#hoping for weekly uploads but life uh finds a way

[effervescent-hoe]

hoooooly shit its done!! chapter 1 of The Essence of You rewrite is finished! it needs editing and cleaned up a little, but i could conceivably publish it soon. it clocks in at 2500 words. Thats about Half of the chapter length of the original, but im splitting chapter 1 into two parts (to add the tattoo scene) so it should balance out! i also might go for shorter chapters overall, just so it flows better. depends on what the people want, i suppose. one scene usually hits 2.5k and i used to try and do two scenes a chapter.

but anyways! if you loved the original fic, and want to help me refine the rewrite and beta, shoot me a message! id love to brainstorm with someone familiar with my work, who understands the direction im going. also just to help with my sentence funkiness/general editing.

[cherylsvixens]

adore you (you're lovely)

ADORE YOU (YOU’RE LOVELY) — and i adore you, too. i’ve been thinking that your love is kind of special. you should know that i adore you, too! ( adore you, nao ft. abhi//dijon )

REQUEST — the reader used to be ugly and archie bullied you. then, after summer break, you totally glo up and are now super hot, and he apologizes.

WORD COUNT — 1.6k

NOTES — i did tweak this request a little bit, simply because i don’t see riverdale!archie being a bully—i think it’s even a little ooc for comics!archie—so i opted for archie sort of ignoring the reader. also, i refrained from specifying a gender since there wasn’t one mentioned in the request. thank you so much for trusting me to write your idea, and i hope this was fluffy enough for you. i felt like it would be kinda rushed to make them kiss in this? i don’t know, but enjoy. ( requests: open )

REGGIE MANTLE’S YOUNGER sibling is hot now.

The news sweeps through the sleepy town with the sort of velocity reserved for level 4 hurricanes. The Instagram video your brother uploads on a beach in June goes high-school-jock viral (which isn’t viral-viral, but garners enough views to decimate any doubt that Reggie is not one of the most popular men within the confines of Riverdale High), though his six-pack, for once, is not the main attraction. You’re the cynosure, in all your post-puberty, swimsuit-model glory. His comments range from complimentary to explicit; two hours after the initial posting, Reggie deletes it.

From the day your surname legally changed, you’ve been your brother’s baby and the passing six years has only strengthened the bond. You two swap texts daily (having rooms adjacent one another be damned), share explicitly embarrassing moments of the other on Snapchat, and act as the other’s support system no matter how popular (football) or dorky (debate team) the event. Peers are still left slack-jawed at the contrast of personality when you aren’t in the oldest Mantle’s proximity versus when you are. He’s your protector, your shield, and the last face a person’ll see if they ever utter a murmur of disrespect toward you—which is more than a little ironic considering he has so little respect for anyone outside of his social circle.

(Within the hour of your return from your family’s annual trip to the Bahamas, Jason Blossom gets his face bashed in.

He also winds up dead two weeks later.

Reggie insists that there’s no correlation.)

September welcomes a follow from Cheryl Blossom on every social media platform, Chuck Clayton sliding into your DM’s bi-weekly, multitudes of party invitations, and a River Vixen’s uniform. Your popularity is as good as notorized, though you don’t think it’ll feel official until Archie Andrews pulls his head out of his ass and acknowledges your seemingly overnight glo-up. But the male’s always been a little more than slightly oblivious; Betty Cooper’s decade-long manhunt for his heart makes sense now that you stand in her Penny Loafers.

Or, to be more literal, your panda slippers that have seen better days.

But still, you get the attraction.

Because the absolute worst thing about your brother is not his knack for miscreance, not his aggression or his unsavory inability to play nice with others—it is Archie Andrews, his right hand man since the aforementioned boy’s unveiled talent for football, and it is that he is on your porch sometime after midnight, on the swing with the creak you frequent when your brain’s too wired for slumber, comforted by his guitar and lyric book. His back’s to you, nothing but broad shoulders and back muscles and tousled red mane, and you can make out the outline of a pencil between his teeth. Dexterous digits strike a chord that either pleases or concerns him because he abruptly ceases playing afterward.

“I thought normal people slept at this time,” you say. Your cadence, however soft it is, still renders him scared, and you’re pretty sure he jumps at least six feet off his seat. Now that? That’s viral-viral Instagram video material.

Archie chances a look at you, which is a feat in and of itself considering you can probably count on one hand how many times this guy’s ever taken notice of you. “You’re out here,” he says before swinging his eyesight back to his guitar.

You’re really growing sick of these monosyllabic conversations with him.

“Well, I’m not normal.” This time when his irises turn to you, they lingers. “Oh yeah, Reggie never told you?” you continue. “The Mantles adopted me from a vampire family. Sweet people, but don’t test ‘em, they bite.”

The corners of his mouth quirk into the beginnings of an amused grin. “You aren’t very pale for a vampire.”

You wave a loose hand around. “Stereotype.”

“And I’ve seen you out in the sun,” he counters.

“Sunblock.”

“You don’t sleep in a coffin.”

“Now that’s just racist.”

Archie snickers. It’s a sound you think you’ll always know but never get used to, like hearing your favorite song when you were a child years later. “I should, uh, I should get back to bed.” He raps his knuckles against his instrument once, yet makes no attempt to stand.

“I wasn’t aware anyone was making you,” you remark in a thinly-veiled attempt to mask the disappointment that threatens to crack your timbre. You’re hot now—have got the midnight texts from potential booty calls to prove it—and he still doesn’t desire to be in your proximity for longer than a handful of minutes. For a flicker of a moment, you ponder that it could be your personality he simply isn’t attracted to.

“Uh, n-no. No, no one is,” he stammers over his words in a way that can only be considered boyish. Even when he’s humiliating you, you find him charming. “I just thought that—I don’t know—you might wanna be alone, and I’m, you know, playing my music, and it isn’t that great yet, and–”

“I’d love to hear it.” Archie pauses mid-sentence, lips parted and tongue heavy with incomplete ramblings. You’re practically watching him mentally replay the five words, disect the syllables, make something of the meaning, and come up short. So you repeat yourself. “I’d love to hear it. If you’re okay with an audience.”

“It’s kind of a cheesy love song.”

You raise the shoulders clothed in a flimsy, white v-neck. “I like cheesy love songs.” You’re quick to add, “But if you don’t want to play it for me, that’s fine.”

A beat. Then, “I’d love for you to hear it.”

The pale pink hue of his pout gradually stretches until the two rows of blanched ivories usually hidden beneath are revealed. And you think, as you stand in the threshold of your front door, arms and legs pimpled with goosebumps, you think his smile could rival the moon’s. You’ve never seen a smile like that on anyone. It isn’t until your third date that you’ll learn he was thinking the same of you.

Your delight is delineated with two claps of your hands and a shrill squeal as the cherry on top. Party Panda emits soft thumps as you bound across the porch before situating your frame before the singer. Long and limber legs fold at the ankles, and similar to a kid you envelop your knees with your arms, intertwining your lithe digits.

Archie waits for you to settle.

And then, he just waits.

His honeycomb irises absorb your very being; they take in the hair atop your head, notice your curious eyes and nose, scan birthmarks and freckles, snag on your lips. You forget to inhale. You forget to exhale. You’re just holding your breath.

He breathes first, a rush of air compressing his lungs and traveling past his thin brims. He nods once, adjusts his arms, glances at the spiral notebook beside him, and sings. “You’re giving me fever. You’re making the pressure rise at night right through my veins. You’re making my heart sing.”

Your initial reaction to Andrews’ breathy, almost sexy, crooning is that you are so grateful the boy can sing. His timbre is virginal, inexperience dripping from every word he croons. It’s rugged, it’s unpolished, it magnetizes you in like skin-and-bone gravity, clinging, and suffocating, and, and—

—and like your favorite childhood song playing years later.

Archie Andrews is that song.

“My mind’s awake all night, daydreaming. When will you be mine? You’re making my sleep wait.” You have diary pages saturated with the loops and swirls of your handwriting about this boy. The time his shoulder brushed against you in the hall, the grazing of hands at Pop’s when you both reached for napkins, and now this—the timid glimpse underneath his lashes as he sings the last lyric, almost like it was dedicated to you. It is everything to you.

“Thinking of you is taking all my nights away, way, way. I really do adore you.” This moment doesn’t need to be inked into pages to be remembered. The feeling of butterflies building a home inside your stomach, the tickle of your mouth, the stretch of your cheeks, all of it is seared into your brain. You are going to die with this moment on the inside of your lids. “I really do adore you, my lovely. I really do adore you.”

Archie unceremoniously completes his song with a sheepish “that’s all I got.” You want to tell him that it was more than enough.

Instead, you say, “Play that last part again. The chorus.” The sophomore crooks a brow, though doesn’t debate. He reaches the very last 'adore you’, and you join in. “And I adore you, too. I’ve been thinkin’ that your love is kinda special. You should know that I adore you, too.”

You aren’t as choppy of a singer as him. The Mantles wasted a total of no time in signing you up for the extracuriccular activities a kid raised in an orphanage only experiences through the lives of fictional characters in books or television. You sing, you dance, you even spent a summer away for calligraphy camp. Everyone in Riverdale knows this, like another fact in their daily life (The car is parked in the garage, I have two kids, and Y/N Mantle is a modern-day Annie.) Archie still stares at you.

(It isn’t your voice that has him doing mental backflips.)

(You have to wait a while to learn that, too.)

“Well?” you prompt. “Was that good?”

His snort is subtle but charged. “You know you’re good at everything, Y/N.” It feels like the first time you’ve ever heard your name.

Your head cocks to the side. The bridge of your nose crinkles. A dip forms in your cheek. “You think I’m good at everything?”

“Nah,” he says, but his smile’s a tell. “I think I just adore you.”

“Yeah, I got that.”

[ultralifehackerguru-blog]

New Post has been published on http://www.lifehacker.guru/westworld-eight-lingering-questions-season-1/

Westworld: Eight Lingering Questions from Season 1

Get all caught up before we had back to Sweetwater for Season 2.

Home Box Office (HBO)

HBO’s twisty sci-fi hit Westworld returns this weekend, bringing with it all the mind-bending, fan-theorizing, and deep philosophical discussions anyone could hope for. When Season 1 ended, series star Evan Rachel Woodteased that those first 10 episodes were “an amazing prequel and a good setup for the actual show.” That means what we watched was essentially prologue for a series that will, in theory, be about sentient robots gleefully slaughtering, or gently protecting, humanity in the various parks owned by Delos. Will they make their way out into the wider world? Perhaps. But first, there are a few more urgent questions we need to get to.

In order to guide you through this brave new world, Vanity Fair is launching the second installment of its Still Watching podcast, with chief critic Richard Lawsonand senior writer Joanna Robinson back behind the microphones to break down every episode of the second season. You can subscribe to the podcast here, and listen to a preview episode including early predictions and pre-season anticipation here:

In addition, here’s a rundown of some of the most pressing questions still lingering from Season 1. Hopefully they can provide you with a much-needed refresher before Season 2 begins Sunday, April 22, at 9 P.M. Eastern on HBO.

Was That Really Ford Who Died?

The most hotly contested question among the Westworld fandom in the long wait between Season 1 and Season 2: did we actually watch original flavor, human Ford (Anthony Hopkins) get shot by Dolores in the finale? Or did she shoot a convincing replica? I’m not sure anyone can blame Westworld fans for going down this particular rabbit hole; after Season 1’s Bernard/Arnold game changer, we would probably be wise to be on the lookout for even more secret robots. And who wouldn’twant Anthony Hopkins back on this show?

That being said, this death really feels like it needs to be a permanent one in order for Ford’s big rebellion to actually matter. To quote Ford’s old friend Arnold, who also committed suicide by Dolores:

Never mind the fact that Anthony Hopkins himself has used the past tense when talking about his work on the show.

But hey, man: if you want to hold out hope for some miraculous resurrection, who am I to stop you?

Why Did the Man in Black Smile?

Ed Harris’s character, the Man in Black—a.k.a. Old William—cracks a queer smile in the Season 1 finale as he faces down a line of murderous robots who, hey, just shot a hole in his upper arm. What is that about? You don’t really have to wait until the Season 2 premiere to find out; we can take our best guess based on information from the first season. Fully twisted by his heartbreaking experience with Dolores, the modern-day version of William is looking for “real stakes,” and a way to change the “game” so the hosts can fight back. “I bought this world,” he tells Dolores. “The only world that matters.”

William might still harbor some feelings for his old companion; after all, he implores her to help him make Westworld even more real. “We can make it true,” he tells her. “One true thing.” That’s also how he references Dolores in the final William flashback. The Man in Black may not have gotten the girl—but, lucky him, by the end of the episode, he got his other wish. But what will he do in Season 2, with a world full of robots that can make their own murderous decisions? Will he make a beeline for Dolores once again?

O.K., But What Happened to William to Get Him Here?

How did the heartbroken and only kinda twisted Young William, played by Jimmi Simpson, turn into the heartbroken and most definitely twisted Old William over the course of several decades? How did he go from romantic hero to reviled villain?

Once again, the context clues were kind of there for you in Season 1. Young William was already kind of a murderous prick by the time of the Season 1 finale—and as Old William told Dolores, somewhere along the way, he found he had a taste for violence. The bigger question might be how Young William managed to take over Delos Incorporated and ensure that his brother-in-law, Logan (Ben Barnes), was further humiliated. If footage from the Season 2 trailer is any indication, we may wind up seeing exactly this, via some corporate maneuvering and twisted mind games.

What Does Delos Really Want?

This might be the most fascinating question bumping around the edges of Westworld Season 1. While a lot of other pressing mysteries occupied our time (where are we? when are we??), the Westworld writers seeded in the idea that Delos Incorporated has a secret ulterior motive behind their pleasure park from the very first episode. In a rooftop exchange in the pilot, the park’s writer, Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman), and upper management Theresa Cullen (Sidse Babett Knudsen) allude to Delos’s bigger plans. Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) doubles down on that allusion in Episode 7 (a.k.a. the one where Theresa buys it), when she calls it “our little research project.” In other words, simply providing a safe haven for the rich to fuck, shoot, and kill themselves into oblivion is not all Delos is up to.

The show itself hasn’t revealed much more than that—but some very invested fans have found curious language in the Delos Terms of Service contracts that HBO posted online back in Season 1. See if anything there sets off alarm bells for you.

Where is Peter Abernathy?

Given that Charlotte was so focused on smuggling “35 years of vitally important data” out of the park, the location of the robot she embedded that information in will be pretty damn important. So, uh, where is Peter Abernathy (Louis Herthum), a.k.a. Dolores’s glitching dad?

The plan was to get him on a train headed out to the real world—but according to Jonathan Nolan, Abernathy did not get on that train. Sizemore was going down to cold storage to retrieve him and instead found . . . well, it doesn’t look like anything to me.

Presumably, Abernathy’s out there in the park, shooting holes in Ed Harris with Angela (Talulah Riley), Clementine (Angela Sarafyan), and the rest of the liberated robots. But technically, we haven’t seen him since Episode 8, when Charlotte and Sizemore uploaded that code into his brain. Herthum has been upgraded to series regular this year, so where, oh where can he be?

Is Maeve Really Awake?

Maeve (Thandie Newton) spent most of Season 1 thinking she had woken up all on her own, and was making her own decisions to rebel against her human overlords. We found out toward the end of the season, however, that she had actually been programmed to rebel. (Ford needed her to cause mayhem in headquarters so Dolores could kick things off in the park.) So, was it really her choice to get off that train to the outside world and head back into the park to look for her robot daughter—or is this lingering code? Newton has since confirmed that Maeve’s decision to go after her child “was the first conscious decision that she made.” That means Maeve is awake now. So is Dolores. So, it seems, is Bernard. The real question may be this: what will this unholy trinity do with all that free will?

What About Elsie, Armistice, Stubbs, etc.?

A few characters were left dangling in life or death situations last season. Elsie (Shannon Woodward) was last seen being choked unconscious by Bernard. Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) was seen under attack from Ghost Nation and Armistice (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal)—though as we know from a Season 1 post-credits stinger, she’s quite literally living up to her name. (“Armistice” means stoppage (stitium) of arms (arma), as in weapons.)

Hemsworth, Woodward, and Berdal are all back for Season 2, indicating that they all escaped death . . . somehow.

What About These Other Worlds?

A lot of hints have been dropped in the off-season about the various new worlds we’ll see in Season 2. Though I’ve not seen them for myself, I’ve heard that there are even a few more that haven’t been revealed in interviews yet. So hold on to your butts. But the big one, of course, is Shogun World, which was teased in the Season 1 finale. Nolan has, however, cautioned against fans getting too excited about spending much time in ancient Japan. He told Entertainment Weekly:

We want to try and gently temper expectations. Most of our season is spent in Westworld—the eponymous Westworld. But we do get a chance to glimpse some of the other worlds. And we have a couple of episodes that are spent in Shogun World with one of our story lines, while our other story lines continue elsewhere. So I say we’re trying to temper expectations, except to say that I think the stuff we did for Shogun World is spectacular.

Indeed, Westworld has stocked its samurai and geisha world with a murderers’ row of talented Japanese actors, including Oscar nominee Rinko Kikuchi.

So get ready for another 10 episodes of twists and turns. Still Watching: Westworldwill be with you every step of the way—don’t forget to subscribe here:

And tune in for the Season 2 premiere of Westworld Sunday, April 22, on HBO.

(C)