and 2,321,768 others

landonorris you attract what you fear? word, oh no a pretty gyal who lets me do her hair😱 oohhhhh how scaryyy

tagged yninstagram

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yninstagram damn 🥵 she’s pretty fit

yninstagram heard her boyfriend’s finer

➥landonorris shouldn’t listen to gossip, her bf can’t match her beauty by far

➥user now THATS SOME RIZZ i didn’t know he had it in him

carlossainzjr y/nnita keep brainwashing him i’m getting good teasing material

➥ynistagram sí señor, el gusto es mio

➥carlossainzjr aye,lando her spanish is better than yours🤣

➥landonorris my tractor is better than yours, mmm yeah that’s what i thought

➥user DAMN LANDO CHILL

➥yninstagram he will be issuing a formal apology at the paddock next sunday señor sainz

➥user i just KNOW she got him at shark slide-point

© httpsserene 2023

[blood-darkened-moon]

@antaxzantax Honestly, I’m not happy with how the story turned out, especially the second half. But I can’t think of a way to improve it right now. My brain ran out of ideas, and this was the best I could come up with at the moment. I hope you still like it a little bit and it’s not a complete disappointment. Thank you very much for your request.

Request: Alfred and Alexia’s 10th birthday (AO3 Link)

10th Birthday

Alfred read the letter for the fifth time. The content had not changed since the first time, the same birthday wishes, the same stories on the latest events, the same offer for the twins to spend some time in England. An offer that his father had already declined before handing Alfred the letter. Alfred had also looked at the photo enclosed with the letter several times before, showing Uncle Andrew, Aunt Theresa, Grandma Nora, and his cousin Mary[1] smiling happily at the camera. They probably took the photo at their Christmas party last month.

Alfred threw the letter on the table and looked at the watch. It was now 6.37 pm. Alexander had already wished the twins a happy birthday in the morning but wanted to wait until after work to give them their presents officially and celebrate. He said he wanted to be ready on time at 5.00 pm this year. An hour and a half later, there was still no sign of him.

Alfred had rushed through his tasks. He had thought that today, his 10th birthday, would be different, that his father would actually take his time. But he should have known better. Nothing but empty promises, like every year.

However, it was different. He had always spent these days with Alexia. The two had played together from morning to night every year on their birthdays. Even when Alexia had started her studies, she hadn’t let that get in the way, and if necessary, she simply took the day off. But his sister had also disappeared.

Since she had started writing her thesis, Alfred rarely saw her. Alexia lost track of time while writing. She appeared less and less often at mealtimes and stayed up late into the night. By now, she had lost several kilos, and her ribs and spine were clearly visible under her skin. And when she made some room in her schedule for Alfred, she usually fell asleep within half an hour. Alfred was worried about her, but Alexia didn’t want to hear about it, and Alexander didn’t even seem to notice her condition. Alexia wanted to hand in her thesis in mid-February. Then everything would be better, so she said.

“More tea?” a maid asked, interrupting Alfred’s thoughts. He held the cup out to her wordlessly; she poured him some and gave it back.

“Shall I cut the cake for you now, young master?” Alfred’s stomach growled, but he didn’t want to start without Alexia. The tea had to be enough until his sister was ready. “No. I’ll wait.”

“Should I perhaps ask Lady Alexia if she could spare a little time now?”

The question infuriated Alfred. He would have preferred to go to Alexia’s study himself and pick her up, but he knew how much finishing this thesis meant to her. And if it was more important to her at the moment than celebrating her birthday with Alfred, then so be it. How could that cunt think of wanting to disturb Alexia?

“If she has time, she’ll come here herself,” he snapped at the maid. Alfred also wanted to hurl a few insults at her but held back at the last moment. That would only lead to another discussion with his father about his behavior, and he wanted to avoid that, at least today.

The woman then bowed briefly and left the room. He was alone again. Alfred thought about what else he could do while he waited. Previously, he had tried to pass the time by drawing and reading, not very successfully, though. But the more Alfred thought about what he could do now, the more he realized that he didn’t really feel like doing anything. Instead, Alfred simply put his head down on the table, wiped the tears from his wet eyes, and pulled the letter towards him again.

---

Alexia typed the last word of the page on the typewriter and removed the sheet. This time, it had taken her seven attempts to type out the handwritten page without any mistakes. Her concentration was noticeably waning, and the coffee was no longer enough to counteract this. But all in all, she had made good progress. Alexia flipped through her handwritten work, still about a quarter remaining. If she kept up her pace, she should be able to meet her self-imposed deadline.

She stretched and yawned. Alexia was tired. No wonder she had rarely slept for more than a few hours per night recently. But she couldn’t allow herself a break, otherwise sleep would overtake her. Besides, it wasn’t that late yet. She should certainly be able to finish a page or two before the birthday party was about to start. Alexia just hoped that she could last longer today without falling asleep. Alfred had been looking forward to spending more time with her again. Alexia longed for it, too. She missed playing with her brother and felt guilty that she was constantly leaving him to his own devices.

But there was still some time before 5 pm, so Alexia inserted a new sheet into the typewriter and took a quick glance at the clock to confirm her assumption. She felt sick to the stomach. No. That can’t be right. The stupid clock is broken. Yes. It has stopped. But as if to mock her, the second hand moved incessantly. It was 8.54 pm. She was much too late.

Why hadn’t she realized how late it was? Why didn’t anyone come to get her? Her father. Alfred. Someone. She jumped up from her chair and ran to one of the cupboards. There she rummaged around in a box until she found what she was looking for – Alfred’s birthday present.

As they spent most of their time at the South Pole, the twins rarely had the opportunity to choose or buy themselves anything for festive occasions. Their father usually did this, or rather had it done for him. Apart from a handful of gifts, most of the things they got were pretty much garbage. Things that were apparently popular among children somewhere, but were either intended for a different age group or didn’t match the twins’ interests. At least the absurdity of some of the presents amused them both. However, presents didn’t matter that much. Spending the day together was the most important thing for them anyway.

This time, however, Alexia had begged Mary during her last visit to get her a present for Alfred that she hoped he would like and asked her to box it in such a way that Alexander wouldn’t find out what it was. As compensation for her absence, her brother should at least get some entertainment. Her father didn’t want Alfred to watch horror movies. He always said it would excite Alfred too much. Alexia didn’t think so, so she got Alien as a present for him.

---

Alfred was lying face down on the table. He didn’t react when Alexia entered the room.

“Alfie?” No response. “Alfred?” she said louder now. Her brother slowly raised his head, still sleepy and slightly disoriented.

“I’m so sorry, Alfred. I didn’t mean to keep you waiting so long. I didn’t even realize how late it was. You could have just let me know.”

“I didn’t mean to bother you,” Alfred said quietly, looking down at the floor.

“You’re not bothering me. Stupid.” Alfred still looked distressed, so Alexia hugged him. “You’ll never bother me.” At least he was smiling a little now.

“Where’s Father? Hasn’t he been here?”

“I have no idea. I don’t care either.” Alfred sounded bitter. Alexia didn’t want to let it show, but she was no less disappointed. Her father had promised. At least he could have spent this one day with them. Although Alexander was very interested in her education, he rarely spent the free time with Alexia. It was even worse with Alfred. Alexander was only really interested in him when he had done something wrong again, or he simply dragged him around as Alexia’s appendage.

“Oh, Alfie. We don’t need him. We’ll just celebrate on our own. Do you want some cake? I want a slice now. And when we’ve finished eating, we’ll open the presents.”

---

“Looks like that was the last one,” Alfred said as he rummaged through the mountain of wrapping paper.

“No, not quite yet. I’ve got another present for you too. Here it is. And this time, I chose it, not Father.”

“Alexia. Thank you. But you...”

“No. Don’t say anything, Alfie. Think of it as an apology for not being able to play with you so much lately. And now unwrap it already.” Alfred tore the wrapping paper and pulled out the VHS tape. Mary had put the movie in the empty Disney movie case.

“Sleeping Beauty?” Her brother looked confused.

“Just watch the movie, but when Father is not around. I’m sure you’ll like this version of Sleeping Beauty.” Alfred grinned.

“So, what is it really?”

“That’s a surprise.”

Suddenly, the door opened, and their father entered the room.

“Did you have fun? Good.” The twins didn’t answer and just stared at him skeptically.

“I know I promised I’d be here today, but there were problems with the ventilation system. All hell broke loose in the labs. I couldn’t leave. Everything’s back up and running now.” Alexander waited a few seconds for a reaction from his children. As there was no response, he continued. “Well, I’ve taken the day off tomorrow. So, what do you say if we catch up on the party tomorrow?”

[1] Andrew is Edward’s half-brother (Alfred and Alexia’s granduncle). He is only 2 years older than Alexander, though. His daughter Mary is 5 years older than the twins. Nora is Arthur’s 2nd wife and the Andrew’s mother, not Edward’s.

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

I finally decided to listen to the Perfect Brains podcast, did all four episodes that are out so far in the last couple of days. And, okay, I wasn’t going to say this because I didn’t want to be pointlessly negative about something people enjoy – but now that I no longer hold this opinion, I can say, I was pretty skeptical when this was first announced. It felt like a weirdly manufactured pairing, since as far as I knew Sam Campbell and Lucy Beaumont had nothing to do with each other before Taskmaster, and it’s not even like they clicked with each other especially well during Taskmaster.

It felt like one of those things where people on Reddit (or, to be fair, Tumblr) see two people on a panel show and say “Oh my God, they should have a sitcom!” And then Avalon just gave them a sitcom podcast, not because there were any artistic reasons to believe that would actually work, but just because fans thought it would be a funny concept. This seemed especially true since they didn’t even have a format when they launched, just said “Okay you guys liked these two on Taskmaster, well here, subscribe to this then.”

And I wasn’t convinced it would work. Sam and Lucy don’t have anything that would make them work well together except that they’re both weird, and they’re not even the same type of weird, or particularly compatible types of weird. Zany characters can be very funny on their own, but when bouncing off someone else, the “straight man” role exists for a reason. The weird one has to be paired with someone who’s been tailored to fit with them.

I can say all those now because it turns out my concerns were unfounded – this shit’s hilarious. It still seems like a bit of a cynical idea that might have just got lucky, but it really works. Possibly because I didn’t need to be worried about the lack of a straight man. They have a “straight man” in the podcast, and his name is Sam Campbell. And it turns out it’s amazingly funny to listen to Sam Campbell playing the straight man. He’s surprisingly good at it.

There’s a kid at the autism centre where I work who speaks almost entirely in “scripts”, in which he’s repeating things he’s heard elsewhere (songs, TV shows), mostly talking to himself, sometimes he can be persuaded to answer a question but only if it’s a very simple one and he can answer with something from his repertoire of quotes. By last week, I’d spent probably 50 hours with him one-on-one in various sessions over several months, and I was very used to his voice. But then we introduced a new program that he didn’t like, and when I started doing it, he suddenly said “All done all done!” in a completely different voice that I had never heard before. It was significantly higher-pitched. He normally mumbles a lot but this was clearly enunciated. If I heard that voice out of context I’d never have guessed it was him. It was shocking to realize I’d heard him say thousands of words and this was the first time I’d ever heard his “real” voice. How he sounds when he’s talking as himself, and not scripting from other things he’s heard. (Not relevant to the story but just to be clear: I didn’t finish the program after he said that. I do not torture children for a living.)

That’s what I thought of the first time I heard Sam Campbell respond to one of Lucy Beaumont’s most absurd statements. Sam stays in character on everything, even situations where most comedians break character (Taskmaster podcast, Off Menu), so the first time Lucy caught him so off guard that he just gave a genuine surprise response, his answer shocked me almost more than her statement. I had that same moment of “Oh shit, I’ve heard you say a lot of words before but I think I’ve just heard your real voice for the first time.” It’s not constant or anything, Sam’s still mostly in character throughout this. But every once in a while Lucy will throw him right off and it’s delightful. Her mother had him unable to keep up any persona for pretty much the whole time he was on, I think he nearly forgot he was meant to be acting and just enjoy the stories. (Please note: That moment of “Oh shit, you became a different person for a moment there and I think that’s the real one” is as far as this analogy goes, I feel the need to clarify because I know the internet is full of speculation about Sam being somewhere on some spectrum or other and that’s not the point I’m making here. I have no theories as to what spectrum Sam Campbell may or may not be on. But I do have views on how funny it is when someone gets emotionally pushed to the point of suddenly turning into the “real” person, my view is: not particularly funny if it’s a child confronted with a therapy program they don’t want and you should probably back off, but very funny if it’s a comedian who’s too confused by another comedian’s mother’s holiday anecdote to remember to do his inflection.)

The biggest downside to this podcast is I just can’t imagine anything living up to that guest episode. Tim Key was so good that by the time his segment finished, I felt bad for Lucy and her mother trying to live up to that. But I needn’t have, as by the time Lucy’s mother was done, I felt bad for Tim having given his time to that podcast only to be comedically upstaged by someone who isn’t actually a comedian (although Lucy’s mother is a playwright, and she sure crafted some theatre in that episode).

I’ve gone through various phases in my assumptions about Lucy Beaumont. It started with – well obviously that’s a character, it’s funny. Then – she is committing to that bit really hard, is there any chance she’s just actually like that and has lucked into her career? Then – oh that was some shitty misogyny of me to even consider that, no one wonders whether someone like Sam Campbell is a character act, obviously Lucy Beaumont also has a differently-pitched voice of a completely different person that she uses in real life, she just never lets it come out in a performance. Then I listened to her on the Comedian’s Comedian podcast where she started talking about how all famous literature was written by ghosts, and Stuart Goldsmith gave her so many opportunities to clarify herself, he kept saying that’s an interesting idea but she means it metaphorically of course, and she kept saying “No I mean it completely literally, I think people are possessed by spirits”, and you could hear the moment when it clicked to Stuart that he wasn’t going to get her to admit she’s doing a bit because she’s not, and he finally said “Are you pulling my leg, Lucy?” and she said no, and then he hurried off the topic. And after that I stopped feeling bad about wondering whether Lucy Beaumont might be actually just like that, not some carefully crafted character. I mean, obviously some of it is crafted. Obviously she couldn’t get where she is if she didn’t know what she was doing and understand that some of her absurd thoughts are funny, and funnier if she plays into that. But I think she does mean this stuff.

Hearing her mother on that podcast has broadened my view of Lucy Beaumont further, to thinking – oh, she might be the normal one. She might be genuinely like this but only because that’s her compromise between the normal she was taught and objective reality. And she, being very intelligent (and you can’t have as successful a career as Lucy Beaumont with having lots of intelligence, even if that someone goes alongside the belief that 1984 was written by an angry spirit), figured out where to find the humour in that compromise and in the gaps, and it’s worked out great. That’s my current working theory. I’ll let you all know how it evolves in another ten or so episodes.

The guests were great, but the three episodes with just the two of them have been funny too. Sam Campbell obviously brings a lot to the table, I’ve had the theme song stuck in my head for 48 hours straight, so fuck him for that, and Paul Williams too for good measure. It is fun to listen to them pass the brain cell back and forth, jockey for which one gets to be the weird one, and Sam Campbell normally loses, which is funny. But he still gets to be the weirder one often enough for that to also be very funny. Four episodes in and I'm sold.

[continuations]

Thinking About AI

I am writing this post to organize and share my thoughts about the extraordinary progress in artificial intelligence over the last years and especially the last few months (link to a lot of my prior writing). First, I want to come right out and say that anyone still dismissing what we are now seeing as a "parlor trick" or a "statistical parrot" is engaging in the most epic goal post moving ever. We are not talking a few extra yards here, the goal posts are not in the stadium anymore, they are in a far away city.

Growing up I was extremely fortunate that my parents supported my interest in computers by buying an Apple II for me and that a local computer science student took me under his wing. Through him I found two early AI books: one in German by Stoyan and Goerz (I don't recall the title) and Winston and Horn's "Artifical Intelligence." I still have both of these although locating them among the thousand or more books in our home will require a lot of time or hopefully soon a highly intelligent robot (ideally running the VIAM operating system -- shameless plug for a USV portfolio company). I am bringing this up here as a way of saying that I have spent a lot of time not just thinking about AI but also coding on early versions and have been following closely ever since.

I also pretty early on developed a conviction that computers would be better than humans at a great many things. For example, I told my Dad right after I first learned about programming around age 13 that I didn't really want to spend a lot of time learning how to play chess because computers would certainly beat us at this hands down. This was long before a chess program was actually good enough to beat the best human players. As an aside, I have changed my mind on this as follows: Chess is an incredible board game and if you want to learn it to play other humans (or machines) by all means do so as it can be a lot of fun (although I still suck at it). Much of my writing both here on Continuations and in my book is also based on the insight that much of what humans do is a type of computation and hence computers will eventually do it better than humans. Despite that there will still be many situations where we want a human instead exactly because they are a human. Sort of the way we still go to concerts instead of just listening to recorded music.

As I studied computer science both as an undergraduate and graduate student, one of the things that fascinated me was the history of trying to use brain like structures to compute. I don't want to rehash all of it here, but to understand where we are today, it is useful to understand where we have come from. The idea of modeling neurons in a computer as a way to build intelligence is quite old. Early electromechanical and electrical computers started getting built in the 1940s (e.g. ENIAC was completed in 1946) and the early papers on modeling neurons can be found from the same time in work by McCulloch and Pitts.

But almost as soon as people started working on neural networks more seriously, the naysayers emerged also. Famously Marvin Minsky and Seymour Paper wrote a book titled "Perceptrons" that showed that certain types of relatively simple neural networks had severe limitations, e.g. in expressing the XOR function. This was taken by many at the time as evidence that neural networks would never amount to much, when it came to building computer intelligence, helping to usher in the first artificial intelligence winter.

And so it went for several cycles. People would build bigger networks and make progress and others would point out the limitations of these networks. At one time people were so disenchanted that very few researchers were left in the field altogether. The most notable of these was Geoffrey Hinton who kept plugging away at finding new training algorithms and building bigger networks.

But then a funny thing happened. Computation kept getting cheaper and faster and memory became unfathomably large (my Apple II for reference had 48KB of storage on the motherboard and an extra 16KB in an extension card). That made it possible to build and train much larger networks. And all of a sudden some tasks that had seemed out of reach, such as deciphering handwriting or recognizing faces started to work pretty well. Of course immediately the goal post moving set in with people arguing that those are not examples of intelligence. I am not trying to repeat any of the arguments here because they were basically silly. We had taken a task that previously only humans could do and built machines that could do them. To me that's, well, artificial intelligence.

The next thing that we discovered is that while humans have big brains with lots of neurons in them, we can use only a tiny subset of our brain on highly specific tasks, such as playing the game of Go. With another turn of size and some further algorithmic breakthroughs all of a sudden we were able to build networks large enough to beat the best human player at Go. And not just beat the player but do so by making moves that were entirely novel. Or as we would have said if a human had made those moves "creative." Let me stay with this point of brain and network size for moment as it will turn out to be crucial shortly. A human Go player not only can only use a small part of their brain to play the game but the rest of their brain is actually a hindrance. It comes up with pesky thoughts at just the wrong time "Did I leave the stove on at home?" or "What is wrong with me that I didn't see this move coming, I am really bad at this" and all sorts of other interference that a neural network just trained to play Go does not have to contend with. The same is true for many other tasks such as reading radiology images to detect signs of cancer.

The other thing that should have probably occurred to us by then is that there is a lot of structure in the world. This is of course a good thing. Without structure, such as DNA, life wouldn't exist and you wouldn't be reading this text right now. Structure is an emergent property of systems and that's true for all systems, so structure is everywhere we look including in language. A string of random letters means nothing. The strings that mean something are a tiny subset of all the possible letter strings and so unsurprisingly that tiny subset contains a lot of structure. As we make neural networks bigger and train them better they uncover that structure. And of course that's exactly what that big brain of ours does too.

So I was not all that surprised when large language models were able to produce text that sounded highly credible (even when it was hallucinated). Conversely I found the criticism from some people that making language models larger would simply be a waste of time confounding. After all, it seems pretty obvious that more intelligent species have, larger brains than less intelligent ones (this is obviously not perfectly correlated). I am using the word intelligence here loosely in a way that I think is accessible but also hides the fact that we don't actually have a good definition of what intelligence is, which is what has made the goal post moving possible.

Now we find ourselves confronted with the clear reality that our big brains are using only a fraction of their neurons for most language interactions. The word "most" is doing a lot of work here but bear with me. The biggest language models today are still a lot smaller than our brain but damn are they good at language. So the latest refuge of the goal post movers is the "but they don't understand what the language means." But is that really true?

As is often the case with complex material, Sabine Hossenfelder, has a great video that helps us think about what it means to "understand" something. Disclosure: I have been supporting Sabine for some time via Patreon. Further disclosure: Brilliant, which is a major advertiser on Sabine's channel, is a USV portfolio company. With this out of the way I encourage you to watch the following video.

So where do I think we are? At a place where for fields where language and/or two dimensional images let you build a good model, AI is rapidly performing at a level that exceeds that of many humans. That's because the structure it uncovers from the language is the model. We can see this simply by looking at tests in those domains. I really liked Bryan Caplan's post where he was first skeptical based on an earlier version performing poorly on his exams but the latest version did better than many of his students. But when building the model requires input that goes beyond language and two dimensional images, such as understanding three dimensional shapes from three dimensional images (instead of inferring them from two dimensional ones) then the currently inferred models are still weak or incomplete. It seems pretty clear though that progress in filling in those will happen at a breathtaking pace from here.

Since this is getting rather long, I will separate out my thoughts on where we are going next into more posts. As a preview, I believe we are now at the threshold to artificial general intelligence, or what I call "neohumans" in my book The World After Capital. And even if that takes a bit longer, artificial domain specific intelligence will be outperforming humans in a great many fields, especially ones that do not require manipulating the world with that other magic piece of equipment we have: hands with opposable thumbs. No matter what the stakes are now extremely high and we have to get our act together quickly on the implications of artificial intelligence.

[cate-eblanchett]

I hope I never lose you, hope it never ends || Cate & Julianna

Months and months of anticipation, anxiety and especially excitement. Cate had this idea since a long time ago, she never did something like this before but with Julianna she had been through several first times and getting a ring, the most perfect ring as symbol of their commitment and as a promise of being by her side for the rest of their lives if it was possible because no one knows when life can change and the circumstances that lead you by different ways, when you lose someone you really love and you have to wait thirty years to feel that kind of love and rush again you don’t want to wait any longer when fate played at your favor. Cate was convinced that Julianna was the one, she has put sweat and tears to get the perfect ring that adorned her girlfriend’s finger and not only that, she wanted the perfect place and moment to pop up the transcendental question. Sometimes Julianna probably wondered why cate kept getting calls and mails that she never wanted to answer in her presence but everything was part of their plan.

After the Cannes festival where their family spent wonderful days where cate and Julianna could share with their kids part of the glamour and chaos of such a big event the couple flew to NYC as cate promised she would spend some weeks with Julianna’s at her place and little did she know that cate would not only spend those days with her, also, she had a big surprise for her.

“I’ve heard this new place in town has the best pasta. I think it’s strange you didn’t hear about it before” Cate said as she walked with Julianna by one of their favorite streets in New York after had left the car that left them there. Cate was wearing a pair of black trousers, a white shirt with a low cut showing off her cleavage and a black blazer, her hair slick back hair style and high heels that echoed against the pavement with every step, cate was not saying too much, she was trying to keep concentrated and calm while their made their way into a well-known building “oh! Do you remember this place? Your first apartment in New York!” cate said “casually” and smiled “what If we walk in? I want to see how much it has changed” she proposed as they kept looking up to the construction from the outside “come on! It will take us just five minutes! you love visiting memory lane!” cate said with a chuckle and pulled julianna inside “seventh floor” she remained where her old apartment was and while the elevator opened, she tapped her foot against the floor a nervously as she played with the buttons of her blazer, she winked at Julianna and held her hand “do you want to explore a little bit more?” she asked with the biggest and naughtiest smile on her face as she held her hand tighter walking through the hallway where julianna walked by every day during a long time and where cate sneaked in to see her every night until their affair ended, “the greatest kisses where shared here” she said leaning against the door of the apartment where julianna lived “do you remember” she whispered as she moved her hand behind her back and put her hand on the knob and “magically” the door opened. Cate pretended to be shocked “it’s open! Shall we…? Yes, yes! Come here!” cate insisted against julianna’s shocked reaction “if we go to jail for breaking in, we will have another anecdote to share with our grandchildren”

When the couple entered to the old apartment, the place had the lights low, some candles lit creating a romantic atmosphere the house was redecorated but when they walked into the living room, it was like if nothing had changed, everything was set up as if it was taken from the 90s, even some objects where the same that they owned back then “welcome to our little world” cate suddenly said feeling confident enough to reveal the real place where they would be having dinner “dinner for two on the floor, in a very exclusive place just for you and me. Do you like it?” cate couldn’t help but laugh with julianna’s reaction and because they were finally there.

[caffernnn]

Hi! I love your blog 💙 also as a fellow makoharu shipper (I finally watch the Final Stroke) I noticed the parallels of Kiyofumi and Ryuuji vs. Makoto and Haru and they are kind of interesting? Kiyofumi tells Ryuuji that "your swimming makes everyone feel good/happy" similar to Makoto saying that he felt happy seeing Haru swim after his race with Rin (also kind of parallels to episode 9 of season 1, where Makoto tells him he felt happy to swim in the relay with him). Also Hiyofumi saying "Hisashiburi" to Ryuuji, which parallels at the end of the movie with Makoto saying it to Haru. Fans on twitter have said that the Fanbook of Free! The Final Stroke mentioned "Kiyofumi is the indispensable presence of Ryuji Azuma as Makoto for Haru but since he passed away Azuma is alone now and really sad." Sorry for the rambling, I just love the meta 😅

Thanks, friend 💚 and YEAH the setup for Ryuuji to see himself in Haru and for his relationship with Kiyofumi to come back in his mind when he sees Haru with his close bonds (especially Makoto) is definitely an interesting one! I think there are more people out there who have spent more time sitting with Ryuuji’s character to properly understand him (I’m trying to be less of a hater) BUT from what I remember (being several months removed from watching the FS movies now) the few insights we got to see into Kiyofumi/Azuma’s past had me curious as to how it would all play into how Ryuuji reacts to seeing Haru’s spiraling trajectory once he chooses to take his advice and isolate. Imagine your grief manifesting into this idea of “I didn’t have a choice, but if you have one, leave before you can have a chance to lose them,” and then not seeing the flaw in that until this kid you see a lot of yourself in falls into that trap and loses touch with himself completely. If the first season of fr! could’ve been seen as a story of lost lonely former swimmers relearning the importance of connectivity through rebuilding (forming a new team, watching Rei learn from the ground up, building skills and trust in each other and everything else), there was ample setup from s3 to the FS movies for Azuma’s arc to mirror that same discovery process. His loss is different (there’s no getting back Kiyofumi for him :/) but there���s still a chance of rebuilding after, connecting after. Coaching is a shot at rebuilding, and the ways he approaches Haru had potential for rebuilding… but I don’t think we got to see as much of that tbh. Part of my delight/frustration with FS is that there are seeds for so many storylines and relationships to care about at this point, but that overwhelm of potential left a lot of avenues not fully explored. I’m not saying that out of all the fun crumbs introduced that the Ryuuji-Haru mentor/mentee storyline should’ve been top priority or anything, buuuut I would be curious to see that whole parallel setup get a proper follow-through. What do they learn from each other, if anything? Does Ryuuji ever realize he’s too close or invested for reasons not related to helping Haru? Do they have a serious talk during his rehab about a way forward that might not involve the pro world long-term, or that might not involve them moving on together? Could there be more moments between Ryuuji and Makoto as he keeps growing as a coach/trainer, since there’s also something interesting there?? Would be curious to see more takes on this 🥲

[matan4il]

I don’t know reeeally how tumblr works because I’m an Old, but I'm going to try anyway because it’s a Friday night and I’ve spent way too much time thinking about this and I wanted to get your thoughts so… I hope this is right. Feel free to ignore me though.

OK OK ok ok… so my new brain rot of the moment under the coma!Eddie theory (though part of me hates the idea of Eddie getting hurt again): We have Buck, who I firmly believe has no confusion in regards to his place in Connor and Kameron’s life and that he 100% knows that he is Donor, not Dad (I mean, a onesie is super typical gift for any expectant couple). I see the show coming back in 6B with Connor getting a little case of cold feet with the fact that Kameron is Officially Pregnant and he is going to be a dad and confiding in Buck, who starts having a little issue being placed in that position since he himself wants a Couch and is still looking for this “key to happiness” thing~ sooo Buck isn’t in a great place.

Meanwhile, Eddie is severely injured on a call and the coma!Eddie arc coalesces (or, if not coma, some other medically incapacitated!Eddie). Now we have Buck also grappling with the fact that his best friend/bro/partner/love of his life is hurt and in the hospital and he needs to take care of their kid. (Ugh, actually a big reason why I hope Eddie isn’t hurt again is because Chris is going to have to go through that AGAIN—anyway) Chris, who is very much growing up but still yet a minor, and whose father has written in Legal Writing that his Buck will be his legal guardian in this very. type. of. situation (!!!!!!!!!!). Of course, OF COURSE Buck steps in (again! just now he knows he legally can as well). He loves this kid. Except who else is in the picture? Helena and Ramon, who come to LA thinking they will be the ones to take Chris in (probably going to framed less in an antagonist way and more in a this-kid-has-so-many-adults-who-love-him way) and then find themselves like ???? What???? Buck who????

“No one will ever fight for my son as hard as you” - So what am I thinking? Buck is taking care of Chris while there’s maybe some sort of family court situation going on… since we know the actors were filming, maybe the Buckley parents step in as character witnesses (do they do that in family court??). As much as I will forever have a grudge against the Buckley seniors and nothing can change my mind that they are terrible parents, 9-1-1 seems to have a bit of a penchant for redemption of parental figures so… maybe that’s how they will be involved? A family court scene could also explain the somewhat preppy!Buck we saw in that BTS video.

I’m not quite sure exactly how the Buck v. Elder Diazs legal guardianship will play out, especially because IRL court tends to drag but What Is Time in TV-world. STILL, at one climactic moment I can imagine a scene in which Connor is calling Buck right before he needs to be in court with a mild freak out about Kameron/Unborn Baby and Buck ends the call with basically a, “You need to be there for your kid… and I need to be there for mine.” MINE — AS IN CHRISTOPHER, Buck finally self-actualizing his role and his importance in Christopher’s life.

Anywho, Eddie eventually wakes up (but not before Chris gets a moment as well, getting a little bit of autonomy and is able to advocate for himself that he loves his Buck and wants to stay with him and maybe Helena/Ramon accept this as fact and realize Buck is More than a coworker etc etc I digress — Eddie wakes up) and is basically like “Uh, duh. Buck is my co-parent and Christopher’s other dad come fIGHT ME ON IT I AM GONNA MARRY THAT MAN. (I just need to ask him out first.)” And THUS beginning the FRIENDS TO FIANCES ARC. THE END. Curtain close on 6B. FriendsToFiances is trending. Tumblr rejoices. *mic drop*

... PHEW. Now how many months do I have before this theory is completely debunked?

Hi lovely! ^u^ It's nice to meet you and please remember, you're not an "old," you're here to enrich us with your knowledge and experience while we share with you what we know! Mutual uplifting for the win! :D *hugs*

LOL Okay, I'll start by saying I love your scenario, I almost don't wanna comment anything at all. XD But since this presumably a meta ask...

One thing regarding Buck is that while yes, a onesie is a very typical gift for a baby, it's the fact that it's a firefighter one that gets to me. Buck put a part of himself into that gift, and the way he broke the news to his friends (it IS simple, Buck! You simply say, "My friend Connor just told me they're having a baby..." the 118 all know the context. But I think he wanted to utter the words "I'm gonna be a father," so he found a way to slip them in) also tells me that he's not really accepted that he's just a donor.

I'm also not sure they'll severely wound Eddie after dealing with his previous injury for all of s5. Lightly? Yeah, that can be. But I can't see him slipping into a coma. And if Eddie freaked out and was ready to interpret his son's wish as being for him to leave the 118, what is he gonna do if he actually goes into a coma? :o How will he ever make a responsible decision to keep being a firefighter if he can't stay out of the hospital for more than one season? Sorry, I'm making fun of 510 Eddie a bit, but I hope you get what I mean.

But I would STILL love to see your scenario play out, if not now, at some point in the next couple of seasons. After all, you are so VERY right in that Eddie saying that line about how no one will fight harder for Chris than Buck, it BEGS to be played out on our screen. We've already seen it once on a physical level, during the tsunami. It would be DELICIOUS to see it on an emotional, custody level. And it would require Buck to do the one thing he struggles with the most: to believe in his own worth. For him to do that so he could do what Eddie wants and what Chris needs would be AMAZING. TV poetry. Give it to me, I'm ready!

Thank you for this ask, have a great day! And here's my ask tag. xoxox

[vespertine-legacy]

I know this game is theoretically an mmo/fighting game, but it’s too much fun playing space Barbies. I’ve started putting together compare-and-contrast shots of the toons of mine that have different versions of the same outfits to try and figure out who is the best-dressed (even though none of them will ever match up to certain of my mutuals’ toons *coughMerkaracough*) and show off some of my favorite outfits.

Fashion show under the cut!

The Impulsive Adventurer set is just too versatile. Pretty much everybody gets to wear it for a little while! Agents while they’re trying to Not Look Imperial, Smugglers just because it’s a good casual look, Bounty Hunters because forearms.

Everybody looks good in the Resilient Warden set, with or without the rebreather mask, and it looks good with almost any dye module.

The Alliance Emissary set (at least the chest piece, I don’t like the leg wraps too much, and I can take or leave the gloves and the belt depending on the toon) is another one that looks good on just about anyone and with just about any dye module. And the hood stays down so you don’t have to worry about going bald with it--and amazingly, the Togruta central lek tucks nicely into the hood on the back instead of clipping through it!

The Armored Diplomat/Armored Interrogator sets give me life, and I can’t really say why. Did I have to buy both of them, even though they’re basically the same just different colors and a slightly different pattern on the skirt and the gloves? Yes, absolutely. (oh, @sunsetofdoom​ if you’re looking for an in-game armor set for Sohnya, this set has little finger-caps on the gloves, FYI). Also! Notice how different Kestrel and Nustia’s outfits look in Republic vs Imperial lighting (they are wearing the same top and no dye module, so it should be the same color, but Imperial lighting is so much bluer)

The Bold Hellion set is a tasteful, nearly tits-out, bared midriff look that is completely impractical for all of these ladies, considering they get shot at a lot, but I love it anyway. (I would like to know why the pen in the breast pocket is bright pink on Coda and Vysh but not on Tulia and Moxie though? is that a tiny “I’m a medic don’t shoot”? It isn’t an artefact of the dye module for either of them, I don’t think--Coda’s dye is brown/black. Maybe it’s just a slightly glitchy armor set...)

The Force Apprentice set is fun because Shoulder Pads and little mini capelets and Fingerless Gloves! I adore the original color of it, but it also takes most dyes well too. The collar has some pretty bad clipping issues (RIP Kestrel’s lekku), but it is what it is.

The Lucien Draay set gives me life, and not just because of the Lite Bondage look (promise). Beware though, it does give BT4 female toons a massive ass. Like, the biggest-looking ass you’ve ever seen. Like, they’ve already got some junk in the trunk to begin with, but DAYM. I’m not a huge fan of the skirt it comes with, so I often swap it out for a variety of different pants.

I don’t know what I love about the Sith Cultist set exactly, but I love it. There is something about the original color though that trips out my eyes sometimes and makes it looks a little like an optical illusion at some angles, so, I guess be mindful of that?

TIDDIES. OUT. The Able Hunter set is a distraction technique for my Bounty Hunters, plain and simple. 

The Distinguished Warrior set makes my teeny Warriors look like they’re playing dress-up in a Much Bigger Warrior’s armor and I love it. But the set dyes really well, and it looks like something that would, you know, actually protect them.

The Wayward Voyager set was my newest impulse buy, and it was mostly because I decided that Vysh wasn’t really that much of a tits-out kind of girl and needed a more modest look, and I absolutely love it, so I gave one to Moxie too.

[anazen333]

How Masking has Affected Me

I don’t remember much about how I acted during my childhood. 

I do remember being asked a lot if I was sad when really I was just thinking. I stared into space a lot, imagining stories in my head. 

I remember a few times people took advantage of me because I didn’t realize they had ill intentions (like when I went to a sleepover once and one of the girls said I had the perfect skin for a desert princess look. When she finally finished, and I got a look in the mirror, it was only then that I realized why the other girls had been laughing - because she had made me look like a clown - literally clown like makeup).

I remember it was hard for me to make friends. Especially when we had to move a lot and my so-called friends never kept in touch. I was always the last one to make contact, and I would wonder what I had done wrong that they didn’t want to talk to me anymore.

Then high school came around and I got into singing. I remember being praised by my voice teacher for my skills, despite having almost no training. She encouraged me to enter a competition. And while I was one of the better singers there, I didn’t place. Because all I did was sing. During the entire performance I didn’t move. Because I thought the whole point of being a singer and listening to singers was about the voice (I always found it distracting when people moved while they sang). So my teacher recommended I get involved in the local youth theater group.

It was there that I learned how to ‘act’. I even took a workshop in it. My teacher spent most of the time getting me to stop smiling whenever I was portraying anger (I think I might have picked that up from an anime I was watching at the time because no one I knew did that).

Then I went to college and had to do presentations for classes. My mom advised me to pretend like I was playing a character - like I did during the theater productions (because I was a good actor). So I did. And soon, the acting bled out into the rest of my life.

I did it to make friends. I did it to get jobs. I did it with my family so I could finally feel included.

Since college, I’ve had the chance to start over three times. And each time, though I told myself this would be the time where I would let myself be myself, I kept falling back into the Act. 

All smiles, all politeness, all the time.

And it is exhausting. 

Even though I now work in a fairly low key environment, where I don’t have to interact with a lot of people, I always keep the Act up, I’ve always got the Mask On. Because I constantly have to be on guard.

Now I think the Masking is finally getting to me.

Several times during the first few months of my new job, there were very stressful and sometimes volatile meetings I had to attend. And while I was able to hold it together during those meetings, the stress would build up and I would have meltdowns at the office (once to the point where I locked myself in a bathroom stall for twenty minutes because I couldn’t stop crying).

When we were all sent home for 18 months, it was such a relief. For the most part. The constant Zoom meetings tired me out so easily, even when I had the luxury of turning off my camera (which was a huge help).

I actually didn’t learn about the term Masking until about a month ago. I can’t remember how I came across it, but I remember when I did, I felt something click in place. I realized that’s what I had been doing this whole time. And then I realized that since that is what I had been doing, I actually had no idea how I would actually react to anything. Because of the constant masking, I had lost my Sense of Self.

Sure, I know what I like and what I don’t like (if presented with options and choices). But it’s hard for me to know if I’m laughing at something someone said because I actually thought it was funny, or if that’s just the Mask. I don’t know if I’m actually sad when someone tells me about a tragedy in their lives, or if I’ve been trained so well on how to react. I don’t have solid opinions because I tend to side with whoever I’m talking with.

And if I don’t know how I’d react to any given emotional situation, how do I know who I am?

Worse, how do I know if people like me for me, or the Mask? And does that mean I will never be liked and loved for who I really am?

[rubyinasnuggie]

Random Headcanons No One Asked For:

-Both Ruby and Weiss are left handed

--Yang was 100% prepared to tease them about it when Blake very pointedly uses her left hand to write something

--Blake is ambidextrous

--which makes Yang the only right-handed one on the team

--until the fall of beacon oops

-Ren is fully color blind

--once baby Nora figured that out, she made it her mission to explain to him what colors are based on other sensations (sue me I love this trope)

--she describes pink as the quiet comfort they share in each other's presence

--Ren finally sees color for the first time when his semblance upgrades, and he can finally see the pink petals with Nora

-Blake likes to climb on things and find random nooks and crannies to read

--it turns into a game of reverse hide-and-seek when someone needs her: depending on how urgent it is the entire squad will drop everything and look for her

-team STRQ won the Vytal tournament their first year, specifically Summer was the champion

--Yang was more upset about the disqualification than she'd ever admit, because she secretly imagined Summer was out there somewhere watching the tournament, proud of her babies

-Tai pulled himself out of his depression by gardening: having a routine helped him, so he encouraged baby Ruby and Yang to get similar gentle hobbies

-Ruby raises chickens at home

--she very lovingly feeds them corn and calls them her ladies

--Yang affectionately calls them creatures and cluckers and other such rude things to get a rise out of Ruby

-Ruby deeply wants a cow

--this is her one and only retirement dream

--although honestly she can never imagine herself living past her 20s

-Yang struggled with picking a hobby, she gets bored easily and hates the expected

--its only post-Beacon that she understands the benefits of a routine

--thats why she ends up with a ton of chores, just some structure to help her through the day

-Ruby will drink any type of milk, but Strawberry milk is her favorite

-Sun is allergic to bananas but he doesn't know

--he thinks bananas are supposed to be spicy

-Weiss loves sour apple

-Pyrrha loves chocolate almonds

-Yang thinks fish are creepy, she just generally doesn't love the ocean

--she thinks Neptune is a little clown though

-Oscar gets dressed by putting on his left sock, left boot, then his right sock and right boot

--RNJR made it their mission to interrupt him during this just to see him walk around with one boot on

-Ruby likes to bake, it's one of the few solid memories she has of her mom

--one night Weiss was feeling homesick and Ruby taught her how to make mug cakes

--"its probably not that good compared to your cake butler, but it's pretty simple, and I like them!"

--Weiss secretly makes them at least once a week, even back home in Atlas

-Weiss has taken flight lessons, at one point Ironwood really pushed for her to become a pilot in the military

-Blake has a field journal of the different types of Grimm she's encountered

--team RWBY & JNPR have spent several nights sitting in a circle talking and adding to the journal

--while traveling across Anima, Ruby sketched and took notes on all the Grimm she saw, just in case she ever found Blake again

-Weiss collects rocks

--no, not crystals. actual rocks

--shes rarely spent time in the real outside, but whenever she has, she picks up little rocks and puts them in her pocket before anyone can see

-Jaune never actually stopped writing left and right on the bottom of his shoes actually

-Weiss had never been allowed to paint her nails as a kid, she'd always get weekly French manicures instead

--by the second semester at Beacon, Ruby, Weiss, Nora, and Ren would have weekly manicure nights where they'd paint each other's nails

--there were several times they'd rope the rest of the teams into it, especially during the Vytal tournament where they'd write team names on their nails

--during the singles round they'd write Yang on one hand and Pyrha on the other

--"we couldn't make it fit without cutting one of the R's!"

-Pyrrha and Weiss became each other's default plus one's for fancy events, to the point people began to speculate that the two were dating

--Jaune was somehow jealous of them both and it was very confusing to him since he had poor self awareness

-Yang cuts Ruby's hair, but after she lost her arm she lost the fine motor skills to do a good job, so Blake started to do it

-Blake is always there to help Yang with her phantom pains and residual limb pain

--she helps massage Yang's arm while leaning close and purring

--Yang cried the first time Blake did this because she's not used to being taken care of

-Nora never gets sick and is the designated nurse when a bug goes around the teams

--the electricity incident was the first time Nora has ever been bed-ridden

-Weiss took ballet as a child

-Jaune is actually pretty good at the guitar

-Pyrrha is not musically inclined at all its a miracle she managed to do the iconic JNPR shine dance

--jk but actually she's a decent dancer when she has the steps choreographed for her but she has no natural rhythm

-in the last few months before Pyrrha's death, she and Jaune would waltz on top of the roof together

--there were several almost kisses

--maybe a few successful kisses who knows

-there are occasions (obv extremely rare) when Ren actually takes the bulk of the energy from Nora

--this leads to thrilling game nights where Ren makes multiple 40pt remnant-equiv-of-scrabble plays while Nora naps

-Oscar is the only person who can beat Ren in scrabble, although it's very closely matched

-Oscar is amazing at chess and will play it against himself like a little square

-Yang and Ruby are experts at the tabletop war game they play in the library

--9 times out of 10, the winner is one of them

-Oscar is the only one who also knew about Compost King, which was very exciting for Jaune

--Compost King is a common game night activity while they were in Haven because its so hard to say no to Oscar

-Yang is a straight-A student and has always been

-Blake never had any formal education and she finds a lot of the classes incredibly dull or ineffective at teaching the material

--she's always the one convincing Yang to skip a class and lie in the sun-warmed grass with her

--she still gets Bs easily

-Oscar is a very fast reader and will devour any book he's given

--his aunt would frequently bring home books from town just to keep him entertained

-Ruby has suffered from migraines and nightmares her entire life, post-Beacon they only got worse

-Weiss shops at local dust stores whenever she can, even though she could get shipments for free

--however she does have Ron Swanson's "I know more than you" energy when she's shopping

-Blake and Ren will sometimes take naps together

--not cuddling, just occupying the same general space

--wake them up at your own risk

-if Ruby isn't engaged with something, she can start to scatter and dissolve into rose petals

--its a very slow process and someone has always snapped her out of it before she's fully vanished, but Yang is worried about what would happen if no one caught her in time

-Ren is afraid of horses

-Blake hates being cold

-Yang naturally radiates heat cause semblance duh

-Weiss glued the tiniest gravity crystals to the underside of Ruby's bed to ensure it never falls

-JNPR likes to push their beds all together so they can sleep in one big pile

-Nora can only sleep if she's holding someone's hand

Hope u guys enjoyed! These are in no particular order, sorry that I kinda jumped around a lot 😅

Feel free to reblog and add your own ideas and headcanons! ❤

[lets-curse-each-other]

Itadori Yuuji. A cursed child

Summary:

• Itadori’s personality, environment, background;

• Life guidelines and principles;

• Tragedies and their impacts;

• Moral dilemmas;

• Character’s development;

• Possible outcome.

Keep in mind:

• This is done to generalize the information and better understand Itadori. Most likely, I’ll not discover new truths, but will simply state the facts and note important (in my opinion) details;

• Periodically I use some interesting ideas from other analyses/theories. Links are attached;

• The article is divided into several points that will be posted separately.

Introduction:

To be a shonen protagonist is hard work. Especially when your story doesn’t focus on how you become a hokage or look for mysterious treasure, yet with how slowly but surely you bring your execution closer. Itadori Yuuji’s death sentence is signed at the beginning, and throughout the story the concept of predictability plays an important role. A walking dead, but this doomed character can easily give us, readers, food for thought.

I. Who are you, Itadori Yuuji?

Itadori Yuuji was a fifteen-year-old pupil who had lived on his own for some time, because the grandad, the only relative, suffered a serious disease and was at the hospital. It clearly showed how independent he was at his age.

“Yuuji was drawn as someone who tends to just go with the flow. He didn’t really have a specific purpose, or a close friend”, as was said in a well-written analysis, and it perfectly describes Itadori. The only friends Yuuji had were older guys from a school club, but we have this frame that explains several things:

A couple of months? There is no information about people Yuuji communicated with before, there were only two guys with whom he spent limiting time a day and sometimes took part in activities which didn’t really attract him. “Other than the freedom he got, the club also offered him some casual company when he wasn’t in hospital to take care of his grandfather, which was enough for him”:

He was good at sports and could join track-and-field team, consequently he would easily reach success at this sphere bearing in mind his abilities. Itadori had refused. We know that seemingly the main reason lay in his grandad whom Itadori had to visit. Personally, I don’t think this is the only cause. It appears he was the kind of person who didn’t like attention or crowds, or who was not vain, or who, despite the fact of being outwardly an extroverted type, preferred calm and quiet, or simply got used to loneliness, and many other “or”. Generally, it is important to point out this small detail and I want to skip ahead and have a look at this moment:

“I tend to get lonely”. Hence the cliché of Itadori being this sociable, hectic and active is ruined, don’t you think so?

This is kinda another proof of Itadori’s loneliness and lack of social interaction. He easily left a native town without looking back at people there. Grandad was the only important person that had sense at that place, so nothing could keep him from moving:

And let’s continue the thought about Wasuke. Later Itadori faces his first significant tragedy – grandpa’s death. I like thoughts from this article: “He is a 15 years old child who doesn’t really know how to deal with his grandpa’s death. Especially because he was the only person he had. He misinterprets his grandpa’s last words… Yuji in episode one is dealing with a huge loss. It is understandable that he holds to his grandpa’s last words, because those words are a motif to keep on going and frame of significance for him. Since everything happened so quickly, he wasn’t able to understand that his grandpa wanted him to have a happy life, to build ties with significant others, not to sacrifice his life…”

Here Itadori got the guideline that would lead him further and according to which he would be able to fight and go through other tragedies. Interestingly, I think Itadori and his grandpa were very similar in character. They both had preferred solitude, and only after close relative’s last words the boy decided to change his… um, life tactic (?) and became more out-going, made bonds with people around, although it's not in his nature.

I made an emphasis on the speed of events in the quote purposefully. In accordance with the article above Itadori didn’t have time to process the grandfather’s death properly, what is more subsequent events forced him to make decisions immediately. And it was like the two things overlapped. The motif: help people; the possibility to fulfill the motif: become Sukuna’s vessel and to be executed.

One more note I want to make is Itadori’s conclusion about proper and improper death. This was the second principle after “help people” that would rule his decisions. He clearly divided in his mind what were good and bad ways to die, being immensely affected by grandad’s death. Before starting sorcery career, the idea was accurate, motivational enough for him to take actions. It even involved his own life, or his death, to be exact. To die surrounded by people – this seemed something worth to strive for. Nonetheless, this very principle of “proper/improper death” would be reconsidered in the end of Junpei’s arc.

After “picking his hell”, Itadori clearly expressed his opinion about unfairness of the situation. He bravely and maturely took responsibilities, however, he didn’t really agree. After some time Itadori would change his mind and call into question the meaning of his own existence.

It’s pretty unclear whether Yuuji’s motivation was dictated by grandad’s “troublesome last request”, by his own life rules or by the mixture of the former and the latter. And then Itadori met Yaga Masamichi. Yaga briefly explained sorcery job and made Itadori think twice, form the motivation more structured. This was a vital thing for such a profession because the possession of a well-planned motif could help to simplify the chosen path. Finally, Itadori formulated his impulse to go further. Hence it's evident that he wasn’t ruled only by grandad’s last wish, but also by his personal traits of character:

The next chapters were basically introducing readers to a new character - Nobara. However, here you can also see one important thing. Itadori defeated his “natural” enemy for the first time as a shaman. He felt great, he was confident in himself, so far this profession did not cause him serious concerns. Itadori was still satisfied, his confidence in his abilities was beyond doubt. And this was point №3 that would undergo changes in the process of hero’s development.

Summing up:

Itadori under the influence of two intermixed motives (help people + not die alone) took his way. This character is interesting because most of his driving impulses will lose their power in the future. Yuuji is constantly "growing", gaining experience and knowledge, turning from a "green" kid with naive, black-and-white rules into a beaten by life person. And this dynamism of the character causes great attraction.

[stargazer-sims]

previously...

56 - San Myshuno (part one)

Dylan has no idea where the week went.

He doesn’t care where it went, really. For the past six days, he and Derek have been on a practically nonstop thrill ride from one end of the San Myshuno city limits to the other. He's pretty sure he hasn't been completely sober since Monday night, and he's eaten so much amazing food that it makes him wonder why he hadn't been dining at restaurants more often prior to this. Derek talked him into going shopping after all, and they've been to see the street art exhibition, and they've both gotten new tattoos. In short, he's having the most fun he's had in ages, maybe since the last summer he spent in the trailer park, before his final year of university.

Their adventure has had its downsides too, unfortunately. They got kicked out of their first hotel because the impromptu party that sprang up when they invited some people they'd met at a club back to their room got a bit too noisy. It'd gone on past three o'clock in the morning, and the night manager had apparently received more than a few complaints about it.

Although they didn't get arrested or charged, the police were called. That'd been a scene, especially when the officers recognized one the people they were with as a known petty criminal. Luckily, that guy had behaved himself in front of the cops. Things could've been a lot worse otherwise.

Currently, they're staying in less reputable accommodations, and if Dylan is being completely honest, it's a place he feels far more at home in than the previous one. The walls are thin and there are suspicious stains on the floor in his room, but the bathroom and the bedsheets are clean, and the diner next door has awesome all-you-can-eat breakfasts.

He finds that he's comforted, falling asleep to the sound of traffic and to all the noises of the city’s humanity around him. In this place, people aren't just existing; they're living. No one is putting up a façade of class and respectability. No one is holding anything back for the sake of politeness or public image. All of it is real and it's raw, and Dylan can't deny that he loves it.

Another advantage of their current motel is that it's cheap enough for them each to have their own room. This has worked out in Derek's favour particularly, since it means he's been able to bring in all the women he wants. There have been several, and Dylan is astounded that his brother hasn't had to pay any of them to entertain him. All of his women have been random clubgoers who, for whatever reason, find Derek irresistible and can't wait to have their way with him.

Dylan, for his part, hasn't brought anyone back to his room. Watcher knows, he's wanted to, though. He'd met a sweet boy last night who made him start to get hard just by looking longingly at him from under his thick, dark eyelashes. The boy, with his mop of black hair, peach fuzz beard and gorgeous brown eyes, was called Nadim, and he was suitably impressed that he didn't need to teach Dylan how to pronounce it correctly. He'd sat on Dylan's lap for nearly half an hour while they both drank straight vodka shots. Nadim put his hands in places where Dylan hadn't been touched in at least a couple of months and told him all the things he could do to him, if only Dylan would take him home.

Nadim swore up and down that he was nineteen, but Dylan knows an underage kid with a fake ID when he sees one. After all, he'd been an underage kid with a fake ID himself once. That was one of the things that kept him from inviting the beautiful boy to spend the night with him. Regardless of anything else, he definitely did not want to get into trouble for sleeping with someone who wasn't a legal adult yet.

"You really need to go find someone your own age to play with," he'd told Nadim. "I'm too old for you."

"But, I want you," Nadim whined, somehow managing to pull himself even further onto Dylan's lap, so that their faces were just centimeters apart. "Can't you tell how much I want you?"

Dylan could tell, and that was the problem. He ran his hands down Nadim's sides and over his tiny hips, and the boy squirmed and moaned. Dylan gave his thigh a gentle squeeze. "I think you'd almost be worth the risk, but I can't do it."

"I won't tell anybody," Nadim said, almost breathless. He put his hand over Dylan’s and tried to guide it. "No one has to know."

"Believe me, I'd love to do everything you want, but you and I both know that I'd get in trouble if I did. You're what? Seventeen?"

"I'm nineteen," Nadim insisted, but the way his golden brown skin darkened across his cheekbones told Dylan he was lying.

"How much would you have asked me for?"

"For you? I'd do it for free. You seem nicer than the usual. I actually want to, with you.”

"How much?" Dylan persisted.

"A hundred dollars," Nadim told him, looking embarrassed. "But, I'll do it for free. I promise. Top, bottom, whatever you want."

"No." Dylan wiggled his wallet out of his pocket and gave Nadim some money. "You can tell everyone how mind-blowing I was."

Nadim pouted, but didn't refuse the cash. "I think you would be. I would've liked to find out."

"Look me up in two years, when I'm divorced and you're legal." And when I haven't got a fucking parasite in my abdominal cavity.

Admittedly disappointed and most definitely unsatiated, he watched Nadim saunter off. He would've enjoyed a night with such an eager boy, and things might've ended differently if Nadim really had been nineteen.

But, maybe it was for the best that he'd caught Nadim in a lie about his true age. It meant he would have to satisfy himself, but he supposed that was better than having to answer awkward questions if the alternative should ever have come to the attention of the wrong people.

And there was Zahir to think about as well. As much as Dylan's entire body ached for what Nadim had offered him, in the end he knows he would've felt guilty for betraying the man he still loves, no matter how hurt and angry he is at the moment. Yes, he wants to make Zahir suffer for mistreating him, but not like that, not in a way that would guarantee they'd never reconcile.

Contrary to what he'd said to Nadim, he doesn't want a divorce. Zahir might not give a rat's ass about his mental health or his wellbeing right now, but some small part of him hopes that will change. If only they could come up with a solution that wouldn't completely wreck Dylan's future and would somehow still be acceptable to Zahir, then maybe there'd be a chance of getting something close to their old life back.

Intellectually, he realizes this entire line of thought is stupid, of course. In reality, there is no solution that can work for both sides. Either Dylan gets what he wants, or Zahir does. Perhaps they will get back together at some point, but it'll never be like it was. There's no possible way it could be. The moment he let Dr. Zira stick a needle into his stomach, they were locked into a new trajectory, one which was destined to destroy everything good that they'd spent the past fifteen years working for. He just hadn't seen that until it was too late.

Why had he even agreed to it? He's asked himself this question a thousand times.

He recalls what he claimed his reasons were, but they hardly make sense to him now. He isn't so overflowing with love that he needs to spread it outward to an extra person. He wants to shower all of it on Zahir, and he wants Zahir to give all his devotion to him in return. The real reason for doing it was because he thought it was what Zahir wanted, and he wanted to make him happy. He'd convinced himself that Zahir's potential happiness was enough to make him happy too, but that's turned out to be a fallacy.

In the beginning, he may have tricked himself into believing that everything was going to be fine, and he may even have thought he'd been interested enough to see it through. But then, things started to get challenging, and he became the object of Zahir's constant nagging and harassment. He began to crack, and it was then that he understood perfectly what an absolutely fucking huge mistake he'd made in agreeing to do something so drastic, solely on the basis of pleasing his husband.

He should have known better. He's spent the majority of his life trying to please the people around him, and it's never made him happy, not once.

When he thinks about the times he's been happiest, they haven't involved hard work, achievements, money or success. Playing the piano, gardening, cooking with his mom, tinkering around with old electronics out in the garage with his dad, pizza and beer and bonfires in the back yard with Derek and their cousins are the things that make him feel most settled and content. Playing on the beach with Zahir, travelling with him, wandering around secondhand bookshops with him, bringing him breakfast in bed on rainy Sundays, walking hand-in-hand downtown, and cuddling in front of the fire; that's his spiritual happy place.

Sure, he likes having money and a nice house, and he enjoys his job, but he doesn't need any of that. He could have done something else with his life, something meaningful and fulfilling. His dream job might not have paid as well as being a software engineer does, but at least he wouldn't have had to cram himself into a mold that was created by someone else and which was never meant for him.

He imagines himself as a professional musician, like he always said he wanted to be. He could spend his days practicing and composing. Maybe he wouldn't be rich, but he'd be doing what he was really passionate about. He could live in the trailer park, among his people, and nobody would care if his house and yard weren't immaculate or if he wore nothing but sweatpants and flip-flops every day. He could have a beer on the front porch, eat mac and cheese straight from the pot he'd cooked it in, and race motorcycles on Saturday nights. Nobody would give a fuck how many times a day he said 'fuck', and nobody would say he lacked etiquette, because they'd hardly have room to criticize him about that.

It might not sound idyllic to some people — it wouldn't to Zahir — but Dylan is positive it's the life he was meant to lead all along. Instead, he's trapped in a world of manicured lawns, professional networking events, refined manners and proper speech, and special forks for salad, dinner and dessert. And with sudden, painful clarity, he realizes he hates it. The only part of it he cares about is Zahir, but he could no more expect his affluent, well-bred husband to leave his neat and tidy existence than he can expect himself to continue pretending to be happy in a world where he so obviously does not belong.

So, he can live the way he wants, but with a Zahir-sized rip in his soul, or he can stay with his love and be tied down by the drudgery of parenthood and miserable in his forced fake sophistication. Either way, he loses something vital. It's all dead ends, no matter which way he turns.

He'd finally convinced Derek that he wasn't suicidal, but Watcher damn it all, maybe he is. Disappearing off the face of the earth would be a hell of a lot easier than trying to figure out what he's supposed to do from here. It'd be so simple too, in a place like this. Someone could give him something that would make him fall asleep and ensure that he'd never wake up. He's too big a coward to jump off a bridge or a building. He'd much rather go painlessly and quietly, and not be terrified in his last moments.

He stares into his glass. If he's contemplating this, obviously he's not drunk enough.

Tonight, he and Derek are at a club called The Spice. It's a different venue than the one they visited last night, where he'd met sweet, sexy little Nadim. They'd chosen this club because while they'd been wandering around town in the afternoon, Derek spotted a poster advertising live music here this evening. They're flying home tomorrow, so they've decided to make their last night in San Myshuno a good one, and what better way than with booze, ecstasy, and a live band? He knows he's going to feel like shit in the morning, but he'll have fun tonight. He can always sleep on the plane.

The band hasn't come out yet. Right now, there's a DJ who's also pretty good. The band should be starting soon, though, judging by the number of people bustling around the area on the dancefloor that's been marked off as the stage.

Dylan watches them for a while. He pulls in a sharp breath and nearly aspirates on a mouthful of liquor when he thinks he recognizes one of them.

Derek gives him a puzzled look. "You okay?"

"Uh... yeah." Dylan coughs a few times. "Sorry. I just... saw somebody."

"Oh, yeah? Someone caught your eye?"

"You could say that."

"I'll bet it's that guy with the braids, isn't it?" says Derek. "Dude in that gay-looking glittery jacket? He looks like he'd know his way around another guy's bedroom."

"He's married," says Dylan.

"What? How the fuck would you know that?"

"I kinda know him from support group."

"You mean the weird alien science support group? The pregnant dude support group?" Derek scrutinizes the man in the purple jacket. "He doesn't look pregnant. He looks fit as fuck. Like, you can tell from here that he's totally fuckin' ripped. Good choice, bro. I'd probably want a piece of that too, if I swung the other way."

"He's not pregnant," Dylan says. "His husband is. Anyway, I doubt I'd ever get near him like that even if I wanted to, which I don't. He treats his husband like fucking royalty. It's like, as far as he's concerned, the sun rises and sets on Félix."

"Lucky Félix," says Derek. "Weird question, but does he look pregnant?”

“Who, Félix?”

“Yeah.”

“Why do you want to know that?”

“I don’t know. I guess ‘cause I’m curious. You’re pregnant but you don’t look like it, so I was just wondering."

"Can you not remind me about the pregnancy, please?"

"Sorry,” says Derek. “But, does he? Look pregnant, I mean.”

"Yeah, he does," Dylan says. “Félix is so thin, he started looking pregnant weeks ago. And he’s proud of it too, sashaying around in those stupid fucking dresses with his belly sticking out, like he's the queen of Willow Creek. And then there’s Davian acting as if he's as fragile as something made out of glass and sunbeams. It's annoying."

"So, I can tell you're not the least bit jealous at all."

"Shut the fuck up, Derek."

"Thanks for the mental image,” Derek says. “Now I'm trying to picture this skinny-ass pregnant dude in a dress."

"With a beard," says Dylan. "That really completes the look."

Derek laughs out loud and nearly spits his drink. "Oh my fuck. That's literally the weirdest shit I've heard all week."

"Those two are the living definition of weird shit. Get this. Their latest stunt is to adopt a mentally disabled alien."

"Why?" Derek asks.

"Damned if I know," Dylan says. "Probably to get noticed. I'm sure the point of pretty much everything they do is to get themselves noticed. I mean, Davian's trying to be famous. If you want people to sit up and pay attention and remember your name, then what better way to do it than to set up your own online show and then put yourself out there in the most bizarre ways you can think of?"

"Ah yeah, I see. They're those people. The 'bare their metaphorical ass and shake it in your face' type."

"Their literal ass, too. You should see the stuff Félix wears when he's not in a dress. The getup he had on at Tae's birthday party... holy shit. His top looked like, I don't even know. A fuckin' sports bra with frills, and his shorts were so short, I could see part of the tattoo on his ass when he bent over to pick up something. Like, seriously, the only time you'd see more skin is if you went to the beach."

"Okay, then. 'The tattoo on his ass' isn’t a phrase you hear every day."

“Well, he does have one.”

“Seriously? Who actually tattoos their ass?”

“The same person who thinks ‘slutty cross-dresser’ is a fashion aesthetic, I guess.”

“Bro, I’m picturing it, and I gotta say I’m not sure whether I should laugh or cringe.” Derek quirks an eyebrow. "The crop tops and short-shorts must look super attractive with the pregnant belly."

"If you really wanna know, they do."

Dylan looks up abruptly at the sound of a new voice in the conversation. He'd stopped watching the stage area while he and Derek were talking, and he hadn't been aware that Davian had left it. Now, the tall, muscular man is standing next to their table, arms folded across his broad chest, copious gold jewelry and purple sequined suit jacket glinting in the club's multi-coloured lights.

Dylan suffers a very real moment of panic, but he recovers quickly, probably thanks to all the alcohol and controlled substances in his bloodstream. They're making him feel kind of bulletproof, really.

He conjures up a smile and says casually, "Hey, Davian. Big coincidence, seeing you. How long have you been standing there?”

"Don't 'hey Davian' me, you asshole," Davian growls. "I've been standing here long enough."

"Oh shit," Derek mutters, probably just loud enough for Dylan to hear.

"What are you doing here, Dylan?" Davian demands. "And why the fuck are you talking about my Félix?"

"It's none of your business why we're here," Derek interjects.

"Nobody asked you," Davian says. He gestures at Dylan. "I'm talking to this trash bag."

"Excuse me?" says Dylan.

"As if I didn't already have a low opinion of you," Davian tells him. "You're in a place like this, showing absolutely zero regard for yourself and your poor kid, not to mention your husband, and now I come up on you talking shit about mine? Félix tried to be your friend, you know. He was fuckin' worried about you, and here you are talking about him like he's the one who's trash."

"Well, I'm sorry to have worried his pretty little head when he's in such a delicate condition," Dylan says. "But, as you can see, I'm fine."

"No, you are way far from fine," says Davian.

"With all due respect, that's not for you to decide. Where I go and what I do is none of your business."

"Maybe not, but Zahir’s been looking for you, and I'll bet he’d like to know where you are and what you're doing. Maybe I should call him and tell him."

"You wouldn't," says Dylan.

"You don't think so?"

"Fine. Go for it, but if you do, I'll tell Félix that you were here, whoring around in San My without him."

"He wouldn't believe you," Davian says.

"Wouldn't he? You've got a reputation for that, don't you? Why do you think he wouldn't believe me?"

Davian smiles, and the effect reminds Dylan of nature documentaries, where the camera zooms in on the leopard who’s about to pounce on its prey. "Because, asshole. We're here together. He’s right behind you, over at the bar."

Dylan tries to glance over his shoulder as surreptitiously as possible. To his consternation, Félix is indeed at the bar, squeezed into a tight blue dress that accentuates his belly, and balanced on impossible sparkly stiletto heels that accentuate his slim legs. He's leaning with one hip against a bar stool, as if he's just gotten there and is planning to stay for slightly longer than the few minutes it'll take the bartender to get him his drink, but not long enough to sit down.

Davian catches his eye, and Félix gives him a flirty little wave and a seductive smile. Félix doesn't appear to notice Dylan, because he immediately turns back to the bartender and holds up two fingers like, Give me a second one of those. Dylan wonders vaguely what he ordered. Probably cranberry juice or some other healthy shit.

He guesses from the second drink that Félix expects Davian to come over and join him, but it seems Davian has his own agenda.

“Watcher almighty, what the actual fuck…?” Derek mumbles. incredulously. “He literally is a skinny-ass pregnant dude in a dress.”

Davian glares at him. “You don’t wanna go there, man.”

“Uh… right.” Derek’s expression is one of stunned disbelief. “Gotta be the drugs making me see shit.” He gulps the remainder of his drink without pausing for breath, and avoids any further eye contact with Davian.

Davian locks eyes with Dylan. He reaches around to his back pocket, and pulls out his phone. "So... you wanna start explaining yourself, or should I just call Zahir right now?"

[ghstandpucks]

Teacher Appreciation Part 3 ~ Nathan MacKinnon (4+1)

Here it is! Part 3 (and last) of Teacher Appreciation! I'm so thankful for all the comments and love, thank you to everyone who has read it! Let me know what you think of this part! Shout out to @cozynightscandle for asking about a part 3 and providing some inspo, as well as @avsfans95 for always letting me bounce ideas off of her!

Also, sixth grade is still considered elementary in my district, so I kept it that way for purposes of the story!

Summary: The four times Nate surprised your class, and the one time your class and Nate surprised you.

Warning: mentions of the pandemic (not the main focus, just touching on how teaching was during that time as I spent the beginning of my teaching career pretty much online)

Word Count: 4,634

Master List

Your first year of teaching sixth grade was actually more successful than you would have thought. It was a different type of bond you were able to build with your students. Instead of having to tie shoes and clean boo-boos, you became someone that your students would come talk to if they were too stressed. They told you their dreams and aspirations; all the while still relying on you to calm their fears when math became overwhelming. Long story short, you absolutely loved it. Yes, some were taller than you, and on more than one occasion Nate would lose you among your kiddos when he would come to help in your classroom. Still, you built connections that you didn’t think were possible after always working with the younger kids. Nate loved seeing how excited you were, and loved when you would come home and tell him all about what your kids did that day.

And yes, home was now with Nate. During a bad snow one evening, you were panicking about having to get back home so you could change just in case school wasn’t cancelled for the next day. Nate, off-handedly, suggested that it would be easier for you to just move in, since you were over all the time anyways; his office half taken over with craft supplies already. You agreed with a sarcastic laugh, thinking he was joking, but woke up to him clearing out space in his closet. During winter break, you officially moved in. Now it was your second year in sixth grade, and a handful of your kiddos from third grade when you first met Nate were back in your class. And if you thought third graders were intrusive, they just got worse, especially when they already knew you.

1

“Miss Y/L/N, could you not give us homework tonight? I have practice,” Steven asked right after the morning bell rang and you were checking over last nights homework.

“Steven, I already don’t give you much homework and you have time to usually start it in class. Use your time wisely kiddo,” you said, stamping his paper as he groaned.

“But Miss Y/L/N…”

“But nothing, do your work,” you responded, making a face at him that caused the young boy to huff out a laugh. You had only been in school for a month now, but have been having a great time with your kids. Today, the Avs would be on campus talking with the fifth graders as they do every year about the presidential fitness test. Last week when your students caught word that the hockey team would be there, half of them pleaded with you to get the team into your classroom. Little did they know that you had a different surprise planned for them. During recess, Nate ran into your classroom as you gathered your PE supplies. “Do they know yet?” he asked, giving you a quick kiss and taking the kickball from your hands.

“Not a clue,” you giggled as he retreated to his teammates and you went to get your kids from line. Leading your students into the gym as you had PE after recess, they all started to shout and jump around when they saw who was joining them. You waved as Nate came into view, accompanied by the entire Avs’ line up.

“Hi Teacher Dad!” Alexa squealed over the commotion, and you swore your face was beat red. She hadn’t used that term yet this year and to be frank, you had forgotten about it.

“Alexa,” you started as the guys laughed.

“Hi Alexa,” Nate called out, smiling at you with a look that told you not to get upset. Looking back at the girl, she sent you a sweet smile and you just shook your head with a laugh.

“You know better,” you said and she giggled. “Alright, ladies and gentleman gather around please! Today we will be continuing our game of….”

“Kickball basketball!” your kids yelled, running off to their teams and taking their positions. “Wait wait wait. Before we get started, would someone kindly explain the rules of kickball basketball to our newcomers,” you gestured towards the Avs who looked completely confused at your fusion of the two ballgames.

“So one team pitches the ball like in kickball and the other team has to kick it. Then they skip around the perimeter of the basketball court and have to make it back home before the other team can get the ball and shoot it through the hoop,” Justin explained.

“There are also no bases so you can’t stop. You aren’t safe anywhere unless you make it back home,” Kalel added.

“This is really a game now?” Andre asked you and you nodded.

“And it is our favorite. So I have my kids playing odds vs evens based on their class numbers. I think you all can split up that way too,” you said, gesturing for the guys to join their respective teams. Nate watched as you settled the argument about who the pitcher would be between three of your boys, not handing the ball over till they figured it out diplomatically.

“She wasn’t joking when she said her students were taller than her, was she?” Andre laughed from beside Nate as he chuckled along. You stood on the sideline, cheering and calling out foul balls for the duration of the game. The Avs took it easy with your kids, just laughing and having fun. Your kids were ecstatic, being able to call some of the guys their teammates; getting high fives and being cheered on by the pro athletes. You PE time was about to end within another five minutes as the teams switched sides after the evens got three outs on the odds. You saw Isaac hand Nate the ball to make him pitcher, smiling as Nate gently rolled the ball to Kiely. After she kicked it and almost made it around, Steven was up.

“Miss Y/L/N, will you kick?” he called out to you, and your class started to cheer. It was no secret that you played PE games with your kids from time to time. A chant of your name was started as you laughed and put your keys and walkie talkie off to the side.

“Teacher Mom vs Teacher Dad, yaaaasss,” Alexa cheered and you shook your head.

“Alexa,” you called and she smiled sheepishly.

“Sorry!” Nate laughed and turned his attention back to you. He rolled the ball slower than you knew he could, but that didn’t stop you from kicking it with all your might. Your kids (and the Avs) on your side were cheering loudly as you skipped around the perimeter laughing, coming back to home a second before Tyson got the ball in the net.

“Evens win!” you called out, then made your two teams shake hands with each other and collect the equipment as it was time to head back to class. As your class was saying goodbye to the Avs, Nate walked over and bumped his arm into you.

“You know I went easy on you right?” he asked, ever the competitor. You laughed and smiled sweetly at him.

“You know you shouldn’t have, right?” you shot back, laughing as he rolled his eyes. “I’ll see you back home. Love you,” you whispered.

“Love you,” he whispered back. You gathered your class and ushered them out of the gym and back to your classroom. The rest of the day went well as your class was floating on cloud nine from their interaction with the Avs.

2

One Thursday afternoon before Winter break, you came home with several bags of potatoes in hand. Opening your apartment door, you walked in on Mikko and Andre watching a basketball game with Nate; your boyfriend automatically getting up and taking a few bags from you. “What’s with all the potatoes?” Mikko asked.

“We’re mummifying them tomorrow in class,” you answered casually, walking off into the kitchen as Nate sat back down on the couch while Mikko and Andre looked entirely confused.

“Did what she just said not phase you at all?” Andre asked Nate and the center shrugged.

“I’ve been hearing about this project for like 3 months now,” he said casually. You walked back into the room and sat on the edge of the couch near Nate.

“Mummifying potatoes?” Mikko asked, looking slightly horrified.

“Yeah, we’re learning about ancient Egypt. We’re going to wrap the potatoes in foil and decorate them with plastic jewels like they were death masks,” you explained in an excited tone.

“How?” Andre asked, now completely more interested in what you were talking about than the game.

“I’m going to cut large slices of potatoes so ever student gets a handful. Then we’re going to pour baking soda and salt on them to dry it out like the Ancient Egyptians would dry a body. Then we are going to wrap it in tin foil like a sarcophagus and decorate. When we get back from winter break, we’ll ‘excavate’ them by unwrapping the potatoes and see how we did with drying it out, documenting changes and what we see like archaeologists,” you explained. Nate smiled up at you as Mikko and Andre tried to figure out if the project seemed cool or crazy. They settled on cool.

“Can we help?” Mikko asked and you laughed.

“Nate’s coming in tomorrow to help. The two of you can come with him if you want,” you said and the guys nodded.

The following day, Alexa answered the door when there was a knock as you were starting to explain to your class what they were going to do with their potatoes. “Teacher Dad! You’re here!” She said quietly as to not get in trouble by you. Nate chuckled, nodding as Mikko and Andre planned on chirping him later for how comfortable your class was with him if they were calling him teacher dad like it was no big deal. It was one thing when they were younger, but took on a different comfort level as they were older.

The guys helped you pass out the materials and made their own sarcophagi as you circled the classroom making sure your students were staying on task and not just goofy around. A few of your sports obsessed boys clung to the hockey players and copied their every move, decorating their sarcophagi to look similar. You laughed, passing by Nate’s and adding an extra jewel because you wanted to make it more sparkly. He narrowed his eyes at you, but let you keep adding jewels until you were content and circled the class again to see how your kids were coming along. Mikko and Andre snickered; only you would be allowed to touch anything of Nate’s and not have him explode on you.

“Mr. MacKinnon?” two of your girls came up to Nate with little giggles. He looked at them confused, but answered.

“Yes?”

“You and Miss Y/L/N are dating right? Like you’re here all the time. Ever since third grade,” Audrey asked in a hushed tone while Cierra continued to giggle. Nate flushed, not sure how to answer them.

“You must really like her. Like, marry her like her,” Cierra added as Nate cleared his throat and his teammates started to laugh. Before Nate could formulate a sentence though, you were calling for your class’s attention, letting them know it was time to put their ‘sarcophagi’ on the back counter and clean up for the day. As you circled the room again, you noticed Nate looking a bit red with the two forwards trying to hold in their laughter.

“You okay?” you asked him quietly.

“Fine,” he shot you a smile, and though you were skeptical, you returned to your class.

“Yeah Teacher Dad Mackinnon. When are you going to make her Teacher Mom MacKinnon?” Andre chirped quietly, muttering a sorry when you shot him a look having heard his voice, but not what he said. Truth be told, Nate had already thought about it and had plans for an off-season proposal.

3

Campus was quiet on a Thursday after school. You had made copies and stapled a few packets together, graded math tests, and prepared a social studies test for Friday. One task led to another and you kept walking around your room hanging up new student work. Sitting down, you started working on going through your students work from the week to check for understanding and participation. As you were stamping and writing comments, you heard your door being unlocked. Figuring it was the custodian, you kept on plugging away. “Hi Ms. Kay,” you said cheerfully, before looking up and jumping in shock. “What are you doing here?” Nate looked at you incredulously.

“Why are you still here? Y/N I thought something happened to you,” he walked over to you and pulled you up and into a hug. Was he worried about you?

“No, I was just getting some things done. How did you get in?” you asked as he let go of you.

“Ms. Kay gave me your room key when I ran into her in the parking lot. Why the hell are you still here? I tried to call you like ten times,” Nate said, obviously worried, but you still weren’t sure why.

“I have bad reception in my room, I’m sorry babe,” you said, grabbing his hand. “Why are you so worried. Is everything okay?”

“You don’t know what time it is, do you?” Nate asked you, laughing humorlessly.

“It’s only like 4:30,” you said, looking at him confused.

“Hun, no,” he said, showing you his watch. “It’s 7:30.”

“Oh my gosh Nate. I am so sorry! One thing led to another and I wasn’t paying attention and…” you rambled.

“Hey it’s okay,” Nate tilted your chin up with his forefinger. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

“I’m sorry,” you whispered, realizing you had worried him. Nate smiled softly at you, giving you a quick kiss before grabbing your backpack and keys.

“Let’s go home,” he tugged on your hand but looked back when you didn’t budge.

“Nate I have so much to do. I don’t know how I got behind this week but I need to get all their work together and sent home in their Friday folders,” you rushed out, starting to feel overwhelmed that you didn’t have all the time you thought you had.

“Then they can get them on Monday. You need to come home and get some rest,” Nate tried to reason patiently with you.

“Nate, they’re called Friday folders for a reason,” you said.

“And I’m sure if they get them late one week no one will riot,” he responded.

“You don’t know that.”

“I know your class adores you as their teacher. Now let’s go home and you can finish them tomorrow if you’re going to stress over it,” Nate started to pull you along.

“But…”

“Leave it.”

The next day you were running on pure caffeine and more thankful than usual that it was Friday. The unfortunate part, your schedule had no room for you to work on your Friday folders. Figuring you would skip lunch to get it done, you went about your day as usual. You were helping Noah with dividing fractions when there was a knock at your door. As you continued to help your student, Justin got up and answered. “Mr. MacKinnon!” he yelled and your head shot up.

“Justin, that is not an appropriate classroom tone,” you said as your class was all trying to get a better look at Nate. “Get back to work you guys. I’ll be right back Noah. Try number 12 by yourself,” you suggested, getting up and walking over to Nate. “Everything okay?”

“What do you want me to file?” he asked.

“What?” you asked, confused by his question.

“You were stressed yesterday about your Friday folders and they still look empty,” Nate gestured toward your hanging files on the wall with all the student’s folders in them. “I figured I would stop by to see if you needed help.”

“Are you my room mom for the day?” you laughed quietly and Nate nodded. Checking the time, you shook your head.

“You just got out of practice. I appreciate the help, but I’m sure your tired. Go home and rest,” you said, feeling guilty that you had worried him yesterday.

“I’m good. Where should I start?” he smiled.

“Please let him stay Miss Y/L/N. I love making my brother mad that Nathan MacKinnon spends time in our class instead of his,” Isaac said from behind you. Turning around, you laughed looking up at the tall sixth grader.

“Why are you up?” you asked.

“Oh! I need help on number 15,” he showed you his messy paper.

“We’ll go over everything right now. But did you flip the second fraction and then simplify?”

“No….”

“Ohhh, I would start there,” you smiled.

“Yes ma’am,” Isaac saluted you and went back to his desk. You laughed softly, shaking your head and turning back to Nate. “If you’re sure you want to stay, their work is all ready to be filed and it’s sitting on my desk. Thank you.” You smiled at Nate with a sigh of relief. He squeezed your arm reassuringly for a moment, then walked over to your desk to grab the stack he needed. “Alright my crazies, let’s go over our keep, change, flip.”

4

This wasn’t actually happening, was it? There’s no way this is real. These thoughts swirled in your head on a Friday in March. The school was closing for an extended spring break due to an outbreak. COVID-19 was closing your school. Nate’s season was just postponed, and now school. You went home in tears that day, not knowing what was going to happen next.

Over the next two weeks, you prepared Google Classrooms and work to do digitally as your school year was called. A month in a half online, then summer. Nate was getting agitated, not knowing what to expect with hockey and also worried for the both of you in the city. “I’m getting us a flight to Coal Harbor before they close the borders,” he mentioned one night during dinner.

“Nate, I can’t leave. What if I need to get back into my class? What if my kids need me?” you asked, your anxiety heightening.

“Then I’ll find a way to get you back here as quickly as possible. I just think we would be safer at home with more space, not an apartment in the middle of Denver,” he explained.

“I don’t have anything to teach there. At least here I have a white board, I can’t take that on a plane,” you rambled. Nate reached across the table and grabbed your hand.

“I already ordered you one for there. It’s being delivered tomorrow. You can turn one of the spare rooms into your classroom, or you can take my office and I can do things somewhere else. I just want to go back home, and I’m not comfortable leaving you here,” he said, wiping a tear off your cheek with the pad of his thumb. You weren’t sure if you were stress crying or worried crying at this point. He did have a point though, and you were online for the remainder of the school year. You nodded.

“Okay.”

~ ~ ~

Three weeks later you were laughing at a story one of your kids was telling you over Google Meet. You had to give it to your class, they were very resilient and working hard to finish the year off. Deciding that you wanted to do something fun for PE, you roped Nate into a low-key training session. You told your kids to come to class that morning in their favorite sports gear and be ready to move. Opening your meet, you appeared in your MacKinnon jersey. “Of course you have a MacKinnon jersey Miss Y/L/N,” Cierra said laughing. You looked at her shocked.

“Who else should I have?” you laughed with her.

“Crosby,” Kiely unmuted herself quickly.

“I heard that Kiely!” Nate yelled from somewhere in the hallway. Your kids started laughing and you smiled at them, thankful to have them all healthy and safe in front of you, even if it was through a screen.

“Okie dokie kiddies. I have something fun planned for us today. Are you all ready to meet our special guests?”

“We know Mr. MacKinnon is there Miss Y/L/N,” Steven unmuted himself and laughed.

“I said guests as in plural Steven. But if you don’t want to meet him, I guess I can just send him back home,” you shrugged, starting to turn around in your chair.

“No no no! Steven stop talking. Miss Y/L/N, who is it?” Noah called, practically bouncing out of his seat.

“Hey, be nice Noah. Alright ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. I would like you to meet your PE coaches for the day. Mr. MacKinnon you already know, but say hi!” your kids all unmuted themselves to say hello to Nate as he walked into the room. “Okay now, drumroll please! Your other PE coach, Mr. Crosby!” The screams of your kids had you pressing ‘mute all’ really quick. If only there was a mute all in real life. Sidney waved at your kids while Nate laughed as Kalel fell out of his chair in excitement. You saw parents running into the rooms of your students, all waving and excited themselves once they saw there was no danger.

After a 30 minute workout with Nate and Sid demonstrating and counting for the kids, you let them have time to talk with your class. They had been working so hard, you figured some time missed from learning to enjoy themselves in this hectic experience was needed. Friday was half day for you online, so after a math review and reading time, you said goodbye to your kids as they all started to log off. Waving till the last one left, you sunk back into your chair as you ended the call. Nate came into the room and placed a kiss on your forehead. “Thank you for doing that today,” you said, smiling at your boyfriend.

“Of course. I would do anything for you, you know that,” he said simply and you smiled. “I am mad at Kiely though. Why should you have a Crosby jersey?” Nate made a face and you giggled.

“She just wants what’s best for her teacher,” you teased him, leaning forward to give him a quick kiss and then standing up to head to the kitchen for a snack.

“Yeah sure,” Nate said, then comprehended what you just said. “Hey!” he ran after you, circling his arms around your waist while you laughed and tried to get away from him.

+1

It was the last day of school for the year, and you were watching a movie with your kids on Google Meet. After the meet you talked about the summer and what they hoped to do if they could. You had them also talk about what their favorite part of the year was and what they look forward to in Junior High. “You guys know that I will always be here for you. I know you will all be awesome seventh graders and I can’t wait to run into you all at the grocery store one day and have you all tell me about it,” you said, starting to get choked up with having to say goodbye to them after such an insane year.

“I’m gonna miss you Teacher Mom,” Alexa unmuted herself and you almost broke. Even though you would get after her when she would call Nate Teacher Dad, you loved being her Teacher Mom.

“You’re going to make me cry,” you said, tearing up and laughing as your kids all started to unmute themselves to tell you not to cry.

“Miss Y/L/N, can you call Mr. MacKinnon into the room please?” Kiely asked softly and you nodded, figuring she wanted to say goodbye to him too. You called for Nate, laughing at a joke one of your boys told you while he walked into the room. Seeing him through the camera, you turned around in shock.

“What’s all of this?” you said to all the little presents and cards Nate was holding and placing down on the desk beside your laptop.

“We all wanted to get you something, so my mom emailed Mr. MacKinnon to plan how to get it to you!” Isaac shouted.

“Email?” you asked Nate, not knowing they had his email.

“Instagram,” he whispered. Your actual room mom DMed Nate.

“You guys! This is too much! Thank you,” you gushed, looking at the outpour of love from your class. “You’re all the best and I love you guys,” you said, not helping the tears that came to your eyes.

“Love you Miss Y/L/N!” a few of your girls shouted while your boys just laughed.

“There is also one more thing,” Nate muttered to you, rubbing the back of his neck. “You guys ready?” he asked your class, and you could hear the nerves in his voice. Why was he nervous? Your kids all nodded, big smiles on most of their faces. “Okay, hold them up.” You watched the screen as your kids held up colorful posters with different sayings on them. Confused, you started to read them.

“Teacher Mom + Teacher Dad”

“Congratulations!”

“Mrs. MacKinnon’s Class!”

“Say yes!” … Kiely’s had a picture of a ring on it. Your jaw dropped as your heartbeat sped up.

“Turn around!” Alexa yelled through the speakers. Spinning in your chair, you came face to face with Nate kneeling in front of you, a beautiful ring in his hands.

“I had a whole speech planned out, but I’m forgetting it now,” he chuckled and you giggled with him, more tears filling your eyes. “I know this time has been crazy, and I didn’t plan on purposing to you during a pandemic, but I didn’t want to wait any longer. I love you Y/N Y/M/N Y/L/N. I’m thankful everyday that those kids brought you to the rink that day three years ago. I love having crafts all over my desk because you need more space, and I love being Teacher Dad; more than I thought I would. But most of all, I love the peace and steadiness you bring to my life, even if you’re running in circles yourself. I love you, and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Will you marry me?”

“Say yes!” shouts came from behind you on the computer screen. You smiled, nodding your head.

“Yes, of course,” you said, tears falling. Nate smiled at you and slipped the ring on your finger, standing up and bringing you into a hug. He wanted to kiss you, but knew you would get mad that it was in front of your class. Cheers erupted from the meet, and you turned to see not only your students but their parents also. Laughing, you showed your class your ring quickly.

“Yay Teacher Mom and Teacher Dad!” Alexa shouted and you couldn’t get mad at her this time. After they all calmed down and you said your final goodbyes, you ended the meet and found Nate laying on the couch. You lowered yourself on top of him and kissed him.

“How did you get them to do that?” you asked, referring to the signs.

“When Isaac’s mom messaged me, I brought it up. She coordinated it all with the other parents,” he said and you laughed.

“I love you,” you said, kissing him again, Nate wrapped his arms around you, holding you close.

“I love you too, future Mrs. MacKinnon.”

Tagged: @avsfans95 @capsvsducks @justjosty @tysojost @natxpat @evphemia @stlbluesbrat21 @fallinallincurls @joeyisourranger @kyratallent @drewseph93 @ayohockeycheck @tkbarzal @stormingroses @dreamandrow @handwrittenheros @brandonbagel @bakerclaire123 @miranda0102 @cherrylita @musiclove-12 @reallyawkwardbandlover

[griffintail]

I watched this really cute anime movie about a deaf girl recently, and it gave me an idea I thought you might like!!

What if Tommy had a kid (how he came upon the child is irrelevant) who was deaf? Music, especially the discs are a big thing for Tommy, so it’d be a big adjustment for him to realize “Oh yeah, they can’t hear this”. He learns sign language with a LOT of help from others cause he wants to be able to communicate with his kid, and he and his kid sometimes gossip and tease people using sign language cause aside from a few basic signs, no one really knows what those two are talking about; well..maybe Tubbo knows, only cause he was the one Tommy spent the most time learning sign with.

Bonus, what if when his kid’s a little older they decide they wanna hear the discs their dad talks about, so they ask Uncle Techno to help them craft something akin to hearing aids; but y’know with magic and stuff. And when they hear their dad’s discs for the first time they cry cause it’s even better than they ever could have imagined??

I just, I like the fluffy stuff!!

- from, an Anon Who Probably Has Cavities From All This Sweetness🍬🍭🍫

To Hear

Summary: Tommy cares for a deaf, child (Y/N).

Pairings:  Parental! Platonic! Tommy x Deaf! Child! Reader

Warnings: Swearing

A/N: Bruh, I was so excited to make this I did in a few hours. I have been thinking about this since you sent it in. I use some elements from Lost Ones but it’s soo not canon to my story.

*Any full sentences in Italics means they’re talking in Sign Language.*

 I hope you enjoy it ♥

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

        Tommy didn’t know.

        How was he supposed to?

        He’d never met anyone that was deaf and didn’t know the signs. (Y/N) was also a baby when he first got her, not exactly like she could go, hey, I can’t hear.

        So, he didn’t know for ages. He really didn’t know what he was doing raising a baby, so when she wasn’t talking by the age of one, he thought it could be a normal thing. He was worried but it could be normal! Babies weren’t super smart after all.

        It was Wilbur that figured it out.

        When he had come to visit his brother and found out he had a baby, of course, they sat down and had a serious talk about it, said baby still happily playing with her toys despite the yelling earlier. After Wilbur realized his brother wasn’t going to simply give up this child, especially after a year of work, he decided he might as well accept it. So, he went over to the child and sat next to her.

        “Hi (Y/N).” Wilbur smiled lightly.

        The child didn’t react though, having not noticed someone was next to her. Wilbur frowned slightly at this and put a hand on her arm, making her look at him now.

        “Hi, little lady.” He greeted her again.

        She made little babbles to him as she turned back to her toys.

        “What words does she know?” Wilbur asked curiously, a small smile on his face again as he remembered when Fundy was a child.

        “Uh, none yet. I can’t get her to say any. She likes making sounds but not much else.” Tommy admitted.

        Wilbur looked at him surprised and Tommy knew now that this wasn’t normal if Wilbur had that face.

        “You said she’s one, right?”

        “Y-Yeah.” He nodded nervously.

        His little girl wasn’t saying words and Wilbur looked concerned. Had he screwed up with his little one?

        Wilbur looked back at (Y/N) though, his mind at work.

        “(Y/N).” He said, but she once more didn’t look at him. “Tommy, does she ever respond to her name?”

        “I mean, sometimes. Not all the time.”

        “When she does respond, are you right in front of her?” Wilbur looked up at him.

        Tommy thought about it before nodding slowly. “Yeah.”

        “Does she ever get scared by your yelling? Or anyone’s yelling for that matter. Loud noises?”

        “Not really, w-what has this got to do with anything?” Tommy questioned.

        “…Tommy, I think (Y/N)’s deaf.”

        Tommy stood there for a moment before shaking his head. “No, no, you’re wrong. She makes noises and things like that. She wouldn’t make them if she couldn’t hear them. And-And we relax to my discs all the time, they calm her down.”

        Wilbur stood up, putting a hand gently on his brother’s shoulder. “She’ll still make sounds, but she won’t be able to form words, Tommy. She would have said any sort of word before now. She can also feel vibrations, they probably feel nice but she can’t hear any of it.”

        At the moment, Tommy couldn’t form words as he stared at his brother trying to deny what he said, but…it made sense. Tommy could never get her to respond to her name. She never really seemed to care when he’d try and teach her how to speak. When he and Tubbo were being loud, she never even flinched. Even a small moment when he had been shouting and swearing profanities when she was napping came to mind as he remembered she never even woke up to that.

        “My baby’s deaf.” He whispered. “What…I…God, how didn’t I notice?!”

        “Calm down Tommy.” Wilbur took both of Tommy’s shoulders. “You’re a smart kid and you’ve been doing this for a year. You can figure it out and I’ll help you with it. I’m sure Tubbo will too.”

        From there, it was a lot for Tommy to process. He had just gotten used to the fact he was taking care of a child; now he had to think several steps ahead and make sure he was ready when she got older. It was a shock to his best friend as well, that felt stupid too for not realizing it sooner, and they both took steps to figure it out.

        There were countless days where instead of going out and adventuring, Tubbo and Tommy practiced having sign language conversations with each other. Other days, Tommy would try and teach (Y/N) simple sign words so she could now start to ask for what she wanted. The relief he felt when she actually started to pick up was immeasurable. He nearly cried when she signed dad to him for the first time without him teaching her.

        When L’Manberg was starting to be formed, he made sure everyone within their walls knew how to talk basics with his child in case she needed anything from them. Tommy never liked leaving (Y/N) with anyone but himself and Tubbo and Wilbur, but when war came, things changed and he had to make sure his baby was being taken care of properly.

        Somethings that Tommy did became said with the new thought.

        Tommy still did his daily ritual with (Y/N), sitting with her and listening to a music disc. His heart broke a little each time now though as when they listened together, he realized every time before he was the only one listening to them. She couldn’t hear a single note. That frustrated him to no end some days as he wished his baby could hear such beautiful sounds but there was nothing, he could do to change it.

        Years went on. L’Manberg was independent from the Dream SMP, Wilbur and Tommy were in power, Tommy had one of his discs back from Dream from a little scam, and (Y/N) was eleven years old.

        “Can we go see Uncle Tubbo?” (Y/N) asked Tommy.

        “Yeah, in a bit. Got to finish writing this for Wilbur. Bitch is so lazy.” Tommy smirked before going back to writing.

        Wilbur looked over at the sounds of (Y/N)’s giggles.

        “What are you doing Tommy?” He asked his brother.

        “Nothing Wilbur,” Tommy called to him.

        “He’s president, tell him to get off his lazy arse.”

        Tommy had to put a hand over his mouth as Wilbur raised an eyebrow.

        “What did she just say? She was going too fast for me.”

        “Just a stupid joke Wilbur.” Tommy grinned as he gave (Y/N) a subtle thumbs up.

        The older man shook his head as he went back to his potions as Tommy finished writing. Putting the book away, Tommy nodded his head for the door of the van and both he and (Y/N) left. She wore her own L’Manberg uniform as they walked down the path towards Tubbo’s home.

        “It still sucks his old house is gone. I liked it.”

        “Yeah, but what are you going to do when you have a power-hungry green bitch?”

        (Y/N) giggled again as they got to Tubbo’s house, Tommy barging in.

        “Tubbo!” He called.

        Tubbo poked his head out from where he was gathering up a few things and smiled.

        “Hey, Tommy! Hey (Y/N).” Tubbo greeted them.

        “Hi, Uncle Tubbo. Did you get any new bees?”

        “I did, they’re with the rest of the hive. You can go see them, just don’t scare them.”

        “I know. I’ll be back dad!”

        Tommy gave her a salute and she was gone.

        “She been doing ok?” Tubbo asked.

        “Yeah, she’s been pretty good.” Tommy grinned. “She talked shit about Wilbur in front of him and it was pretty funny.”

        “I still can’t believe you taught her to swear.” Tubbo shook his head as he went back to his chests.

        “It’s hilarious! No one else knows what we’re saying but you!”

        “That’s because I learned with you. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t know either.” Tubbo reminded him. “Jack figure it out yet?”

        “No.” Tommy rolled his eyes.

        A few of the new members of L’Manberg and the Dream SMP struggled to remember (Y/N) was deaf and often startled her or would simply walk up to her and try and just simply talk. The little girl struggled with her deafness sometimes as she was different from everyone else. Tommy was always there to assure her though that she was fine the way she was.

        “But hey, I was thinking about how to get my disc back from Skeppy,” Tommy mentioned.

        “Oh yeah, what this time?” Tubbo asked.

        (Y/N) came back in smiling as Tommy and Tubbo were talking animatedly about their plan. She gave a simple clap to let them know she was there as she often did when she’d enter a room and no one noticed. They both looked over and motioned her over, talking about their plan instead in sign so she’d know what they were talking about.

        They were talking about the discs again and she frowned slightly. Her father loved playing discs when they were home and she liked feeling the music but she couldn’t help but always wonder what it was like to listen to what her father could hear. To know why he liked them so much that Dream would take them from him.

        A few months past and (Y/N) got herself a new uncle when he settled down close by to their homeland. Technoblade had come to see what his brothers were up to and decided to stick around for a while to see if their government got out of hand. (Y/N) wasn’t sure what that meant but she thought he was pretty cool.

        One of the coolest things was that he already knew rough sign language, having needed it for one of his travels. She thrilled for her father not have to teach someone once more the basics, instead Techno taught himself how to sign better and more advanced words so he could talk to her when she was around.

        She was around a decent bit of time.

        As Techno was now around, Tommy liked to spar with him and (Y/N) liked to watch her father’s skills at work. Alongside that, Techno told her a few stories about his travels or just stories with the sign he taught himself. He often also lent her books for her to read in her spare time.

        Tommy had never felt more grateful for his oldest brother.

        Sure, he couldn’t talk shit around Techno because he’d know what he was saying, but seeing (Y/N) smile to be able to talk to someone else made up for it.

        Today though, (Y/N) had to ask Techno for a favor. All of the boys and her were at Wilbur’s to just have some family time, so now was the perfect time.

        “Hey Techno.” (Y/N) stood nervously in front of him as Tommy was arguing with Wilbur in the kitchen.

        “Yeah?” He raised an eyebrow as he watched her.

        “You know how to do enchantments and stuff right?”

        “Yeah, I do quite a bit of it.”

        “Are you really good at it?”

        “I’d say so, why?”

        “I want to hear.”

        Techno leaned back in his seat watching her. She looked rather passionate about hearing.

        “Why?”

        She hesitated to move her hands. “Dad really likes his discs and I just.” She paused. “I want to hear what they’re like, even for a few moments to have something more with him.”

        Techno gave a small smile as he nodded. “Yeah, alright. I’ll work on something when I get home. You got to go into the kitchen right now though and curse Wilbur out.”

        “Easy! Deal!”

        A few moments later, Tommy was dying of laughter as Techno smirked in his seat as Wilbur demanded to know what (Y/N) was saying. Wilbur knew he should have been getting more lessons from Techno.

        It took Techno a few days but he managed to get small devices enchanted to hear for a few hours.

        “It’d take me a lot more work to get permanent hearing. That’s a long project and I’d need some help. But these will work for a few hours before they bug out.” Techno told her as she held them in her hands, having taken her to “watch her”.

        “Thank you so much Techno.”

        “It’s what I do. And I guess you can start calling me Uncle.”

        She grinned before putting the devices in her ears. For a moment, there was nothing, but that was because Techno made sure they were in a quiet place so she wasn’t overwhelmed. He waited before speaking.

        “So?”

        She jumped at the sound before smiling widely.

        “I can hear!”

        “Great, let’s go see Tommy.” He said as he signed along with his words.

        She wouldn’t know what each word would sound like, that would take more than a few hours, so she’d still have to see sign but that wasn’t the purpose of Techno’s work. They walked back to Tommy’s base and Techno knocked on the door as (Y/N) was looking around in amazement. Tommy flung the door open, grinning to see (Y/N) was already back.

        “You bored her already?” Tommy laughed, (Y/N) looking over as she smiled at the sound of her father’s voice.

        “No, I only needed her to see if what I made actually worked,” Techno told him as they went into the house.

        “And what the hell is that?” Tommy asked as he looked at (Y/N) as Techno’s back was turned. “How stupid was it?”

        (Y/N) giggled. “You sound pretty cool dad.”

        Tommy frowned, confused, as Techno leaned on a wall. “What does that mean?”

        “Uncle Techno helped enchant devices that let me hear for a few hours.”

        Tommy stood frozen for a moment before he snapped his head to Techno.

        “Is she serious?” He asked.

        “Dead serious.” Techno nodded.

        Tommy looked at (Y/N) and grinned, hugging her tightly.

        “You can hear!” He laughed, making (Y/N) cringe. “Oops, right. You’re not used to that.”

        “I’m ok.” She told him figuring he was feeling guilty.

        “She won’t understand words, remember.” Techno reminded his brother.

        “Right.” Tommy nodded. “There’s so many sounds you should hear. I don’t know where to start!”

        “Well, I asked Uncle Techno so I could hear your discs.”

        Tommy’s eyes went wide before he grinned taking (Y/N)’s hand and pulling her to the jukebox outside.

        “Wait right here.” He instructed her as he rushed back inside, Techno coming out lazily with a smile.

        Tommy ran back with a familiar purple and white-colored disc. He rested it on the jukebox before speaking to (Y/N).

        “This is Mellohi. It’s the disc I gave to Dream before I got it back. One of the discs I played for you all the time when you were a baby before I knew and even after. This is one of our discs.”

        Tommy picked up the disc again, taking a deep breath before putting it on. He sat next to (Y/N) on the bench as the song started to play. (Y/N) sat in amazement as she felt the familiar vibrations but also heard the sound it made. Tommy had such a wide smile as he wiped the corner of his eyes of tears as he watched (Y/N)’s reaction to one of their discs.

        She begged him to put on another and Tommy gladly brought out the rest of his collection, Techno having long ago left to see his mission accomplished. They spent those hours they had listening to their discs, Tommy telling Tubbo at one point and the other boy joining the two of them. The trio sat there until the enchantment ran out, but Tommy couldn’t be happier.

        His baby had heard their discs and he swore to himself that he’d help Techno with whatever he needed to make it permanent.

[maxwell-grant]

Ask Round-Up: June

Hi there! Got some time to spare so I figured I’d kick this one off first thing in the month,. A couple of points, as usual

-Happy Pride Month!

-I posted a video on Twitter recently dubbing a comic Dan Schkade did, and I’m linking it here to announce that I do intend to use my Twitter for stuff soon (mostly when I do start “The Grim Screen” proper, which is the name of that big mystery project I keep alluding to, and where the characters in my profile pictures come from). I’m still figuring out how I wanna use social media to share and promote my work in a way that isn’t more grating than it’s worth, I need to start trying new things, this being one of them. 

-It’s COLD-AS-SHIT here in Brazil, we’ve been getting hit with some of the absolute coldest days in the country’s history, honestly reminded me of when I spent some weeks in London during a winter. Getting raised in a tropical country absolutely does not prepare you for that kind of shit, especially when coats (and clothes in general) your size tend to be stupidly expensive. And COVID’s spiking again to the point most people can no longer pretend this pandemic ever ended. 

-I picked a stray cat off the garbage over a month ago and, after trying every available option to see if someone could take care of her, running a ton of tests and taking her to vets and looking after her in our studio, we ended up giving up on pretending we weren’t gonna adopt her. Currently in the process of moving her to our home and getting our house cat to adjust to the new presence and it’s, a work in progress. 

-Still massively busy due to musical theater, currently trying to get enough time to finish my resume and start looking for work elsewhere. 

-Currently caught between several juggling acts that have only gotten exponentially worse and more stressful since the first draft of this post but nevermind let’s go:

@jcogginsa asked:  So we just got a new Street Fighter VI Gameplay Trailer, with what seems to be a fairly massive change to the series' gameplay

If anything, the gameplay seems to be the least changed aspect of it, or maybe it’s just the one I’m noticing the least because, frankly I don’t care about gameplay that much, but, wow, color me genuinely impressed with what they’ve shown so far. Just, Christ, this is what a major step forward finally feels like, not some faux-Alpha soft reboot or all-stars compilathon, no, they really are serious about taking Street Fighter to the future. Ryu, I already remarked at being pleased with them allowing Ryu to mature and change his outfit and role, but I’m far more impressed that they’re clearly letting Chun-Li follow suit as well, getting a slight visual overhaul (sort of a lightly-colored combination of her two key designs, SF2 and Alpha, with a characterization that seems to be building off her Third Strike era and a handful of new details like the change in bracelets and more exposed forehead to cement her maturity) and getting to show off a little as a teacher in the trailer. It feels nice to have good things to say about the direction they’re taking Chun-Li as a character (and oh thank god she’s got a new voice actor, I never liked Laura Bailey’s voice for her, this game really is spoiling me). 

They even got me onboard with having Luke stick around as the MC! Yeah, color me fucking shocked, but when he doesn’t look as much like Logan Paul a grotesque eyesore with a superfluous personality and he looks like a character that actually belongs in this world, and he gets a very neat-looking rival character to play off, yeah, I’m onboard with him. Really liked Jaime, too, I think he really sets a new standard for SF character design quite nicely, I like that just from a glance he pays homage to a lot of SF archetypes while very clearly being his own character (to a better extent than Luke, who seems to have been designed with the same idea in mind), love that he’s Street Fighter’s first take on the “drunken master” archetype except he’s not just a hokey old cliche but instead a fresh new spin on the archetype. This is what Street Fighter made it’s name on, this is what it should always be doing. 

Also saw that most of the starting roster was leaked a while ago, a couple of comments on that: I love that none of the OG World Warriors are coming back without some form of redesign, in particular I love Blanka’s new clothes and E.Honda looks cooler than ever. Not a fan of them finally being cowards enough to give Zangief pants but, fine, they are clearly scaling down the cartooniness of the prior installments, I get why the speedo had to go. Glad they kept Dhalsim’s beard while reverting back his bald head and, changing his necklace? Interesting. Very interested in what the hell’s going on with Ken, fucker looks more divorced with every new installment, kinda surprised that it’s Ken who looks like he’s got his shit together a lot less than Ryu this time around / and uh, I wrote this post before it was apparently leaked that Ken actually is divorced? The fuck? Curious to see how that goes.

LOVE LOVE LOVE GOUKI’S NEW LOOK, holy shit this is what he should have looked like in SFV to begin with, fuck, finally they made a redesign for him that doesn’t suck. Love that they seem to have incorporated one of the concept ideas they had for him for SFV, which was to have him wear the fur of a bear he killed, into his main design, because that is 100% a Gouki thing to do and it works masterfully with the lion / wildman imagery he’s already got going on.

Funny, I was JUST thinking the other day if they were ever gonna bring Dee Jay back and if they did, they were definitely gonna have to redesign him and tone down everything that made him look like a grotesque racist caricature or, at least, change it so that he doesn’t stick out as much compared to the other characters, which it seems like they did, I’m actually kinda shocked over how much I like how he looks now, he’s like 100 times better. I always did like Dee Jay’s concept as a fun-loving musician who, unlike the other characters, really was just in it to have fun, and I like that he actually looks the part now. LOVE that they brought Rashid back and redesigned him to look sexier, actually, I like that they seem to be a lot more willing to let the dudes look explicitly hot this time around at a similar and show more skin while the female characters look like they were made with looking cool as a priority over looking like someone’s fetish (might retract this statement depending on how Laura or Mika look like if they make it to the game).

Juri was obviously gonna come back, but I definitely prefer this look over the SFV bodysuit, not surprised Ed’s back but am mildly interested with where they’re taking him lore-wise. The new characters look a little samey and, to an extent they kinda look a little more like Tekken characters (but then again the whole aesthetic of this game reminds me a lot of Tekken), but I definitely like their look, and I definitely think they are gonna make a vastly better batch of newcomers than what IV and V had. I’m particularly interested in Marisa, JP, Kimberly and Aki. So, yeah, I’m definitely on board with where this game is heading. 

Anonymous asked:  Do you have any interest in seeing other parts of South America?

Sure. Already traveled through quite a bit of it, but I always wanna travel more, traveling’s one of my favorite things to do. Unfortunately it’s also terribly expensive even besides the whole, cough, pandemic. But, yeah, I definitely miss traveling. 

Anonymous asked:  Excluding pastiche of the character like Swam, what is your favourite version of the phantom of the opera ?

Come to think of it I, don’t think I actually have one? My favorite Phantoms are the ones I make myself out of extensively curating and Frankensteining together the dozens and dozens of existing Phantoms, sort of like The Shadow but to a much greater extent since there’s hundreds of Phantom of the Opera stories out there and the character’s public domain. I guess for me it’s not so much particular “versions” of the character, so much as it’s particular ideas. 

I love Leroux’s Erik, I think the resolution to his story is still pretty unsurpassed (except by the one depicted in the short story “Beauty and the Opéra, or The Phantom Beast” by Suzy McKee Charnas, that one has by far the best take I’ve read yet on the Phantom x Christine relationship), I find myself lately appreciating a lot how remarkably childish and darkly humorous he’s written to be, way more than you’d ever expect the original take on The Phantom to be. I like Lon Chaney’s Phantom likewise for the humor and classic villainy he has fun with, particularly in his final scene. I like Ken Hill’s Phantom for similar reasons and he’s probably my favorite of the on-stage Phantoms I’ve seen or heard (I have some more, mixed, feelings for the ALW version, I wrote like a massive report on it recently so I don’t feel like talking about it for now). 

I love how BATSHIT HORRIFYING the Phantom of Althea Liu’s Christine is, I really like some of the ideas at play in the Charles Dance version (not a wholly satisfying take but, there’s some ideas in there I like, and honestly being played by Charles Dance does go a long way in at least getting my attention). I love how he’s drawn in the MAZM game (hadn’t had a chance to check it in full yet) and I have some other favorite artistic renditions of him by artists like Greg Hildebrandt, Kyu Ha and Anne Bachelier, to quote a few among many. I have a LOT of space in my files devoted to cataloguing Phantom media and anything adjacent to it as a reference point, I go through them every now and then whenever I start thinking about the kinds of Phantoms I want to create.

Honorable mention right now goes also to the Cosmos Takarazuka Phantom played by Yoka Wao. I’ve never been remotely able to witness this play, there’s no records of it I can find online outside of this terrific review penned by @ancientphantom​, but reading that immediately shot this up into becoming one of my absolute favorite takes on the character to read about or imagine (reading that, during Christine’s debut, this version of The Phantom broke the 4th wall by actually going offstage to the orchestra pit in order to personally conduct the orchestra went a long way in making this my favorite show that I’ll never get to watch, seriously, what a brilliant usage of the character). 

@thedeathalchemist asked:  Since you are doing musical theater, do you have any favorite musicals (can be both stage and film)?

Actually not that many, especially when it comes to stage since music theater shows tend to be terribly expensive. This might seem weird coming off the previous ask, and the fact that I did this big writing assignment on it, but I don’t actually consider the ALW Phantom among them (it’s, weird, the history I have with that play, but I don’t dislike it though). Among the ones that come to mind would be The Lion King (I was a little young to “get” the worship people have for Lion King when I watched the movie, but the play definitely instilled that impression on me), and Morte e Vida Severina gets a very strong recommendation from me.

For film, definitely my number one pick would be Phantom of the Paradise, followed by Little Shop of Horrors and The Prince of Egypt, and now Descendants 2. I watched the whole Descendants trilogy recently and I definitely have a lot of thoughts on it, but Descendants 2 in particular is shockingly good, trust me, it’s worth putting up with the first movie (not bad but, not terribly interesting) to get to it. Speaking of Descendants, I also gotta put it’s older sibling High School Musical here, mainly for 2 and 3 (my favorites being, every number done by Sharpay or Ryan across all three films, the “Troy has a mental breakdown” songs, and “The Boys are Back”, which almost kinda redeems Chad for a second). I also really liked The Happiness of the Katakuris which is, kind of a musical, it’s kind of a whole bunch of things but I don’t remember enough of it to talk more of it. Otherwise I’m not terribly familiar with musicals enough to have a proper list. Get back to me after I’m done with musical theater and that might change.

@krinsbez asked:  So, apparently, Dan Schkade has posted a list of "Batman Hot Takes" which includes Alfred being a retired Shadow. Thoughts?

Not something I would write personally in my takes on either character, but I like it primarily because Dan’s reasoning of “He goes from The Master to a servant, shaping the next generation” is a rock-solid foundation for where The Shadow should go as a character if he were to actually “retire” for real. I’d seen this idea of his a while back and actually, this was kind of a crucial puzzle piece that went into my thought process for my “The Shadow meets Cassandra Cain” post, I was wracking my head thinking of ways for these hardline incompatible characters could co-exist or work together and then I found this on his tweets and stuff just kinda clicked together. It made perfect sense. 

I also like it because Alfred already kind of embodies a “prior generation” of crimefighter in how usually he’s written to reference James Bond, and because Alfred’s generally a character who already carries some kind of mystery and intrigue in his backstory, part of what makes him work as an all-timer anciliary character comes from us not knowing much about his life other than the myriad of skillsets he once had as the most awesome man on the planet and how that life culminated in him eventually becoming the right-hand man to the current most awesome man on the planet. The Batman crossovers even kinda played around with the idea of The Shadow effortlessly being able to become Alfred even without Bruce noticing.

You could make a very good point based on how well this gap in Alfred’s past fits with the existing gap in The Shadow’s post-1949 future, how seamlessly you could make it so one ends where the other begins, and besides, Alfred’s main vocation besides butler is often established to be that of an actor, which is almost 90% of the time in fiction code for “this character isn’t what they say they are / don’t trust everything they say”. Is it really that unbelievable that Alfred was just, one in a million other names in a lifetime of fighting against evil by adopting different monikers and identities?

Again, not something I’d go for or establish “canonically”, largely because I don’t want The Shadow to be tied down to Batman more than he’s already perceived to be publicly, but the logic and thematic worth here is quite sound.

Anonymous asked:  Related to that last question, which fighting game franchise has your favorite lore, and/or the lore that you would most want someone to expand on in another type of work?

Besides the two big ones I already talk about on the regular (Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat), definitely Capoeira Fighter, created by Scott Stoddard (who you can see above in the line-up, as he jokingly inserted himself into the game as a character called “Maionese”, portuguese word for mayo, I was frankly surprised to learn he was North-American). I’ve known about it for a long while but it was only recently that I started doing some looking into it and it’s character designs, and I’m only just now discovering that the creator of this was also the creator of Mad Shark and Robot Unicorn Attack, and the only social media he seems to have is his Youtube channel. Looking up Capoeira Fighter and it’s creator company, Spiritonin, nets you basically just dead pages and zombie pages still up that don’t work anymore because the game was made for Flash, so, yeah, it’s hard to even call Capoeira Fighter a franchise when it largely consists of mostly tech demos and one game that is pretty much gone unless you look for it in BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint.  Capoeira Fighter 3 does look a lot more polished and boasts a lot more than could ever be feasibly expected from a flash fighting game, including an interactive Arcade Mode where you can make choices that affect your character’s storyline. 

I regret that I didn’t get to play Capoeira Fighter 3 before the death of Flash, because looking it up makes me frustrated. There’s quite a lot to like here. This is absolutely a series that I would love to see get a proper shot under the sun with a budget and some more polish (gameplay definitely could use some work still), there’s a lot of incredible stuff here.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a fighting game, or even a game really, where I look at the characters and recognize not just the pop culture archetypes they draw from, but I also recognize people in them, real people I’ve met. Both of it’s main masters, Mestre Loka and Mestre Rochedo, are opposites and yet they both look unmistakably like real fighting masters and people I’ve trained under (Loka in particular). You see the Muay Thai girl in the image above, named Chompoo? Not only is she the 2nd woman in fighting games who uses Muay Thai, but she’s the only one who actually looks like it (King is by leaps and bounds my favorite of the SNK girls but she’s evidently not dressed for combat), but she actually kinda reminds me of my teacher’s wife (the absolute scariest person I’ve ever seen fight Muay Thai, not even joking, he loves talking about her and showing me videos of his tiny and lovely and terrifying wife tearing down opponents twice her size in the ring), I bring this up because this game's authenticity absolutely deserves praise as well as it's character design. Look at the other two characters above, Ramba and Buldogue, and I’m gonna post this excerpt from BigMex’s article on it that better summarizes the two and part of what is so great about this game:

The diversity of the characters could not be understated. There were 15 unique capoeiristas, in addition there were 13 other "World Warrior" type characters that represented other fighting styles like Muay Thai, Tae Kwon Do and boxing. It was not the sheer number that made the game unique but instead the showcase of figures. 

 In other fighting games, the playable characters were always roughly the same size and body type. They never had an ounce of fat on them, and were never too short or tall. Capoeira Fighter 3 had every skin color and body type that a person could imagine. The various tones and shades of skin suggested that several characters were of mixed marriages, mulatto or even native. 

There was a character that reflected just about every type of gamer there was, including the young and old. None of them seemed feeble when competing against fighters in their prime. 

Very few games, before or after, had put as many minority characters in the roster. Very few games had ever put minorities in prominent roles for the accompanying story. The lineup featured tall, skinny, fat, short, muscular and average build body types. Even the heroic Mestres could not have been more opposite

Ramba had actually been away from competition because she was busy at the university. She was asked by Mestre Loka to look after his students. She reluctantly agreed as it would be a good excuse to get away from law school for a moment. 

Along the way, Ramba met Buldogue and offered her a better life. Ramba knew that Buldogue was a strong fighter, but had never been given an opportunity outside of the roda (fighting circle). Buldogue had been used as hired muscle by other characters in the game and Ramba wanted to get her out of that life. She knew that the bruiser was actually respected by the community, especially the poor that lived in the favela or ghetto. 

If she were able to get an education and become known for something other than fighting, then Buldogue could become an inspiration for other women trapped by their situation. Players were given a choice whether to team up Ramba and Buldogue or to play solo. The purpose of Ramba in the game was not to beat the main villain, but instead to help guide those in need. 

If players completed the game solo, then Ramba learned what she was really fighting for. She earned her degree, but decided to open her own firm to help the less fortunate. If she teamed up with Buldogue, she became a mentor and enrolled her in school, while still working double-duty as a lawyer.

Strong, positive, dynamic, interesting minority female characters that didn't need to flash skin to get noticed? There had been few and far between for over 25 years. Designers in Japan and the US had lost focus on how they could introduce new faces without relying on pandering or stereotype. 

Characters could color the perception of gamers after all. When done in a positive light they could stop perpetuating stereotypes. Capoeira Fighter 3 had set a standard that would be hard for many developers to follow.

And, man, do I wish Capoeira Fighter 3 actually did set a standard to be followed by the bigger fighting game studios, especially in how they approach black or Brazilian characters. It’s hard going back to those now, seeing a different standard as to what they could be like. So many franchises these days are getting unexpected revivals or glow-ups, I would absolutely be onboard to see Capoeira Fighter get this kind of treatment or to even write and conceive stuff for it myself.

Maybe 2D fighting games have gone with the wind again (platform fighters seem to be growing more as the new rage) but, man, it would break my heart to see this be forgotten, and it very easily could have been. I absolutely do not want this to go the way so many other flash games did, I think Capoeira Fighter's truly remarkable and I would love to see it be revived in some form (or maybe I should just finally take a crack at game design already and make my own fighting games, who knows).