#failure to properly communicate

[thebirthofvenusfly]

i love that siffrin is the rogue of party with his clever wit and quick reflexes and cool gloves and dagger and fun vibes and mysterious eye patch and it's literally all a trauma response and/or nervous habit

[the-broken-pen]

“You’re going to blow out your arms,” the villain observed. They watched as the hero merely grit their teeth, shoving themself through another pull-up. It looked painful, and if the sweat slicking the hero’s brow was any indication, it was.

They waited for the hero to let themself drop from the bar and accept the villain was stronger. But they didn’t.

Three more pull-ups, and the villain stepped in.

“Hero,” they said slowly. “You’re about to tear the ligaments in your arms. You need to stop.”

The hero blew out a shuddering breath. Struggled for purchase, fighting gravity—and let themself drop.

The hero’s hands were bleeding, calluses torn open by the bar. The hero didn’t seem bothered when their own hands shook so much that their blood began to splatter on the gym floor.

For a moment, the villain could only stare at them.

Shit.

They didn’t know how to handle this. They knew the hero was dedicated. They knew the hero was strong, and perpetually trying to be stronger, but they hadn’t thought…

They hadn’t thought the hero would be so willing to tear apart their own body for success.

It was supposed to be fun, the villain thought. They felt a little sick as the hero pressed their palms together to soothe the bleeding, an action that was practiced and familiar. As if they had done this before.

The hero reached for something in their bag, smearing blood on the side, and pulled out a roll of blue electrical tape. The villain didn’t understand why, until the hero tore a strip off and made to wrap their hands with it.

The hero would be the death of them.

They crouched in front of the hero, plucking the electrical tape out of their hands.

“What are you doing with this?”

The hero blinked at the villain like they were the strange one in this situation.

“Wrapping my hands?”

The villain hissed in a breath.

“With electrical tape?”

The hero flushed slightly, looking down at their bloody hands. They looked close to tears.

“It…sticks to skin, really well. And it doesn’t move, either, when you move your hands or wherever else, even if you’re fighting. Plus, blood doesn’t make it come off, at least, not for a while.”

The villain blinked at them.”

“Blood doesn’t make it come off,” the villain repeated, processing. The hero nodded, reaching for the electrical tape. The villain settled it out of reach.

“Not if you wrap it right.”

Dimly, the villain realized that meant the hero had done this enough times to have it down to a science.

“And you couldn’t use a bandaid?” The villain asked incredulously. The hero shrugged a shoulder, then winced at the motion.

Yeah, the hero had absolutely blown out their arms.

“Bandaids move—“

The villain hushed them.

“Be quiet for a second.”

The hero, wisely, went quiet.

The villain rubbed a hand over their face, then studied the hero for a moment. They took one of the hero’s hands into their own, studying the damage.

“Why did you do this to yourself,” the villain murmured.

“What do you mean, why,” the hero snapped. “It’s my job.”

“Your job is to save people,” the villain corrected. “Not destroy yourself.”

“I’m not destroying myself—“

“You are.”

“Shut up—“

“Hero.”

“I need to be better,” the hero snapped. Their voice rang out across the gym, echoing into the rafters, and they both froze. After a moment, the hero spoke again, voice soft. “I need to be better.”

They said it like they needed the villain to understand. The villain wondered who they were really saying it to—the villain, or themself.

“Better than who?”

“Everyone.” It was hushed, like a secret.

The villain watched them, waiting.

The hero took a shaky breath

“My whole thing is being the best. I have always been the best. That’s the only reason I matter. If I’m not strong enough, then I am nothing, so I need. to be. better.”

The hero had started crying, very quietly, like they were afraid to take up too much space.

The villain was not equipped to handle gifted kid burnout.

“There’s more to you than just being a good athlete,” the villain said hesitantly, and the hero shook their head.

“No. There isn’t.”

“Hero.”

“Can you give me back my electrical tape?” They hiccuped to contain a sob.

“No,” the villain said firmly, and then the hero really was sobbing.

“You don’t understand—“

The villain didn’t. Not really. They had never been the kind of talented that the hero was.

They wondered now if maybe that was a blessing.

“I don’t,” the villain agreed. “But I do understand that you’ve saved half the city, and you give everything you have to give, and you always do your best.”

“But I-“

“No.” The villain stopped them. “You are doing your best.” They tipped the hero’s chin up until they met the villain’s eyes. “And it is enough.”

The hero froze, eyes darting over the villain’s face. They wondered if anyone had ever said that to the hero, if whatever mentor they had was giving them anything other than orders to be stronger. Be better. Be more.

The villain had some new targets to take care of, it would seem.

For now, though, they had to take care of hero.

“We’re going to go wrap your hands,” they said softly. “And then we’re going to take care of your arms, and you’re going to take a nap.”

The hero nodded, watching them like they were some kind of good, selfless person.

“And if I ever catch you using electrical tape again, so help me, I will put you six feet under.”

That startled a laugh out of the hero, and they let the villain guide them to their feet.

“Fine.”

The villain turned to them. “Okay?”

Are you going to be alright?

The hero seemed to understand.

“Okay,” the hero agreed.

Yes.

And so, it was.

[omegamoo]

i have lots of. thoughts about like why the wp as a project has turned out the way it has and lots of those thoughts are really good sweet ones about community and then lots of frustrations too i think

[unproduciblesmackdown]

payoff of being embedded in a unit of authoritarianism since birth is sure then being able to go like "wow this is just like dynamics & phenomena i experienced up close & personal, repeatedly, in many contexts & configurations in my first two decades of life" plus also beyond that in abuse culture world & the noncoincidence that even interactions beyond the confines of the home(tm) reinforced / did not contradict the hierarchy & concomitant abuse within....but then like hey yeah also the Larger Units of hierarchy & abuse / authoritarianism (ft. their logics & practices necessary for continuously & continually shoring up that hierarchy) can also make it like hey yeah the Two Parent abusive nuclear family more like the Two Party [the US is also a one party state but in typical american extravagance they have two] where right wingness is defined by the degree of directly embracing white supremacy & "left wing" is "anything else" hence like wow The Left is always infighting (everyone with any ideas besides "umm christofascist white ethnostate?" so like yeah there are many other ideas) vs The Right's admirable cohesion (simply re: the white supremacy idea which also necessarily embraces all other Out Group / Nonperson paradigms & practices b/c that's what all already has been necessary for shoring up the [when has the US been a nongenocidal non white supremacist non oligarchy])

like obviously individual experiences & contexts vary but like narrowing in on [the Family as immediate relations ideally cordoned off into nuclear households] ft. [Parental Authority the top priority of which is preserving that authority, ideally patriarchal, an abusive mother e.g.? hey, that ought to be the father] times it's like, think people tend to struggle re: having the "nicer" / "safer" parent who was also shitted on as well but also at the end of the day would always side with the "meaner" "more dangerous" parent, even in whatever terms most sympathetic to the abused parties, with the underlying logic that we're always just going to have to deal with them so some secret strategic mitigation is the best that can be done, perhaps the equivalent of being sent a ":(" after an Onslaught Of Expressed / Enforced Authority(tm) event....the tendency to see the best in any lack of actual intervention / protection on the assumption That Could Never Happen Anyway & forever At Least that the one parent isn't as bad as the other [the Not That Bad / Could've Been Worse infocation, like free bingo square in manifestations of minimization if not outright abuse denial] & all the sympathy for, you know, being human & doing their best(tm) &c which sure might all be true but the abused parties (oft children, more vulnerable than adults, by virtue of being children i.e. considered legal property of some specific adults & theoretical property of any adults in general (the paternal logic in any "protect [xyz]" like maintain one group's supposed ownership / control over [xyz] "for their sake" then? great) & also generally smaller & newer at being alive in this world) but who are liable to not extend that sympathy to themselves (or certainly not be extended that sympathy....when is "they're doing their best / they're only human / they mean well or whatever / they love you, they're family" successfully deployed the Thwart an abusive parent like it is to tell an abused child to not be too resentful of this situation, when is it actually deployed toward the abusive parent at all really. & again in the lack of boundary between the authoritarianism within many individual family households & that of the state they exist in (here re: the US) like that naturally one encounters the logic of abuse expressed just as "common knowledge" & the Assumptions of other people, e.g. the rejection of a parent having zero access to a child, the reinforcement of automatic apologia deployed for whatever a parent could possibly do, argued for "family", yet not deployed the same way to automatically defend anything thee child(tm) could do, thinking emoji lol....see: like the non boundary between [the Patriarchal home/family(tm)] & capitalism when uh oh capitalism the system of continuously maximizing exploitation Needs various forms of labor to be unpaid, uh oh another lack of boundary when white supremacy is used to also shore up the patriarchy that shores up the white supremacy, e.g. that even if in some "inferior" class it's treated as More Important that at least you're not that And black, the theoretical ideal/normal white man is a person while a white woman is a woman while a black woman is black, white women could have any legal property via chattel slavery which needed white women's participation to help enforce, the specter of sexual violence all coming from nonwhite & especially black men & it's up to the genteel white man to Protect Women (see prev, implicitly white or you'd have to specify otherwise)

anyway that is to get around to pointing to the Two Parent System wherein so shockingly the results are the same as the One Parent System re: abuse maintaining The Family (properly, i.e. unquestionable & certainly undeniable parental access to children, & "ideally" ofc again the patriarchal Father as ultimate authority w/ownership over the Mother, who in turn is theoretically honored for that motherhood (at least you own your children, insofar as it doesn't contradict w/what the father wants to do with his superior claim to ownership) & then finally all the obviously shittiness from being in that position in a patriarchy is in turn dumped on The Children who are ungrateful & owe the mother everything Because of what the broader society & immediate personal expressions of that abuse have done to her. see also ofc that two adults likely don't have the resources to raise a child in time or money or energy, maybe there's only one but also even an extended family's worth of adults aren't enough, is it enough when a child is sent to school for some other adults to be in charge most of the day, or even if someone is hired to look after them beyond that, all this ofc with the assumed premise that a child is always limited to the various Domains of The Adults In Charge, & from there i segue into how naturally being in gay baby jail unless & until adults are no longer recognized as Legally In Charge Of You (the grand like 5 minutes it's relatively been since the ideal timeline of a woman's life wasn't being legal property of her father until asap passed along to legal property of her husband. still considered ideal ofc but like with "maybe you can have a bank account" now & "maybe you can become 29 before you're in Old Maid danger" Maybe, i said, Maybe....anyway that obviously adults(tm) being divided up (atomised. spritz) into Households isn't even supposed to be enough to live on their own, re: necessitating Marriage, much less uh oh having kids who are stuck with their parents who are stuck with them, but then all the obvious actual problems & abuses inflicted on Adults to have to have their family households & exploited jobs are dumped on the children who Must appreciate & be loyal to the parents (i.e. never Deny Access) while yknow kids have Fake Problems they're whining about, the one Real Problem of having to pay a bill gets the payoff of leverage to tell your children to shut the fuck up or perhaps the more vulnerable spouse

hm didn't segue right into "so shoutout to like The Ratchet Effect diagrams lol, the "Two" Party System where its supposed left wing Blocks Movement To The Left, right wing Moves Everything To The Right" but even that is like, mm, conferring a passivity to what democrats do in the continual movement to the right (won an election? lost an election? the lesson either way is The Right Is Right; exact same logic as in "winning or losing" "the war on crime" like the collection & analysis of whatever statistics show the trend of some "crime" is increasing in frequency or magnitude? show that it's decreasing? the lesson either way is Cops Need More Power) like the institutional effort of democrats to push a candidate nobody wants through primaries (did we even do that this time around. oh great that the assumed candidate even graciously agreed to not force themself as The Candidate, & now like 5 min left with the Next In Line candidate dumped on everyone now with the lesson for the left(tm) to shut up already lol) & then it's up to Grassroots Voters. it's up to Unity & well we all Need to listen to the white supremacists, points were made, in the "elections" with voting as limited as possible & with the electoral college & supreme court as Safeguards against democracy & here's the senate, eternally thus, & again the conclusions will always manage to be moving To The Right, paraphrasing from twitter like democrats are about to be or already at the point of "in the name of unity we will no longer be running against republicans; it's too divisive :(" which yknow is already The Statements of all of yesterday from various like "i'm the republican official white supremacy agree-er now" after also the entire campaign of "no, I'm the fascist" where like wow shocking that the appeal to the fascists didn't win a) the fascists who will ofc want the even more overt fascism, why wouldn't they or b) the people who want antifascism actually, and do not want fascism; who could have foreseen? & it's always the fault of being Too Antifascist for the actions of the fascists or the Diplomatic Comprimises the other party makes with the fascists &/or their Failure to thwart them....the Nicer, Safer party in power is surely doing their best & at least they're not the Meaner, More Dangerous one but at the end of the day they'll always side with that party over america(tm) & those bearing the brunt of the actions of State Power can be told to keep their chin up or else to stop acting out b/c how do you expect that state power to respond, cmon, you bring it upon yourself, & you Have to work with them & understand all their feelings & your role in resolving those feelings by being lesser inferior property, you do Have to understand, b/c in the end this is All About Family, surely Good & Necessary, whoops i mean in the end this is All About America

anyway yeah i'm like damn my "nicer" (also shitty) father who was also the even more sexist & racist (& certainly no Less ableist, queerphobic) parent was basically the democratic party of the Two Parent System of Family Government lol. b/c we Need to perpetuate this Family, no other logics much less actions are acceptable....& people struggling with the Parent / Adults in their life like that who were the "safe" & "protective" ones who markedly failed to protect & minimized the harm afterwards but also in general, never to confront the reality of the situation, or do damage control like "aw some points were made at all :( ah i see you have Feelings about this :( hmm yes the Parental Power is gonna have to make some changes" & then as soon as possible (assuming reeling in the party who was deviating too much) these changes(tm) are already compromised or diminished if done at all, & then oops things incrementally might be right back to how they always were, no guarantees it won't be Worse b/c the Power is even more insecure / aware of weaknesses, & the only way this is thwarted is if the Wayward Parties can actually leverage new boundaries / less vulnerability, not b/c the supposedly sympathetic parties, who never came through where it counts & likely would also become overt antagonizers / wielders of whatever power within the Family hierarchy / turn on the more vulnerable parties to Get Them In Line, actually came through. movement Away (more disruptive to the maintenance of The Family, The State) is blocked, incrementally only ever moving everything back, & then Further....& despite this being what the power structures are, & do, the Disruptive parties liable to be scapegoated lol, can't believe the scapegoat child is ruining everything for everyone, this Family would totally improve & start being everything it could be otherwise & we ignore who actually has the power & is actually enforcing the hierarchy harming everyone to point to that scapegoat; can't believe thee left is destroying america (republican voice) can't believe the left is destroying america (democrat voice) So You See? The Undeniable Consensus. just like how i believe it was my fault my family unit was Like That & i had those experiences, according to the vast majority of Input from that family & even others who, knowing nothing, would say how Lucky i was to be relatively close to home, or just of course that oh well parents love their children & mean well & try their best. just like how i believe that being treated like i've been generally as a neurononconforming person, i.e. hated & the interpersonal abuse & bullying & ostracization & [attention possibilities: ignored, responded to but negatively, interacted with to get something from] & actually rewarding interactions or just actions being liable to get Deluxe authority responses as disruptive(tm) & ofc disobedient(tm) like hell fuckin yeah lol. just as i don't think that other people who have similar experiences or ones i don't have, i.e. assessed race being automatically seen as wrong / inferior, being isolated & undermined from all around? well gotta be their fault then, cmon lol....Abuse is actually normative, not extraordinary, in every Arena of interactions, & so are the logics / apologia / assumptions

anyway lol re: like yeah people struggling with the like betrayal of the "nooo i'm on your side, i sympathize, i'm the one who's nicer & you Need so that things aren't even worse" party, not even One Big Novel betrayal, but rather that that's what's Been done the whole time & doesn't stop. that supposedly if you have Any sympathy for that party you have to be like aw :( keep doing your thing (necessarily reining everyone in) or if you have Any sympathy for the people who also want things to improve but blame & take it out on the more disruptive parties (more disruptive to an abusive family e.g., btw. & not like i see Cohesion as necessarily some Good rather than neutral? when i'm autistic / my existence is supposedly antithetical to this? or when i'm able to look at a zillion hypothetical or actual situations & recognize how "cohesion" isn't the best goal / a destructive one / a vague concept anyways like cohesion Between Whom? on what basis? recognized & pursued how? why? up next: same as vague shit like "family" or "community" &c) then it's like yep gotta be Responsible for their feelings too if you're at all sympathetic & capitulate, The Only Possible Action, vs the idea of those in power actually making things shit stopping, much less being stopped / having to stop in the various ways that can happen....one way being "oh no, adult children who choose to be no-contact with parents" which is seen as A Tragedy, & sign of a Deteriorating Society, take me back. ah jeez oh no, look at the divorce raaates....Oh No, twentysomething women aren't pursuing marriage enoughhhh....again the undetectably identical echo when people peak vaguely talk about "conflicts" that thwart "community" or whatever, ugh nobody will date anymore, commit anymore, be friends anymore, hang out as coworkers anymore, talk to me if i want to talk to them anymore, &ccccc....

the real tl;dr is like wait ""two party"" (one party) US electoral system, just like ""two parent"" maintenance of thee family lol. ratchet effect raise your hand if you've only ever experienced Movement Away from the abusive family blocked, forever incrementally ratcheted back in to the desires & pursuits of those most in power / top of the hierarchy / thus of course most invested in the abuse, that's what the power & hierarchy is made of, sustained by, perpetuates....sorry doing our best :( sorry that's just all that's realistic, no other choice Really. cmon. kind of Your Fault if you don't agree to that & whoops now Everything is the fault of whoever doesn't agree & cooperate enough :( now look what you've done & brought upon yourself :( & we'll just forget the eruption of violence suppression happened & will happen again & be the overhanging threat all in the meantime

[salemlunaa]

☀︎ YOU’RE NOT BEING PRODUCTIVE, YOU’RE LAZY AND AFRAID ☀︎

And this will cost you a lot of time that could be spent with your desires…

You have all the information, why aren’t you applying. You tell me you have been in this community for 6 months, a year, 2 years+, but how many of those days you’ve spent in this community have you actually applied, how many of those nights did you actually apply and don’t just fall asleep after 5 seconds.

And i know why you’re lazy, it’s because you’re scared, you’re scared of inducing process, whether it be success or failure. You make yourself busy with scripts and subliminals, “i’ll script this really cool thing first”, “i’ll scroll a little on tumblr first” “lemme just look at the success story hashtag before i do it, it really motivates me” You try and distract your self, you delude yourself into thinking you’re being productive but really you don’t want to, if you wanted to you wouldn’t be here and I will ALWAYS stand by that. You put it off until the last minute and then when it “doesn’t work” you run back to tumblr acting like you actually did anything.

a really good analogy from @archsariel333 - “you buy the pens, the notebook, you plan for the book you’re going to write but, you never write it”

“let me just add this one thing to the plan”, “let me look at inspo for book covers and art styles for illustration”, “let me go to my book writers group on tumblr and see if they have anymore advice for me even tho i know how to write a fucking book”

I know it’s comforting and validating to be in the “waiting period”, the period of anticipation. You want to go shopping for a vacation, pack your suitcase, look at reviews on social media, plan the pics you’re going to take, but getting on the actual plane can be scary, you ask yourself “what if they deny my boarding pass”, “what if i fail to make it on time”, “what if im not eligible to fly for whatever reason”, you don’t want to leave your comforting circumstances and even the trip itself scares you just a little, so you cope by buying all the vacation outfits in the world, saving inspo pics into a pinterest board, looking at vlogs of other people going to that place. You can’t bring yourself to get on the fucking plane.

You need to apply, and properly, 2024 is almost over, the amount of weeks we have left isn’t even in the double digits anymore, I don’t want you to make it to the end of this DECADE still keeping the tumblr “foryou” page company, watching people coming and going feeling paralysed as people who came here later than you pass you by. I know the feeling sucks but whose fault is that?

I want you to scrap the amount you’ve been here. Since you’re the operant power right? I don’t care how many weeks, months, years you’ve been here, scrap it, you’re going to start afresh and you’re going to actually apply, when you have the time, you’re not going to go back to your notes app, notion or pinterest to script some more, you’re going to apply.

A lot of you have the knowledge that majority of the world doesn’t and time on your hands, do you know how powerful and extremely fortunate you are, to have time AND knowledge? i don’t think alot of you understand how much of a privilege that is you are unstoppable yet you stop yourself out of fear that you will “fail” to tap into the void and let yourself down. You are so privileged to know what you know and to have the time to apply it, so do it, your not gonna scroll on tiktok for a few more minutes or shove a million subliminals down your throat to “prep yourself” you’re just going to take a breath and do it. Induce pure consciousness, and if you fall asleep scrap that assumption and do it again.

Look at your life right now, do you honestly like it, do you like envying others for having what you can have at the snap of your fingers. Do you like the life you are living?

I want you to tell yourself that you will not be the reason for your own demise. you will NOT be the reason that it’s 2026,27,28 and so on and you don’t have what you want.

please just go and apply, i don’t even know you guys and it hurts watching you kill time when you could’ve had everything a day ago, an hour ago heck even 5 minutes ago.

apply apply apply, don’t let this feeling be the reason you “fail” 💋🍑

[changeling-droneco]

Hi I'm that person who made the original post about "no doesn mean no" when a small bit of the mr beast company document was leaked, well, now we have the full document (thanks rosanna) so I'm going to go over it. Please note I am not a lawyer or a business man, I'm in college for psychology, so I might misunderstand some things or make the wrong conclusion. However, if this is a document made for the average mr. beast employee, if I cannot understand it properly, then im sure some employees also struggled

First of all, the opening paragraph. Like I get it's supposed to be like, to put people at ease, but

This is so strange? Like, first of all, this is your EMPLOYEE MANUAL, you should have run it through like, a spell check? Or had someone edit it? This is already incredibly unprofessional. Also the promising of a thousand dollars if you pass a quiz on it? It's bizarre and I'd love to see if it's an actual quiz.

Jimmy, hun, please god get an editor for this you're already trying my patience.

YOU SHOULD, you genuinely should, while interconnected these are all COMPLETELY different jobs, if you think you could write a separate manual for each branch you SHOULD

I'm sure I'm about to get an answer but what the fuck is the best YOUTUBE video then? If it's not comedy, its not production, its not quality, its not look, then what the hell is left? (monetization, it's monetization)

First of all, Jimmy, why are you using internet lingo in this, it's not a text message, this is not a place for, idc, and lol, and not capitalizing your headers correctly??? Also like I said, he's chasing trends for monetization, and also he's just wrong, there are plenty of hollywood level shows and the like on youtube. You fully admit you do not care about trends and actively rush things?

This is just fucked??? Like of COURSE IT MATTERS??? Results based company is bullshit, your employees that worked for five weeks and failed aren't "lesser" then James, it's a structural failure! They still worked for HOURS to try and succeed?? That shows merit and loyalty??? What the fuck???

Rosanna covers this one in her video but it's worth restating that this is FUCKED??? It's clear overwork "your job is your family" culture. Especially the use of the word obsessive? If you do not OBSESS over your work, you are considered poisonous. NO WONDER we have so many reports of employees doing things they feel is dangerous or unsafe, if they don't they're considered POISON to the company.

The formatting in this doc continues to fucking kill me, what are you DOING man GET AN EDITOR

This feels like such an easy fix of just...make the thumbnail after the fact? Or only make a rough draft of one first? Like if production makes a red bouncy castle instead of a yellow one, that feels like an easy fix to the thumbnail OR a communication error, and again, that's on management

A lot of the next stuff is like analytics stuff that for the most part I can't really speak on as someone who does not do any of this stuff. There are a few things though

Which like???? what??? a lull??? what do you mean "watching a video without even realizing they are watching a video??" That doesn't scream good or even mediocre content to me. If I'm actively tuning out as I watch a video, that's bad. Especially because there have been plenty of times I've been like half way through a video i go "hey this sucks actually" and click off. They actively want their audience to not be paying attention to the video so it runs all the way through, that's kinda pathetic.

I don't actually know if this is common or not in this industry, but as an outsider this seems INCREDIBLY micromanaging to me, to an immense degree.

Jimmy why are you putting swears in your employee manual?? sir??? and also something about this whole thing icks me out, I don't quite have the words but the whole emphasis on "im different im special no one else can be me" just reeks of something kind of manipulative

Why is production changing so much Jimmy??? Infinite growth is the mindset of a cancer cell Jimmy! This is incredibly unstable working conditions! Also again with the word obsession, if you take time out of your own day on your own time to watch hulu, that's seen as not being obsessed enough for the company. This is nonsensical!

Again, this is INSANELY micromanaging, and also so fucking unhinged??? "God himself couldn't stop you from making this video on time" is NOT a healthy work mindset, things HAPPEN!!!

In this segment he's actually talking normal things but I did just want to highlight his use of "freaken" who the hell puts that in an EMPLOYEE MANUEL

Again with the micromanaging, and the immense pressure on employees for problems OTHER people do. While he's not fully wrong that you should be in more contact with the contractor then the example, this is too much in the other direction. How much time in the day does he think people have?!

My kingdom for a fucking paragraph break dude, my fucking eyes. Also this is a lot of "im so great and do everything and you should do more for me and if i dont know something that's your fault" for something titled "I am not always right"

I'm getting lazy with my highlighting, but again, the micromanaging? If you're SOOO busy, the first question should be the ideal? it's quick and makes a quick decision, while the second one meanders and meanders

Again, Jimmy is pushing blame for HIS mistakes on OTHER PEOPLE. For again, a section called "i am not always right" hes taking NO accountability for that and just making the SAME excuses he's berating in other places.

I can't even tell what he means here AN EDITOR JIMMY

Autism Hell tm, PLEASE email me so I can DOUBLE CHECK IT, things in writing are SO useful

Again the language towards "C-Players" which as mr beast has said, are the people who y'know, are NORMAL employees who DON'T live and breathe this company

Okay first of all, a Lamborghini is like 300k so that's already A REALLY hard task, and i sure hope don't usually put typos in the tasks. SECOND of all the fact he thinks its okay to go "hey if the studio is literally on fire around you and you stop working to get the Lamborghini, you're not doing good enough" even if he claims it as a joke is NOT OKAY what the FUCK

We've covered this before, but to reiterate this segment is named after a sexual assault reference when it could have been named ANYTHING ELSE and harasses employees and pressures them to break rules, don't do that.

I'm not an editor, so maybe this is normal, but as someone from the outside it seems strange to put this much emphasis on dividing focus between so many videos at once.

Jimmy, hun, are you paying extra for this? Because if I'm an editor and you want me FILMING stuff then i want to be paid more for doing TWO jobs and I probably still wont be as skilled a TRAINED CAMERA MAN

First of all now THAT'S a type, consteatants. Also the fact they are aware that leaving contestants out in the sun is bad, why are you not doing MORE TO STOP IT BEYOND "hey maybe giving them three hours of heatstroke is bad, try only two next time"

Don't we love favoritism, more shitty unprofessional writings, and a completely unstable work environment?

If your people have to pull all nighters period something is wrong, and if something happens to an employees car that could have seriously hurt someone, i sure hope you care more then just "LOL FUNNY" Who's picking up the broken glass? Who's reimbursing the car owner? That one meme of "your first care should be commitment to the bit" is a MEME jimmy, it's not ACTUAL ADVICE

Ah shit I hit image limit, well, you've seen enough screenshots to know these are screenshots, we're almost done I'll put them in as quotes

"Let’s say you are tasked with finding us a castle to live in for 50 hours and while doing research you find a castle and a number to call for the owner. So you do call, and he answers. Only problem is he says he quit the castle renting business to pursue his dream of building a 100 foot tall lego catapult. You can obviously tell where i’m going with this. Ideally you’d recognize that’s badass as fuck and try to convince him to let us use it when we do find a castle. This is a bad example because it’s so obvious but if you’re doing your job right you will be doing an absurd amounts of calls and data collecting. While trying to complete your prios and prepare for the video you should always be on the lookout for new things you can bring to your creative team to inspire them. Because just like me, they don’t know what they don’t know and you can’t just say “i’m in production and i’m not very creative” because that’s literally the equivalent of saying I suck at what I do. You also need to apply this same mindset when problem solving because many people lose sight of this stuff when in the weeds. If a problem appears, always always always ask yourself if your new plan is whats best for creative, not just the easiest bandaid."

First of all it's really funny seeing all the red lines pop up, second of all this insistent blurring of everyone's job seems so strange? Again maybe this is normal, but it really feels like Jimmy wants everyone working every job, instead on focusing on what they are actually hired to do.

"What is the goal of our content?

To excite me. The goal of our content is to excite me. That may sound weird to some of you, especially if you’re new but to me it’s what’s most important. If I'm not excited to get in front of that camera and film the video, it’s just simply not going to happen."

That's fucking weirddddd, like I get that he's trying to be like "im authentic" but it always feels like a bad sign when the goal of a company is literally just "What amuses the boss" like...bad sign

"this is youtube and there are constraints. You know the video can’t be a minute so you’re obviously going to need a story to hold the viewers and there are rules to storytelling. Our audience is massive and because of that you have to be simple, for 50 million people to understand something it must be simple. Content can be anything but there is structure and rules that we must mold it into that I want to teach you about, because virality doesn’t just happen. Every frame of our videos will be seen by 10s of millions of people"

Gross

"I'd say the average MrBeast viewer is a teenage memer that likes video games."

Mr Beast is completely aware of his demographic and puts screen shots of it, he is very aware his stuff is aimed at kids, even when its about gambling or hiring people not around near minors

"I feel silly for having to write this but all the time I talk to 32 new people that have at most seen like 5 or 6 of our videos and it’s mind blowing that they don’t see a problem with that lol."

It's almost like your audience is teenage memer and that people who working here are not in fact, teenage memers.

"What you consume on social media, when you watch youtube, tv, the games you play, etc. are what I like to call your information diet.

How do you stay up to date on the latest memes? How do you know what’s going on with celebrities? What’s trending on youtube? What other creators are doing? What’s popping on tik tok? Your information diet. Consume things on a daily basis that help you write better content."

If my job as a creative writer had my boss tell me to have to see whats "popping on tik tok" as part of my job i'd quit also again, the micromanaging of someone's life as well pops up again, it's weirddd

"It’s okay for the boys to be childish

If talent wants to draw a dick on the white board in the video or do something stupid, let them. (assuming they know all the risks and arn’t missing context on why it’s not safe) People like when we are in our natural element of stupidity. Really do everything you can to empower the boys when filming and help them make content. Help them be idiots"

More favoritism

"If you’ve made it this far you are probably at least semi interested in this being your career. So I wanted to chat about it. Because if you're ambitious and want to dedicate your life to work, you picked the best company in America to do it at. I really don’t care to hoard a bunch of money and I deeply believe in rewarding the people that help this business get where it needs to be. But before I get into that, let’s talk about the future. As I write this we have 2 teams, that will grow to 4 in the next year. (and possibly 8 in the next 2 years but I can’t talk about that cause james will kill me haha). We need more leaders in the company. Weneed hard working, obsessive, coachable, intelligent, grinders that can step up and take some of these leadership spots over the next 2 years. Every single department has an opportunity for you to grow in and you’re in luck because we don’t do yearly reviews. We do whenever the fuck you want reviewes"

Lack of communication from management, and more emphasis on grinding and crunch culture, goodie, all while riddled with typos! God.

"I see a world where this company is worth billions and one day 10s of billions. And those of you that help build this will be rewarded. I want nothing more then for you to go all in, obsessive all day everyday, and become so god dam valuable this company can’t operate without you. And in return for becoming so valuable I hope to give you incredible experiences, a fun place to work, and of course, more money then you could ever dream of making at any other company."

I feel like I'm reading a fucking pyramid scheme document here, "youre so so valuable spend literally every minute of every day on this company haha" good GOD man

[transmutationisms]

@annevbonny yeah so first of all there's the overt framing issue that this whole idea rests on the premise that eliminating fatness is both possible and good, as though like. fat people haven't existed prior to the ~industrial revolution~ lol

more granularly this theory relies on misinterpreting the causes for the link between poverty and fatness (which is real---they are correlated) so that fatness can be configured as a failure of eating choices and urban design, meaning ofc that the 'solution' to this problem is more socially hygienic, monitored, controlled communities where everybody has been properly educated into the proper affective enjoyment of spinach and bike riding, and no one is fat anymore and the labour force lives for longer and generates more value for employers

in truth one of the biggest mediating factors in the poverty-body weight link is food insecurity, because intermittent access to food tends to result in periods of under-nourishment followed by periods of compensatory eating with corresponding weight regain/overshoot (this is typical of weight trajectories in anyone refeeding after a period of starvation or under-eating, for any reason). so this is all to say that the suggestion that fatness is caused by access to 'unhealthy foods' is not only off base but extremely harmful; food insecurity is rampant globally. what people need is consistent access to food, and more of it!

and [loud obvious disclaimer voice] although i absolutely agree that food justice means access to a variety of foods with a variety of nutrient profiles, access to any calories at all is always better than access to none or too few. which is to say, there aren't 'healthy' or 'unhealthy' foods in isolation (all foods can belong in a varied, sufficient diet) and this is a billion times more true when we are talking about people struggling to consume enough calories in the first place.

relatedly, proponents of the 'obesogenic environment' theory often invoke the idea of 'hyperpalatable foods' or 'food addiction'---different ways of saying that people 'overeat' 'junk food' because it's too tasty (often with the bonus techno-conspiricism of "they engineer it that way"). again it's this idea that the problem is people eating the 'wrong' foods, now because the foods themselves are exerting some inexorable chemical pull over them.

this is inane for multiple reasons including the failure to deal with access issues and the fact that people who routinely, reliably eat enough in non-restrictive patterns (between food insecurity and encouragement to deliberately diet/restrict, this is very few people) don't even tend to 'overeat' energy-dense demonised foods in the first place. ie, there is no need to proscribe or limit 'junk food' or 'fast food' or 'empty calories' or whatever nonsense euphemism; again the solution to nutritionally unbalanced diets is to guarantee everyone access to sufficient food and a variety of different foods (and to stop encouraging the sorts of moralising food taboos that make certain foods 'out of bounds' and therefore more likely to provoke a subjective sense of loss of control in the first place lol)

but tbc, when i say "the solution to nutritionally unbalanced diets"---because these certainly can and do exist, particularly (again) amongst people subjected to food insecurity---i am NOT saying "the solution to fatness" because fatness is not something that will ever be eliminated from the human population. and here again we circle back to one of the fundamental fears that animates the 'obesogenic environment' myth, which is that fatness is a medical threat to the race/nation/national future. which is of course blatant biopolitics and is relying on massive assumptions about the health status of fat and thin people that are simply not borne out in the data, and that misinterpret the relationship between fatness and illness (for example, the extent to which weight stigma prevents fat people from receiving medical care, or the role of 'metabolic syndrome' in causing weight gain, rather than the other way around).

people are fat for many reasons, including "their bodies just look like that"; fatness is neither a disease in itself nor inherently indicative of ill health, nor is it eradicable anyway (and fundamentally, while all people should have access to health-protective social and economic conditions, health is not something that people 'owe' to anyone else anyway)

the 'obesogenic environment' is a liberal technocratic fantasy---a world in which fatness is a problem of individual consumption and social engineering, and is to be eliminated by clever policy and personal responsibility. it assumes your health is 1) directly caused and indicated by your weight, 2) something you owe to the capitalist state as part of the bargain that is 'citizenship', and 3) something you can learn to control if only you are properly educated by the medical authorities on the rules of nutrition (and secondarily exercise) science. it's a factual misinterpretation of everything we know about weight, health, diet, and wealth, and it fundamentally serves as a defense of the existing economic order: the problem isn't that capitalism structurally does not provide sufficient access to resources for any but the capitalist class---no, we just need a nicer and more functional capitalism where labourers have a greengrocer in the neighbourhood, because this is a discourse incapable of grappling with the material realities of food production and consumption, and instead reliant on configuring them in terms of affectivity ('food addiction') or knowledge (the idea that food-insecure people need to be more educated about nutrition)

there are some additional aspects here obviously like the idea that exercising more would make people thin (similar issues to the food arguments, physical activity can be great but the reasons people do or don't do it are actually complex and related to things like work schedules and exercise doesn't guarantee thinness in the first place) or fearmongering about 'endocrine disruptors' (real, but are extremely ill-defined as a category and are often just a way to appeal to ideas of 'naturalness' and the vague yet pressing harms of 'chemicals', and which are also not shown to single-handedly 'cause' fatness, a normal state of existence for the human body) but this is most often an argument about food ime.

[theremustbeabear]

a lot of monster media has a hard time with balancing making their monster incredibly dangerous but also keeping the most important characters alive without it seeming like obvious plot armour

but i think the terror does a really great job--not just because they do allow it to kill a number of important characters, but because of the composition of the two scenes where tuunbaq is beaten

the first, in ep 5, is when tuunbaq chases blanky up the foremast, which, on the surface, seems like a very obvious case of plot armour. tuunbaq kills several other crewmen with incredible ease in that very same scene, but then blanky is spared long enough to escape from it, simply because he's an important character.

but that's not what's going on there. all of the easy deaths, so far, prior to this, have occurred on tuunbaq's territory. on flat ground, on the ice, and now tuunbaq is staking its claim on terror. but terror is still occupied, and blanky, especially, is a man who is more at home on a ship than land. tuunbaq is beaten, here, because blanky is playing with a home turf advantage. blanky does have armour, but it's not because he's an important character--it's because tuunbaq has invaded the space where he's most comfortable, and so he goes up, to where he knows a bear can still follow him, but it'll be exposed, and too heavy to follow him all the way.

and this show has done a great job of setting the stakes, already, by this point--the first time i watched this scene, even though blanky was so far surviving the confrontation, i was incredibly sure that he wasn't going to make it out. i thought for certain that he was going to have to sacrifice himself in order for them to hit tuunbaq with the cannon, and so it was deeply satisfying when he actually survived. i was so fucking happy, because i was already starting to get sad about him being dead, even though he wasn't dead yet, lol. it feels earned, when he makes it out, and fair enough that he loses a leg in the process, too.

the second, in the final episode, is i think a bit more obvious, and considering how many other major characters get torn apart, it doesn't feel quite so much like crozier has plot armour. but tuunbaq is once again beaten by using the things that are not native to its land, that tuunbaq isn't designed to deal with. the sick and poisoned flesh of the seamen it's already consumed, for one, and then the boat chain.

and, for the second time, in order to beat tuunbaq, a limb must be sacrificed--crozier's hand, i think, counts, even though he loses it after the confrontation is long over, because blanky only loses his leg properly after the fact as well. and i think this can be brought around to how tuunbaq's shaman must remove their own tongue to communicate with it--if one wishes to have any sort of dominance over tuunbaq, a part of their body must be given in exchange. silna and her father give their tongues, blanky gives his leg, and crozier gives his hand.

and it is emphasized through hickey's failure that tuunbaq cannot be controlled by the expeditioners. the colonizers. it can be beaten back, and suppressed, and killed, through sacrifice, but it cannot be harnessed. it belongs to silna's people, to the inuit, and cannot truly be taken away. the only way to beat it is by invading its home with foreign powers and losing something of yourself in the process.

tl;dr thomas blanky doesn't need plot armour because he's just that good /silly and also this show is just. awesome.

[hanaybuns]

man… i think it’s so important that karamatsu is the center of the osomatsu san movie. I honestly don’t think it could’ve been anyone else but him. Bc only karamatsu would hold onto a fight that happened over 10 years ago. Like yes, his regret is about the letter, but it’s more so about his failure to bring his brothers together and have an actual conversation. It’s about his helplessness and inability to communicate his frustration properly. And while it’s ALL their regrets that brought them to that world. Karamatsu has the best recollection of that time because he’s been ruminating over it for years.

...which, of course, is something he told no one about. if anything, he initially tried to get them to think positively about their high school days.

but after they drink some more, he's the first one to start talking about their past seriously

also, if you go back and watch this scene, he's the only one whose face we don't see while jyushi is teasing them with their old pics. everyone else starts laughing at his antics, except karamatsu. in fact, he actually has this reeeeaaaaalllly subtle moment where he hunches forward slightly. like he visibly tenses up a bit (i wish i knew how to make gifs man).

with karamatsu the writers like to take a very “show don’t tell” approach. Yes there are episodes where he narrates (overseas vacation) and that could be considered his inner monologue, but for the most part we kiiinda don’t really know what he’s thinking. especially when he's being insulted. like he straight up either doesn't respond or he just goes "mmmm~~?"

(and as we know, he gets insulted a lot)

the thing is, this is by design. Because not only do we have a direct quote from his voice actor (yuichi nakamura) about it.

we also literally have an entire skit criticizing him for it.

but i think that this tendency to hold things in directly stems from that fight on the roof. The one time he really tried to step out of his comfort zone and approach his brothers about something earnestly, he started the worst fight they’ve ever had.

(also side note, he actually only starts opening up about it after he takes a couple sips from the beer osomatsu got for them)

Now I’m not going to argue with the director over whether karamatsu is a 100% bonafide kind good hearted person or not (though i should note that this was from 2016 and his characterization has changed a lot since then). but i think it's important to note that the rest of them lowkey forgot about that fight while karamatsu consciously held it in because he didn't want to remind them of it and potentially start another fight.

when they discuss their regrets, the rest of the bros are more-so regretful over how they acted as teens. they discuss how their teenage "weirdness" stemmed from their dislike of being sextuplets. this dislike further manifested as a dislike for each other. but karamatsu's regret was over his failure to bring them together. i do appreciate that this strong piece of characterization was based around the love he has for his brothers.

this is getting wayyy too long, but i have more to say (especially about how passive karamatsu is... so many thoughts) so i might make a part 2. stay tuned (maybe lol)

[charcubed]

I have soooooo much I want to write about Doctor Odyssey and if I keep waiting for the perfect moment to write something PROPERLY GOOD AND COMPREHENSIVE then I’m simply going to explode. So instead I’m going to write a messy little post on my phone when half asleep and try to keep it to one main topic.

Yeah yeah the throuple had a threesome (and I’m foaming at the mouth over it) but can we talk about the THEMES!!!!

This show is for crazy people (me specifically). Once again, I have a lot to say, but for now let me just focus on the wedding episode itself. That threesome is informed by the context of the rest of the episode in a way I simply CANNOT get over.

Let’s look at our passengers: the bride, groom, and best man. We find out all of them are being unfaithful to each other in various ways, miserable in their silence and unhealthy relationship dynamics. They all went to school together and were once close, but things went wrong somewhere along the way. The best man’s speech implies he has feelings for the groom, the groom is a sex addict who’s had multiple partners (possibly the best man included) because he feels trapped in a lie, and the bride and best man are having sex with each other. And none of them are communicating about it, and the groom who had preexisting mental health struggles commits suicide.

What happens to the three of them is a tragedy and it is absolutely a result of heteronormative monogamous culture. That culture was passed down from the bride’s mother to her too by example and societal influence.

I’m not exaggerating. It’s not subtle!!! At all!!! Everything explodes for those passengers because monogamy and repressing bisexuality wasn’t working for them.

They’re a dark mirror and cautionary tale. (Bonus points for how Avery’s sad backstory is that she was betrayed by her longtime friend / brief husband who cheated on her with a mutual friend as well, which is why she’s definitely hesitant about love now.)

By comparison, Avery and Max and Tristan have been avoiding some similar big pitfalls: they know they’re into each other and it’s not a secret, rivalries keep being squashed with effort, and no one is pressuring anyone to choose (so far).

This is what our beloved main characters have on their minds before what follows. And again, let’s not even get to the sex part yet… THE BUCKET LISTS!!! I’m losing my Goddamn marbles!!! The way all 3 of their lists intersect? Holy shit. Off the top of my head: Max and Tristan want to fall in love and have kids, Avery and Max want to see the world, Tristan and Avery have niche interests outside of medicine that they want to explore more… We were given itemized lists to show how the 3 of them balance and round each other out perfectly.

It’s not about any 2 of them because it won’t work with just any 2. It’s ALL THREE — just like all the framing and blocking of shots is consistently all 3, they walked down the wedding aisle all 3 together, the first sex scene for any of them that WE as the audience see on screen is all 3 of them together, a “bad threesome” is defined as 2 people getting too wrapped up in each other and the 3rd being an accidental outsider, we often see that if one duo gets a couple-y moment then the other duos get similar moments later as well, etc etc. Sorry. Let me not continue the summary list here and now so I don’t get too sidetracked but there’s A LOT.

But like, my current point? That wedding episode is a goldmine and the threesome explicitly happening doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Far from it. The themes are themeing in the whole show, of course, which is part of what I want to write about elsewhere at some point too: this show is repeatedly very deliberate about making sure heterosexuality or monogamy aren’t framed as the default or only correct options, and queerness is sprinkled everywhere. But this wedding episode specifically… the themes were nearly the ONLY PLOT. Nothing else — it’s basically only that, and it’s very focused. The failures of monogamy are on full display. And that’s why and how we get an explicit threesome right after it, which will lead us into how things will continue to develop for our trio.

Now, as for why the threesome happens so relatively quickly? My hot take on that is that general audiences can be stupid and so the creators wanted to put the throuple explicitly on screen fairly early to get people to start Noticing. Show them how the characters need to be together… and that sets us up for the possible angst and tension to follow as they have to accept it emotionally for themselves too. Now, as an audience member, you’ll more strongly know what to root for. You’ll know what’s right because you’ve seen it and you’ll want them to get back to that place, come what may. (If you’re not a puritan.)

It’s so fucking good. Insane silly show for insane people. Are we seeing the vision??? I need everyone to lock in.

This ramble is probably a disaster and I apologize for that but ohhhh man I had to put SOME words down so I wouldn’t explode. Suffice it to say I’m having a ball up in this bitch and I cannot believe this show exists. I couldn’t believe my eyes and my brain cells in the pilot, and I REALLY can’t believe them now.

What a time to be alive!!!!!! Polycule “love fest” on a cruise ship, baby!!! The world needs more love, all kinds of love, as the Captain says!!!! Onward to gay week!!!! LET’S SEE THOSE BI MEN KISS

[wonders-of-the-cosmos]

Mariner program

The Mariner program was conducted by the American space agency NASA to explore other planets. Between 1962 and late 1973, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) designed and built 10 robotic interplanetary probes named Mariner to explore the inner Solar System - visiting the planets Venus, Mars and Mercury for the first time, and returning to Venus and Mars for additional close observations.

The program included a number of interplanetary firsts, including the first planetary flyby, the planetary orbiter, and the first gravity assist maneuver. Of the 10 vehicles in the Mariner series, seven were successful, forming the starting point for many subsequent NASA/JPL space probe programs. 

The name of the Mariner program was decided in "May 1960-at the suggestion of Edgar M. Cortright" to have the "planetary mission probes ... patterned after nautical terms, to convey 'the impression of travel to great distances and remote lands.'" That "decision was the basis for naming Mariner, Ranger, Surveyor, and Viking probes."

Each spacecraft was to carry solar panels that would be pointed toward the Sun and a dish antenna that would be pointed at Earth. Each would also carry a host of scientific instruments. Some of the instruments, such as cameras, would need to be pointed at the target body it was studying. Other instruments were non-directional and studied phenomena such as magnetic fields and charged particles. JPL engineers proposed to make the Mariners "three-axis-stabilized," meaning that unlike other space probes they would not spin.

Mariner 1 and Mariner 2

Mariner 1 and Mariner 2 were two deep-space probes making up NASA's Mariner-R project. The primary goal of the project was to develop and launch two spacecraft sequentially to the near vicinity of Venus, receive communications from the spacecraft and to perform radiometric temperature measurements of the planet. A secondary objective was to make interplanetary magnetic field and/or particle measurements on the way to, and in the vicinity of, Venus.

Animation of Mariner 2's trajectory from August 27, 1962, to December 31, 1962. Mariner 2 · Venus · Earth.

Mariners 3 and 4

Sisterships Mariner 3 and Mariner 4 were Mars flyby missions.

Mariner 3 was launched on November 5, 1964, but the shroud encasing the spacecraft atop its rocket failed to open properly and Mariner 3 did not get to Mars.

Mariner 4, launched on November 28, 1964, was the first successful flyby of the planet Mars and gave the first glimpse of Mars at close range

This archival image is an enhanced contrast version of the first Mars photograph released on July 15, 1965. This is man's first close-up photograph of another planet -- a photographic representation of digital data radioed from Mars by the Mariner 4 spacecraft. Data was either sent to Earth immediately for acquisition or stored on an onboard tape recorder for later transmission.

The pictures, played back from a small tape recorder over a long period, showed lunar-type impact craters (just beginning to be photographed at close range from the Moon), some of them touched with frost in the chill Martian evening. 

Mariner 5

The Mariner 5 spacecraft was launched to Venus on June 14, 1967, and arrived in the vicinity of the planet in October 1967. It carried a complement of experiments to probe Venus' atmosphere with radio waves, scan its brightness in ultraviolet light, and sample the solar particles and magnetic field fluctuations above the planet.

Mariners 6 and 7

Mariners 6 and 7 were identical teammates in a two-spacecraft mission to Mars. Mariner 6 was launched on February 24, 1969, followed by Mariner 7 on March 21, 1969. They flew over the equator and southern hemisphere of the planet Mars.

Mariners 8 and 9

Mariner 8 and Mariner 9 were identical sister craft designed to map the Martian surface simultaneously, but Mariner 8 was lost in a launch vehicle failure. Mariner 9 was launched in May 1971 and became the first artificial satellite of Mars. 

Mariner 10

The Mariner 10 spacecraft launched on November 3, 1973, and was the first to use a gravity assist trajectory, accelerating as it entered the gravitational influence of Venus, then being flung by the planet's gravity onto a slightly different course to reach Mercury. It was also the first spacecraft to encounter two planets at close range, and for 33 years the only spacecraft to photograph Mercury in closeup.

Venus in real colors, processed from clear and blue filtered Mariner 10 images

Mariner 10's photograph of Venus in ultraviolet light (photo color-enhanced to simulate Venus's natural color as the human eye would see it)

This mosaic shows the planet Mercury as seen by Mariner 10 as it sped away from the planet on March 29, 1974.

source x, x | images x

[witchofthesouls]

Can we some some bird boy Jack and motherly Soundwave? Kinda funny if Optimus doesn’t know what to make of Soundwave offering to help his strange fledgling

Anon, I raise you that the 'cons are doing 'pstpstpst' to the little bird, trying and failing to steal Jack away. Some 'cons are really curious if it's actually the real deal. Others are thinking of ransoming Jack back for supplies. There's also a general consensus that the Autobots, a faction of civilian or higher caste alt-modes, don't know how to truly care for a frame suited for military and war. Much less a Seekerkin sparkling.

Jack is, however, super careful, especially around Skywarp since Jack was warned about the Seeker's teleportation ability. Soundwave is really trying to edge the kid out by using the Cassettes. Rumble and Frenzy enjoy gross facts, video games, and TV shows. Ravage leans into Jack's scavenger and hunting tendencies.

The Decepticon Seekers are adamant that TFP Optimus doesn't know how to care for the sparkling properly. The little one needs a proper and stable flock. Not whatever paltry and lackluster substitute the Autobots ape at. They look at the Aerialbots as an example of their massive failure. Made worse as the Autobots do have a few remaining Seekerkin, and yet they let go of their own community ties and cultural identity.

Ohhhh, the screaming matches between the Decepticon Command Trine versus the remaining Autobot Praxians.

[thenerdykneazle]

To Hold

A Sequel to "Her Touch"

Summary: Ominis's wedding night with his new wife.

Ominis Gaunt x F!MC

Warnings: the mildest of hand kinks, kissing, a surprising amount of schoolwork, stressing about exams, failure to communicate

Word count: 6463

Ominis never got to see you walk down the aisle. He will never know just how radiant you looked in your dress or the expression that was on your face as you stood opposite him. He had never loathed his blindness more. He wanted to take in the sight of you and tell you how beautiful you looked and have it mean something – even if you assured him that it meant the world to you whenever he said you were beautiful.

Ominis would, however, always remember the feeling of your hands in his as you both said your vows. They were warm, soft, and sure as your fingers entwined with his. Kissing you for the first time as his wife had been dizzying – even though he had been unable to stop smiling long enough to do it properly. He remedied that when he finally brought you home, though.

He carried you across the threshold and down a well-memorised path to his bedroom – well, your shared bedroom now. In the preceding weeks, he had practised walking the route from the door to the bed hundreds of times without his wand guiding him. Sebastian had caught him at it once, and Ominis’s face was positively flaming as he tried to explain himself. It was worth it, though, because carrying you to the bed went flawlessly.

Ominis had got a good feel for your dress at the reception. He had been utterly incapable of keeping his hands off of you. He had felt how the gown lay tight to your waist before blooming into full skirts that fanned out into him as you danced together. He had played with the layers of ruffles on your elbow-length sleeves as you two made the rounds greeting your guests. He had even discovered the way the low neckline left your collar bones exposed. You ended up having to heal a mark he had left just above one of them after sneaking you away from the festivities for a few minutes.

After all that, Ominis felt he had fully appreciated the garment. Now he was eager to get it off you. First, though, he slipped off his shoes and sat behind you on the bed as he carefully helped you undo the intricate plaited chignon Natty had styled for you. When your hair finally fell loose around your shoulders, Ominis buried his fingers in the roots, massaging the tips of his fingers along your scalp.

You hummed with pleasure as you let your head fall back on his shoulder. “That feels exquisite, love,” you said.

Ominis kept one hand tangled in your hair while the other swept your locks back from your neck. He lowered his lips to the delicate skin and kissed a path from up near your jaw down to where your dress began on your shoulder.

“I assure you that you feel even better, darling,” he muttered against your skin before placing an open-mouthed kiss to your shoulder. “So soft.” He nuzzled into you. “So delicious.” He licked a slow line out until the sleeve of your dress stopped him.

You moaned softly, twisting your head to give him more space as he traced up the length of your neck with his tongue. Your skin was salty from the hours you had spent dancing and celebrating with your friends and family. Ominis felt like he could devour you as he sucked a mark into the skin behind your ear. He was determined to savour you, though.

You reached back to curl your fingers in his hair as Ominis nuzzled your jaw, trailing up and down it with the flat of his nose as he breathed you in. Another hum rumbled through your chest. Ominis wished he could capture the sound and replay it each night, letting the echo of your contentment lull him to sleep.

Bringing his free hand up to your jaw, Ominis turned your face to bring your lips to his. He moaned into your mouth as your lips interlocked. He continued to massage your scalp with the other hand before tugging the silky locks into his fist as he nipped hungrily at your bottom lip.

Ominis was confident about this part. He had done it with you often. Too often, probably, and it was only by some mercy of Merlin that he had made it to your wedding night without taking things too far.

You rested your hand on his thigh, and Ominis became keenly aware of how hard his heart was beating. You two had, as a rule, generally kept hands above the waist on each other – especially when kissing. Ominis had an additional pair of rather prominent restricted zones on you, whereas you had the benefit of being able to rest your hands on his chest whenever you liked.

Ominis had to be diligent about not letting his hands stray where they should not. Even resting one on your knee had become too tempting the stronger his affections for you had grown. That did not mean the odd slip never happened – though, not nearly as often as Ominis had wanted them to. Still, he was far from used to having the warmth of your hand so close to his more intimate parts. Your hand ran up and down the inside of his thigh, making more and more heat pool low in his abdomen with every upward stroke. His anticipation at feeling your hand on his length built to bursting.

He got so worked up he had to pull back to gasp in more oxygen before he fell faint. He rested his forehead on yours.

“I love you,” he said, breathing the words out onto your lips.

“I love you, too,” you confessed. Ominis could hear the earnestness in your voice, and it made his heart sing.

A smile broke out on his face. “I can’t believe you’re really my wife,” he said, damn near giddy. It was an odd feeling juxtaposed with the extent of his arousal, but it also felt right. You made him incomprehensibly happy. You also stoked desire in him until he teetered on the brink of madness. Your engagement – the longest months of his life to date – had him rapidly oscillating between both states. It was fitting that they should merge in this moment.

You lifted your hand to stroke your thumb over his cheek. “From now until forever,” you replied. Then, you teasingly added, “So, I hope you’re not having second thoughts.”

“Never,” he vowed earnestly before reconnecting your lips to seal it.

You shifted on the bed, twisting around to face Ominis until you suddenly fell into him with a yelp, knocking him back on the bed as his hands flew up to hold your arms steady.

“Are you all right?” he asked, both worried and confused.

“Yes, sorry. I just got a bit tangled up in these skirts,” you said, chuckling. “Could you, um, maybe help me out of my dress?”

Ominis felt his cheeks warm. For as excited as he was to get you out of your clothes, actually doing it somewhat terrified him. All of that was completely new for him. He had no experience to go off of, and he could not exactly learn from pictures. There was no one he would rather figure things out with, but he worried about being….well, bad at things.

You two had discussed things a few times after your engagement. Ominis had received a general education about sexual matters in his latter teens, but it had been more confusing than anything. After your engagement, you had taken the time to explain your anatomy to him: how it was structured and how it responded when you were aroused. It made a lot more sense than his previous instruction had.

He had gone into the talk rather mortified. He felt he ought to have already known more than he did – after all, you already knew the basics about him without needing him to elaborate. But you were patient with him, and he quickly discovered that discussing your body was rather erotic. You two broke the discussion up into several brief conversations to avoid them getting too heated.

Ominis had additionally been rather nervous about being physically disappointing. Again, he had no frame of reference for what was normal. He feared damning you to a life of dissatisfaction. You assured him that would not be a problem, but he was unconvinced. It culminated in him, with your consent, showing himself to you after you had been snogging in his – now your – living room.

“Oh,” you had gasped.

His whole face, neck, and chest had burst into flaming heat. You had not sounded disappointed, exactly, but it was far from the reaction he had expected. “What? What’s wrong?” he asked, panicked.

“Nothing!” you insisted quickly. “It’s just…much prettier than I’d expected.”

He fought the urge to roll his eyes. “I want your honest opinion,” he said.

“I am being honest!” you replied defensively. “People talk about male anatomy rather disparagingly, and the illustrations aren’t exactly flattering. I just didn’t expect to find you so…aesthetic.”

Ominis felt on top of the world.

“I…” You cleared your throat. “You should probably put it away now.”

Ominis might have been embarrassed all over again if not for the fact that he could hear your arousal in your voice. He was very glad you knew what he looked like. Still, he had the good sense not to ask to feel you in return. There would have been no chance he kept control of his passions if he had.

Now, on your wedding night, he would finally get to feel you. Every inch of you.

Ominis stood from the bed and held a hand out to help you up, as well. He unlaced your gown, and he heard the rustle of the fabric as you stepped out of it. You stepped back in front of him in just a chemise. He could tell as his hands came to rest on your hips.

You helped him out of his robes in return. Then, you carefully removed his braces from the front of his trousers. Your hands grazed his lower abdomen as you unfastened the straps, sending heat pulsing through him. He had to fight the urge to abandon restraint as you began slowly, maddeningly unbuttoning his shirt.

Ominis let his hands roam up to your waist and over your ribs. He slid his left arm around your back while his right hand skated forward in a familiar path under your breasts. Then, it deviated from the usual course, instead traveling upward into previously forbidden terrain. His hand grazed the underside of your breast before gliding up the valley between them. He bit back a groan. Just your barest contours made him feverish. Your hands fisted into his unbuttoned shirt, signalling that he was not the only one affected by his exploration.

“Ominis,” you keened as his fingers stretched out across the centre of your chest and up toward your collar bones before dragging back down the plane of your sternum.

He needed to get you out of that chemise.

Ominis gripped the garment at your thighs, and you let him pull it over your head. His heart was pumping adrenaline through him now, burning desire coursing alongside it.

He shrugged off his shirt before pulling you to him, your bare chests pressed together as he kissed you breathless. He had never felt the heat of your skin sinking so deeply into him before. He felt like the two of you might very well melt into one at any moment. In a way, he supposed you already had when you vowed your lives – yourselves – to each other.

Ominis could not stand being apart from you any longer.

He walked you back toward the bed, laying you back properly before climbing in after you.

He hovered over you with his hands on either side of your head and one knee between your legs before he leant down to reconnect your lips.

His tongue teased yours as it surged desperately into his mouth. Your hands tangled in his hair, wrapping locks around your fingers, stinging his scalp once more as you scrambled for purchase. It was a pleasant sensation, heightened by your passion for him. You were arching up towards him, eager for every extra bit of connection you could gain. He found your desire for him addictive. He had never imagined someone would want him so fervently – and he had certain never thought it would be someone he so ardently yearned for himself.

You pulled back suddenly, and for a horrible moment Ominis feared he had hurt you.

“Wait. I want to see you,” you said, gripping the waistband of his trousers.

Ominis hesitated. “You can see me all at once, but it takes me time to feel things out. Let me catch up,” he said before nuzzling the tip of his nose against yours.

“I suppose that's fair,” you replied, though you did not seem wholly enthused by the idea.

Ominis chuckled. “Patience, love,” he said, shifting his weight onto one arm so he could run his free hand down your arm until he laced his fingers with yours. He brought your hand up to his lips and pressed a kiss against the back of it. “I’ll make it worth it.”

He was not sure where his sudden boldness had come from to make such promises. It had his desired effect, though, as you let out a soft, needy whimper.

Ominis raised your hand to his lips and kissed each of your knuckles in turn before opening your hand to kiss the pads of your fingers as well. He wanted to feel every part of you on his lips. When he reached your thumb, he took the whole of it into his mouth, pressing his tongue flat against it to taste you.

You let out a moan that made arousal jolt through him as your free hand reached up and grasped onto his other forearm as if to steady yourself. The muscles were already taught as it bared his weight, but he found himself tensing them further in response to your touch. Flexing, if he were honest with himself.

Sliding your thumb out slowly from his mouth, Ominis hummed in approval. Every part of you was so utterly perfect to him, down to the smallest of details. He kissed your wrist next before meticulously making his way up your arm, pouring his adoration into every reverent press of his lips on your silken skin. Again, he felt a spike of need urging him to ravish you. But, again, he resisted. He had implored you for patience, and he would exercise his own in kind.

As he continued his path upward, one of your hands gripped his shoulder, while the other tangled in his hair. You began to squirm as Ominis kissed across your collar bone. When he reached your throat, he switched tack and licked up it to your pulse underneath your jaw. You clung to him as he sucked against the delicate skin there.

“Oh,” you breathed out in a needy whine. It made Ominis throb with arousal, and he regretted not divesting himself of his trousers earlier.

Ignoring the constricting fabric, he began teasing his hand just under the swell of your breasts. He allowed himself to graze their edges as he passed beneath and between them. It was even more maddening to feel their curves without the fabric separating him from you. He was testing his own patience, trying to ease into things. Trying to make it good for you.

“Touch me, Ominis,” you begged, voice cracking and desperate as you continued to writhe under his attentions.

He groaned at the sound – at how much you needed him. He slid his hand up over the mound of your breast, filling his palm with the soft flesh. He squeezed, massaging his fingers into you as he felt the weight in his hand. So full. So supple. And now his.

Ominis withdrew his hand partially to allow the tips of his fingers tease your nipple, circling over it lightly until it stiffened under his touch. Ominis licked his lips before dipping his head on instinct, anchoring his hand on your waist as he leant down. He took the bud between his lips, letting his tongue flick out to meet it.

He moaned as he tasted you. Your breaths turned to quick pants, and your hand gripped tighter in his hair, making his scalp burn at the roots. But Ominis only grew more fervent as he suckled at your breast. He could have easily spent the whole night mapping each one out with his tongue.

Or he might have, anyway, until he caught the scent of your arousal. It was heady and sweet. He had caught hints of it on a few rare occasions after particularly heated snogging sessions. He had to fight hard in those moments to resist seeking out its source. It was intoxicating – arousing. Downright mesmerising. He would probably smell it in his amortentia.

The tension in Ominis’s neck strained as he forced himself not to immediately bury himself between your thighs. He rested his forehead on your breastbone as he panted from the effort of restraining himself. He groaned as your nails dragged across his scalp.

Your fist closed tight in his hair as his hand slid down your stomach to your core, his middle and ring fingers gently parting your folds. Your tender flesh was hot and slick on his fingers, and he could not help but think of how incredible you would feel on his cock. You moaned as he stoked languidly along your slit. Ominis pressed a kiss to your sternum in gratitude – he loved the noises you made for him. Only for him. He did not get to see you naked, but there were other aspects of you that would be his alone – the feeling of your breasts, your core, your skin; the scent and taste of your arousal; and the sounds of your pleasure.

“Gods, that feels so good!” you groaned.

“Yeah?” Ominis asked before he could stop himself. He cursed his insecurity. He should be confident. Assertive.

“Mhmm,” you assured him. Even that sounded needy, and it barely counted as a word.

“You feel divine, darling,” he told you. “You’re so wet for me. You’ve been as anxious for tonight as I have, haven’t you?”

You just whimpered in response.

Ominis shifted so he could lie pressed beside you as he continued his ministrations, mapping out your sex with each stroke. He felt along each of the soft inner lips you had described to him. He found your entrance, letting just the tip of his middle finger dip inside. It made your breath hitch, though Ominis was not totally sure if it was a good reaction or a bad one. Either way, he pulled back and continued up to the bundle of nerves at the apex of your centre. He rubbed light circles over it, gliding easily with the slick of your arousal.

Your hips arched up into his hand.

“Is this right?” he asked, wanting to ensure he was properly following the guidance you had given him in your discussions.

“Just a little to my left,” you replied breathily.

Ominis shifted his hand, and you gasped. Before he could ask if it was in pain or pleasure, you let out a wanton moan.

“Merlin,” you said, the word slipping out on your exhale.

Ominis could feel your body growing tense. He would have assumed he had done something wrong if he had not learnt from some of his own research that it was common as a woman’s body was increasingly stimulated. It made sense to him. His own body had done similarly on the occasions when he had touched himself, and Ominis felt a deep satisfaction that he was able to build the pleasure within you that way.

His own senses were being overwhelmed. The scent of your arousal was heavy in the air as he coaxed more of it from you with each pass over your swollen little bud. Your flesh was slick and velvety on his fingers. Your breathing had turned to panting, interrupted only by the whimpers and moans that escaped your lips, as your body wound tight with pleasure. He pressed his aching length against your thigh in a bid for some relief.

“I want you so badly, darling,” he admitted. “I want to be inside you. Fill you up with me.”

Your hips began to cant against his hand as your breaths became rapid. He wondered if you were imagining meeting his thrusts as he slid into you. He was certainly imagining it as he rutted against your thigh.

Ominis tried to kiss you, suddenly desperate for the contact, but his lips landed on your jaw becuase your head was turned aside. You quickly turned back to meet his lips, moaning into the kiss as he kept rubbing your clit – rather urgently now, in fact.

“Ominis! Oh! Don’t stop!” you panted as your thighs trembled. “S-so good! Gods, I love you! I–”

Your body began to spasm as the sound of your moans filled the room. Ominis’s desire hit a new peak as he both heard and felt your orgasm – one he had given you. Your body practically convulsed, down to the little muscles spasming under his fingers. He kissed you hard as he did his best to keep up his ministrations. He moaned as your tongue slid desperately into his mouth. Harsh puffs of air from your nostrils hit his cheek until you had to break the kiss to drag in deeper breaths, panting as you came down from your high.

“That was so beautiful, love,” Ominis said, nuzzling into the crook of your neck. He could feel your pulse racing.

“That was…You are…” you tried between gasps. “I love you.”

Ominis smiled against your collar bone. “I love you, too.”

Having caught your breath, you pulled him into a kiss. Your lips locked with his before beginning to wander across his face to every spot you knew he loved.

His ears were especially sensitive. Aside from his wand, they were his best way to take in information about the world beyond his immediate reach. He was protective of them, too. His governess had boxed his ears once, and he had collapsed to the ground in a sobbing heap. His mother had frequently dragged him around by them, unperturbed by his wails of pain. Ominis tensed up whenever someone else touched his ears. But you were always so gentle with them – with all of him, really. You trailed your tongue from the angle of his jaw up to lightly trace the edge of his earlobe. You grasped it delicately between your lips, and Ominis moaned out as you tugged it ever-so-slightly, sending a wave of pleasure through him like a burst of magic.

“I love when you moan for me, Ominis,” you said in a low voice.

The feeling was decidedly mutual. And hearing you say his name in that sultry tone – gods.

Your hand dragged down Ominis’s chest and over his abdomen, and his pulse quickened the lower you went. The light scratch of your nails against his skin sent gooseflesh pricking up across his torso and down his arms. All the while, your hand kept moving down toward the painfully tight bulge in his trousers. Ominis felt feverish with the need for you to touch him – and to touch you again.

You stilled just as the heel of your hand reached the top of his trousers. On the verge of combusting, his breaths came out in rough pants. He could not hold back his moan as your hand twisted around and down to cup over his erection. His own hand immediately found its way back to your centre, returning the favour.

Your palm was hot against him as you massaged him over his trousers, greatly relieving the ache that had been building as his body strained eagerly towards you. Even warmer was the heat of your folds as they moulded around his fingers. A cold sweat broke out on his neck as he imagined that warmth wrapped around his length. As he slid his middle finger into you, the fantasy became all the more vivid. You were hot and tight and–

“So wet for me,” Ominis muttered aloud.

You moaned in agreement as he pumped his finger languidly in and out of you. Your hand came up to clamp his shoulder as you rocked your hips in sync with his movements. Soon, your other hand began massaging him again. It was almost overwhelming to think of being inside you. He quickly began to have a very real fear that he was going to climax before he was even naked let alone making love to you.

It had happened once before, shortly after you had gotten engaged. He had walked you home after an evening at the Sallows’. He had gone inside for just a moment to bid you goodnight. He had placed a sweet, chaste kiss to your lips.

He could hear the smile in your voice as you said, “I can’t wait until we don’t have to say goodbye at night anymore.”

Ominis’s heart had filled to bursting. “Soon, darling,” he had promised.

You had stepped forwards and wrapped your arms around his middle as you rested your head on his shoulder. In a soft, sweet voice you said, “I’ll miss you.”

Ominis held you tight against him, savouring the fleeting moments of contact before he would have to leave. You nuzzled into his neck, the tip of your nose grazing the sensitive spot under his ear. His blood had begun to heat, having your body pressed to his and your breath fanning over his neck as you clung to him. He tilted his head down and found your lips, just brushing his against them as he knew stealing another kiss would be asking for trouble. His resolve crumbled almost instantly when you tilted up to meet him, and he captured your lips in a heated kiss.

The kiss quickly turned to snogging, which resulted in pinning you back against the door he should have long-since left through. One of your hands tangled in his hair as the other traced along his collar bones, which made him realise you had undone the top button of his shirt somehow. Only your shoulder blades touched the door as you arched into him. One of Ominis’s hands wandered down from your hip to grasp your bum and pull your hips further into his own.

He felt feral – utterly out of control – as he rutted against you while snogging you against a door. The pressure and friction clouded his mind in a haze of lust. It was ecstasy. He knew it was wrong. Gods, he knew your parents were sleeping a floor away and liable to catch the two of you. But he could not stop. Not when you seemed just as eager as he was. Not when you held him close and moaned and rocked against him in equal measure. Not when sparks of pleasure zipped up with spine at every thrust, every moan, every tug of his hair.

Keeping his grip on your round bum, his other hand had wandered up your ribs until his thumb could swipe along them just under your bust. Your breath hitched at the contact. When he – probably accidentally – grazed the underside of your breast, another moan escaped your lips. Ominis took the liberty of sliding his hand up to grasp you fully, and he was rewarded with your increased fervour as you canted your hips against him. He could feel through the scant layers of your casual dress, that his length was at your centre. You were utterly lost in the pleasure of him, and Ominis was in you, as well.

Declarations began to spill from your lips.

“I love you.”

“You feel so good.”

“Gods, I love to feel you against me.”

In turn, Ominis professed his own love, praised your curves, and revelled in the feeling of you. Hearing your words of praise made his actions all the more desperate. He knew he would be touching himself to the thought of them as soon as he got home. Or, he would have, if you had not said what you did next.

“Merlin, Ominis! I want to feel you inside me. I want to make love to you.”

Having already been teetering close to the edge, your words pushed him over. His orgasm crashed into him like running into a brick wall, knocking the air from his lungs as it caught him off guard. His muscles grew rigid as he continued thrusting against you, pulse after pulse releasing from him in vain within the confines of his trousers.

When the blinding pleasure faded, the shame and mortification quickly replaced it. He immediately started stammering an apology. You assured him that you were not upset. Further, you claimed to find it arousing. Though, with the haze of lust sufficiently broken, you both agreed it would be for the best that you did not carry on any further. Ominis was still embarrassed, but a shred of his dignity was retained with your gracious response to the situation.

He went on to recall your words every occasion he touched himself, and he found them no less effective than they had been that night. Having you want him was a high better than he could imagine any potion giving him.

Now, on your wedding night and with his desire for you overwhelming him, he worried the same might happen again.

“I think I’ve been very patient,” you said, voice husky, as your fingers traced the outline of him straining against his placket. “Gods, I want to see you. I want to lie with my husband.”

Even if Ominis would have had objections, they would not have stood a chance against that. He could not stop the groan that ripped from his chest. Though, fortunately, he was able to hold off his climax.

He kissed you firmly before agreeing that he was ready. After, rather regretfully, sliding his finger back out of you, he stood up to rip down his trousers and undergarments. Quickly rejoining you in bed, he covered your body with his own, kissing your neck as your heat sank into his skin. He relished the feeling of your body on his, free of barriers. It felt intimate even without the upcoming union of your bodies. It felt right being together, uninhibited. Like you both were made for it.

Ominis’s breath hitch when you reached between your bodies to take hold of him. He was flooded with desire as you slid your hand up and down his length. He already felt like he would die if you ever stopped touching him, and then you whispered a lubrication charm that multiplied his pleasure. That sent him into a state of utter bliss that had your name tumbling from his lips.

“Ready, love?” you asked.

That was a loaded question. Ominis was beyond ready. He had wanted you so badly for so long, and it only got worse each day he fell more in love with you. But he was also terrified – of hurting you, of disappointing you, of embarrassing himself. In that sense, he would never be ready. But with his wife underneath him, stroking him into delirium, there was nothing he wanted more than to make love to you.

“As long as you are, darling,” Ominis replied, trying to keep the nerves out of his voice.

“Gods, yes!” you groaned out in a breathy tone. “Ominis, please…”

He did not need further encouragement. After replacing your hold on him, he lined himself up at your entrance with only a slight readjustment needed. He edged forward cautiously, feeling the strain of his control. A part of him desperately wanted to ravage you – a part ruled by carnal desire that had long whispered in his ear to toss propriety aside and throw you into his bed. In truth, he was fairly certain he would give in to his baser instincts one day, but not this day. It would be a future day when both of you had the experience to experiment safely. Right now, he needed restraint. He wanted to be close and make love to you and make you feel good.

Ominis shuddered as his head sank into the warmth of your core. Slowly, he pressed deeper and deeper until he was fully sheathed within you.

It was better than he had expected. Better than he had imagined. He felt your muscles contract around him, squeezing with a maddening pressure that made him want to promise you anything as long as you let him stay inside you.

You let out a sharp breath.

A bolt of panic shot up Ominis’s spine. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” you assured him, seeming sincere. “I just…I feel so full.”

“Sorry,” he replied reflexively.

“No,” you said. “It’s good, but…I…could you move?”

Ominis was about to ask where you wanted him to move to when he caught your meaning. He had been motionless, just buried inside you – you needed him to move. He withdrew carefully before sliding back inside.

A truly obscene moan left your lips, and sweat began to bead on Ominis’s back as he held himself steady. He repeated the motions, setting a gentle rhythm pumping into you. Every press inside brought the sweet embrace of your walls around him. Every pull back created a glorious friction as your body clung to him like it was fighting to keep you two joined together.

Ominis rested his forehead on yours. “You feel incredible, darling.”

You whimpered at his words before capturing his lips in a kiss.

Gods, he wanted to come. The thought of spilling inside you was doing nothing to help him avoid doing so prematurely.

You began to meet his thrusts, and Ominis increased his pace incrementally. You were panting and moaning underneath him while your centre pulsed once around him. He thought of the spasm of your muscles under his fingertips and was filled with a sudden urge to feel you orgasm around him. It had always been his goal, however lofty it seemed, to have you climax first. He wanted this to be good for you. He wanted to pleasure you. But now he was doubly motivated as he craved the sensation of your muscles pulsing around him over and over.

Shifting his weight onto his left arm, Ominis freed his right hand to stimulate you. He made steady circles around your clitoris with his thumb. You lost sync with his thrusts as your legs trembled in response. Ominis’s teeth sank into his lip as he tried to stem his own arousal at making you lose control that way. You were a fearsome warrior – able to command a whole battlefield with ease – and yet under his touch you ceded authority over yourself.

You were practically writhing. “Fuck, j-just like that!”

The smell of sex was heavy in the air, a mix of sweat and arousal. Ominis could taste the salt on your skin as he trailed open-mouthed kisses across your collar bone. Your nails scraped down his back as you clung to him. He could feel your muscles drawing tight as you edged closer and closer to your breaking point. He felt his own pressure within, building higher and higher until he felt like he was trying to hold back an explosion. His bollocks felt heavy even as they drew tight to his body. His length throbbed with need, too swollen to be sustainable for long.

He moaned out your name. He was losing coherence with every thrust as he fought to hold back. His face was buried in the crook of your neck, his heavy breaths panting across your sweat-slicked skin. The muscles in his neck were strained tight and threatened to snap. “Please,” he begged. “Please, come for me. I need to feel it, darling. Please. You feel so good. Want you to feel good. I can’t–I’m so close. Please.”

Somewhere on the edge of his consciousness, Ominis realised you had stopped breathing. You had drawn so tight it was difficult to keep thrusting back inside. The vice-grip as he buried into you was a siren coaxing his release. Blinding pleasure was just a moment away if he let himself succumb. But he held on. And it was well worth it.

Your breaths came out in rapid, staccato puffs as Ominis felt you contract around him. Waves seemed to pulse down your whole body as shudders wracked through you. Your cries of ecstasy, even more than being buried in you, shattered the mental dam he had built to contain his own release. You were falling apart under his touch. You were in rapture because of him, and you were so beautiful when you hit your peak. Your pleasure seemed to multiply his own, and it overwhelmed him as each of his thrusts was paired with a throb of his length that spilled more of him inside of you.

He rode out both of your highs until the fog of his mind began to clear and the exhaustion set in. He kissed you passionately – in love, in thanks, in reverence – before peppering kisses across your cheeks, nose, eyelids, shoulders – wherever he could reach. Your hands stroked lightly up and down the length of his back, soothing the abrasions your nails had left. Only after his body had calmed down enough for his length to go soft, he finally pulled out.

Ominis collapsed to his side before wrapping you up in his arms. You wiggled to fit your back against his chest, aligning your bodies until there was not even an inch of space left between you. He pressed kisses into your shoulder as he held you tighter to him. With his arm wedged underneath you, his hand slid down until his palm rested flush to you, low on your abdomen. His other hand slid down your arm until his fingers laced with yours as he entwined your legs too, seeking to unite your bodies in as close an approximation of the intimacy he had just experienced with you as he could manage. You exchanged whispers of your love for each other, and it was not long before sleep claimed Ominis as he lay entangled with his wife – the woman who had stolen his heart with just a simple touch, and who he now got to hold for the rest of his days.

[prettieinpink]

Improving as a person and a woman is work from the inside out, an important part is being a better friend - so how can I be a better friend?

This is a basic guide on how to be a better friend. The most important part of being a better friend is to communicate properly. Not all friendships are the same and will ask for the same things. Talk to your friends and figure out how you can be a better friend for them. Although, don’t drastically change yourself. 

BE CONSISTENT. Check up on your friends, ask them if they’re free, hype them up on their posts, and be consistent with it. You’re not friends with someone if you only talk to them twice a year, plus it makes people feel good when they think that you’ve been keeping them in their thoughts. 

AVOID JUDGEMENT. A big factor in a friendship, but it tends to be neglected in the moment. It is completely okay to question someone’s actions and give feedback sometimes, however, you have to know when judgment is not wanted or needed. Typically, avoid judging someone at all, consider their perspective. 

HONESTY. Be honest with your friends. If you do something that impacts them, tell them. If you happen to talk about them without their presence, tell them. Many people are much more forgiving if the person owns up to it. A friendship founded on lies, will not last. 

USE YOUR SKILLS TO HELP. If you excel in a certain area, ensure that you help those who struggle in that area. An example, teaching your friend how to code, or giving them advice starting in the gym. Moments of when someone willingly and happily helps you, are not easily forgotten. 

MEAN > GOOD. The heading is a bit odd, but to continue off my last point, it is much more easier to remember a small mean act, than a small good act. Likely, no one is going to remember if you held the door for them however, they will remember if you ever talked behind their back. So, think about your actions, and their effect on how people will perceive you. 

PRAISE YOUR FRIENDS. Start finding the joy in your friend’s successes. That same good energy from those successes will find you. If you curse or envy them, you will be bound to failure as you cannot share that energy. The small things like a compliment or a cute note on their locker increase that energy.

[greenerteacups]

I can't help but giggle how Ron and Harry in LH both doubt Draco's feelings for Hermione when it's, like, the complete OPPOSITE of what they think. Harry's being all big brother-y like about Hermione and how Draco should treat her right and respectfully or ELSE whilst Ron in the latest chapter assumes he's playing around with the poor girl.

And in reality I'm pretty sure Draco is envisioning his and Hermione's wizardesque wedding for the past 2 books.

Can't help but love the boys' obliviousness in regards to feelings here.

Also goes to show how Draco truly opens up only to Hermione in the most profound-est way. I love them.

Oh, yeah. I think I wrote this in a reply to a comment on AO3, but Ron and Harry are very good people afflicted with Teenage BoyBrain, and in Harry's case, Brother Instinct wherever Hermione is concerned. So they assumed that if Draco and Hermione like each other but aren't together, it's because Draco's not being an upstanding young gentleman, not because (as is the case) Hermione's indulging in a bit of age-appropriate emotional terrorism.

There are also broad gaps between (1) what Draco reveals via narration, (2) what he reveals to Hermione, and (3) what he reveals to Harry and Ron. They know each other very well, but Draco plays his cards so close to the chest — especially when it comes to the whole "if you're important to me it means I'd firebomb a hospital for you" thing. He has this unspoken idea that the moment he admits he cares for someone, they're immediately going to get snatched away by the long hand of the universe, which in fairness to him is informed by certain events that make him not totally wrong. (You might also attribute this to his taste in people, however, which trends towards the reckless and the driven; cue moth/flame metaphor, etc., etc., you all know.) So that's why there's about a half-year lag between whatever Draco recognizes in his own emotions and what everyone else in the story seems to believe: that's about how long it takes Draco to get comfortable broadcasting his feelings.

By the middle of fifth year, both Harry and Ron are full aware (as the chapters reveal!) that Draco cares for Hermione, but I think both boys project themselves onto him, to the detriment of their understanding (as most teenagers do). Ron reads a little more into Draco's possessiveness and jealousy, which are the traits they have most in common (cf. Ch.73). Part of that judgment is Ron's emotional straightforwardness: he sincerely can't imagine any reason that Draco wouldn't be dating her properly if the feeling was reciprocated, so he assumes that there must be some obstacle somewhere, and because he's a bit in love with Hermione in his own right, he obviously assumes the obstacle is Draco. What's Draco's number one problem? He's got a bucket of daddy issues and hangups over his family legacy, especially vis-a-vis public displays of affiliation. And Ron doesn't maybe think Draco's being actually prejudiced here (otherwise, he would have been much, much harsher with him in their argument) but he does think there's a degree of shame or uncertainty on Draco's part that's in the way of them getting together.

Harry, meanwhile, reads the whole situation as a communication failure: he thinks Draco doesn't realize what he's doing, because if it were Harry, messing someone around sincerely would be a cognition failure. It's not outside Harry's frame of possibility that Draco could end up in a romantically charged situationship by accident. And he probably rates higher the possibility that Draco would deliberately maintain a relationship like that to avoid losing Hermione's attention. Notably, Harry doesn't assume that Hermione's particularly hard-done-by in this situation; in fact, his default assumption is that she's where she wants to be, and if she didn't like it, she wouldn't be there. His trust in her is helped by the fact that he regards her as a pseudo-sister, and doesn't have any stake in the love triangle except that everyone treats each other well. For that reason, his final comment on the matter is a plea for Draco to consider how Ron might feel: he wants to remind them that they're friends, because he watched the group fall apart last year over an argument similar to this one (jealousy, possessiveness, and a torturous litigation of in-group favoritism). Harry is provoked to intercede because he thinks there's a danger of the situation blowing up due to miscommunication and leaving all of them isolated when they need support the most — which is naturally something that the increasingly isolated and angst-ridden Harry thinks should be top priority.

Anyway, I love them, too.

[galene-gothic]

𝖧𝗈𝗐 𝗐𝗈𝗎𝗅𝖽/𝖽𝗈 𝗈𝗍𝗁𝖾𝗋 𝗉𝖾𝗈𝗉𝗅𝖾 𝖽𝖾𝗌𝖼𝗋𝗂𝖻𝖾 𝗒𝗈𝗎 ?

୧ ‧₊˚ ⋅* ‧₊ I hope this reading found you in good health, every reblog is appreciated and thank you for everything :) ˖♡ ˎˊ˗ ꒰ 🐇 ꒱

˗ˏˋ༻ʚ♡︎ɞ༺ˎˊ˗             PAID SERVICES

⸼ ۫ ︎︎⊹ ! 🪡︎ Pile 1 ꒱

People would describe you as someone who's confident, persistent and resilient. Some of them know about situations or people that have caught you off guard in the past. They'd describe you as someone who has a lot of courage and jumps even when feeling fearful. These people would describe you as someone vigilant and someone who is kind of on their guard because of past experiences. They'd describe you as someone who leaves the past behind themself. They'd describe you as someone who's kind of drained mentally but is still pushing on. They'd also describe you as someone who's able to learn from their past failures. Someone could've hurt you and I think these people who hurt you were in some sort of a silent competition with you? People would talk about it. They'd describe you as someone who doesn't really struggle with finding a community and deepening your relationship with them. They'd say something like "___ always has people who are there for them even if it's not their immediate friends or family." For some of you, you prefer going to the same cafés, restaurants, etc. or love (or atleast feel comfort in) your hometown and people would talk about that.

For some of you, they'd talk about your broken relationship with some of your family members. They could also say things like "___ isn't even all that" or something like "___ changes their partner quite frequently". For some of you, your close ones could discuss your sad childhood. They'd describe you as someone who struggles with extremes when it comes to emotions, some say you're too detached while others say you're too emotional. They'd describe you as someone who has released most if not all of their fears. For some of you, they'd talk about how you're juggling two different things (like school and job, full time job and part time job, etc.) They'd talk about how you've got priorities but know how to fit different things into their schedule and life as they enter. They could describe you as someone who's busy though. They'd talk about your time management and organisational skills. They would talk about how different you can get when things come down to it though. They would talk about how hardworking you are. They would describe you as someone who is able to persevere despite all the troubles that life might throw at you. They would talk about how your focus is both on the long term and the short term. These people would compliment you and go "how do you do all that?"

⸼ ۫ ︎︎⊹ ! 🪡︎ Pile 2 ꒱

People would describe you as someone who's not very honest with their feelings. They'd describe you as someone who tries to be self aware and extremely critical of themself to the point where it affects your emotions. Some of you hold guilt towards someone, maybe even yourself? People who know about that talk about that as well. They could very well describe you as someone who ignores their own emotions. They'd describe you as someone who cares about their friends. Also someone who's popular. They'd describe you as someone who knows how to have a good time. They'd describe you as someone who's quite social or is always thinking about connecting with new and powerful people. They'd describe you as someone who tries to talk about their emotions to certain people (especially if it starts to threaten your relationship with them). If not, you atleast try to communicate properly. You could be a part of a trio or were at some point of time. They'd describe you as someone playful and fun. They'd describe you as someone warm who shines amongst everyone but still tries to make others shine? You could very well be the type to compliment people or push them to be in the spotlight. They'd describe you as someone who's living a good life and is abundant in many aspects. They'd describe you as someone loving and maybe even someone childlike. They'd describe you as someone who they feel safe with and someone who tries to include others.

For some of you, they'd describe you as innocent looking. They'd describe you as someone who's confident and doesn't mind being the center of attention. You seem like someone who's unapologetically themself in many ways. So many people tend to be insecure because of how the spotlight just naturally finds you. They'd describe you as someone affectionate. They'd describe you as someone who's open to the unexpected and is emotionally open too. They'd describe you as someone who shows their emotions even if you might not be honest with them. They'd describe you as someone who's kind of difficult to catch? It's like you're just like a kid (that's what I heard). Especially, at the beginning people tend to think that you're very expressive, affectionate and childlike but as time passes by, they realise that you're actually not the most open when it comes to talking about your emotions (negative ones atleast). Some people describe you as someone who has a nostalgic personality and also has a harder time moving on from the past. Some people describe you as someone who's too naive and let's others take advantage of them. Different people have REALLY different perceptions of you. Some people think that you're very mature, too mature for your age even. I wouldn't be surprised if you get along better with people either younger or older than you than with people the same age. At the core, even I'm picking up that you're quite mature. I feel like sometimes you act childlike just because when you're yourself, people feel threatened.

⸼ ۫ ︎︎⊹ ! 🪡︎ Pile 3 ꒱

People would describe you as someone who suppresses their emotions. There are people who describe you as selfish. Some people describe you as someone who lacks self respect (probably for the ones who stay in toxic relationships, friendships or situationships 💀). They'd describe you as someone who is always tired. They talk about how you should leave certain people or situations. They describe you as someone who acts indifferent even though you're really affected by certain situations. Some people describe you as a person who has no interests aside from your love interests. You could be leaving a situation, if yes, people are applauding you for it behind your back. They describe you as someone who is taking some time in order to get your life and thoughts in order. They would describe you as someone who is going through an emotional time right now. People see your potential but feel like you're not making the most out of it, supposing you're a student who's kinda average, teachers might try to push you to do better because it's apparent that you have a lot of potential. Some of you might not have the privilege to solely focus on school, university or work.

Some of you might have financially struggling families so you've always had to suppress your desires, so you wish to start working as soon as possible. If you're still in school or university, this could cause you to come off and perform half heartedly. NOT AT 'VAMPIRE' BY OLIVIA RODRIGO PLAYING. IF YOU WALKED AWAY FROM SOMEONE OR SOMETHING, DON'T EVER LOOK BACK !! Why are only songs like that playing, 'moral of the story' is playing now. People would describe you as someone who needs to isolate to deal with their problems. They'd describe you as someone who feels empty on the inside because of how you surrounded your life around certain people or places. They'd describe you as someone who doesn't let go until they drain the shit out of you and almost literally crush your heart into pieces. They'd describe you as someone who's discontent and keeps on repeating certain patterns. They'd describe you as an imaginative person who daydreams a lot. They would describe you as someone pessimistic and depressed too though 😭. I feel like this reading is more like confirmation or guidance, please take good care of yourself.