#goes hand in hand with that steam review

[mihotose]

well it makes me feel pathetic and uncomfortable and bad and i think thats awesome

[misspygmypie]

Ginge With Lando & His Overly Affectionate Girlfriend

Pairing: Lando Norris x reader Requested: Yes, another one for @remmysthings ❤️ Summary: Angry Ginge can't keep himself from making jabs at Lando and his girlfriend Words: 849

Please do not repost, thank you, and leave some feedback :)

Angry Ginge and Lando were in the middle of filming yet another video together. Their friendship had garnered a respectable following for their shared humor and chaotic antics. For today’s video, they met at Lando’s place since Ginge was already in Monaco for vacation, and it was supposed to be a straightforward review of the newest gaming gear. However, Ginge had other plans.

“Alright, Lando, let’s get this party started!” Ginge exclaimed, clapping Lando on the back with enough force to nearly knock him off the chair. “Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of ‘Ginge & Lando’s Adventures,’ where we test out the coolest gear and I get to make fun of Lando.”

Lando’s laugh immediately filled the room, a warm and infectious sound. “You know, one of these days, I’m going to get you back for all these jabs.”

Ginge snorted. “Sure, sure. We’ll see how that goes. But for now, let’s get to it. And hey, speaking of ‘getting back,’ look who’s here!”

The door creaked open, and Y/N walked in, carrying a steaming cup of coffee and wearing a smile that made Lando’s face light up instantly. She walked over to Lando, who was now wearing a goofy grin, and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek.

“Hey, lovebirds,” Ginge called out with a smirk, tilting his head towards the camera. “Nice to see you two being all cute and lovey-dovey. Did you come by to remind Lando to stay smitten?”

Ginge put on a mock serious expression, placing a hand over his heart. “Ah, the daily dose of affection. How romantic. Tell me, Lando, does Y/N have you wrapped around her finger, or are you still pretending to be a rugged racer?”

“Just bringing Lando his coffee. And yes, I’m here to remind him how amazing I am" Y/N laughed, her eyes twinkling with mischief.

Lando rolled his eyes but couldn’t hide his grin. “I’ll have you know, I’m perfectly fine with being wrapped around her finger.”

Y/N raised an eyebrow playfully. “Is that a problem, Ginge?”

Ginge shook his head. “Oh, no problem at all! I just find it hilarious how you two are so completely absorbed in each other. I mean, you guys make every day feel like a cheesy rom-com.”

Y/N chuckled, wrapping her arm around Lando’s shoulder. “Well, someone’s got to keep Lando from turning into a complete hermit.”

“Touché,” Ginge said, putting a hand to his heart in mock defeat. “Alright, let’s get back to the review before I start feeling all gooey from this lovey-dovey vibe.”

As the filming continued, Ginge made a few more playful jabs at Lando and Y/N’s relationship. He turned to the camera with an exaggerated sigh. “You know, I wonder if we should just rename this video ‘Ginge With Lando & His Overly Affectionate Girlfriend.’ It might get more views.”

Lando tried to stifle a laugh, shaking his head, but failed miserably as a deep red blush crept onto his face. “Oh, shut up, Ginge.”

“Ginge, are you saying you don’t appreciate our affection?” Y/N, pretending to be offended, placed a hand on her chest in mock horror. 

“Not at all!” The red-head said with a wink. “I just think it’s a bit much for a gaming video. But hey, if it makes you two happy, who am I to complain?”

After the video wrapped up, Lando and Y/N shared a smile, clearly enjoying the playful banter. Ginge, meanwhile, was still chuckling to himself, clearly amused by the day’s events.

“Thanks for stopping by, Y/N,” Lando said, giving her another quick kiss, this one lingering just a bit longer. “You made the video more fun.”

Y/N smiled back, her eyes sparkling with love. “Glad I could help. And don’t let Ginge get to you too much. He’s just jealous of our cuteness.”

Ginge shook his head, feigning exasperation. “Jealous? Me? Never. I’m just here to keep things interesting. And trust me, this is as interesting as it gets.”

As Y/N prepared to leave, she paused at the door, glancing back at Lando and Ginge. “You two better not be late for dinner. I’ve got a reservation at that new place we all wanted to try.”

Lando’s eyes widened in realization. “Oh, right! I almost forgot. Thanks for the reminder, Y/N.”

“No problem,” Y/N said, giving Lando a final wave before stepping out. “Have fun with the rest of your filming. And Ginge, try not to embarrass Lando too much.”

Ginge gave a mock salute. “I’ll do my best. But no promises!”

As the door closed behind Y/N, Lando turned to Ginge with a grin. “You know, you really should try to be a bit nicer. I’m sure you’d make a lot more friends if you weren’t always so cheeky.”

Ginge raised an eyebrow, a mischievous glint in his eye. “Where’s the fun in that? Besides, if it weren’t for me, who would keep you on your toes?”

Lando laughed, shaking his head. “Fair point. I guess I can’t complain too much.”

[darkficsyouneveraskedfor]

Winter's King 1

No tag lists. Do not send asks or DMs about updates. Review my pinned post for guidelines, masterlist, etc.

Warnings: this fic will include dark content such as noncon/dubcon, cheating, violence, and possible untagged elements. My warnings are not exhaustive, enter at your own risk.

This is a dark!fic and explicit. 18+ only. Your media consumption is your own responsibility. Warnings have been given. DO NOT PROCEED if these matters upset you.

Summary: You are a maid to the Duke of Debray, a lord of the Summer Kingdom. That is, until the king of Winter appears with his particular air of coldness. (Medieval AU)

Characters: Geralt of Rivia

Note: this one came out of no where.

As per usual, I humbly request your thoughts! Reblogs are always appreciated and welcomed, not only do I see them easier but it lets other people see my work. I will do my best to answer all I can. I’m trying to get better at keeping up so thanks everyone for staying with me.

Your feedback will help in this and future works (and WiPs, I haven’t forgotten those!) Please do not just put ‘more’. I will block you.

I love you all immensely. Take care. 💖

It’s uncharacteristically grim on the plains of Debray. Rains pelt the tall green grasses, flattening them in a slanted downpour that dims the horizon. Clouds blot out the daylight and lend to atmosphere of unease in the warring lands. 

Behind the castle walls, one can forget about the bloodshed staining the counties red, though it is all the dukes and his audience can speak of. The lords that bluster through those gates, sometimes at the toll of morning, some in the black swathes of night. You can’t count them all, you can name even fewer, but they come anon and leave just as brusquely. 

A peel of thunder shakes the land and a dark line limns the curve of the horizon. What appears first as a storm cloud advances quickly through the fields, appearing more clearly to the naked eye, distant nonetheless. Men. Another party fast on the approach. 

The alarm goes up at a man’s holler. Ethred, man at the gate hollers to the other men in mail. Niam peers out from the vantage of the tower and calls back down. A hush falls and bodies scurry all around, metal clinking and boots crunching. There’s something amiss. Something you can’t quite place. 

You turn away from the window, the steam rising from the basin in your hand swirling around your head. You carry on down the corridor, wool skirts around cautious steps as you balance the swaying water in the vessel. You approach the lady’s door and give it a rap with your knee. Merinda, another handmaid, opens it from within. 

You enter without a word and place the basin on the vanity table. The duke’s daughter preens herself with a painted fan, fluttering her lashes at her reflection as her curls spill down her long back. She tilts her head this way and that. She snaps the fan shut and puts it down, touching her soft brown cheeks with a devilish grin. 

“Do you know what father mentioned last eve?” Jazlene asks with a vain flutter of her lashes. 

“What did he mention?” Her mother, Lady Rezlyn prompts lazily as she plucks another cherry from a dish heaped in fruit. 

“A husband,” the daughter grins coyly at herself, “it is well due, isn’t it, mother? Who do you think it might be? Lord Gai, perhaps? He is young still.” 

“Perhaps the Earl of Mesafin,” her mother taunts back to a disgusted gasp. 

“Do not,” Jazlene pouts, “I could never... I am much too pretty for that haggard beast.” 

“Well, then, who might you have, precious?” Rezlyn goads. 

There is a clamour in the hall that keeps the younger of the woman from answering. She rolls her eyes and darkly glare at the door. You peer back behind your shoulder as a wail goes up carrying her father’s name; ‘Lord Dustan!’ 

“What is all that?” Jazlene whines, “as if it isn’t enough with the rain and the winds. It is summer!” 

“It’s always summer in Debray, darling,” Rezlyn scoffs, “otherwise I’d have never married your father. Pray you don’t hook yourself a winter lord.” 

You peek over your shoulder as you stand near the door, in your vigil, awaiting your next order. You face the ladies again as the elder continues to feast and the younger fusses over her thick brows. You scrunch your lips back and forth, a habit that often has your jaw aching. 

Jazlene turns to narrow her eyes at you, “what is it then? What has you making faces?” 

You bow your head, appeasing her ego, “my lady, there were men coming. A party approaching from the north.” 

“There are always men,” she shakes her head, “who was it then? Anyone I should wear silk for?” 

Her mother laughs, “I warn you, daughter, that trite tongue will not endear any husband.” 

“I do not know, lady,” you answer. 

“Ugh, useless, must I work as my own handmaid?” Jazlene tisks, “come, pin my hair. Merinda find me a gown. Mother... wipe the dribble from your chin.” 

“Eh, watch yourself,” Lady Rezlyn rises and wipes her lips with her sleeve. She wears muslin in a dark shade of burgundy, embroidered with little copper finches. “Or hope you marry above me before you lash that tongue at me.” 

Jazlene merely trills with laughter. You take the pins and work at twisting her fine curls into place. Merinda brings to her a dress of teal satin and is promptly shooed away, “something pink. It brings out my bosom.” 

You ignore her bawdy jest as her mother harrumphs. You work in quiet tandem with the other handmaid. You add a touch of paint to the lady’s cheeks and kohl around her eyes. You tint her lips with pigment and she pushes out her lips at the mirror. You help Merinda dress her, pulling the noble daughter’s corset tight enough to leave her lightheaded. 

The pair of ladies, elder and younger, leave the chamber with you at their skirt tails. They sweep through the corridors with chins up. They are queens in their own minds. Their fine dresses and sparkling gems are untouched by the disparity of war. The lives lost are squares on a game board, tawdry talk for men in their studies. 

“Lord Dustan,” Lady Rezlyn mimics the earlier call for the lord of the castle, “my husband. Dear, dear husband!” 

The women go to the banister and look down upon the great hall as the flurry continues below. You and Merinda loom behind, not daring to stand at a level with the pompous nobles. You have never volunteered yourself for their impetuous lashings. 

“Woman!” Dustan booms back up, “do not trouble me now.” 

“Oh, has another lord come? Perhaps a suitor for our lovely daughter--” 

“Cease!” The duke demands hotly, “now is not the time for womanly games.” 

“Tell me it true, husband, she will be an old maid before you find a suiting son-in-law--” 

“Go away to your chambers. Now. The men who come are not to be trifled with and you lot do trifle overly much!” 

“Bah! Oh do not be so uncouth!” Rezlyn decries. 

“Father, please, is it a husband?” 

“Go before I send my guards up to put you away like thieves in a dungeon. Hear me when I warn you that this does not concern you. Not as yet,” Dustan snarls, “you would spoil this war with your puny concerns.” 

“Ugh,” his wife puts her hand to her forehead, “he does tax me. All I ask of him is to take care of us, daughter. As any husband should.” 

“I should have your lips sewn shut!” Dustan rebukes hotly, “be gone before I find a tailor.” 

The women share an aghast look. The turn back to flutter away in their skirts. You and Merinda follow them to the drawing room, closing them in as they fall onto the velvet cushions. Jazlene reclines dramatically on the chaise as her mouth mopes on a sofa. 

“Shall I be alone forever, mother?” Jazlene snivels, “why won’t he let me marry?” 

“He only wants to find the right man, that is all, darling,” Rezlyn coaxes. “He is overprotective and that is good for it means he will find a husband for you with a similar bearing.” 

“Such sweet words cannot convince me. He punishes me. When all my lady friends have wed and borne a whelp or two, I remain with the dust and stone.” 

“Do not be theatrical,” Rezlyn girds, “you are silly.” 

“I am not silly, mother. I am afraid. I am twenty and three and I have no suitor. I have only a war butchering any man who might have my hand. Why must this go on? Why must I suffer for the gripes of stubborn kings.” 

“We cannot fear. This war will be won and you will have a knight for a husband. Isn’t that better? To have a warrior you can be proud of than some bookish lord in his tower?” Rezlyn stands and moves to sit with her daughter, petting her as she cooes, “oh my beautiful, no man can resist you. You will see.” 

⚔️

Some hours pass with the restless women, pacing and chattering, about careless things beyond marriage and war. Like needlework and a banquet that should be had upon the truce. Would that the day would come sooner. 

You and Merinda stifle yawns that pass between you. The act is contagious as you stand in the tedium of the wealthy and wait for a duty to be called upon you. The hours you spend watching the women preen and swoon make you envy the stable boys and the shit shovelers. 

The noise beyond those walls continues. You heard the moat open and the clopping hooves of horses, even the clatter of carts. The voices had since hushed but footfalls carried back and forth. The wordless activity betrays an air of impatience, almost of nervousness. As the ladies within mirror the sentiment. 

Finally, as the windows darken and the candles burn brighter, a knock shakes the door. The ladies snap their heads around. Merinda is asleep on her feet as you move first. You open to a man in grey and black waits on the other side. He is not Lord Dustan’s. 

“The duchess and her daughter,” he garbles through a mouth that sounds full of salt. 

You dip your head and look to the ladies in question. There is a tension, of unease, of unknowing, of excitement turned to dread. This is not as it has been. There is not call to the dinner table. There is no buoyant introduction of a lord Dustan met as a young scamp. There is silence and fear. Has someone died? Has a battle been lost? 

The women emerge and greet the man with niceties and tight-lipped simpers. He does not pay them heed as you and Merinda exchange looks. You trail after the ladies but the man stops. He turns back, a hand on the pommel at his waist, and sneers, a furrow in his brow. 

“One of ya,” he grits. 

Jazlene says your name. She must’ve noticed Merinda swaying on her feet. If she even cares so much about a maid. You keep your head down and follow as they press on. Down the corridor and around the duke’s study, recently deemed his war room. You’ve never been within. It is not the domain of women. 

The grey and black soldier thumps on the door. Mother and daughter clasp hands. Even they can sense the unusual frigidity. The door opens from within. It is Lord Dustan. He wears a serious look on his lined face. The ladies are beckoned in and the soldier nudges you after them as you hesitate. 

Lanterns light the space from the desk at the rear of the chamber. The large table draped in maps, wooden horses, and little wooden pucks stands central on a thick rug. A figure stands behind it, head down as his burly and broad silhouette seems to sop up the shadows. 

The ladies follow the duke to stand across from the man. His head is down as he slides a horse along a road on the map. He stops it and grips it tight. He looks up and the lantern light dances on his features. You suck in a breath, as the rest do, stunned by his appearance. 

His hair is white, his eyes are a goldish yellow, pupils deep pools of black, and his square jaw is just as thick as the rest of him. You have never seen a man like him before, but you have heard of one. Of him. King Geralt of Rivia. 

You stand in similar confusion to the ladies. Their silent confoundment is broken by Duke Dustan as he nears the table. He sniffs and presses his fingers to the table top. 

“Your highness, my wife, Lady Rezlyn, and my daughter, Lady Jazlene,” he introduces. 

The women glance at each other then curtsy to the white king. He watches them dully. You fold your hands, taking it in curiously. It is rather something to witness the scene. You are so unimportant as to not be a part of it. 

“Your highness,” the recite, “it is...” 

“An honour,” Dustan finishes for them, “of course it is. We fondly welcome you and your allyship. We hope that we will be essential in ending this war. In helping you attain the peace you have so valiantly fought for--” 

The king raises his hand to silence the lord. You can’t help but quork your head. Allyship? But King Geralt, he is of Rivia, he is of the hinterland, he is the one who invaded the summer country and bid it his own. He is the foe. That is what they told you. 

“Enough...” the king speaks in a silty tone that scrapes in his throat. His eyes wander over the women and narrow. You wince as your own meet his golden irises and you shy away, putting your chin to your chest. That’s a mistake. “...words.” He slaps his hand down, “you do not win wars with words.” 

“Yes, your highness, you are correct. I know it well. It is why I invited you here. It is the very reason I made my entreaty. You have my men, they will win this war for you.” 

The king is hardly impressed by the fact. He looks back to the table and moves the horse further before turning it back. He knocks it over and stands completely straight. 

“And the daughter of Debray, your highness. To have a wife of summer’s blood, men will bend the knee. If you show them you do not mean to eradicate but to join with them,” Dustan moves to stand closer to his daughter, “isn’t she a fine queen for a fine kingdom?” 

Jazlene swoons and falls against her father. She’s fainted. Rezlyn grabs onto her other shoulder and you peek up at the chaotic scene. You come forward to help, snatching a pillow from the single couch, and you place it under Jazlene’s head as they lay her down on the floor. 

A shadow shifts as Dustan and Rezlyn fuss over their daughter, fanning and calling to her. You look up as darkness clusters over you. You see the king staring down at the scene. No, not them. He staring at you. Before he can reprimand you, you put your head down. 

You must quit that lest you find yourself at the wrong end of a switch. 

[titaswrld]

gryffindor characters modern! AU

according to me….

description: silly modern! AU head canons of the main gryffindor characters :)

pairing: harry, ron, fred, george, ginny and hermione x reader

contains: mentions of substances, alcohol and weed. mentions sexual acts (i think…)

|an: bored and decided i’d made something a little silly. literally just my thoughts lolll don’t take this too seriously

modern AU! harry potter who…

— definitely has a flip phone and refuses to be on any form of social media bc he thinks it’s awful for you

— i think being around his friends who do have social media would give him the spiel on most things tho

— oh he loveeesss house of dragon omg

— only listens to 70s 80s 90s music and some jazz tbh

— i feel like he’s just very old fashioned and he’s happy that way

— such a loving and caring bf since he’s hardly ever even touched the internet he’s pure lol

— def a lil goofball he’d say a little slang term the twins taught him and repeat it back to you…”harry who taught you that…”

— don’t ask him to do no substances i think he’d be kinda against them..not a smoker…occasional drinker.

modern AU! ron weasley who…

— is a stoner! thru and thru. i think he’s a bong rip typa fellow but a blunt or a joint would do it too. doesn’t strike me as a cart of eddie guy.

— big female rap supporter imo…def into latto and maybe dabbles into some meg that’s his girlll lol

— definitely a twea/seltzer guy oml cannot take shots is my hc

— heavy on the lowk himbo boyfriend

— not stupid at all but not super street smart i fear, more of a book smart type of guy.

— super cute and adorable bf overall, he’s a big boy. for sure.

—armmmmssss…. gymrat imo he loves to blow off steam at the gym

—i feel like isn’t a social media person as well…has an insta but doesn’t post on it nor have a lot of followers..no tiktok maybe twitter

—luv him but he was def on drakes side of the beef…definitely a champagne papi

—kinda a video game nerd imo but he’s definitely into the sports ones like FIFA

— buys you n him the crumbl cookie lineup every week and you review them tg in the car pretending to be those tiktok crumbl reviewers😭🫶 (he’s so cute)

modern AU! hermione granger who…

— is 100% on booktok

— do not ask her about the summer i turned pretty or bridgerton unless you wanna listen to her talk for hours.

— don’t play with her and noah kahan…

—or taylor swift

— or chappell roan..

—she’ll have a cute little mixed drink or perhaps a seltzer but do not give this girl no shots she don’t want none!

— her and colleen hoover….

— brings her digital camera everywhere and is most def the camera girl friend….”hermione pls send me the pics from last night”

modern AU! ginny weasley who...

— does not play about female wnba players at all.

— don’t even mention paige bueckers…that’s her girl.

— is a party animal just like her brother.

— loves her chappell roan too.

— always on social media u cannot get this girl off her phone. she’s like an ipad kid u couldn’t rip it out of her cold head hands.

— such a good girlfriend, definitely so protective over her s/o, especially on social media.

— “ginny why’d you respond to every comment under my post complimenting me with ‘& she/he mine..so’…”

modern AU! fred weasley who…

— definitely asks u “english or spanish?”

—definitely goes to too many parties…like at a function every weekend he loves the party scene.

—treats his girl RIGHTT i would compare the relationship to don toliver and kali uchis, flowers all the time, handsy. posting/supporting his girl allll the time

—“i❤️mygf” typa fellow, all his posts on socials are her! all his stories, his highlights and his posts.

— also a weed demon, doesn’t strike me as a beer or seltzer guy but ooooo that liqah….

— dress to impress demon. his gf definitely got him to play it and he got hooked and now he’s a fashion maven.

modern AU! george weasley who…

— is every girls dream man…im talking flowers, boo baskets, burr baskets, easter baskets, omg you say the word and he’s massaging your feet and feeding you grapes.

— always posting his girl just like his brother she’s on his absolutely everything and he has a highlight for her.

— type of guy to post those tiktoks of his girl on his account appreciating her all the time and the comments are like “omg on his account too!” and it’s so cute and adorable.

—isn’t much of a party guy like his brother…will go to a few but i feel like it’s not his thing at all and he’d rather be hanging out with friends instead of at a big function with strangers.

—literally the ken to your barbie and yes he took you to see the movie and yes he got into costume with you. and he did it happily.

— always hanging out with his girlfriend and wouldn’t want it any other way.

[nicole-ashwood]

Double Exposure: A guide on how we make them pay and the signs that will show it's working

Yes, I know a lot of the hate is going to Deck Nine, and believe me some of that is deserved. But ultimately Square has final Veto power and dictates where the story goes thanks to studio mandates.

Either way, this first part is how we focus our own power and make the bastards fix this. You want change? Here's a guide.

Do not buy ANY more Life is Strange products. Corporate bastards only pay attention to cash flow. Hit their wallets.

If you have self control and decent writing skills, leave a review on Metacritic. Praise what works (Hannah, some of the writing, the inklings of a background plot revolving around an evil future Max), and damn everything else.

Everyone else? Try and do the same on Steam. Just make sure you have enough playtime (~30 min - 1 hour) so people will be more aware. Quality doesn't matter on Steam so much as the Community Score.

Attack the story and writing choices, not the cast and writers. Bosses exist for a reason, focus your fire if you plan on referencing anyone.

Do not dox, send death threats, or do ANYTHING that they can use to justify your dismissal. You want this fixed, don't stoop to their level.

If you can, vote in any game awards the series appears in. Hannah has another game on the way, we'll make sure she gets her proper praises then.

Get your opinions where they matter. Instagram, TikToc, Reddit, and Twitter are where the search algorithms look. Make sure people know how bad they fucked up here.

Return the game if you can, and just watch Let's Plays. Bleed them dry.

This game will only sell if we aren't loud enough. Games are expensive. Your average buyer will still look up reviews and scores before they pop down a 50.

You want change? Don't say it's hopeless and get to work.

You die when you lose hope, and if anything I at least plan on taking as big a chunk out of them as possible before then.

And now for signs we need to keep an eye out for.

Anonymous Employee leaks and what tone they are going with. If the leaks show us things like Arcadia Bay, character returns, or anything else that gives us a hint to the plot taking place in AB, those are good signs.

Keep an eye on anyone who might return, and what their upcoming work is. Rhianna/Chloe has the mystery Lead and is our best clue, but the actors for Joyce, David, Victoria, Steph, Alex, and Ryan are all people we need to keep an eye out for. If they plan on bringing in LiS 2, then keep an eye out for Daniel's actor. He is the only one who could really return.

Watch for updates to the Remasters and series wide collectors editions. Square is going to milk the shit out of any capstone game, and this is where they'll do it.

Look for collabs that feature Max AND Chloe. Those will be meant to keep the series fresh in peoples minds up until 2027/early 2028 (assuming the tweet screenshot I posted previously continues to be true).

Books that highlight Chloe's view will probably be on the way soon. A lot of the stuff we've seen regarding Chloe in this game points to them revising what they originally wrote so Chloe appeared less toxic then originally wanted (yes, I just heaved when I wrote that). These books will continue to soften her, and ensure that she is single for the next game. Yeah, I fully expect the next game to ape the theme of restoring bonds from the first.

Keep an eye on their LinkedIn. As of this writing, they have 101 employees, half of which are artists and designers. Expect that number to increase come January. The finance report for this game will be out by then, and Square will probably pour more cash into D9 to hasten the next games release.

This series can be salvaged. It needs to be salvaged, if anything because it's the loudest voice gaming has for those who are marginalized. This series, in our current hellworld, is too damn important to end on some bullshit pivot like this, but it's only going to make it if we force their hands ourselves.

If you are a fan.

If you care about LGBTQ+ issues.

If you want to help those who feel alone and without anything to look up to in life.

Then by the Gods you damn well better do your part.

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 8/6/2024

people mad at a video game for being woke, i'm mad at it for not being woke enough. so it goes.

also i wrote a yeehawgust fic

listening

another addition to the "SOMEBODY COME FUCK THIS (GAY)" playlist, thank u charli xcx and billie eilish

-

reading

im still really annoyed with Retraction Watch for platforming a terf last year and then not doing any sort of sockpuppet damage control in the comments. since they got acquired by crossref they've done way less guest editorials. not to be all "stick to sports!" but stick to sports, retraction watch.

they did introduce me to this substack series i will be following with great interest about the rise and fall of hindawi. wiley acquired a paper mill a few years back, bc they seemingly did zero diligence, and then blithely ignored the problem for two years before being forced to do the single largest retraction of papers in scientific publishing history, somewhere above ten thousand articles because it is STILL ONGOING.

i do love following various retractions bc i like seeing what finally made someone go "wait a minute", and, as i have just written in a cover letter, "I studied astronomy and have held several data jobs because I’m fascinated with how and why systems work and fail..."

-

watching

my best friend has decided while i'm at her home in the evenings eating her food and bothering her children (for my mental health, it is very important i am fed tiny bits of mushed up banana by hand by her one-year-old), our new project is watching all the xmen movies. i have no particular desire to do this or special affinity for the xmen, and i would like to keep eating very good texmex and bothering her children (for my mental health, it is very important i play hot wheels with the five-year-old). this sounds so super bitchy of me but it's hard to convey that these are essentially on for background noise.

saw the first two. the two things i know about them are that hugh jackman is in them and they're at the statue of liberty in one

-

playing

an ideologically baffling little environmental game free in the epic store this week, LumberJack. this is on PC and Switch for $13, which is far more money than the playtime anyone can get out of this game. tiny tiny tiny little Spain-headquartered studio without an active website, it looks like one guy hired out to make this and two more games and then went back to single-dev projects. i can respect that!

steam reviewers are mad at this game for being woke, and i'm mad at it for being woke in a very strange way. your one mechanic, as a bear, is swinging a big axe to remove cars and trailer offices and portapotties and various garbage from the landscape.

i wish the movement and look controls are inverted, and i wish they weren't, or at least had an option to make them normal. i know Why this isn't a mobile game (can't monetize something with twoish hours of gameplay and twenty levels) but it's a very straightforward and simple game that would translate very well to mobile. much like donut county.

now for being picky about the political mindset of the developers: as much fun as it is to be a bear swinging an axe around, lumberjacks are not the people i associate with wild preservation movements.

saving the land and turning it back into pristine and perfect land for wild animals in this game looks like erasing every hint of human activity from a site and turning it into sheer recreational use. many levels are heavily polluted, but some can definitely be read as recycling centers. im confused by the erasing every hint of humans in early levels, and then this level where you break down a radio station, slap the host with your axe, and she turns into a park ranger who starts gardening and taking care of chickens?

i don't think that removing all the traces of people from the landscape will magically fix everything, nor do i think simply being in unspoiled wilderness will magically fix me.

there's a golfing level where you whack bombs into various small buildings. i think golfing to save the environment is a strange choice to make for designing a game.

i also briefly thought this bird in every level was an extinct ivory-billed woodpecker, which was a little alarming bc there are some real nutjobs out there with very strong beliefs about this bird and government overreach and how much the government is lying to you about the extinctness of various animals.

i stopped playing about halfway through bc i was not having fun and found the underlying environmental message a little confused. they've managed to sell at least 10k units which is...not very good. i am not surprised this is free on epic, and i wonder what their payout for that was. would not be surprised if they negotiated a payment to their nonprofit partner ecologi as part of that.

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making

yeehawgust fill! i have another bitchy blond babygirl!

what the fuck is the prisoner? cult 60s british spy tv. with all the surreality and anxieties about the cold war and midcentury psychological horror you could possibly want

He’d been drugged enough times to recognize the splitting migraine rapidly galloping down his neurons. “Where am I?” He fought down the taste of bile (ketamine? xylazine, by the aftertaste) and the rising panic. Oddly enough, the migraine was always worse with veterinary sedatives. One would think a mind would adapt to nearly three hundred years of irregular drugging and constant experiments. One’s body had adapted and ghoulified, but in equally unhelpful ways. The tycoon flickered, approximating an appraising blink. “This meeting has been a long time coming, hasn't it? You've come a long ways, literally and, I suspect, figuratively as well. You’re in the Free Economic Zone of New Vegas.” They’d pretended the prisons were so many different places: across the Continent, in various parts of London, up and down and all around the East Coast of these wretched States. Rarely this far west, aside from the awful escapade in the faux pre-War Western town. “What do you want?” He managed to swing his ankles off the saddle (also pre-War? Heavily used. It certainly wasn’t his, the equestrian event had always been his worst event in the pentathalon) and jolted what felt like every half-dead nerve in his half-dead body.

[roxannepolice]

Rant 3/phantom pains of Schrödinger's lore in ChibnallWho/"the history between" doesn't mean much to the author. that is, it does. but it doesn't. but it does. but not really. but./can someone in the group chat please read my time sensitive questions I posted 25 hours ago?

Between bracing myself to finally open the advisors reviewed thesis, waiting for anyone at work to give a newbie a hint, and reading a fairly good criticism of the political stance in ChibnallWho, I guess it's a good time to let go off some steam about this era. Now, an important clarification for tumblr: when I criticize the show, I am not in any way bashing on people who enjoy it! Good for you, and that's why I try to tag these appropriately.

But yeah, this is going to go deep into what I mean when I say the writing in this era is just bad, something even its defenders sometimes concede. This often turns into dicussions of political/social messaging in seasons 11-13, which is as fair criticism as any. Yes, it often veered into confusing to downright appalling. But for me, that's not what "bad writing" means. You can make an excellent story about a likeable rapist and murderer. You can make compelling propaganda of pretty much any economic stance (well, maybe except for "the solution to problems with Amazon is to blow up their trucks so now everything has to be delivered on foot I guess", that's something straight from Monty Python). And of course, the "too woke" "criticisms" aren't anything valid like at all.

No, for me the bad writing in ChibnallWho lies in the general sense of confusion as to who exactly is the target audience here: someone who's very well acquaintanced with the lore(s), or someone who's completely new to the show. Now, this is also inspired by some criticisms of RTD2 is that it is too expository, leading into the show-within-a-show theorizing. And of course, exposition can be done well or not-so-well, and there's good argument some parts of exposition in s14 were on the nose. But the thing about a television series, especially one as long as Doctor Who, is that any episode can be someone's first - and the writer's job is to make it so it won't be their last. What this means is that the audience needs to be provided the information necessary to grasp at least the emotional level of the story, if not every bit of earlier lore logic. In the case of Doctor Who there's also a part of establishing which part of the lore is valid to the story at hand, considering that both within the show itself, but also the huge multimedia lore, there are bound to be contradictions. And that's ok! You have a good story idea that will require a retcon for a better pay off, go for it! Like, if you really think the Doctor should get to save Gallifrey for their 50th birthday, then go ahead, just reduce the Time War to a local conflict between Time Lords and Daleks instead of underlining just how widespread across time and space it was, and logistically impossible to contain by removing one party (this is one of the many cases of "I don't like what Moffat did, but I agree the execution is functional").

Basically, Lancelot having an affair with Guinevre isn't relevant to him storming a wedding and killing mortally wounding giving a fleshwound to the bride's father.

So, essentially my issue with ChibnallWho writing is simultaneously trying to cut itself off from lore/earlier seasons, while relying on it for any emotional pay off. To give a counterexample from this very era's one of best written episodes: when the Doctor goes on about what being turned into a Cyberman means and that she won't lose anyone else to that, that's bloody powerful! And it's powerful regardless of whether you know it's specifically about Bill, or just go on the information provided within the episode - that the Doctor lost someone to this. Unfortunately, The Haunting of Villa Diodati is an honourable exception in this and many other aspects.

So, to start from the beginning. There's a frequent criticism that team TARDIS was overcrowded in seasons 11 and 12 with three companions, to which an immediate defense is that it's not the first time there were three companions at once. Fine. But combine this with the following: it's not just three companions introduced at once, it's three companions introduced at once, plus a brand new Doctor, plus a brand new sonic, plus a brand new TARDIS interior (that's absent for nearly full two first episodes). So you're basically left with four strangers and no point of reference in your getting to know them. And by no point of reference, I mean something that I haven't noticed anyone else pointing out: Thirteen is literally the first Doctor since One to have no established elements in their first season, at all (barring the TARDIS and sonic, again, completely redesigned).

It's a bit hard to discuss One to Two regeneration relying only on stills and audio, but Polly and Ben are there to act as audience proxies for this Beatle-hairstyled guy with a recorder being the old man he was a moment ago. Three's first season all revolves around UNIT, established in Two's era. Four inherits UNIT and Sarah Jane. Five inherits Adric, Nyssa, Tegan and the Master for his welcome. Six has Peri. Seven has Mel, the Master and the Rani. Eight's movie is all about the Master. Even the reboot for Nine has the Nastene consciousness as a hello and the whole season revolving around the Daleks. Ten gets Rose and Tylers, and Cybermen, and Daleks, and Sarah Jane, and K-9. Eleven gets the previously established River Song and a Classic Who villain reunion in the season finale. Twelve gets Clara. Thirteen gets.... Twelve's suit that she should have stayed in and Daleks, nearly three months from her first episode.

And the thing is, I understand how this would have appeared to be a good idea on paper! Complaints about the show getting lost up it's own self-referential ass have been around for years by this point, and even Moffat tried to go for a soft reboot in s10. Chibs literally asking him to set the TARDIS on fire is as symbolic a new beginning as they get. A bold, intriguing idea. As is trying to explore Titanic with nothing but a snorkel.

Because in practice it had two fundamental flaws, one more general and one specific to the story as it unfolded. The general one has been hinted at: this is basically why there's the sense of overcrowding on the TARDIS, while also leaving the audience feeling they don't really know anyone on board. Are we getting to know the new Doctor from the companions' perspective? The companions from the Doctor's? The new villain (and a really unfamiliar one, Toothboy isn't a familiar threat like plastic pollution metaphor or pshysically inevitable end of the world) from an alien's or humans' perspective? The new worlds from all of theirs? We sort of end up relating most to Grace, except she dies in the first episode. The thing is, it is in confrontation with the established that we learn most about the characters. Nothing characterizes Nine more than his interactions with the Daleks, going from torturing one to deciding he can't commit another planetary destruction to stop them. Basically, between a kind straight Black navy officer and a White lesbian strangling her wife in a jealous rage, you're likelier to recognize Othello in the latter. Something tells me this is why RTD had Fifteen interact with another Doctor, Donna, Mel, Kate, UNIT, the Toymaker and even toothied Master before sending him on his own merry way.

The second problem has more to do with the direction the story actually went in. Because just from the above, and indeed after s11 it was a frequent praise of the era, it would look like Chibs is going for something easily accessible to new audiences. Great. But then comes s12 and basically all of the emotional pay off comes from the audience's attitude to the the lore! Or, maybe I'll put it this way: all charitable interpretations of it are rooted in not only lore literacy, but specific readings of established lore. And not only is the lore hardly established for the newcomers, but it's also not established which parts are to be cherry picked for the returning audience. Nowhere is it better visible than in Fugitive!Doctor's TARDIS being a police box. This was clearly meant to tell the audience yes, this is indeed the Doctor's TARDIS, but if you know how much of a deal pre-Hartnell Doctors would be, you'd also know the TARDIS doesn't just look like a police box, it was stuck looking like one in 1963. And so we end up with secret third Doctor theories between classic series 6 and 7.

And this is the fundamental problem with the timeless child. It shakes the lore to the core, but without establishing what this lore is, and how the audience is supposed to feel about it. Oh, you can go for post-colonial criticisms, but that relies on you reading the Time Lords as the british empire, a reading not clear to all of the audience, as exhibited by an actual academic article (because yes, I spent my hard earned money on a collection of academic articles about ChibnallWho and no I absolutely won't share a pdf should anyone dm me) written by an author more rooted in feminist than post-colonial critical theories seeing the new origin of Time Lords as replacing a masculine creatio ex nihilo ethos by that of a feminine explorer-scientist [appreciative]. You're basically supposed to get a phantom pain of a lore that's both alive and dead until observed, the presumed intention being that you will have a positive or negative feelings about the cat, without considering most people will be either abstractly impressed by the metaphor, or equally abstractly disturbed by animal abuse. It's criticising the roman empire by debunking it being founded by Mars's children raised by a she-wolf.

And this is also visible in the Doctor's own reaction to the revelation, which I guess you might argue is complex, but I would say it's more shifting from establishing moment to establishing moment. She goes from being shocked by it (again, no part of the text informed me I shouldn't cherry pick her characterization as including calling Time Lords the most rotten civilization in the universe, also is it even established that's the second time Gallifrey was destroyed?), to describing it as empowering, to apparently not thinking about it for 100 years, to having an identity crisis, to stating her identity is about what she does, to bemoaning the could-have-beens, to deciding she doesn't want to know, to her deepest desire being wanting to know it after all (the vision of ttc in potd). Like, come on, not finding your glasses means your room is messy, not complex. The effect is infantilizing more than anything else, I mean it's been what, three months since the last time a villain informed a heroine she has an epic origin that's also very horrible in The rise of Skywalker? Which impression is amplified by the only clue as to the Doctor's personal, not performed, attitude being that she apparently finds the cliche chosen one story of a boy abused by his adoptive family turning out to be a wizard, and a special wizard at that, comforting. Probably not the intended reading that wouldn't even be available if Rowling got cancelled earlier, but there as things are.

And of course, this has a lot of bearing on how thoschei dynamic is executed. On the one hand we have the entire emotional pay off rooted in the "history between them", on the other vague references to Classic Who and expanded universe, on the third characterization of the Master that is rooted more in fanon Freud-for-dummies woobification than anything this character's motivations have ever been established as. Like, between the charitable reading "Thirteen is hostile to the Master because of the events of s10" and the anti-charitable reading of "Missy's development was retconned in the Master's hostility", the answer is, it doesn't bloody matter to the story at hand, or else it's the writer's job to point to it as meaningful (again, as Maxine Alderton did with cybermenification in THOVD). Another case of "I don't agree with Moffat, but I agree the execution was functional", but you can juxtapose this with the way Simm!Master was presented in s10 - yeah, he got cured and kicked out of Gallifrey; that's really all you need to know, because his role in this story is being an unrepentant asshole and no amount of gifs slowing down John Simm turning his eyes down before saying "Eh, you wouldn't understand" will change that. The same goes for "see, the Master didn't destroy Gallifrey over everything that's been done to them, but over Theta being hurt uwu" interpretation - neither the reading this was the motivation, nor anything relating to the Master suffering from the Time Lords have been established in the text, neither as it unfolded nor as a pay off reveal! This basically relies on the attitude that the most charitable reading is by default the intended one, which is how you end up with "op means that Taylor Swift being gay shouldn't make you ignore all other gay women musicians".

A little bit of an aside, but people remember O was an actual person the Doctor met in unknown circumstances, not just a creation of the Master from the beginning, right? Like, this is taken into account in all "he's so desperate to be friends again uwu" readings, right?

So this is why "if the history between means anything" quote falls flat to me. The meaning is rooted in lore that's brushed aside in the same breath. The author relies on it being meaningful for the audience, while providing only the bare bones of "we were friends, but took completely different paths" background, and that by the end of the first act. Just as he relies on the audience having an emotional attachment to the lore without doing anything to create that attachment.

[ariundercovers]

Palladium (Prologue)

Title: Palladium (Prologue)

Co-written with @ezras--moon

Pairing: Pilot!Frankie “Catfish” Morales x F!Reader

Word Count: 3,828

Warnings: None for now

Chapter (Prologue) Summary:

After his time in the army, Frankie gets a new job as a med-evac helicopter pilot. Reader, a paramedic who has been working on the chopper for quite some time, is unsure of her new coworker and has some serious doubts about their compatibility. 

Authors’ Notes: Slow burn with lots of smut. Multi-chapter fic in progress. F!Reader, referred to by a nickname in later chapters. No use of y/n. 

This fic is co-written by @ezras--moon and @ariundercovers. Please follow both of us for updates! We will be going back and forth to post each chapter, but catch a masterlist pinned to each of our blogs.

Day 1 - Monday, September 4th

The early morning light bathes the bedroom in an orange glow and the warmth of the sunlight hitting your face tickles you awake before your alarm can. You lay there silently for a long while, letting your brain slowly catch up with your body until it’s no longer comfortable and a groan slips out, slowly rolling over to your side to stretch your limbs. Eyes finally blinking the sleep away as you rise, the alarm goes off right as you sit up and put your feet down on the floor.

 A quick shower wakes you up, and a steaming cup of french press coffee immediately afterward motivates you to get ready for the long day ahead of you. You hastily grab a cream cheese bagel along with another cup of coffee to go as you head out for the base, morning news on the radio barely registering in the back of your mind as you pull into your designated parking space.

 Briskly walking to the locker room, you frown when you find it empty and remember what day it is. 

Phoebe’s gone.

The pilot you’ve been partnered with for years, your closest friend and confidant - you can’t blame her for leaving, as much as you’d like to be angry. Her promotion, which comes with a really nice pay raise, meant a transfer to a new base, away from you. 

“Well, fuck,” you mutter under your breath, frustrated with the change. You steady yourself, take a deep breath and a sip of your second coffee, before you slip into the rest of your gear, bright yellow warning vest last. Heading down the hall to the office, you clock in, hoping to see if you can find Benny or catch a glimpse of the new pilot. As far as you can tell, neither of them are anywhere to be seen - not that you would even know what the new pilot looks like. So, you go check in with your boss, Chief Lewis, who is in his office as usual, mustering up an enthusiastic greeting.

 “Morning.” He greets you with a smile and immediately hands you a stack of paperwork. “I need you to meet your new pilot out back, fill this out over the course of your shift today, and then hand it back in tonight before you leave.” You raise your brows and look at the pages stapled together at the upper left corner. Glancing down at the header, you realize that it’s an evaluation, and he wants you to report back about any issues with communication and cooperation between your team and the new member.

“This is just the initial review, you’ll do a few more later on. One next week and the other in six. Alright?” he folds his hands under his chin and looks up at you expectantly. 

You nod, still reading the questions on the paper in your hand, “Alright.” 

You’re caught off guard when he continues. “And, if there’s nothing urgent coming in soon, you’ll be doing a test flight or two to get the crew acquainted with one another. So, go grab Miller and get started on that first.” The disapproval seems to be evident on your face, as he’s now the one to raise his brows. “Please, don’t scare off the new guy with that frown on his first day, now.” There’s a lighthearted chuckle to his tone, but the words he chooses don’t slip past you, either. 

New guy. 

You’re the only woman left on your little team of three. Chief Lewis ushers you out of his office then, and you let out a frustrated sigh in the hallway as you make your way to the heliport to find Benny.

 When you come to find out neither of them are dressed for work yet and are, instead, engaged in some kind of animated discussion while just standing around next to the helicopter, you’re fuming. This means that, most likely, you’re going to be the one carrying the equipment out and loading it into the chopper while they catch up on getting ready, which they should have done at least ten minutes ago.

 Benny spots you stomping towards them and you catch him nudging the new pilot who’s just out of view behind him from where you’re approaching. The stranger is sporting a gentle smile and waves shyly at you as he sidesteps Benny, emerging from behind your trusted nurse.

 Your breath hitches in your throat just for a split second when you see him fully. His face, his imposing build, the messy mop of dark hair that he quickly hides beneath a baseball cap…

He’s handsome. You can feel your eyes start to widen for a split second before you reel yourself back in. 

The moment passes quickly, however, almost instantaneously replaced once again by the annoyment from before as you set down the two heavy bags of medical supplies you’re carrying. 

“Why aren’t the two of you dressed yet?” you almost bark, Chief Lewis’s request not to scare off the new guy going straight out the window. 

Benny raises his hands in mock surrender and rolls his eyes. “Well, good fucking morning to you too.” The new pilot’s smile drops into a neutral expression and it occurs to you briefly that you’re being rude. 

You sigh and ease up a little bit, but your brows remain furrowed as you step closer. “Morning, Benny.”

 The new, aggravatingly attractive guy introduces himself as Francisco, ‘but you can call me Frankie’,shaking your hand firmly and confidently. The sheer size of his palm compared to yours makes you swallow dryly, adding to the list of annoyances  you’ve already racked up today. 

“Please, go get dressed. And hurry. I’ll get started on loading up.” The two men disappear out of sight and you get to work.

 At least they don't take long and have the courtesy to bring the rest of the equipment on their way back out. And then it's not much longer until you’re finally seated with your headset on, buckled in, and Frankie’s communication with air traffic control layers staticky over the vibrating thrum of the chopper starting up.

 It’s deeply annoying that even his voice is nice to listen to, but you know that’s not the source of your frustration... It’s the fact that he’s replacing your friend - your best friend. 

It’s that you’re outnumbered by men, and it’s especially that they’ve already known each other forever. Benny told you as much while you were strapping everything in and sanitizing surfaces before take-off - apparently he had put a good word in for Frankie to be hired.

 There’s an easy banter between the two of them over comms, in which you decidedly don’t partake; it feels like you’re the third wheel, intruding. You feel out of place with them, on this helicopter, on this job. You’ve never felt like this at work before, not even on your own first day when you met Phoebe. She made you feel included and comfortable from the moment you shook hands, and you immediately worked together as a cohesive unit. 

 You’re in the middle of an inner monologue about the situation, talking yourself deeper into the frustration, when Benny addresses you. You’re settled in the air, finally at altitude as Frankie smoothly tilts the helicopter along a predetermined route given to him by air traffic control.

“What’s that you got there?” he asks, pointing at the slightly crumpled evaluation form you’re clutching in your hands. He’s aggressively chewing gum and bouncing his leg, it makes your facial muscles finally relax into somewhat of an easier expression. At least it’s still the same Benny you’re working with. You hand him the sheet and he skims it, then gives it back with a grin, but doesn’t say anything. 

 “Are you okay back there?” Frankie asks when there’s no verbal reply to Benny’s question, glancing back over his shoulder. 

“Yes, don’t worry about it. Focus on getting us back down in one piece,” you respond. It comes out a little harsh, but you don’t pay it any mind.

Frankie shakes his head and turns back to the windshield, flying them smoothly and competently along the route. The longer you’re in the air, the more frustrated you feel, finding nothing about his demeanor or his flying that you could legitimately be disappointed with. Nothing to write down as a negative on his evaluation form.

Turns out, he’s infuriatingly and devastatingly competent.

You can feel your own leg start to shake back and forth a bit, the inner boiling beginning to affect you a bit more outwardly. Frankie’s voice sounds over the comms as you all arrive at your given location - just a mile or so out from the hospital.

“Turning around, and heading back to base, now.” The smoothness of his voice catches you off-guard every time. It’s like an expensive liquor in your ears, even through the static of the comms and the deafening loudness that is the inside of a helicopter. You close your eyes and sigh heavily, shaking it off. It feels impossible, but you just have to get through today. You could go home tonight and pour yourself a big glass of wine over it, but you have to figure out a way to not let this affect you. So, you shift in your seat, looking out over the city in front of you, and you count your breaths a few times, trying to regulate yourself. It helps, at least a little, and you sit back in your seat with a small sigh. 

Frankie has the helicopter back in no time. He’s landing at base, again without a hitch, and you unbuckle yourself so that you can shuffle out of the chopper and back into base as quickly as possible. 

You hole yourself up in the dorm for as long as you can, figuring some distance might help you shake the ugly feeling in your chest. Trying to focus on a new book Phoebe gifted you as a going away present, you’re laying back in your cot as you flip through the first pages. 

An alarm blares over the intercom. They’re sending you out on your first call with the new pilot. A glance at your watch tells you you've lost track of time a little bit, it's almost noon already. You groan but immediately get to it, tossing the book onto your bed and grabbing your bag before jogging out to the helipad. Frankie is already there, climbing in, and you meet him inside just as Benny arrives as well. Everyone’s headsets are on in barely a moment as the chopper starts. Frankie turns and offers a nod to each of you - which you reluctantly reciprocate - before he takes off in the direction of the accident.

It’s a short trip - only a few minutes, really - and you land on a closed-off highway that’s got a three-car pileup blocking all lanes of traffic. There must be hundreds of cars unable to pass and waiting on tow trucks, police and your own team to clear their path. Ground EMS is there, too - you can see the lights from where you are, and you jump out of the helicopter, booking it toward them as Benny pulls out the stretcher to meet you there. The firefighters have already pulled your patient from the car, laid out on one of their stretchers with a very visible head injury. You crouch down, telling them your name and a few gentle pleasantries. You’re not sure they can even hear you, but you do it for all of your patients, no matter how bad of a shape they’re in.

“We’ve got you, now. Don’t worry - my team’s gonna get you to the hospital in no time at all, we’re gonna take good care of you.” One of your fellow paramedics on the ground gives you the low-down on the patient, explaining their injuries, position in the crash, and how the firefighters pulled them out. You nod, taking note of everything as you scan the patient yourself for visual confirmation. Asking a few follow-up questions, you nod to them and offer a polite ‘thank you’ as they stand and step to the side. 

Benny jumps in then, offering you a smile before locking eyes with you. On the count of three, you lift the patient over to your stretcher. Two of the firefighters jump in toward the foot of the stretcher, grabbing the backboard along with you and Benny, and the four of you move quickly over to the helicopter as you load the patient into the cabin. 

Frankie glances back at you, watching to make sure everything goes according to protocol. You and Benny finish buckling the patient down, and then sit in your seats, turned toward them as Benny continually takes vitals and you apply pressure to a deep wound on their shoulder. After one last cabin check, Frankie takes off, en route to the second closest hospital, given it has the resources to tend to your patient properly. 

“Three minutes to General.” He calls back to you, and Benny nods with a ‘roger’ in response. Those three minutes are always both the longest and the shortest all at once - Benny and you working seamlessly to tend to the patient with all of your supplies and training available to you. You’re watching them inevitably deteriorate at once, so you’re grateful when you can finally feel the descent down to the helipad. 

Doctors and nurses are waiting on the pad with a stretcher already, making the transition an easy one as you slide the patient off of the backboard. They run off then, Benny in tow, and you lag behind at the helicopter as the blades above you slowly whirr to a halt. Frankie climbs out as they stop, walking over to stand next to you. 

“Everything go alright?” He asks.

You sigh, the adrenaline of the call slowly starting to wear off. “Yeah. As alright as it could have.” You’re not sure what else to say, so you stand there awkwardly, thoughts bouncing around in your skull for a long while. “I’ve gotta do some paperwork.” 

You walk off, moving back into the cabin of the helicopter to grab the papers Chief Lewis handed you this morning. Setting them up on a clipboard, you settle into your seat and cross your legs, propping it up. It’s not actually that much paperwork, really, but it’s enough to make your head swim. This is, and will always be, your least favorite part of your job.

You fill out the pages on auto-pilot, jotting down route numbers, ID badge information, and generally recalling the course of the day so far. It startles you, then, when you hear the pilot’s door open up. Frankie steps in and takes a seat, swiveling his legs around to face you. He ticks his chin up at you and says, “Hey.”

You lift your eyes to him only briefly, not looking away from the page for more than a second, and raise one eyebrow at him in confusion. “What do you need, Morales?” He blinks back at you a few times and shakes his head.

“Nothing, just… wanted to say hi, I guess. We didn’t really get much of an introduction earlier.” You raise your chin to meet his gaze, settling against the back of your seat as you regard him.

“Well, hello. Consider us introduced.” You sigh, getting back to work on the papers and doing your best to ignore him further. - - -

The look on your face confuses Frankie to no end. He feels like maybe he did something wrong, said something wrong, perhaps? Made a wrong call during their test flight? It has to be something horrible to make you dislike him so blatantly, but you’ve only been working together for a few hours or so at this point. 

He’s been replaying the day in his mind over and over again, searching for the moment where he slipped up, that moment when everything went wrong, but no matter what he does, he can’t find it, can’t quite figure out why you’ve grown to detest him so much already. He shifts in his seat, staring blankly out through the windshield as he waits for Benny to get back. It’s another internal battle to figure out if it’s worth it to keep trying, or if he should just give up and let you sulk. Maybe it had nothing to do with him, after all. 

But, he’d never know if he didn’t try.

Sighing, he turns back around again and gives you a once over before speaking up once more. “Hey, uh… I feel like maybe we got off on the wrong foot or somethin’. Can we try this again? Tomorrow, maybe.” You huff, but acquiesce, looking up at him with a scowl on your face.

“Sure, fine. Whatever you want, Morales.” You look back down at the papers in your hands as Frankie brightens just a little bit, feeling better at the chance for a fresh start, even if you’re less than enthused about it. He sighs, letting out a breath he didn’t know he was holding in, and turns back to the windshield, eyes trained to the hospital doors that Benny would hopefully be walking back out of soon.

It’s a few more minutes only and he’s doing exactly that, climbing up into the cabin of the helicopter with one of his bright signature smiles that makes Frankie shake his head. They head back to base in silence, unloading themselves and their equipment to clean and sanitize. They restock their bags, reload the chopper, and then they’re left to their own devices again. 

Amazingly, they don't get another call for the rest of their day. Frankie stays largely in the day room with Benny, and he doesn’t see you for the rest of the shift, or even when he goes to leave. Benny walks up to him as he’s slinging his backpack over his shoulder and they walk out of the base together.

“Hey, Fish. Decent first day, I hope?” Frankie sighs, pulling off his hat so he can run his fingers through his hair, putting it right back atop his thick dark curls.

“Decent enough, I guess.” Offering a nervous chuckle, he shifts his backpack on his shoulders as they start to head out. “Very different from flying in the army, that’s for sure.”

Benny smiles back at him. “It’ll take some time to get used to, but you’re a natural. Knew you would be, man.” Frankie nods, appreciative of the compliment, and they continue to walk in silence for a few more steps before he perks up with a question of his own.

“Hey, Benny, can I ask you somethin’?” Benny turns, regarding him as the cadence to their steps slows.

“Sure, man. Whatever you need.” They pause in front of Frankie’s beaten up truck, turning to face one another. Frankie’s head ticks toward the base.

“Is she always… like that? Feel like I did somethin' wrong… real wrong, if I’m being honest. Is she cold like that with everyone? Or is it just me?” Benny lets out a hearty laugh and claps Frankie on the shoulder, squeezing him reassuringly.

“Just give her some time. I think she’ll warm up to you pretty quickly. You’re a good guy, Frankie, so just keep being you. She’ll get there, I promise.” Frankie nods in understanding, accepting Benny’s words with a frustrated huff.

“Alright, If you say so.” They offer each other a curt nod and head in their own directions, Frankie ducking into his car and taking a moment to settle himself before driving off in the direction of his apartment.

~ ~ ~

It takes Phoebe a while to pick up when you call her that night, leaning over your kitchen counter and fidgeting with the handle of your spatula. You almost give up when the line finally connects and you hear her voice at the other end. She’s just slightly out of breath, making you think she must have rushed to find her phone at the other end of her apartment.

“Hellooo,” she sings as a greeting and you hear her sit down in her creaky porch chair, front door falling shut in the background. You sigh before you say anything, but then muster a squeaky “Hey.”

It must be so obvious, the exasperation in your voice, because she makes a sympathetic sound before she asks you what’s wrong.

“Oh no, honey, rough day? What happened?”

You sigh into the phone and plop yourself down in your kitchen chair after flipping your food in the pan. “It’s just… the new pilot. He’s a man so I’m left now as the only woman on the crew. And, even better, he and Benny have been super close for years already, and it was him who recommended him for the job. I’m like the third wheel. It’s horrible!” You can hear a breathy laugh on the other side that she tries to cover up, unsuccessfully. “Oh come on, Phoebs… You’re living your best life in your new cushy job and I’m stuck with these two big burly boys. By myself. You’ve abandoned me!” You’re joking mostly, at this point, but the feelings inside are still real, even if you’re covering them up with a bit of laughter.

“I know. A new start like this is tough. But give the guy a chance. If he’s friends with our Benny, he’s gotta be a good one, right? He deserves a fair shot. Give it a couple of days, and see how you’re feeling about it then. It’s too raw right now to be able to make any real sense of it, anyway.” She pauses for a moment and you take a deep breath, standing up to check on your food.

“I’m sorry, sweetie. I know I didn’t give you much time to prepare for it, either. It’s hard, no matter how you swing it.” You nod your head, even though she can’t see you, and look out into the distance of your living room.

“It is. But you’re right, too. I can give him a couple days, that’s only fair.” You sigh, frustrated to know that she’s right, but always grateful for her advice, anyway.

“Exactly. If it was you in his position, you’d only want the same, wouldn’t you?” 

You huff, her wisdom starting to whittle away at your misplaced rage. “Yeah yeah, voice of reason. I know. I’ll give him a chance.”

She chuckles on the other side of the line. “Now that’s my girl! I’d bet he makes out to be pretty decent, after all. Benny wouldn’t stick his neck out like this for just anyone, and you know that.”

You nod in agreement even though she can’t see you. “Definitely not.”

“So just keep your head up and ride it out. You’ll know soon enough.”

[cha-melodius]

Year in Review: Favorite Lines

Tagged by @kiwiana-writes and @firenati0n, and I didn't originally think I'd do this because it's so fucking hard, but I was bored out of my skull and didn't feel like writing, so here goes. I waited until after creators were revealed for the TMFU exchange to post this because one of my favorite lines this year came from that fic. I could not limit to three or five or whatever so you get how many you get lmao.

If you're wondering why there are no lines from Nova, Baby, it's because 1) there are far too many, and 2) the ones I'd like to quote are mostly super spoilery. Read the fic, I guess! 😂

RULES: feel free to share your top three/five/however many favorite snippet(s)/line/quotes/paragraphs from your published fics (or wips!).

From Playing Cat and Mouse with the Light (Napollya, E, 12k)

Illya’s thaw toward him had been slow, like a reticent spring that warms a frozen lake so gradually that you don’t realize the ice underneath your feet has thinned until the catastrophic crack that sends you plunging into the depths. That’s what this feels like. Shattering.

From Step Into My Office, Baby (Firstprince, E, 2.4k)

Alex winds his fingers into Henry’s collar and buries his face in his neck, and it’s all Henry can do to hang on like he’s clinging to a life preserver in a storm. Except somehow, Alex is both the life preserver and the storm.

From All Comes Crashing (Napollya, E, 5.6k)

“I hate this,” Napoleon says, his voice thick with emotion, “but I love you, so I guess I’ll take it.”

From This Hell of a Season (Firstprince, E, 21k)

If he were a writer, he would write a thousand poems and never come close to capturing it; as a painter, he’d spend hours—days, weeks—on the curve of jaw and never be satisfied; even the finest photographer would still struggle with the fact that a single image could never capture the vibrancy of him.

(also from the same fic)

No matter where they are—at home in their flat in Langley or standing outside a hut in the middle of a Mexican forest—all he really needs is this. Alex in his arms. The heat of Alex’s skin pressed to his. Alex’s heart, beating in time with his.

From Please Don't Let Me Be So Understood (Firstprince, E, 20k)

In. Out. Henry’s hands are warm and soft where they grip his. Alex doesn’t know if he realizes he’s swiping his thumb over the back of Alex’s hand. In. Out. Their faces shift, bringing the bridges of their noses together. In. Out. Henry’s warm breath washes over his skin and paradoxically makes goosebumps rise on his arms. In. Out. The air he’s breathing in feels thicker, honeyed, heavy like the atmosphere before a storm. In. Out. “Excellently done,” Dr. Chen says, and the words yank him back to reality like coming to the surface after swimming underwater.

From Falling Down the Stairs of Your Smile (Firstprince, M, 4.1k)

The press of Henry’s lips to his, the way their mouths slot together as easily as if they’ve been doing this for years, the zip of electricity that fizzles under his skin and spreads out to tingle in the tips of his fingers and toes… Alex has never been kissed like this, has never felt like this being kissed, and it’s exhilarating and terrifying all at once. Like he’s falling. Oh. Fuck.

From Black Moon (Napollya, E, 6k)

If this was supposed to be a release, it didn’t work—or rather it did, but only in the way that releasing steam from an over-pressurized system prevents imminent explosion. The pressure is still there, the need is still there, in some ways worse than it was before.

From Will You Brie Mine? (Firstprince, T, 5.8k)

The longer they kiss, the more he realizes that there’s something else that’s different about this kiss: it feels, unmistakably, like the last first kiss he’s ever going to have.

From Lessons in Foreign Diplomacy (Firstprince, E, 5.4k)

“I think,” Henry gets out tightly, “that you’re stubborn—” Alex bites down on the tender skin at the crease of his hip. “—opinionated—” A slow lick up the length of his shaft. “—arrogant—” A hot breath, ghosting over the crown. “—uncouth—” Alex curls his fingers, and Henry whimpers as his spine arches up off the bed. “—and if you don’t get inside me right now, I’m going to stonewall all of your treaty negotiations for the next month.”

From Something To Be Proud Of (Firstprince, M, 3.4k)

No one jumps out to call him out for being an impostor. Henry offers him a careful smile, then turns back to his work like he knows Alex needs a moment to himself. He lets his fingers rub over the surface of the pin, feeling the little enamel ridges, and something settles under his skin, like an itch he hadn’t even been aware of until it was gone.

From Always Where I Need To Be (Firstprince, T, 5.5k)

He thinks about how Henry is the last person he wants to talk to at night, and the first person he wants to see in the morning. He thinks about how making Henry laugh has become a significant reason that Alex does anything these days. He thinks about how he’d dropped everything to make sure Henry was all right, and how he’d do it again in an instant. He thinks about how he can’t really get enough of how Henry smells, the way the clean, grassiness that Alex always kind of assumed was part of his cologne had clung to him on a day when he hadn’t even gotten out of bed. He thinks about how perfect Henry had felt in his arms, and how he’d put up with a lifetime of his arm going numb every night if it meant Henry was sleeping next to him.

From Cold Light (Lokius, M, 3.7k)

“Tell me about your mother,” Mobius says. “If you want.” Loki smiles softly at him, and there, under the breathtaking northern lights, he tells a story.

[jetwhenitsmidnight]

Take All of Us by Natalie Lief

Publisher: Peachtree Teen / Holiday House

Release date: 4 June 2024

Genre: young adult apocalyptic/dystopian horror

If you like:

Unbury-your-gays

Disabled kids surviving an apocalypse together

Found family

Zombies 🧟‍♂️

Some light cannibalism

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫/5

Synopsis

Five years ago, a parasite poisoned the water of Ian’s West Virginia hometown, turning dozens of locals into dark-eyed, oil-dripping shells of their former selves. With chronic migraines and seizures limiting his physical abilities, Ian relies on his best friend and secret crush Eric to mercy-kill any infected people they come across.

Until a new health report about the contamination triggers a mandatory government evacuation, and Ian cracks his head in the rush. Used to hospitals and health scares, Ian always thought he'd die young... but he wasn’t planning on coming back. Much less facing the slow, painful realization that Eric left him behind to die.

Desperate to confront Eric before the parasite takes over, Ian joins two others left behind—his childhood rival Monica and the jaded prepper Angel—on a journey across town. What they don't know is that Eric is also looking for Ian, and he's determined to mercy-kill him.

Content warnings

Death, violence

Ableism

Blood, gore, body horror

Cannibalism (but its not super graphic imo)

Vomiting (but descriptions of vomit is minimal)

Abandonment

Past medical content

Epidemic

Hallucinations

Mentioned physical/parental abuse

Review

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC!! 💀🧟🛢️

There's a post about how if people became zombies they would just continue going about their day-to-day lives because that's what their bodies remember. That is literally this book.

I found the synopsis to be rather misleading. It gives the impression that this book is a scary survival thriller, where the characters have to fight to stay alive, against terrible odds with heavy angst. While Ian, our main boy, does do some angsting, for the most part, this book feels really cute and cozy to me. The begrudging-allies-to-found-family pipeline is real and I eat it up every single time. The characters initially beef with each other upon meeting, but quickly bond over their shared circumstances (being abandoned, chronic illnesses, being outcasts). I liked how the author quickly established their personalities and circumstances, making it clear how their dynamic works from the get-go.

I'm sleep deprived and running out of steam so the rest of this review is in bulletpoints.

The Romance

Cute!

It's giving 😳👉👈

I didn't expect it to turn out the way it did, given the synopsis, which made it sound very ominous.

The Chronic Illness Rep

idk how accurate it is, as I have no first-hand experience

The synopsis says that Ian gets chronic migraines, but he is dead for most of the book, so he doesn't have any migraines in the story, but he also doesn't mention it ever

He does talk about his epilepsy though, but mainly in terms of how people react to him (staring, calling for an ambulance when he doesn't need it)

The synopsis says that Monica is chronically ill, though the book doesn't state exactly how, and she also uses a cane

Character Arcs

Ian's arc is mainly about how, as a chronically ill person, he struggles to take up space because of the guilt he feels from needing people to help him

I think Ian's arc was well-executed, but the arcs for all the other characters were lacking

I wish Eric could have gotten his own arc, he has a bunch of stuff that goes unaddressed

The Premise

The most unrealistic part of this book is that the dead people have oil for blood and the US government didn't round them up and throw them in the Oil Extractor 3000

The most realistic part of this book is that the government (belatedly) discovered a parasite in this town's water supply that turns people into zombies and instead of trying to clean the water or evacuate the townspeople, just told them to drink filtered water

Amount of Horror

Most of this book didn't read like horror to me, other than the light cannibalism

The last 10% is the most horror-y part, very trippy and strange, with more gory bits

Overall

This wasn't the best written book, there were some minor plot holes, and the character development could use some work

But! This was so entertaining and so much fun to read so 5 stars just for enjoyment reasons

[slocumjoe]

Peer-Reviewing “The Synthetic Truth.”

And a long rant about irresponsible journalism

This will be a long read. As mentioned before, I was going into careers for this thing. But I’m not anymore, it’s been a while, and I’m doing this for fun in my free time. So, if you notice something I don’t, feel free to point it out. The coolest thing about my Piper rants are the other writers nodding furiously. But at the same time, disagreement is a source of learning, so don’t be shy if you have a counter-point to anything.

The point of this is to pick apart Piper’s reporting and figure out everything wrong with it. Why? Because people agree with me when I say she’s bad at her job, but I don’t think they understand just how bad. The articles themselves are long, boring slogs to read through, full of filler paragraphs and unimaginative ways of making a point. They’re forgettable. Pair that with the fact that many likely haven’t read them, and it’s easy to buy into Piper’s shtick of being a sharp, charismatic field journalist. 

Consider this post a refund. 

Noodles. We all eat them. We all love them. And Diamond City's Power Noodles has supplied this sustenance for the past fifteen years. From the stilted mechanical cadence of Takahashi's programmed Japanese, to the fragrant steam that wafts from each bowl, to the scalding tang of each delicious mouthful - the ordering and eating of noodles is but one of many shared human experiences. Or is it?

October, 2287

The Synthetic Truth

By

Piper Wright

This opening is weak and poorly connects to the next paragraph. The thesis of this article seems to be that Diamond City has a synth issue; we’ll get to that later. Noodles have nothing to do with the overall idea of the article, and she’s wasting a lot of ink on it. Remember, this is a post-apocalypses newspaper. You’d think she’d want to make things easy on her printing press and not waste her resources.

Now, the closing line here is awful. I’ve seen classmates ripped to shreds for hypothetical questions. Do not ask hypothetical questions, especially if you’re not going to outright respond to them. It’s a lazy way of getting to your point. I can just see my writing workshop teacher’s red ink on this one. 

Also, I have two nitpicks. Firstly, the description of the ‘noodle experience’ doesn’t work. It described Takahashi, but then the noodles. If it was Takahashi’s Japanese, then something else, then noodles, it would work better. When doing a three-point description, you want 1-1-1 or 3 of one thing. This is 1-2. Doing 1-1-1-1, or four points, is on shaky grounds. 3 is a magic number; not too little, not too much.

Secondly, the line “And Diamond City’s Power Noodles has supplied this sustenance for the past fifteen years” is awkward. With the first three sentences, this paragraph opens with “Noodles. We eat noodles. We Love noodles. Power Noodles makes noodles.” It’s clunky. I won’t suggest fixes because the entire paragraph needs to be thrown away.

I was struck by this very question as I sat at the counter of Power Noodles last Wednesday night, just after 5:00 pm, enjoying a dinner I had so many times before. That's when I noticed our very own Mayor McDonough sidle up to a stool, and engage in the very same ritual. Right hand extending. Mouth opening. Teeth chewing. Yes, eating noodles. The shared experience of almost every Diamond City resident.

This paragraph also needs cutting. Really look at the content of it. It describes the act of eating food. This paragraph wastes ink and paper, time, and most importantly, reader attention. The average person is not going to sit down and read through this, Piper. Aside from the creepy, stalker-like tone of this paragraph, it’s also counter-intuitive to her point.

Piper is trying to convince everyone McDonough is a synth. Here, she describes him doing something that would be very odd for an Institute agent; he goes and gets dinner at the same place she does, while she’s there. Knowing he’d be scrutinized for it. This paints the rest of the article in an unflattering light, as Piper is accusing McDonough of being a synth, while not providing proof, at the same time she’s describing ordinary behavior. 

This paragraph also fails to connect to her hypothetical question. Piper asks the question, and describes when she herself asked it. She doesn’t properly acknowledge it. This is a journalism crime. Hypothetical questions are bad, and using one, then shuffling past it, is even worse. So much red ink needed here.

So it must have also seemed to the residents of Diamond City nearly sixty years ago, on an uncharacteristically warm May evening in 2229, as they sat around this very same counter. But that was before the days of Takahashi and his noodles, when the bar served not noodles, but ice cold Nuka-Colas, frothy beers, and stiff shots of whiskey. The barman's name was Henry, and that night, he facilitated the shared human experiences of drinking, smoking, talking and laughing. That is, until tragedy struck.

The focus has shifted from an odd, pointless note about McDonough eating dinner, to the Broken Mask incident. The first paragraph is about noodles, the second is about McDonough eating noodles, and this third paragraph is about how this noodle stand used to be a bar. If Piper was writing about the noodle stand itself, this would be acceptable with some changes. But this isn’t about noodles, it’s about synths in Diamond City, but we’re still talking about the damn noodle stand.

Some nitpicks: ‘uncharacteristically’ can be cut; ‘facilitated’ is an odd word choice; 1-1-1-1 description use, ‘talking’ and ‘laughing’ could be lumped in together under ‘merriment’, ‘partying’, or some such. 

This is a matter of personal taste, but I would have left out the final line. That way, it would be of some shock when the tragedy actually strikes. It would better fit the tone Piper is going for. If this article were more objective and historical, prefacing that there is tragedy would be appropriate. 

There aren't many among us who are even old enough to remember that evening - although some of the city's Ghoul residents certainly could have, had they not been forcibly removed, thanks to Mayor McDonough's anti-Ghoul decree of 2282. But there is one person among us who does remember, distinctly, the events of that evening: respected matriarch Eustace Hawthorne, who recounted her story in a Publick Occurrences exclusive interview.

Unless Piper wants to make a point about the ghoul exile, half of this paragraph is unwarranted. Simply take the last part about Eustace and put it on the end of the last paragraph. “Eustace Hawthorne remembers the evening well.” That’s all you have to do. Saves ink, time, and reader attention. 

"Oh, I was there all right. Sitting right at the bar, sure as you're sitting in front of me now. Twenty-two years old or so, and just looking to have a good time. I was safe behind the Wall - we all were - so what was the harm? And let me tell you, that Mr. Carter made it easy. He came into town earlier that day, said he was from out west somewhere. It didn't really matter. What did matter was his smile, and his laugh, and the way he'd make everyone feel at ease. That night, at the bar, we all just sort of crowded around him. Everyone wanted to exchange a word, or hear about the state of the Commonwealth. And Mr. Carter, he was all too happy to oblige. It was just so wonderful. Until it wasn't."

What Eustace is describing is, of course, is the infamous event known as the "Broken Mask," when the people of the Commonwealth learned for the first time that the Institute, the shadowy scientific organization responsible for the creation of combat androids, had actually succeeded in creating a model so advanced, it could effortlessly infiltrate human society. Unbeknownst to the people of Diamond City, the Institute had somehow evolved their androids into true synthetic humans. Synths.

Eustace continued her account of that evening, and the moment when things turned sinister, and the truth about Mr. Carter was revealed.

"We'd been drinking, and carrying on, must have been three hours. Mr. Carter had four or five drinks in that time. He seemed a bit drunk, I guess, like the rest of us. Then something just sort of happened. He was smiling, but the smile sort of went from his face, all in an instant. And then his cheek started twitching, kind of funny. And I remember watching him, clear as if it happened just yesterday. He reached inside his coat, took out a revolver, and then 'Blam!' - He shot Henry, the barman, right in the head. Didn't hesitate, didn't show any emotion - Mr. Carter killed Henry as casually as if he were paying him for a drink. But his cheek never did stop twitching. Let me tell you, all Hell broke loose after that."

"After he shot Henry, that Mr. Carter shot three or four other people, too. Like I said, all Hell broke loose. The guards came running, they opened fire, and Mr. Carter he kept shooting, and throwing people around left and right. Finally, those guards put him down. Seemed like they had killed a man who had flipped his lid. Gone crazy. And he lay there like a dead crazy man, sure enough. God, it was horrible. But then we saw the plastic and the metal - this was one of them early synths, you see - and we realized it wasn't a man at all. It was then we all knew. The Institute wasn't just 'out there.' The Institute was everywhere now. Among us."

Oh, Piper. Sweetheart, god bless. 

Never, ever, ever use a full quote like this. Ever! A cursory Google search will tell you to use quotes sparingly. Any middle-school teacher will tell you to not just drop them in and leave, like you’ve written a paragraph. Every writing resource out there will tell you to do something with a quote, and give it a point. This paragraph fails on all metrics.

When using large blocks of quotations like Piper is doing, for the love of god, paraphrase. Piper, in this section, has two paragraphs; one is saying that Eustace’s quote isn’t done yet, and the other is describing what Eustace is already describing. If I put anything like this in front of any of my teachers, they’d call in for a welfare check, asking if I’d lost my mind over night.. Piper writes nothing of her own substance here. You cannot use a quote like this. Sure, this is an interview, and maybe interview articles have different rules, but surely this is a massive amount of ink, spent recounting Eustace’s winding manner of speech.

I’m doing the same thing here, but the difference is that I am directly examining each paragraph; Piper is just dropping in her quotes and continuing on. This is a rookie mistake. I know Piper wasn’t properly taught these things, but it still is a sign of weak, purposeless writing. If you have a point, and you care about it, and, crucially, it has the legs, you don’t need to prop it up with a quote dump like this. 

It was never determined precisely why the synth known as Mr. Carter went on his killing spree. Some suggested he had somehow been remotely controlled by the Institute, who wanted to test his combat effectiveness. Still others felt he had simply malfunctioned (a hypothesis supported by the twitching cheek), and was never meant to kill anyone. But at that time, the "why" hardly seemed important. What mattered was that the humans of the Commonwealth had been truly infiltrated by an organization whose intentions and motives were, and still are, a complete mystery - using a model of synth even less advanced than the ones the Institute has in service today.

I can’t tell if this paragraph looks alright to me because of the horror of the quotation section, or it’s genuinely inoffensive. It’s boring, sure, but it has a point. It lays out the theories behind Mr. Carter’s attack, and then pushes the point that it doesn’t matter; there are now synths among them, hiding in plain sight. The last sentence is a bit of a run-on, though. It could have been broken up into two sentences. 

This paragraph gets a solid B. Unimaginative, a bit too long, but it has a purpose and fulfills it competently. It uses too many adverbs, though, but that’s a common issue throughout the article. Precisely, remotely, simply, hardly, truly - it’s a small thing, but once you get an eye for it, you’ll never stop noticing it. 

Which brings us to noodles. Specifically, the noodles consumed by Mayor McDonough last Wednesday night, in the same spot that Mr. Carter the synth went haywire, and mercilessly killed several people - after spending hours sharing an experience the people of Diamond City assumed was reserved for members of the human race. They were wrong.

This paragraph attempts to connect McDonough to Mr. Carter through this stand, citing it as a common denominator of Institute meddling, the heart of Diamond City now invaded. But she does this through the fact that Mr. Carter went haywire here, and the fact that McDonough eats here. This is false correlation. Piper herself eats here, but in her eyes, McDonough taking an action that Mr. Carter also took is proof that the Institute is pulling the strings. To her, this noodle stand is a symbol of a lost security. But objectively, she’s still just talking about McDonough getting dinner.

This is not how you do set up and pay-off. I’ll give a demonstration of tying the ending back to your opening at, obviously, the end of this post.

Are we?

You ended. On a two-word hypothetical question. 

If my teacher received anything, no matter how well the rest of it was, with a two-word hypothetical question for a closing paragraph, she would have stood up on her desk, pointed at it with her red pen, and gone into exhaustive detail for the remainder of class why you don’t do this.

But for all the bad writing decisions in this article, they aren’t the worst thing.

Let’s talk about journalism, and the responsibilities of it.

Accountability 

A keen eye will have noticed the inflammatory nature of this article.

This article is somewhat insidious, as the wording and topic choice leads to a subtle hint towards paranoia. “They were wrong...Are we?” wants the reader to wonder if they, themselves, are in danger of a synth going haywire, or a synth walking past them like anybody else. Piper wants her reader to keep this in mind, every single day. She wants them to never not think about the Institute infiltrating their home. 

Piper writes about nothing, but the subtext is everything. She encourages a reader to view everyone with suspicion; after all, if a synth can eat noodles and drink and make merry with anyone, how do you trust anyone? It’s a valid point, yes. But it’s a shortsighted one. How do you trust anyone in the wasteland, synth or not? Someone could be trying to rob you, sell you into slavery, kill you. Piper singles out the Institute as the only real threat in her articles. Need I remind you, Piper is unaware of Quincy’s recent siege and take over by the Gunners? 

Quincy was a large, thriving city, and was a major trading hub. There’s a reason Piper picked Quincy as your fake origin. The wealth and resources are why the Gunners attacked in the first place. It was a massacre. On a trading hub. Think of what that would do for the weak economy. Think of how many people would know the traveling traders, or had friends and family living in Quincy. Piper doesn’t go to the Quincy survivors for their account, or Preston for his side of the story as the failed protector. To Piper, the Institute is the most urgent threat to the Commonwealth. She fixates on it. The Institute is a threat, yes. Remember University Point? But Piper doesn’t write about that, either, and there’s been time for the news of U.P to reach Diamond City. For Quincy, I’m willing to forgive her. It was a recent attack. But as a reporter, Piper should be keeping her ear to ground for these sorts of things. 

A quick list of things Piper should be writing about, for the good of her community.

The Ghoul exodus, and the pointlessness of racism in a time where you need every friendly hand you can get.

The Gunners and their encroaching presence in the Commonwealth

Quincy being commandeered. 

The Brotherhood rolling into the Commonwealth.

News about crops and economy from other settlements.

Homesteading information that would be useful for a post-apocalypse home, such as preserving, tailoring, and the like. 

The Railroad.

Goodneighbor, and the difference of leadership between Hancock and his brother. 

Dangerous areas in the Commonwealth, safe routes you can take to other locations.

Merchant routes.

Bunker Hill.

The rebuilding of the Minutemen. 

Institute top-side activity, such as in University Point, the Mayoral Bunker in the west, and more.

The destruction of the Commonwealth Provisional Government, and why the Institute wouldn’t want the Commonwealth to be united.

But that isn’t what she writes about. Piper writes about synths in Diamond City. Diamond City is already paranoid about the Institute after the Broken Mask Incident. Piper can write about the Institute; she just doesn’t do it in meaningful ways. Her paper literally has an advice column; this isn’t a reputable source of information, it’s her own think-pieces.

If I was a journalist in the wasteland, I would be trying to unify my community. I would be looking for important news, useful information and survival tips, and trying to find answers where there are questions. I would not be rallying my community against each other, telling them that our leader is a fraud, that any of them could be frauds. And then I wouldn’t insist to anyone willing to listen, that no one is believing me, despite the town being in a constant state of dread. 

That’s the real problem I have with Piper; she can’t take no for an answer, even when she’s getting ‘yes’. Piper’s articles are working, but because they can’t just throw McDonough out, she blames the residents of Diamond City. She calls them cowards, sheep, brown-nosing. The guards are talking about synths, the residents are talking about synths, people want Nick thrown out after all his good deeds because they just can’t trust him anymore. If you walk around Diamond City, people will tell you they broke up with their girlfriend because she did something weird, so she must be a synth. Cathy at the barber thinks the mayor’s secretary is a synth, because her hair is too nice. The general store owner, Myrna, who has to interact with more people than most, can barely run her business because she’s so terrified that she isn’t interacting with who she thinks she is. 

And Kyle, a DC resident, thinks something killed his brother, Riley, and stole his face. Angry, grieving, deluded, he tries to put down the mockery, only for guards to execute him. There were no synths, but someone still died because of the fear that there might have been. 

And where does this happen?

In front of the noodle stand. 

(See? That’s how you bring things back around.)

Piper writes that the Institute first invaded Diamond City at this stand, the heart of town, and now, a synth leads Diamond City while eating here. But the Institute isn’t what is hurting Diamond City. It’s fear. Everyone turns on everyone else, for fear they’re a synth. There is still violence, for fear of history repeating itself. 

Fear that Piper will not stop perpetuating.

[jeffgerstmann]

Hey Jeff sorry if you've talked about this on a podcast but are there any major publishers out there who won't send you a game anymore because you're not affiliated with a site anymore? Or has the smaller streamer actually become a large part of how publishers get game access out there?

It hasn't been a problem. Most of the cases where I didn't get a game usually come back to me just not asking. Like I probably could've tracked down whoever is repping Cities Skylines 2 and gotten it from them early--someone on my Steam list had time on it so I knew it was available--but I knew I wouldn't have time to touch it until well after its release date, so I didn't bother.

Sometimes you'll get emails that are like "click here to request a review key" and that can be hit or miss. I got a rejection email from whoever was handling Lies of P only to get a key from them like a few weeks later for Game Awards purposes. Would've been helpful to have that earlier, since I would've had more time to play it then, but that's just how it goes.

I've also started getting weird influencer-y outreach from companies that handle key distribution to people who aren't press. Sometimes that's like "hey, do you want two Payday 3 keys? Click here! By the way we're not paying you to stream it!" and sometimes it's "would you like to create unpaid content for Samba de Amigo on Switch? Fill out this form!" I filled out the Samba form and never heard back. I'm sure if I had tracked down the person handling it on the press side I would've gotten my hands on it.

I think the other thing that might not be as obvious is that the reach on the podcast is actually quite good. Overall I'm probably reaching more people now than I was two years ago. So the "affiliated with a site" thing isn't an actual indicator of how many people are engaging with a thing.

[angel-of-hunky-doryness]

The Conflicts of Disney's Hercules (Part 1): Meg vs Hades

Long post y'all.

I promised my diva of a sponsor to get to this and since my last post gained steam, I thought I'd finally talk about one of my favorite Villain vs Heroine conflicts in Disney's canon. This will be a bit of a mini series as I break down and explore the conflicts in the movie, think Hades vs Zeus vs Hercules, Hercules/Hades vs the Fates, etc. As I continue the series if you have a suggestion for one you want me to deep dive I would love to hear it!

That's the fun part about Tumblr, the opportunity to hear voices and begin discussion about little things no one mentions in a 20+ old film. Also, bare in mind I will be exploring other Disney films eventually, but I've just spent too long digging in the Hercules trenches i can't help but gush about it even if it is far from my favorite Disney film.

Also fair warning ahead of time but there is a CW in one section of this post that can be easily circumvented if you so wish. There will be a space and *** symbols to indicate when it starts and when it ends as we discuss some dark themes and symbolism.

Now on to the evening's entertainment!

The history of Disney hero(ine) vs villain goes all the way back to Disney's very first animated film: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. In this film, we are treated to a classic clash between good vs evil with well-established background that fully explains the animosity the Queen has towards Snow White and to a lesser known extent of myself when I was 3. However, keep in mind, the Queen interacts with Snow White through indirect sources like the Huntsman and when the Queen disguises herself as a hag.

To summarize in case you haven't seen the movie, Snow White finally gets to the ripe old age where a person can finally be considered fair, which I suppose is 14 years old. The queen gets so frazzled her hair falls out and turns white and ages about seventy years or something.

Anxiety, hits at every age y'all. Even for the wickedly beautiful.

And so ensues the assassination plot of an abused princess who manages to escape and finally gets the love and life she dreamed about for so, so long.

The reason I'm using Snow White as a jumping off point is because we have the very first example in Disney's canon of a deal being offered to an otherwise naïve young girl.

And that naïve young girl accepts out of her own volition, no forcing, no pressuring, at the end of the day, taking a bite of a poisoned apple or in Meg's case taking Hades' hand sealing both Heroine's fate.

Now, while Disney's Hercules touches on how Meg got ensnared in Hades' plans, let's review what we do know:

Meg was at the end of her rope when her ex died. So much so that she was willing to do anything to get him back, and she meant it. While we do not know exactly how healthy Meg and her ex's relationship was before his untimely demise, the fact that her Ex ran off with another girl soon after tells me a lot on what the relationship was really like. It wasn't as steadfast or true as Meg had previously believed.

Oh yeah, weird side note, but we're completely ignoring Twisted tales: Go the Distance. Yeah, way to go. You took away Meg's chance to shine and connect with an unspoken minority in the audience. Do you know how many friends of mine found so much connection with Meg because she had been in a prior abusive relationship and still found love despite all the trauma she went through? Meg's iconic. Having Hades be the reason her ex took off is such a dumb move. I don't think he was that invested in her personal life to ruin it even further just to mess with her. He could care less, he's focused on taking over Olympus rn.

Anyway, tangent over.

So Meg's whole life revolved around her ex, and she was willing to put in the sacrifice and effort to be with him, but he snubbed her. The movie is very clear that the reason Meg is so cynical when we meet her is b/c she used to be a very openly sweet and loving person back when everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. And in that period, when she was so enamored with this Joe Schmo, she was probably starry eyed and saw everything in rose-colored glasses and thus didn't see the red flags of this chump. But she grew up and learned from her mistakes, but in a path that stopped her from ever trusting or loving someone else.

It's interesting, but Meg's ex comes up again at least referenced in I won't Say(I'm in Love), in the line:

"I thought my heart had learned its lesson..."

But when Meg sings that line, do you know what part of the garden she's in?

***CONTENT WARNING: R*pe. We will be discussing the setting of where I won't say (I'm in Love) takes place and picking apart at the various statues littered about in the Greek courtyard.

.

.

.

.

.

Now the garden is filled with statues of lovers and other symbols of love, but some that are not examples of love, specifically ones that revolve around scenes of r*pe.

The reference to her ex by the aforementioned lyric is when Meg's surrounded by scenes of r*pe: We have a centaur carrying off a lady and a satyr chasing after a girl. A common theme in greek myths, and I can't help but feel this was intentional on the writer's part. They are shouting and screaming at us that Meg's ex was a bad dude. Why would the only reference to her past dating life be when she's surrounded by the only sexually perverse imagery in this entire scene? Of males taking advantage of women? Carrying them off when they are not at all interested based on their body language?

-

-

-

***

I think that's why when Meg and Hades talk after her fake dating AU with Hercules their whole conversation is filled with so much substance. The song pushes so much character development for Meg that it enables her to face her trauma head-on and accept the past and still have the courage to move forward and try again with this budding new relationship now that the Muses helped support her- as her back-up chorus and her conscience lol.

But there's still one problem. One overhanging problem that's give or take 7 feet tall of abandonment and anger issues, permeating with the stench of sulfur and brimstone.

When the song ends, Hades almost immediately appears in the most on the nose way. By ripping apart a pair of young lovers as he emerges from the Underworld like the extra edgelord he is.

Thus begins my favorite scene of the movie. Songs don't count.

Now we've seen Meg and Hades interacting before and I will touch upon the scene after Zero to Hero later, but its poignant to get to the only time they really have a true clash first. The garden scene is the first time Meg is facing Hades as a heroine and not a reluctant minion.

Gosh, I love it when a girl goes feral, and Meg goes all out here. The interchange between Meg and Hades is written so tightly and neatly, everyone is dripping with so much character I just adore it.

But the most ironic part that isn't given much thought is why Hades says his most iconic and memeable line:

You bet this line is hilarious, but look at Hades' expression in the gif before. The exaggerated eyeroll, the sagging shoulders of disbelief as Meg is full of so much love and hope she almost forgets who's she's saying all this to.

The irony of Meg gushing about Hercules to Hades is this: Meg and Hades have had this exact conversation before. But now the guy in questions isn't her ex, it's Hercules.

And this time around, Hades is done beating around the bush and pretending everything is hunky-dory. Last time, he was fine with her going on about her ex and gushing about how "great" of a guy he was b/c he just wanted to take her soul. Hades probably had to fish her Ex out and knew what kinda guy he was once he read his record. In fact, I'm willing to wager, Hades has had multiple women similar to Meg who had done the same as her for some deadbeat.

And that's why Hades comes across as so annoyed by her being back in the same position.

Didn't she learn her lesson? Hell, even Hades knows guys can be pigs. And a small part of me has always wondered if his annoyance is also springing up b/c he knows that Hercules is a son of Zeus. While I don't think Hades ever had a soft spot for Meg- went lenient with her, etc, I can't help but wonder if Hades saw Hercules as someone who got around like Zeus and had a reputation like Zeus' other sons, ie, Apollo, Hephaestus, and even Hermes(yes Hermes had a lot of kids with tons of women). So Hades might legitimately be trying to warn her. I mean he's about to set her free, he's trying to pass on some good advice here before he disappears from her life

Btw, Ares is the only son of Zeus and the only god in Greek mythology who ever had a 100% confirmation rating of consensual relationships.

Be like Ares.

As the scene continues to play out, we start to see that as Meg continues to resist Hades' attempts for her to spill about Hercules' weakness, we see Hades for the first time lose it at Meg instead of his imps.

What little control Meg thought she had in her servitude comes crashing down and I think it's at that moment she realizes how much Hades had been holding back or really how good he was at pretending. He had been manipulating her into thinking she had a platform/control in her life. When Hades takes off his mask and Meg realizes when he had "convinced" her to seduce Hercules in a classic Samson and Delilah situation, it was never her choice. And now she's second guessing if Hades really intended to free her for the information she was undercover for.

He has all the leverage in the world after all.

That's why despite the threat Hades made on her life, she doesn't budge one bit. B/c she loves Hercules more than her own safety. And Meg triumphantly declares to Hades that he lost b/c Hercules can't be beaten b/c of his lack of weaknesses.

Only to realize too late that Hades possesses far more emotional intelligence to understand what's going on. Villains who understand that love is a motivator for people and don't dismiss it as a stupid chemical imbalance are some of my favorite. Not only does Hades understand that if someone like Meg had fallen so quickly then the other party had to have been a genuine person who sought her in the same way she wanted to seek him. Sure, he's taking advantage of it, but he's been around enough to know how much love can be used against people.

And I think that's why when Hades finally meets Hercules, old flame head decides to spill the beans to Hercules about Meg and her role in Hercules' downfall.

Yes, he wanted to hurt Hercules and taunt him and torment him with thoughts on how deep Hades and Meg's relationship went, but he did so to hurt Meg too.

Her show of loyalty to Herc was the last straw and Hades wanted to make sure she could never salvage a relationship with him for her slight against him. But also doing it in a way that broke her spirit and put her in a terribly guilty position that she would feel so undeserving of being with Hercules right as she is freed by him. And ensuring that she never faces Hercules again- maybe split town so she could avoid being harmed, idk.

And that makes Hades revealing Meg's complicity all the more personal. Bc Hades knows how much Meg wants to love and be loved again.

So when a powerless Hercules crumbles beneath Pain and Panic's taunting we see the first time this stubborn, hard-hearted girl cries. Not for her sake, but his.

We have seen throughout this movie that Meg and Hades have the most conflict, the most interactions, and the most character heavy scenes in the movie. They are very similar characters. Both are awfully cynical and sarcastic, both want to be free from some higher power's hold on them, and they're both bitter, bitter people who hate how their lives fell apart at the hands of someone who didn't care for them: Zeus and Joe Schmo.

Now, I'm going to backtrack and move to the Hades scene right after Zero to Hero.

Here, we get another facet of their relationship.

Hades finally realizes that he'd been sending so many beasts after Hercules, so to not be labeled insane, this time around he decides to send in a beauty. *Insert Susan Egan played Belle on Broadway joke here*

Which let's be real, should've been his first approach based on who Herc's daddy is.

But Hades doesn't try to convince Meg with yelling and screaming like he does with the boys, instead, he levels with her. Homeboy puts all his cards on the table, but does so by first empathizing with her and reminding her who helped put her in this situation.

For one second of this film, Hades shows some degree of humanity. And that is super scary. Out of the disney villains, Hades displays a huge, huge depth of emotional intelligence. I don't think any other villains compare and that's what makes him such a compelling villain. Most villains don't have that, and his ability to read the room and know how ppl work that really explains how he's able to manipulate ppl so easily. Even someone like Meg who's been putting up with him for quite a while was persuaded by him. And he does it by turning off the used car salesman persona and acting like an empathetic human being, albeit a flamed hair one.

Maybe that's why he doesn't bark orders to her, he has to appeal to her to let her be more agreeable for a better success rate. Or maybe Hades really is one of the few gods who uses consent.

When I first watched this movie as a kid I never saw the implications of Meg and Hades' relationship until I got older and watched the movie Casino (1995). James Woods, the voice actor for Hades, plays a pimp and that had a kind of whiplash for me when I realized why his role in Casino felt eerily familiar. In Meg's first scene, Hades had sent her out to recruit a centaur knowing full-well that centaur's really dig chicks. We all remember a certain statue in Meg's iconic song, I'm pretty sure the writers knew what was going on.

And that has some super dark implications right there about what Hades expected the scenario to come to and why he sent HER of all people to recruit Nessus without some kind of backup. Whether you agree on my analysis about this is something I really won't argue about. I don't personally see Hades as a pimp, but he does take on characteristics of one mostly b/c of his conman persona since they are rather similar in their manipulation tactics.

Just thought I'd put it here to give some food for thought and since I don't want to make a post on it.

In the end, after reviewing the most important scenes between Meg and Hades you can start to understand my perspective of why the conflict, the clash, and the antagonism feels the most vivid when its centered on Meg vs Hades. Far, far more so than Hercules and Hades ever had. And dare I say it? Even more than Zeus and Hades.

We only get the implications of Hades and Zeus, we don't see them at the forefront.

Everything boils down to Meg. In fact, b/c Hades drags her in, b/c she saves Hercules when he was powerless that Hades ever had the slightest chance of winning, but on the flipside, so did Hercules. If Hercules had remained a deity, he would've been lounging about too along with his parents and unprepared for the oncoming attack.

Throughout this film, Meg grows from being an unwilling participant to someone who's willing to risk it all, overcoming her fear and trauma to get the band back together to save Hercules and ends up helping him get his powers back. So it wasn't so much Hercules' actions that save the day, but Meg's.

At the end of the day, the conflict between Meg and Hades has always felt like the central conflict in Hercules more than what Hades vs Hercules was ever like. Every scene, every biting interchange, its quite obvious the two had a heated past and I can see why some ppl have shipped them even if I personally never did.

It's why I really don't see Hercules as the main character. After zero to hero, we start to lose focus on him since he has no bearing on the overall plot of stopping Hades. To me, Meg has the most growth, the most courage, and the best development in the film and that is because of how well she works as a foil to Hades, the film's antagonist.

If you made it this far, thanks for sticking around.

It's been a real slice.

[raccoon-bubbles-killer]

he had a headstart

ch1/? || 2522 words

archive of our own

That night, Sally Jackson would go through with her plan. She rehearsed it. She reviewed it. She prepared for it. And most importantly, she knew that it would work.

She had done her research before doing anything else, the discreet visit to the library reviving the nostalgia she held for her failed academic career. Life hardly ever goes as it should, and her parents’ sickness, as unfortunate as it was, kept her from pursuing higher education.

Maybe she would go back to school one day. For that to be a possibility, however, tonight had to be successful.

Books on botanic and natural poisons were surprisingly easy to access, though that might be due to how likely it was for someone to use that knowledge to plan a murder. Not impossible, of course, but the chances were slim enough for the knowledge she needed to be so readily available.

She read through the books that day, with her young son, Percy, looking through picture books by her side. Gabriel had wanted the apartment to himself that day, and she had jumped on the occasion to both complete the first step of her plan and get her baby away from that man.

Percy was five now. Most of his memories included the one she called a husband, and while she knew the risks, they would have been exposed to should she not have married Gabriel Ugliano, she could not help but regret her decision. She wanted Percy safe but was unwilling to pay that price, the price of a human monster getting to break her boy before the real monsters could even get a chance to try.

Sally married Gabriel Ugliano when Percy was two. Three years later, she was going to get rid of him. The only question left unanswered was how.

And the answer was foxglove.

It’s a wonder how such a pretty flower can become a weapon once you know how to use it properly. It just so happened to also align perfectly with her current situation. The fact that someone thought of planting it in Central Park was only an added bonus, for it made her quest much easier.

All she had needed to do was ask one of the nature spirits where she could find the plant, and after explaining to the kind dryad that she was clearsighted and what she was going to use the flower for, they were more than willing to show her the way to a nearby patch of flowers that was littered with it.

After that, it was almost too easy. Gabriel didn’t even question the bowl of chili she brought him, eating it faster than he could taste it. He returned the empty dish swiftly, leaving her with shaking hands and the usual chores.

*** * ***

Deep breaths, Sally. In, and out. She stared down at the steaming bowl of chili, not yet believing the reality of the moment. It was just like any other night, with Gabe watching sports far too loudly for anyone else’s taste, and her cooking him a meal while Percy drew with his crayons at the counter.

Expect tonight she had almost ruined the recipe four times due to stress. Except tonight Percy favored his red crayons rather than his usual blue as if sensing that something was happening.

Tonight was real. The chili bowl was real. The page of paper filled with red crayons was real. And the powdered foxglove, all remains of which she flushed down the sink, had been far too real.

She glanced at her husband Gabe through the door. He was blissfully unaware of his faith, yelling at the ongoing football match with a pack of beer between his legs. Chips and other similarly unhealthy foods littered the coffee table. She still couldn’t believe how his lifestyle made it so easy for her to build the narrative for his murder untimely death.

Tonight was the night.

*** * ***

She fed Percy his meal -a different one, that she kept as far as possible from the poisoned chili-, did the dishes, put her son to sleep, and promptly went to bed herself, bringing a book along.

There was no way she was getting any sleep that night.

Everything that came after that went fast. She walked out of the bedroom the next morning and called the emergency services when she ‘found’ her husband dead in his seat. Next thing she knew, they took his body away and hooked her up with a funeral home to organize funerals for the poor excuse of a man she married.

She went through everything, every piece of paperwork, every detail of his funeral, as quickly as possible. She was eager to put all of this behind her. Eager for a new start.

His family had come, and so had his friends. Sally would have preferred not to show up at all, but it would stain her image as the dutiful, mourning widow. So there she stood, all clad in black with her toddler by her sides, playing her role to perfection.

*** * ***

His mother had been the first to approach her.

Sally never liked the old lady, just like she had never liked, or Olympus forbids, loved her son. Her near-constant sneer and the dirty look she gave Percy every time the two of them stood in the same room never allowed Sally to warm up to the woman.

“The first few years are the hardest,” were her surprisingly honest first words to her. “But don’t let it crush you like I did. For your son’s sake.”

Without waiting for a reply, Mrs. Ugliano walked away, leaving Sally to process her words by herself. She carded her fingers through Percy’s hair, unsure what to do with her mother-in-law’s sudden concern for her son’s well-being.

It took her a moment, but eventually, Sally remembered that Gabe, in a way Mrs. Ugliano must have perceived as similar enough to her own story, also lost his father at a young age.

Guilt squirmed in her guts, calling her out for her lies.

Sally stood strong though, ignoring the weight of her sins to maintain the mask of grief she fabricated for herself to cement her tale.

*** * ***

The next thing on her list was to erase all traces of that man ever being in their lives. The memories might still haunt her -hopefully the same isn’t true for Percy-, but destroying all physical evidence would help her breathe better.

It was not an easy task. His trash was everywhere, from the ground to the cupboard, without forgetting between the couch’s cushions, the furniture smelled at him, and the walls were stained by his smoking.

The longer she spent working on cleansing the apartment of his presence, the stronger she felt the urge to burn the whole thing down. And that’s what she ended up doing, in a very much non-literal way. Thankfully for her and Percy, Gabriel had left them a hefty sum through both his personal savings and his life insurance, and as it turns out, moving out was easier than making the place liveable again.

Sally then reenrolled herself into school with what was left of that money, fully planning on getting a higher education to find a better-paying job to give her son all the chances she could. He deserved that much after Gabriel.

Her work schedule at the candy shop swiftly shifted from full-time to part-time, and with more time to spend with her son, a chance to finally pursue the education she had always wanted, and the absence of a husband in her life, her brand-new good mood quickly started to affect her job.

Her colleagues were the first to notice and were happy that things were finally looking up for her. The regulars were the next ones to do, commenting easily on her improved mood.

*** * ***

Mr. Fletcher was the kind of customer that made Sally’s day. He was a gentleman, always took the time to talk with her and her colleagues when he wasn’t in a rush, and regularly brought his dates to the shop, as if to show off the small business he visited on a weekly basis.

And most importantly, Mr. Fletcher gave her back her hope in humanity, if only for a moment, each time he walked into the shop with an order from the nearby orphanage. He was everything she would have looked for in a man but was also happily married to his husband.

What could you ask more than for a man to take the time out of his day to buy candies to the less fortunate?

It had been a while since she last saw him, what with the funerals when he walked into the shop. The bell cheerfully rang when the door opened, and Sally raised her eyes from her literature textbook to meet his eyes. She smiled when she recognized him.

“Mr. Fletcher. How have you been doing?” she greeted him politely.

He paused, as if not expecting to see her there that day. “Sally. I’ve been well. How about you? You seem… happier.”

She considered his odd choice of words for a moment. Had she really looked that noticeably miserable before Gabriel’s passing? Or maybe did she simply look better due to the good turn her life had finally taken? With the new flat and her debut in higher education, on top of her concealed crime, she supposed that could be it.

“I suppose I am,” she finally replied.

“Whatever it is, I’m happy for you.”

“Thank you.” There was a pause, during which neither of them knew what to say before Sally redirected the conversation. “So! What would it be today?”

“Right!”

They moved along easily, the conversation taking a sweet focused turn as Sally helped him fill the day’s order, and just as quickly as he had walked in, Mr. Fletcher was out of the door, bringing with him a bag heavy with candy.

Oblivious, Sally returned to her textbook, once again silently thanking her employer for their lenience which allowed her to study during her shifts.

Mr. Fletcher, however, walked away with more questions than he had previous to his visit to the candy shop. Thoughtfully, he wondered what happened to the source of the bruises he had observed on Sally during his previous visits. It might be worth an investigation.

*** * ***

It took a few more days for the other shoe to drop, and when it did, it was at the time and place she expected it the least.

She had just come home from a long shift, which had immediately followed the two classes she had in the morning, meeting and paying Percy’s babysitter in the doorway. Locking the door behind her, she kicked off her shoes and walked into the apartment, which was already well obscured by the night.

Blindly, she put her purse on the dining table before searching for the light switch. The place was still unfamiliar enough to her that she had to take a moment to search for it, feeling the wall with the tip of her fingers until she found it and the light came.

And where she had expected to turn and see only her purse on the empty table, she found instead her purse, Mr. Fletcher from the candy store, and two strangers sitting in her kitchen.

She paused, unsure of what to do in this situation, staring at the intruders and only taking her eyes off them for a fraction of a second, which she used to locate the knife block. She might appreciate her talks with her clientele while on the job, but the same wasn’t true when she found them in her home at ungodly hours of the night.

“That’s your idea of a potential recruit?” one of the strangers commented eventually, breaking the silence. They looked her up and down with a sneer on their face. “She looks more like a single mother than anything else.”

There was a sigh.

“That’s because she is a single mother, Paisley. Her son probably is sleeping in the next room,” Fletcher informed them, his tone so detached it seemed otherworldly, especially in their current predicament.

“That begs the question, then; why are we here?”

Fletcher opened his mouth to answer this Paisley person’s question once more, but this time, Sally beats him to it.

“What is this?” she asks. Her tone is shaky, but firm, in a way she hopes indicates her willingness to resort to physical violence to defend her home.

All three of the intruders exchange a glance, and after a moment, the second stranger, who had yet to say a word, spoke up.

“An assessment.”

“An assessment for what?”

‘Paisley’ whistled in a totally not subtle way. “She’s willing to hear us out. She either has as much potential as you said she had, or she’s completely stupid.” Fletcher was however quiet to elbow them into silence.

He turned toward her and answered her question. “We know you killed your husband, and-”

“I didn’t though,” she replied automatically. The lie, nowadays so solidly implanted in her daily life, became as easy to speak as the truth. She knew it was false, but she repeated it often enough that it might as well have become her truth.

“…but you did. You might have convinced the world otherwise, but we know. We recognize the signs.”

“And what might those be?”

“The high concentration of cardiac glycosides in your late husband’s system,” the third intruder immediately stated. “Commonly associated with foxglove poisoning,” he added as an afterthought.

“Let’s say it’s true,” she said, shifting closer to the knife bock discreetly. “How would you even know that?”

“It’s written all over his charts at the morgue.”

“And let me guess. You guys went to check Gabe’s toxicology report just on the off chance that I might have murdered my husband. Is intuition all you need to investigate a widowed mother?” she asked the last question with a hint of sarcasm.

“No,” came Fletcher’s answer. “But a change in behavior does. You have to admit that your being so much happier after the facts were curious as of itself. And you started sporting fewer bruises after his passing.”

Had his marks on her skin been so visible?

She felt angry for a moment at the thought. The world saw. The world knew. And yet they let her suffer. They let her son, poor innocent Percy, suffer. They knew, and yet, they did nothing.

She took a more direct step toward the knife block, hoping that the outright hostility would make them leave. “What are you, the cops?” More venom than necessary slipped into the voice.

“Quite on the contrary,” Paisley said. “We’re assassins. Hitmen. Professional killers. Whatever you want to call it.

“…what?”

Fletcher stood up and made a step in her direction. She took a step back as a reflex, despite his relaxed posture and hands stored deep in his pockets showing her how little of a threat he represented.

He spoke again, undisturbed by her reaction to his approach. “How do you feel about a new job, Sally?”

[fridge-reviews]

The Textorcist: The Story of Ray Bibba

Developer: MorbidWare Publisher: Headup Publishing Rrp: £11.99 (Gog.com, Humblebundle, Steam and Epic) Released: 14th February 2019 Available on: Gog.com, Humblebundle, Steam and Epic Played Using: A keyboard Approximate game length: 8 hours

It's not often I play a typing game, in fact I think the last one was The Typing of The Dead from House of the Dead Overkill. There is a reason for that though, and its not just because there aren't that many out there compared to the many other genres, it's because I'm dyslexic and trying to type while under pressure only makes me mess up even more. And yet I find myself drawn to them, every time I see a game that features typing I always want to give it a go.

This game has you take on the role or Ray Bibba an exorcist who has separated from the Holy Church to become independent. Ray isn't some kindly old priest, if anything he's more akin to a hard grizzled detective from a film noire.

The game gives you an idea of how much typing you'll be doing from the very start, and by very start I mean the starting menu, you have to type the word start correctly before you can even play. The same goes for entering the settings too, while I love the dedication to the theme, I do have to point out that forcing the player to type settings does pose an potential impediment when it comes to accessibility.

You may have noticed that this game is played using only a keyboard (I'm assuming that you've read the details I put at the top of these reviews) which makes sense when you consider it's a game about typing. However, this isn't a game that you can use to improve your typing skills simply because you have to control your character as well, meaning that one hand will almost always be on the arrow keys. Yeah, that's the thing I didn't mention, this game is a boss rush, bullet-hell. Sure, there are brief moments between the bosses where you have to do a small amount research and interact with the story but the meat of the game is the combat with the bosses.

We finally arrive at the combat. As I mentioned earlier this game is a bullet-hell, as such you have to control Ray and try to avoid the various projectiles that will be slung your way. If you do get hit you'll drop your bible (this is will be explained in a moment) and if you get hit again before you pick the bible up you'll lose a point of health. You attack by typing out the verses from you bible, or rather you created a hollet (a holy bullet) with each successfully typed word, once you complete the full verse all your hollets will fire at your enemy and all the projectiles in the area will vanish. As I mentioned earlier, if you get hit you drop your bible, without it you can't type out the words so you absolutely need it. Dropping your bible pose one, rather major, issue... when you drop your bible there's a timer, if you can get to it before the timer runs out you can pick up from where you left off, if you don't though you have to start the entire verse from the very beginning. When typing you have to be careful not to make a mistake, any mistyped letter in a word places you back a letter within that word. For example; if in the word 'Amen' you pressed the wrong letter instead of [N] you'd be set back to [E] and have to retype that. Some of the enemies attacks are designed not to cause injury to Ray but instead make it more difficult for you to type. One of the early enemies in the game vomits in an attempt to cover the words in your bible forcing you to either have to wait for the vomit to clear or guess/remember what you have to type.

Speaking of difficulty, did I mention that some of the verses are in Latin? And not to sound like Columbo but there is one more thing, you have to be within a certain radius of the enemy to be able to perform the exorcism. So not only are you typing with one hand while trying to dodge attacks with the other, you sometimes have to type in Latin which may or may not be obscured or even upside down, you also have to be within a certain (not very large) radius of the enemy in order to be able to type at all.

I enjoyed this game, even if it did drive me a bit batty at times. Let's just say its not dyslexia friendly.

If this appeals to you perhaps try;

Typing of the Dead Overkill Epistory – Typing Chronicles Crypt of the Necrodancer

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If you’d like to support me I have a Ko-fi, the reviews will continue to be posted donation or not.

[ecargmura]

The Apothecary Diaries Episode 22 Review - Make The Roses Bloom Mad

Maomao might be a terrible babysitter for the young Princess Lingli, but I cannot deny she’s an excellent hater when it comes to Lakan. I love that her entire incentive for making the blue roses to give her estranged father two middle fingers. Part-time florist and full-time hater is Maomao’s game.

The first few minutes of the episode confirms that Maomao will be a very terrible babysitter. She’s drawing poisonous mushrooms in front of the baby princess and not normal flowers. It’ll be hilarious if Lingli grows up to be a crazy apothecary like her. It’ll be easy to know who to blame once that happens.

The rest of the episode is Lakan talking about blue roses and Maomao seeing that as a challenge once Jinshi brings it up. Maomao’s intelligence is practically her superpower at this point, but I do like that this episode brings up that while she’s a genius, she’s not perfect. Her biggest weakness is that she’s super single-minded that she’ll risk sleep and health just to see things through. In fact, her injuries haven’t been completely healed that Gaoshun had to get Xiaolan to be her assistant so she wouldn’t open her wounds again.

I love that she retraces her steps and goes to the Crystal Pavilion as she remembered making a steam house when Lihua was ill. She uses the steam house to be the place where she’ll make the roses bloom early by making it warm and bringing them sunlight when needed. However, I do wish that Maomao was a bit more aware in the sense that Lihua’s servant girls were staring at her because they wanted to help out but couldn’t bring up anything to say to her.

I think the fact that blue roses aren’t real and that the reason they were that color was because of dye was pretty cool. I think this is practically a gardening exercise of sorts. I feel like this could be applied in real life. I’m glad that Maomao showed off her tricks to the Emperor first so that he’d be aware of what’s going on.

The episode’s ending gives some spotlight to Lakan. It was interesting to see how his prosopagnosia works and how he views everyone as either black or white stones. He’s also quite kooky himself as he uses a colleague’s hat to wipe his dirtied hands and then put it back on his head. I think that it’s finally time to see what sus monocle man’s deal is.

If you watched this episode, what are your thoughts about it as a whole?