#i did make all of these they look random bc the quality of the source material varied wildly. anyway i tried lmao

[mgu-h]

mexico city gp 2024 carlando 🧡❤️

[tenthgrove]

Reverse Engineering the OIAR Tagging System: Part 2

I've had another look at things and I have managed to create a more concrete theory for how the tags work, though at this stage I would be very surprised if it were all correct.

A reminder for the unfamiliar- every TMAGP statement comes with a long code, consisting of a CAT (category?), R (rank? - two statements do not have this), a four digit number which seems to be totally random, and the dates of both the statement's origin, and when the episode is set.

I've created this theory by identifying patterns between the CAT and R values and the themes, characters and dates of the statements. It is clear we need some more statements to be sure, so I will update this as new episodes come in. That said, here is my theory.

CAT = Is the Monster an External and/or Being Actively Taken Advantage of by the OIAR?

CAT 1 = Yes. CAT 2 = No, but there are plans to acquire it. CAT 3 = No, and there are no plans to acquire it. CAT 23 = The monster possesses some special quality which the OIAR would like to take advantage of, but currently has no means to do this (hence making it both a CAT 2 and 3 in a sense).

Our only confirmed external, Mr Bonzo, is a CAT 1. The two other CAT 1s are monsters that could very well function as OIAR assassins. Granted, Needles seems to be killing for his own pleasure and seems very ‘green’. BUT- how in the living hell did he murder a man on the streets of London and it wasn’t national news? Maybe, just maybe, Needles was recruited as a result of that incident and the OIAR pulled strings to clean up his mess. Additionally, two of the CAT 1s are delivered literally days before we learn of them. One is older but refers to Bonzo, who we know for a fact is still active. The other was delivered in May 2022. All these statements are live matters, referring to beings who are almost certainly still out there making body counts.

Moving down to the lower rankings, the current CAT 2s are plant guy, Vouyer, the charity shop volunteers and the backrooms service station. These are all statements that leave huge question marks. None of them are delivered by a primary source. They are all 1-15 year old statements. This could mean the OIAR is trying to locate the beings within the statement to potentially take advantage of them, but have not yet tracked them down.

The current CAT 3s are InkSoul, the violin guy, and the bone dice guy. Violin and dice guy are both dead, and the dice were presumably lost in the destruction of the Magnus Institute. It’s clear why the OIAR wouldn’t be interested in them. Now what about InkSoul? Well there are a number of reasons why the OIAR would not want to recruit them. Maybe their power is not reliable? After all, it seemed the effect they had on their victim in the statement was linked to her being an artist. Maybe they’ve already tried to recruit InkSoul and it didn’t go well. Or maybe InkSoul has become inactive since the statement in 2022.

Now, what about CAT 23? I’m really not sure about this one (there are only two CAT 23s so far, one of which is the Red Canary statement) so my theory here is a stand-in. I previously suggested CAT 23 could refer to dimensional cracks and it’s possible that is also the case. It could be that CAT 23 IS the ‘Magnus Protocol’, and that ‘Magnus’ doesn’t specifically mean ‘pertaining to the Magnus Institute’ but ‘pertaining to the Magnus Institute or similar known cracks in reality, of which the Magnus Institute is the one we know most about’. It could be that the OIAR has an active interest in manipulating dimensional cracks but hasn’t yet figured out how, and CAT 23 is created to reflect this.

R = How Useful is this Monster to the OIAR?

A = Frighteningly powerful, possibly equivalent in its impact to the rituals. AB = Between A and B value. B = Pretty useful, but not going to massively improve the OIAR's position by itself. BC = Between B and C value. C = Not especially useful for the OIAR's purposes. Unranked = Value either not investigated or pending investigation. We have no Rank As thus far, and the only rank AB, the Red Canary statement, is widely believed by fans to be the most crucial piece of the puzzle so far to the wider mystery. I believe the first rank A statement is going to be truly massive.

Current Rank Bs include Bonzo and Needles, as well as the bone dice and the Voyuer movie. Bonzo is a known OIAR assassin and as above, Needles very well could be/could become one if the OIAR wanted that for him. However, they can't exactly take down society. Equally, the dice and the movie have limitations that only allow them to target one person at a time - the dice only affect the person who rolls them and the movie relies on only having one audience member to customise itself for.

The Rank Cs are, so far, just the charity volunteers and the ship tattoo. I admit this may be the weakest part of the theory as it's not clear how these two are 'useless', especially if CAT 23 means what I theorise above. Maybe Rank Cs are useful to study but not important to the main goals of the OIAR, whatever they be.

The two unranked statements are the plant guy and the violin. The violin statement could be unranked because it is just that old, and the plant guy could be unranked for a number of reasons. Maybe he is CAT 2 because the OIAR want to study him, but they don't actually have a use for the anomaly that sired him.

Conclusion

As you can see there are various weaknesses to the theory and I would be very surprised if it turns out to be entirely right. The biggest gap right now is the rank C/unranked theories which are not entirely apparant why they're so low. If Protocol is anything like Archives, almost all these monsters will be revisited, so reasons for their placements could still be revealed to us. I am fairly certain the OIAR already knows more about most of them than is let on. I will revisit this theory as more information becomes known.

[haethyre]

X-Men 97 Thoughts

My personal opinions

Okay. So I grew up with X-men The Animated Series. It was one of my fave shows. It always came on late at night on Toon Disney (at times i shouldnt have been awake LMAO) so it has a special place in my heart. I was very surprised that of all things they decided to "continue" it. So, when I heard about it, I did a full rewatch (even that ungodly last season where quality took a nosedive OOF) Anywhoo! Started and finished 97. Those who know me best know at heart I am a big OG fan of my fandoms and am trepidacious of reboots/even continuation reboots, bc lets be honest most of them are all about stomping on the source material, SO I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed Xmen 97.

You could really see how much they tried to capture the feel of the old show and the characters. The voice replacements were surprisingly well done. (i mean, Wolverine is a little off, but i'll give the guy a break its been like...28 yrs XD ) The animation looks amazing. Even if i'm taking some points off for the hair hfgjhdf haha

Now the storyline.... The elephant in the room. We all know the one. I have been a Romy fan since I was a kid and yes, when I was a young girl in Borders, I did come across the comic that showed the RoguexMagneto storyline. I hated it then and I hate it now. Its just...weird. (Again, my opinions. If you like it, power to you. Enjoy, but its not for me and this post isn't for you) but its even weirder in the show, and ill tell you why. As a Marvel comic reader, I'm well acquainted with the fact that everyone gets with everyone. That is just a trope of Marvel comics. All ships of imaginable and unimaginable proportions happen. BUT I think when doing this, they really should have thought it through a bit more in context of the show's universe alone . Bc I'll be real, if you're coming in from TAS, this kinda hits you out of nowhere. She had no form of connection with Magneto in the past show. Like....they had a makeshift funeral for him and she didn't even care. She was just worried about Gambit being stuck in space. So, their "secret" just seems so random and out of place. I do like that it was used for her to understand fully her feelings for Gambit, but man was it frustrating to see him just killed off when he was one of the best characters.(even if it was really well done and the animation, again, was amazing)

There's talk of him coming back as "Death" which is a storyline I'm not familiar with but I also heard talk of the original showrunner idealizing a timeline where Rogue and Magneto have kids....so... IDK It all just left me a bit frustrated and disheartened bc Romy was like one of my earliest ships before i knew ships were a thing. To see what happened to it made me sad, even if it could be part of a long game to get them to their HEA. (and thats always an if bc we don't know, even if the original guy isn't in charge anymore)

Other things that bugged me a little but not too much. Gonna bring up Morph. I love Morph. They were always a fave and they went through so much to finally be back on the team again. I really don't understand why they changed their character design tho? I read it was to make Morph look more like the character changeling from the comics but this is again something that doesnt make sense coming out of TAS bc Morph always had that other appearance throughout the entire show. I mean...it could have at least been explained... Also, as far as the feelings for Wolverine, i kinda found it funny XD bc in TAS, it always seemed like it was the other way around jkhfgjkdfh Wolverine was so attached to Morph and wouldn't let 'em go. That being said, I kinda wish they didn't go this route if its only meant to be unrequited and sad. AGAIN. I know. Marvel is all about unrequited drama jfhdkjfdh but hasn't Morph been through enough??? That being said, I love the ship even though I know its doomed. Wolverine is the worst person to be down bad for tho. Mans falls in love at the drop of a hat fhghdfjhsd

Other than these couple things, I really loved the show. Some people said "why are they shoving so much story into such a short amount of time" XD The storyteller in me would like to agree but i will be honest, there is nothing more like Xmen TAS than smooshed storylines jkdfhfkjds with random one-off eps in between. XD So, I was fine with it.

I liked the conclusion with Scott and Jean, as messy as it was. The family fun time was a pleasure to watch.

Xavier and Magneto. They really highlighted their messy, but still devoted relationship from the original series, so that was nice to see. I was glad to see him back in the red suit LMAO bc the one he was wearing all season was weird for me.

I loved Jubilee's journey, and it was cool that they brought Alyson Court back for that one episode.

I was very pleased overall that they didn't tone things down and since censors are different these days, they could show more stuff they couldn't in the 90s. So, I am looking forward to more seasons (and pleeeeease for the love of god give Romy back to me i am begging)

[zeltqz]

niyaaaa do u have any tips for people who wanna get into fic writing? 👀

i don’t really get how the whole posting format for fics works on here tbh 😭 and like your info area it’s so cool

YEAH OFC!! btw dm me your username so i can follow and support you <3

tip 1- the posting format isnt that hard to get used to actually its just you create a tumblr text post and then copy and paste your fic onto it, add the tags and stuff then post it. if you want to add banners, headers and stuff to make it look better then go ahead, just add images to the text post

tip 2- the info area is the same as above, just add pictures of your choice etc to the text post, add your information, name, age, fav things etc and then to link posts to your post, highlight where u want the link to go, then copy the link of the post u want linked then press the hyperlink that looks like two chains linked together when you highlight the text if that makes sense? sounds like a lot but its rlly not i promise haha

tip 3- always type your fics on other apps like word or google docs since they have an auto save feature!! i dont reccomend typing your fics on tumblr since one if the app crashes, it doesn't automatically save your work so everything you wrote will get deleted (some versions of tumblr do have autosave, my laptop has it but my phone and iPad doesn't, so i dont rely on it)

tip 4- idk if you want tips on actual fic writing or just how to get your fics onto tumblr but ill help you with that anyway. with me when i write fics i always imagine it out in my head. theres some of my fics where i just went with the flow and wrote wgatever came to mind and those are the fics i hate the most because they dont rlly make sense to me. theyre always so random and it just seems rushed and bad.

i picture my fics like a scene in my head and whatever i want the character to do, think, say or feel i write that shit down asap. i use other online sources to help get more descriptive like the emotion theasurus <- honestly one of my favourite things to use ever, they have so much body language to use for every emotion in the damn book

dialogue is also something i find difficult. i've improved i personally feel like but its still hard for me especially if im writing a new character. i never want to make the character seem OOC so i do lots of research before hand. i normally use the wiki to read up on a characters personality.

for example i'll use ran for this since he's like 99% of my account lmao. in the wiki, he's described as "naturally whimsical toward others which makes him inscrutable" though ran doesnt have many scenes in the manga (which i hate bc i love him sm) its impossible to actually write him down to a tee so i use that naturally whimsical description to make him playful, charismatic, carefree etc, going off what little information i have with him.

getting a characters personality down is what can make or break a dialogue. for me when im reading a fic of a character and their dialogue is so OOC it puts me off and i dont even wanna read. so i apply my same fic icks to myself and think if I don't like seeing this and that in a fic, why would I incorporate those in my fics and have ppl get put off it if they have the same fic icks as me?

hope that makes sense!!

tip 5- dont rush yourself at all. i used to rush a few of my fics and i just ended up hating it so much after and fought bck the urge to delete them so many times but then i'd see people's comments and realise i was being too harsh on myself. i'd keep them up but i'd just hate seeing them get attention.

rushing only makes you hate your work and the quality of your work will decline if you are not in the right headspace.

thats also why i have the don't rush me thing in my rules because not only is it annoying to see people constantly asking for updates, it also makes me mad because i know i'll just put out a piece of garbage if i did rush.

also another tip don't give yourself deadlines!! if you know your writing consistency can be a little sloppy, don't tell your followers that you're going to upload every so and so day. if something happens and you miss the deadline, you'll feel bad and rush something out and most times out of ten, a rushed fic doesn't do well. so take your time and don't rush.

tip 6- dont listen to what other people say or feel obligated to write something you don't wanna. establish your boundaries!! for example, from day one i started this blog i said im accepting requests but i will not write anything to do with non-con, incest or minors. i made sure that was out there so i wouldn't feel uncomforable writing anything i wasn't comfy with.

there are people on this app that may like your writing and request you to write something for them. you are not obligated to write anything for anyone! don't feel like you have to just because they asked nicely.

if you want to accept requests you can im not saying you shouldn't, im saying don't feel like you have to. you always have a choice. its your blog.

tip 7- remember this isn't a job. you're allowed to take breaks, allowed to have a personal life. don't feel like you need to be updating every day. i used to think i was obligated to be uploading consistently at least every week because i was obsesssed with engagement and seeing peoples comments and was scared if i took a break ppl will unfollow. now i honestly don't care. i'm not active as much as i used to because of school and that's fine! if ppl want to leave, let them. don't feel like you're forced to keep being active in order to keep your follower count stable.

tip 8- this app can get really toxic sometimes. luckily enough i've only had one toxic anon in my inbox and i've been on this app for a year. some people have so many, some ppl get harrassed etc. if that happens to you just be prepared since there's no actual way to find out who's behind anons. you can turn off your anon options which means if ppl want to inbox you something then their account will be showing. some people arent comfortable with that and that's fine! i keep mine on because i want people to feel comfortable on my page.

just remember though if you ever feel like this app is getting overwhelming take breaks! for the sake of your mental health take breaks. i know so many writers on here that took breaks and came back healthier and stronger.

i feel like this tip goes for social media in general. as much as i love social media im aware how unhealthy it is. breaks are so important for you. remember that.

i can't think of anymore tips right now but if i have some more i will edit the post and add it on.

if u have anymore questions about the tumblr posting format dm me and ill help you out :))

[nereidprinc3ss]

i have such a very unpopular opinion. but have you seen pretty little liars? if not, the show is about four girls who try to figure out the source of anonymous threats messages that attempts against their lives. it even has a criminal storyline going one. one of them, spencer hastings, SHE EVEN SHARES HIS NAME is the smartest one and has a similar storyline to reid. i even believe that her character was inspired by reid.

she dresses like this preppy academy girl, has high iq and she even struggles with her own addiction (sleeping pills) that leads her to having anxiety and other psychological things. she makes more sense than maeve trying to be spencer. if a crossover ever happened to exist in some random universe, i’m constantly asking myself how would spencer deal with someone like hastings, or even fall in love with them because it’s so easy and relatable.

reid was the first male character i could relate to because you know, male gaze. and men in comparison to women don’t face the same amount of pressure when it comes about intelligence quotient which is why i’m always seeking comfort in female characters. specially, smart ones because i feel the same. personally speaking, in dating, i also rely on smart men rather than ‘average’ men which is also what i seek when it comes about intimacy/sexual intimacy. for me it’s not about the looks anymore.

i first learned about hastings before reid and fell in love with her because i relate to her so much, for me it’s about our psychological struggles and our tendency to use our iq to hide our vulnerability which makes it so real because we are so fucked up that we will always choose to hide that side of us to normal people. sorry for my rambling, but i needed to get that out.

# i’m claiming this emoji. ❤️

i love rambling!!! thank you for sharing i have not seen pll but i will go on a related rant about iq and self worth and stuff

first of all this is exactly what my and my friend were talking about the other day but with the show suits!! the character mike ross also is a genius w and eidetic memory and a drug problem who goes to jail!! spencer reid truly is the blueprint i think but you can NEVER outdo the doer!!

as for the iq stuff you are so so right. for a long time i based my self worth on my iq and being “gifted” until i realized it was actually completely meaningless and other people thinking i was smart would do nothing for me in the end. but it was the only thing i had to feel good about myself bc i was NOT attractive in middle school/early high school and i was pretty socially awkward so i made myself feel better by thinking about how much smarter than everyone else i was all the time but as you can probably imagine that actually did NOTHING for me except make me feel further isolated and also rlly amped up my narcissistic defensive tendencies!! which was not good!!! (to clarify i am not a narcissist😭 but in my early teenage years i was definitely developing narcissistic QUALITIES)

and then i realized i was failing all my classes anyway and i couldn’t retain any information and i was a fast reader but had absolutely NO reading comprehension. like couldn’t remember the sentence i had LITERALLY just read. and then i got evaluated and diagnosed w adhd which like thank god for medication because im FINALLY capable of learning again but my point is that intelligence is sooo complex and abstract and essentially a empty signifier that means different things to different people. it’s a terrible thing to base your self worth on because it can fluctuate too, and also speaking directly about iq—there is a threshold with iq where if you get above a certain number of standard deviations of average you are actually predicted to be less successful than people with lower iq’s. iq is much less important than we think it is. it’s about what you DO with your potential, not the amount of sheer potential you have

i was actually thinking about that recently cause like?? spencer reid is obviously a rare case and exceptional in every measure BUT a big part of his genius is just his personality. like there are people with eidetic memories and staggeringly high iq’s who do absolutely nothing with their lives and work in offices or construction or something. and obviously he’s fictional but i think that aspect of his character is so interesting because it speaks so much to who he is a person like he never was inherently going to be so intelligent, he had a lot of potential, but it was more due to his desire to learn and his childhood and probably approval seeking but i digress

and also yeah me too babe i am ridiculously sapiosexual but i also have never been attracted to a man who isn’t pretty objectively physically attractive so i need a male model bf who is ALSO a genius and ALSO hilarious and not vain about his looks. like do you hear how ridiculous that is??? im a 7 on my most attractive day and i can’t do mental math like at all…….. so ig this man also must have low standards LOL

so there was my ramble😁 if you read the whole thing im so sorry

[starglow-xx]

(About the brother!atsushi) aRE YOU READING MY MIND MISS?! Because that has been on my mind for MONTHS. TYSM For writing it was amazing!! If you don't mind, may I request (if requests are open) atsushi, still an older brother, but with a sister that's 10-13 yrs old? It's totally fine if you don't wanna do it. Keep up the good stories, ily mwuah!

*sobs* you’re so kind thank youu 🤧🤧

i wrote this a bit differently i hope that’s okay anon! at first i planned for this to be mainly abt atsushi and the reader, but i decided to add in relationship hcs with the agency bc i ran out of ideas

if you guys liked this don’t worry! im planning a special part two for this one so be the look out for it hehe

atsushi with a tween! sister

ft. the armed detective agency

like in my baby sister hcs, you’re still the most important thing to him period

the two of you got picked up by dazai and kunikida when he was 18 (obviously) and when you were 12

for a 12 year old, you were a bit small bc of malnourishment (which makes atsushi feel so bad) so both dazai and kunikida thought you were a bit younger than you actually were

they assumed you were about 9-10ish

you and atsushi both share a favorite food !! chazuke :)

so when kunikida treated the two of you, he made sure you got more bowls bc like i mentioned above, he feels really bad that you were malnourished and under weight

(don’t bring this up but kunikida felt bad too hehe)

when dazai went with your brother to the warehouse, you were with kunikida

imagine the surprise of the other ada members when kunikida came in with a little girl dressed in rags that popped out from behind him

kenji was the one who vocalized his thoughts 

“kunikida-san you have a daughter?! wow! i didn’t know that! :D”

when you found out your brother was a tiger, you were a bit concerned but you were actually kind of excited

you were even more excited when you found out the two of you were going to be taken in by the agency

anything was better than the stupid orphanage

and besides!

you got a tiger for an older brother and a bunch of other super powered agents to take care of you! who could want anything else?

at your age, you’re very impressionable and can be influenced easily so atsushi makes sure to teach you more in depth of good morals and the importance of kindness

his heart swells with pride and relief when he catches you being kind to others

pride bc he’s proud that even after all the two of you have gone through, you still ended up being a good kid and having a bright view of the world

and relief bc he hasn’t failed as a big brother

pfftt like he could ever fail

but please, from time to time reassure him that he’s perfect and the only big brother that you’d ever want bc he rlly needs that kind of validation

with his salary and savings, he tries to buy nice things for you

what a sweetheart 🥺

he saw you eyeing that one dress at a store window? fast forward abt a week and half and it’s inside a pretty gift bag for you

you wanted to try that dessert from the nice bakery? that’s dessert after dinner at one point

but other than buying you things, he sets money aside for you

like all the time

(y/n), here have this, you might need it”

“but nii-san you just gave me—”

“take it”

#1 spoiler

also your #1 confidant and source of physical affection

you tell him anything and everything (except crushies and those kinds of things)

atsushi loves it when you talk abt your day and he can see the big smile on your face and the sparkle in your eyes

it gives him the strength to keep going 😖😖

the two of you aren’t as touch starved as you’d probably think, but that’s only bc the two of you had each other

in your opinion, no one can match the hugs of your big brother

and it got even better bc YAYY he has tiger arms now ٩(◕‿◕)۶

if you ask, he’d carry you around too hehe

you also get nightmares quite often so he’ll always be there ready to calm you down, talk if you need to, and rock you back to sleep

god i love him 🤧🤧

atsushi will do everything in his power to protect you and make sure you get to grow up happy, supported, and loved

port mafia attack? oop he’s already taking you to the nearest escape route

someone is starting to harass you? they just got suckered punched into the next week

you want to go out to have some fun? he’ll go ask the president for a day off

you’re not feeling well? he’ll take another day off and take care of you

whatever you want to do, he’ll do it with you! (as long as it’s within reason)

will always be your #1 supporter! and he’s the president of your fan club hehe

he loves you so so much and will do anything for you; your life and happiness will always be more important to him

you are his reason to keep going

agency head canons !!

atsushi is your big brother, but kunikida is most definitely some sort of father figure

everyone can see it

except kunikida of course

kunikida scolds you lightly if he thinks your manners need work or if you make a mess in the agency

you listen to him of course and in turn as some sort of a reward, he’ll give you pieces of stationary

he always gives you the nice, good quality kind and you’re over the moon

atsushi adores it when you come running to him showing your new notebook or fountain pen and blabbering what you’re going to do with it

sometimes it isn’t even as a reward for being a good child; he’ll just give it to you and he’ll say smth like “i noticed you’ve used up your last notebook quite quickly, so here’s another one” or “did you run out of ink? here have this then”

he usually has a soft spot for children in general, but he most definitely has a soft spot (or a thousand) for you

yosano is kind of like a motherly figure to you

she gives you the guidance a mother should and goes on shopping trips with you!

atsushi always gets dragged along by you, but he thinks it’s worth it seeing you look so happy

yosano being a doctor also tries to teach the things you should know, or things that would be helpful to you

she’ll teach you the basics of cooking, sewing, how to treat a cold/fever, etc

also gives you excellent advice 1000% of the time

“remember (y/n)-chan if someone hurts you come tell me and then i’ll chop them into—”

“yOSANO-SENSEI DONT TELL HER THAT—”

fukuzawa is like a father to most in the agency but you see him more as a grandfather figure

bi weekly tea and gossip sessions hehe

along with cat talk!

most of the time though, it’s just you talking and him listening to you, but the two of you enjoy it nonetheless

“and then kunikida-san ended up crashing into a pole and dazai-san started to laugh at him and i did too because it was really funny but we ended up getting scolded—”

“hmm i see...”

he’ll let you stay in his office as he fills out paperwork; you’re usually doodling or drawing in your notebooks

sometimes he’ll meditate and you’ll join him, but 4/7 times you’d fall asleep

you always wake up with a blanket over you

dazai is like a cool but a highly concerning and kind of high maintenance uncle

frequently takes you out with him when he ditches work

walks in the park, eating at uzumaki so he has the excuse of treating you so he doesn’t have to pay his tab avoiding kunikida and sometimes chuuya and akutagawa, all that fun stuff

also tries to not talk abt suicide in front of you especially if it’s just the two of you alone

he knows that you mean the world to his pupil and that said pupil would probably hate him for putting suicide inside your brain

he teaches you random but useful things like how to pick a lock, how to steal kunikida’s notebook if you’re looking for some information, how to sweet talk your way out of things, etc.

is also the one to tell you that if you ever get a significant other to introduce them to the agency first

he always wants all of your gossip; some of them work pretty well for blackmail

“dazai-san! dazai-san! did you know that kunikida-san lost his glasses and he was looking for them for nearly an hour when he was just holding them the entire time??”

“woah really (y/n)-chan?! hey hey can you say it again into this recording device so kunikida-kun would believe me when i tell him—”

always ends up giving kunikida a heart attack when he says that you’ve been with him all day

ranpo is also like a cool but a highly concerning and kind of high maintenance uncle

will share some of his snacks, but don’t push it or you might not get anything at all

loves it when you compliment him

if you tagged along with him and your brother on a case, he will show off to impress you

“...and that’s how the crime happened”

“UWAHH RANPO-SAN YOU’RE SO COOL”

atsushi is lowkey and kunikida is highkey stressed that ranpo’s eating habits will rub off on you

“ne (y/n)-chan do you wanna try this highly caffeinated drink and this concerning amount of sugar filled snack?”

“can i really?!”

“rANPO-SAN NO—”

ranpo definitely does stuff like that on purpose 

the tanizakis are like siblings to you!

a weird set of siblings but siblings nonetheless

the two of them adore you and think you’re precious

atsushi definitely knows how to do your hair whether it’s long or short but he got even better at it when he asked the two

hehe braid trains are definitely a thing + kyouka and kenji (and maybe even dazai)

sometimes you have sibling swap days

you’re with junichiro for most of the day and atsushi is with naomi

strange i know

each of the tanizaki siblings try to make it fun bc they know that the two of you did not at all have a happy upbringing

junichiro likes spending time with you by taking you out to different places that naomi likes to frequent

like the mall, different stores and restaurants, the park, places like those

naomi does the same thing with atsushi so if you ever bump into them, you go out and eat together :)

besides atsushi, the next one in line who spoils you the most would be junichiro (and yosano & kunikida both coming in at a close third)

he honestly can’t help it; you remind him of how naomi was when she was younger

and besides

he’s always been a sucker when it came to the happiness of a little sister

“would you really buy this for me junichiro-san?!”

“of course! don’t worry about it” :)

wanna talk abt boys/girls/celebrity crushes things like that? naomi is your girl

you feel a bit embarrassed to go talking to yosano or your brother abt that and kyouka does not know a thing abt them either

“uwahh naomi-san look at all these people in this magazine! they look so good!”

“right?! but of course onii-sama is still the best—”

you get along with kenji and kyouka quite nicely being roughly the same age as them; they’re also like siblings!

just pure, wholesome vibes from the three of you

you’re over the moon when she finds out that kyouka is staying with you and your brother

atsushi is twice as happy seeing you talk your mouth off and finally having a girl around your age to talk to

“do you think demon snow can change how she looks?”

“hmm... im not sure...”

you and kenji talk abt anything and everything

he even teaches you how to take care of plants!

sometimes the two of you are kind of in the same boat bc you don’t know much abt yokohoma being stuck in the orphanage and kenji doesn’t know much abt cities in general

“wait where are we again kenji-san?”

“ah we’re close to the ports! but im not really sure how close because i don’t know what the symbols on this sign mean”

“don’t worry! neither do i!”

bonus things!

yosano was kind of too late teaching you abt you know what

“NII-SAN IM BLEEDING IN BETWEEN MY LEGS”

you’re sobbing in the agency’s bathroom and atsushi is panicking trying to get you to open the door

“Y/N?! H-HOLD ON LET ME GET YOSANO SENSEI”

ranpo overhears and cackles making everyone around him confused

suddenly atsushi bursts in the agency basically on the verge of tears rambling incoherent sentences abt the bathroom, you, and blood

it just clicked for everybody in the room

(im going to pretend that kenji has sisters back home so that atsushi is the only one who remain oblivious here hehe)

atsushi is genuinely confused and sort of concerned that no one is freaking out with him

yosano waves her hand saying smth like that she’d take care of it and junichiro pulls atsushi to the side to talk to him

fast forward like half and hour and dazai and ranpo are cackling on the looks of both of your faces

honestly not sure who’s more traumatized, you or your brother

“why does this have to happen” :(

“ne ne (y/n)-chan!~ you’re too young but at some point you’re not going to have it!”

“uwahh really dazai-san?” :D

“yeah! but first you have to have ANFK—”

next thing you know your ears are being covered by your brother and dazai is thrown across the room by kunikida

you know

the normal

you’re twelve and have never gone to school, but the agency takes care of that

it’s too dangerous to go to school so they teach you what’s necessary and whatever else they can

kunikida takes care of math (obviously)

yosano takes care of science/biology/anatomy/health (whatever you wanna call it)

ranpo even dragged poe to help you with english

atsushi even got lucy to help you out with english too!

as tanizaki and naomi used to be students, they give you their old work books and they try to teach you all the other subjects

sometimes kyouka and kenji are there learing with you too!

sorry if there’s some errors! i’ll read through it again later :)

and as always, reblogs and shares are appreciated! i hope you all stay safe! and just in case nobody told you they loved you today, i love you! you are enough! <3

writing belongs to me! please do not plagiarize! the reblog button is there for a reason

[imperiuswrecked]

Diamond Distribution is Dying

And why that’s a good thing. 

I’m sure by now most comic fans have heard of Marvel breaking their ties to Diamond Distribution. A  lot of fans are happy about this and other fans probably aren’t aware of just what this means in the comic world. So a short comic history lesson to help everyone, this is generalization by me from my time in comic fandom because I love reading up about comic history, so if anyone else has more specific sources or wants to add on then go ahead.

Back in the 1980′s there was different smaller distributors for comic companies however they all started getting bought up by one distributor, Diamond. 

What is a comic distributor? They are the company that gets comics into the shelves of stores. Think of it like this: 

Creative Team gets paid for their work and complete comic > Comic Company prints comics with their preferred printer company based on orders from Diamond > Diamond gets their order information from Comic Shops who get their pre-order information from customers interest >  Comic Company ships comics to Diamond warehouse > Diamond ships comics to shop > Shop places comics on shelves or in pull list boxes and wait for costumer to come in and pay for comics > Comic Shops pay their Diamond invoice bills > Diamond is paid and also pays Comic Company for comics > if comic is a hit then it goes to second printing > if comic flops then Comic Shop still owes Diamond their money because Diamond does not accept returns on comics and Diamond needs to get paid and to pay Comic Company. This is all done in bulk orders.

This is the direct to market approach that was great for comic companies but not so great for comic stores. This is why pre-ordering comics is so important, because realtors (comic shops) and Diamond would then try to guess what the customers demand was and would buy more of that comic to sell. This is why IP’s like Spider-Man, Batman, Super Man, X-Men, always get more comics made rather than less mainstream characters. The more popular the character the less the risk of comic shops losing money.

Diamond had a near monopoly on this whole operation, which means everyone is stuck using their outdated and old model of sales which hasn’t been updated since the 90s, (the 90s comic crash had many contributing factors that also aided in Diamond becoming a monopoly*). Everyone was stuck only looking at what Diamond reported in sales, which means online comics being bought were never really disclosed (this is still unsure of bc no one ever says what online digital comics sales are). Physical comics took longer to get overseas in international markets. And this meant that when in the early 2000′s, Diamond raised the pre-order minimum price from around $1,000 to over $2,000 then smaller independent comic creators were screwed. This is also why independent or smaller creators/comic companies have to fight like hell to get their comics even MENTIONED in Diamond Distributor’s preview order catalog so stores can pre-order.

In the past Diamond has faced accusations of censorship, and bullying smaller companies. 

Due to the 2020 Pandemic, Diamond stopped distribution last year for three months, DC cut out early and left to another company but Marvel stuck it out until 2021 where they just announced that they were joining with Penguin Random House to distribute comics. This is a huge deal, without their two biggest buyers then Diamond will die, maybe they can struggle along but there are no guarantees. Unlike DC completely cutting and running, Marvel is giving realtors the option to stay and order through Diamond or to order through Penguin. 

What does this mean for comic fans? Penguin will probably be able to get marvel comics into an international marker better than Diamond. Penguin might be able to distribute comics in places other than comic shops which could bring in new fans, they might be able to get comics into places that could go before because in order for Diamond to ship the buyers had to have an account through that one company, which is why most book stores only have a limited comic section, if one at all.

Do you recall all those old pictures of comics being on racks in general stores and pharmacies and stuff? I’m not saying that would come back but there is a possibility that you could see comics in more places like that. The comic model of sales of today has changed a lot since the 90s and Diamond never got that. I’m personally glad comics are not going to be held by only one huge distributor any more.

* If you don’t know what the comic crash of the 90s was then its pretty simple: In that era there was a huge boom of people suddenly buying up comics because of their perceived value, when stuff like Batman’s first comic selling for so much money was a hot topic and more people were suddenly getting rich off their old comic collections, as well as hard core comic collectors looking to increase their collections, spectators jumped in and began buying up like 10 or more issues, and keeping them for a later nest egg sale. 

Creators were becoming celebrities overnight thanks to new characters, stories that shifted from the classic ongoing tales to ‘YOU WILL NEVER BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED IN THIS ISSUE. THIS IS THE COMIC THAT CHANGES IT ALL.” shake up stories and less restrictions on comics. Things like the Death of Superman was flying off the shelves because people thought it would be worth money, it was not. In addition to this huge boom of sales, people who knew nothing about comics or selling were opening up shops left and right, over ordering and not selling, and very shortly places became bankrupt and closed down. Comic companies were literally raking in the cash and thinking that things were going to stay as they were but then the quality of comics had deteriorated, older fans were turned off by this, the bubble burst, people lost interest, and things went downhill.

Marvel bought Heroes World, to distribute their own comics on the idea that their X-Men Reprints were going to make them mad money but uhhh it did not and their terrible distribution pissed people off so they all went to Diamond and thus the reason for Marvel’s bankruptcy in the late 90s where they sold off movie rights to their biggest characters for literal pennies to stay afloat.

[buckleyydiaz]

random moreid fic idea!! reid and morgan were online boyfriends years before joinign the bau, but ended bc of long distance. they meet again on reid’s first day and he immediately recognizes morgan, even though he’s gotten taller and more muscular, and when gideon introduces him to the team as “dr. spencer reid” morgan’s speechless, and its slow burn from there ♥︎♥︎

here is chapter one! sorry this has taken a while! also on ao3 here

if you weren’t just an online romance 1/?, 900 words, moreid

summary: 

It would without a doubt come as a great shock to the Behavioural Analysis Unit team members that Derek had been in a long term relationship, and at that, a committed one, not a quick fling or dalliance more about sex than emotions.

It would not, however, surprise them that this had been a one time occurrence, although there were a myriad of other elements of it that would. Primarily? That it had been with a man, but also that it occurred online, and that even over a year after the relationship’s end, he would still go back to Spencer without a second thought.

Apparently, Gideon had a new protege. A kid, who from all Derek had heard, despite being quite the genius, barely made it into the FBI, with the usually mandatory fitness tests being waived for him, and no attempt even being made to try and give him a gun. That was, if the rumour mill was to be trusted.

To say Derek was unexcited to meet the new kid would be an understatement - the last thing he needed was to have to look after some hopeless, useless newbie, pretend that he liked him, and wait out him inevitably leaving when he realised what the job really involved, that it wasn’t some desk job where he could solve problems, but a real, hands on job, where people got hurt, died, and that was life.

Whilst he trusted Gideon, he was also slightly skeptical of the supposed genius - how smart could he really be? After meeting Spencer, his ex-boyfriend, Derek had gained very high standards for the capabilities of a genius, and he wasn’t sure this newbie would reach them.

The other team members did not seem so doubtful about the kid, which almost made Derek feel bad, but Derek had not been a trusting person for a long time, so he figured he could excuse it - this wasn’t something specific to this incoming kid. It wasn’t as though he wanted the new guy to be a disappointment either, he just preferred to brace himself for it.

His eyes alternated between the door and the clock as he awaited the kid’s arrival, occasionally glancing back down at his work to keep up the image that he was actually doing work - not that anyone was fooled, nor cared. Most of the team were buzzing with excitement over the new agent’s imminent arrival, a pleasant change from the gloom that had seemed to be stuck over them for the months following Agent Hazelton’s death, since Gideon’s suspension. Even if he wasn’t excited about the idea of the new kid, and who he was, Derek did desperately hope that some new blood would help make this shift a permanent one.

It seemed as though the newbie couldn’t even be on time on his first day, something which frustrated Derek to no end. Not only was he going to end up having to babysit this guy who hadn’t even been able to properly get into the FBI, but he was going to have to deal with someone who was either highly disorganised, had really bad luck, or was just chronically late - none of which were things that were good qualities for an agent in the BAU. Gideon really must be losing it if he thought that this kid was going to work on the team, and Derek hadn’t even met him yet.

“Hello, my delicious piece of chocolate!” Garcia said excitedly as she walked to his desk.

“Hey Baby Girl,” Derek responded, grateful for the distraction from the door and the clock, both of which were quickly losing interest, despite knowing that any minute, the new 

“Do you know when the new guy is coming?” she asked, beginning her standard rapidfire speaking, “He is supposed to be starting today, right? I can’t wait to meet him, although I’m sure he will be nowhere near as perfect as you!”

Derek couldn’t help but grin - he really had found his (platonic) soulmate in Penelope Garcia, even when he was moping about a new agent, she could brighten up his day immeasurably. He swore it was some kind of magic power of hers - if anyone were to have magic, it would be her, anyway.

“The newbie is running a bit late, I think, that’s all. And I had better hope that you don’t plan on letting this kid replace me! Can’t have anyone stealing my girl!”

That was when Derek realised how quiet the rest of the bullpen had gone, highlighting the single gasp that he heard following his words. He turned his head around again to face the door, where he had neglected looking during his quick chat with Garcia, and saw the source of the noise.

A familiar set of eyes met his, and he quickly took in the man in front of him - although he was slightly taller and healthy looking than when Derek had last seen him, the cute face, the lanky limbs, the nerdy haircut - they all gave him away.

It was all that Derek could do to keep his jaw from dropping to the floor at the sight, the sight of a man he had never expected to see again, not in real life, not in the office, not anywhere but in his dreams.

But there he was, as clear as day, as real as everyone else in the building with them. 

Gideon cleared his throat, getting everyone’s attention, stopping the eyes of those around them from flickering between Derek, Garcia and the new agent, releasing it was much more important to listen to what the Senior Agent was about to discuss than to contemplate the newbie’s shock at Derek and Garcia’s slightly unconventional friendship.

“As you all are aware, today we are getting a new agent joining this team. I would like you all to meet Dr. Spencer Reid, the BAU’s newest team member.”

Not that he had ever doubted it, but Derek’s recognition had been correct. This definitely would not go well.

[eyeslikefoxglove]

Episode 11 - The Yunmeng Sibs have shitty parents & *Screams in Doctor*

Hello hello! Long time no talk, who’d thought finishing med school wound not free my schedule up? Not me that’s for sure. Btw I have an iPad case (where I’m watching and writing) that can turn into a stand so the screen is upright. HOWEVER the lower flaps that hold the iPad in the case broke so it just keeps sliding down and giving me heart attacks, you’ll hear me screaming about it further down I’m sure. So enjoy my pain.

This farewell scene is fucking me up tho. Why do you want tears so early in the episode screenwriters? Why? (Also, MY STILL HAS NOT HAD TREATMENT FOR THAT STAB WOUND)

Aw my One Braincell Trio worries about MY is adorable tho (yet another missed opportunity for him to make actual friends who care about him and not end up as JGY)

I’m sorry for the thirst but HOLLY SHIT WANG ZHUOCHENG’S BONE STRUCTURE.

That’s it. I’m going to stop the tv series here when they’re in Lotus Pier and everything is fiiiiine. Btw watching that servant girl run through the place has convinced me that I 100% would trip taking a corner and end up in the lake.

YUNMENG SIIIIIBS

Ok, pause to say: I do think Madame Yu is a BAMF. I also think that’s literally her only redeeming quality. I don’t like Mme Yu and I don’t like JFM and y’all are gonna have to endure my ranting.

This woman is just spoiling for a fight isn’t she?

Ok, the first time I saw this, I was willing to be on her side. My mum does the same thing where she rants when she’s worried and my dad is more phlegmatic (until he snaps then they just scream at each other and I eat popcorn). The instant I decided that she could go hang was when she started being an asshole to her kids. And they just take it, so it is clearly not the first time she’s called her daughter a mildness follower and her son idiot and useless fuuuuck her.

And of course JFM goes and pulls the ���man from way back when” misogynistic bullshit and tells her to go rest. Why would he either try to not have this conversation in from of their children or stand up for all of them.

Ok. How did LWJ not get a massive footprint on his PALE BLUE clothes from WZL’s kick?

Also, let me go down the clothes, or rather footwear, rabbit hole for a second. Those fucking boots can’t be comfortable. I know that’s the shape they had and whatever but they don’t move when you walk. My god, I own 12 pairs of Doctor Martens, I did pointe in my ballet class for years, I know a lot about unyielding shoes and I can tell you, that walking without being able to flex you foot is horrendous. How. Why. Am I missing something that’s common knowledge about those boots by virtue of not being Chinese? (And having almost zero knowledge of traditional Chinese clothing)

Alright, back to the show LWJ about to throw hands at WC (not with, WC is too much of a coward).

Yay the butterflies!

My one track mind: *takes note of the fakeness of the fake blood*

Xichen bb noooooo.

Wait wait wait. Assuming the Cloud Recesses siege and the conversation when JFM tells our boys they’re leaving for Nightless City in three days are happening simultaneously that means LWJ fucked off to indoctrination ON A BROKEN LEG. And he got there only a bit before the people from Yunmeng, however Cloud Recesses is further away than Lotus Pier, so he was fucking rushing, ON A BROKEN LEG. Please tell me he was at least wearing plaster under his clothes (no he wasn’t, at least not in the Murder Turtle cave) *Screams in Doctor*

(But FR, don’t pull that kind of bullshit, walking around on a fracture can cause the bone fragments to shift, compress the blood supply to your foot and you can loose it)

Look, this idiot is back. Again, if you see random bouts of screaming is just me not wanting to listen to Su She.

Ok, ok I’ve got a bone to pick here. I’ve seen some people say that Su She cracking and telling the Wens how to get in is less about him being an asshole and more about he not wanting to die. Fair enough, wanting to survive is natural. HOWEVER, my problem with this situation in particular is that, as long as he saved his own skin, he didn’t give a fuck about all the people who were going to get murdered. That’s a dick move.

And before anyone can tell me that’s not how regular people work, my building caught on fire about a year ago, my first instinct after putting my cat in his carrier by a fresh air source was to leave my flame-free flat to go check on my neighbours. I don’t know my neighbours, hell, our relationship consists on them letting their kids scream until past midnight and me blasting death metal at 6am the day after in retaliation. (They were gone for the weekend and both me and the cat were fine, thank fuck for skylights). I know it isn’t the same stakes as being held at swordpoint but, my dude, human decency is human decency.

Su She: people like LWJ look down on us outer disciples.

LWJ: *literally gets his leg broken bc he saved Su She’s life*

My one track mind: where’s the arterial spray?

Every time I seen Yunmeng disciples shooting kites I start hearing Kill Bill sirens.

Speaking of shooting kites. I don’t think JC has ever actually been jealous of WWX like sometimes I’ve seen mentioned. He clearly encourages him to best his shot in front of all the disciples knowing he’ll make it. He’s had his mother’s poison and his father’s indifference poured in his ear since he was a child, if this really was a Thor-Loki/Scar-Mufasa/Cain-Abel brother dynamic those tiny little gestures wouldn’t exist. JC could not give less of a fuck that WWX is “better” than him, it has been, however, used to hurt both of them; and that’s what pisses him off. Not that he’s compared to his brother, but that whoever is doing that comparison explicitly seeks to hurt. Also, knowing that you baby brother (I don’t care WWX is older that JC, he’s the baby in this relationship) is a prodigy, and yet he’s in such deep shit he probably won’t be able to get out, and what can you, not a prodigy, do to help him out? Nothing. That’s terrible, that’s painful and as we all know JC only emotes in anger.

SOMEONE HUG NHS PLEASE HE LOOKS SO SAD.

Oh I’m living for Peacock’s facial expressions.

Ok, listen, listen. That whole scene where WWX turns around, LWJ is looking gorgeous dressed in white, flanked by the two Wen soldiers walking down the aisle to joint the front of the queue reads too much like a Western wedding for my poor heart to not make the connection. Also, LWJ (in white) is walking towards WWX (in black) which is usually the positions and colour schemes of an heterosexual version of those weddings and as much as I say fuck gendering WangXian (ppl calling WWX mother or wife makes me homicidal) you will pry those parallels from my cold dead hands.

I can’t even make fun of the *Bichen grip* because my taciturn bb is so hurt right now.

Thanks for reading!

[rogueshipagogo]

ppl have been asking me my opinions on space channel 5 vr... and i guess since i bought a vr headset off craigslist just so i could play it and speedrun it before work the day it came out... i should talk abt it now... i dont rly think i’ll be able to separate it into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ things i think i’m just going to do a rambly stream of consciousness bc i have a headache... but i DO have good things to say abt this game... so st.... sta stay t tune  d

right off the bat, the thing i appreciate most abt this game- i like that space channel 5 vr doesnt have cash grab vibes. i Do genuinely believe that they Wanted to make this game For the people who are still obsessed with it, and that they ultimately did what they set out to do when they intended to scale certain aspects of the series up conceptually to match the way the fandom perceives it nowadays. but like i’ve said before... i’m not going to Disagree with the very common conclusion that it Needed to be longer, or at Least more intricate plot-wise. one of my fun and fresh excuses for sc5vr being as short as it is is because you arent really supposed to be playing vr games for too long anyways, its really disorienting and kinda painful, but even that doesn’t account for why so much of the game that we got is a rehash of old settings, concepts, songs, and characters. [i dont even have a problem with reusing old songs, i just think the ones they chose ended up being misleading]

for example i think it makes sense that the first report is a remake of the first games first report on the surface, it’s meant to take you back to the way the first game felt and give you an idea of what it means that the games classic scenery can be rendered in actual high quality detail now [same with the recurrence of events like encountering the space pirates in the asteroid belt/the last battle against a villain being singing to it about what it’s done wrong], but i really thought, like, report 1 was going to end up being a simulated scenario for the benefit of lou and kee’s training... which i dont think ended up being the case??? i think they really did write ‘ok here you are in the first game’s setting again, fighting the old enemies again, because... :^) ok have fun playing report 2!’

and then whats report 2... you fight another old boss from the first game... but theres Still no clear villain or motivation for anything thats happening... and there wont be until like... basically the end of the game...

like, glitter is a really cute character, but its kind of underwhelming that shes just a random citizen who was kidnapped by an entity that we NEVER LEARN ANYTHING ABOUT... like part 1 was extremely notable for being about corporate greed and corruption, part 2 honestly wasnt that political in comparison but at least made you do a think wrt purge’s motivation and his methods, and this game just has a plot device that feels like it’ll do smth but then ends up not doing anything beyond what we already learned about it from the information on its character bio before the game was out. if it turns out that cell x is actually relevant again in a future entry in the franchise and they do have a more developed concept for what cell x Is in mind, i’ll do an entire backflip, but for now its just chalked up to being the result of More Space Hijinks that dont need to be explained

ESPECIALLY WITH ALL OF THE ALLUSIONS TO CELL X BEING AN ENTITY THAT FEEDS OFF OF DANCE ENERGY... it had me thinking that there would have to be some New Method of fighting it off that didn’t just lend it more power in the process, but nah apparently just tacking on the disclaimer ‘*this dance energy is not for glitter’ is enough to turn it from smth it can consume for power into big attacks you can use to kill it... like honestly it sounds like im asking for a lot from a game that has Never made too much sense, but considering that in part 2 they could add details like ‘oh didnt you know purge can open pocket dimensions? ulala is capable of manifesting tangible dance energy and the only other person who can do that is purge???’, its not like they havent come up with weird new shit for dance energy to do within the plot before. they just didnt do it in this game fsr

like did anyone else think that cell x/glitter was going to be the result of tossing purge out into deep space and him encountering the sc5 universe’s equivalent of an eldritch alien creature, smth more bestial than morolians?? even if purge wasnt part of it, when you say ‘uh oh, this guy Eats this society’s only source of energy!!!’ i expect the stakes to get HIGH, and i want the ramifications of it to be kinda STARTLING, because blank wanted money and purge wanted to ritualistically end the world but something this near to an ecological disaster that would force an entire paradigm shift hasn’t occurred yet in the series?? its totally new!!! there’s a lot they could do with this but OH DONT WORRY ABOUT IT EVERYONE ulala knows how to make dance energy kill cell x instead of feed it she’s got this we’re good no need to investigate more into all that

i can’t explain why the game is like this. and i dont expect grounding to address it in any meaningful way either. i’m sure they’re Aware of these complaints by now- the game reviewing community has Not been kind to sc5vr specifically due to all of these shortcomings [i didnt even touch on the issues with motion sensing and how many of the games mechanics were removed in favor of smth presumably easier to program yet much less satisfying, like Secret Moves just being mini quicktime events and Turning Your Ratings Into Stars just being replaced with the standard Three Strikes You’re Out method of scoring], but the pr team still seems very enthusiastic abt the game and is still promising dlc and potentially even more games in the series after this one- heres hoping that they’ll at least take these grievances to heart and consider making the experience not only more accessible [aka it will... go back to being a rhythm game with controller input.... and not... an exclusive vr experience...], but also as immersive and detailed as the old games, with less reused plot beats. i can let some of it off the hook in this game simply because i’m aware that it began its life as a tech demo that was only supposed to be that initial first report from the first game But Happening All Around You!, but i Really dont think they could get away with doing this little to expand upon the groundwork set by the first two games again. not with the way people remember part 2 being such a vast upgrade from part 1... the bar had been set so high that this just felt like a huge backslide into something even sillier and harder to take seriously than part 1 before we had any idea what kind of staying power the franchise would have as a hallmark of sega’s quirky antics. like... this game is what i think space channel 5 looks like to people who don’t understand the appeal of the first two games. and that scares me

but i guess for the most part, aside from wishing they had done more to revitalize the setting and the lore of the sc5 universe itself, im kind of glad it didnt do a lot to change the existing storylines the characters have kinda forged for themselves- here i was stressing out that they would pull out some plot development that would utterly and drastically change the way we talked abt the series for the rest of time, but so little happened and so little was added to the bank of sc5 lore that we can kind of all just carry on as usual and keep having the same headcanons we always had.

BUT!!! there ARE a lot of cute little details here and there that make the experience feel wholesome and like i said not an utter cashgrab- like so many of the character profiles referencing previous games [all of the references to npcs in this game being relatives of the npcs of the last games made me lose it] and how often ulala changes her expressions up and looks right at you and talks to you. the new music they wrote for the game also all slaps and everyones redesigns [if they got a redesign... rip pudding] are stunning

one of the most important things they did in this game was give a nice sort of Update to every character.... for example explaining that ulala isn’t a rookie reporter any more like she was in the first 2 games, that she’s moved up to being in charge of training new channel 5 reporters, and that while pudding is still somewhat stuck on her rivalry with ulala her career isn’t stagnant either, she was just cast in a romcom series as the lead... which is really nice considering how in the past she was portrayed as somewhat of a loser with almost no remaining fans left from her idol years

and you knew i was going to bring up jaguar at some point HES ALL OVER THIS GAME AND IT LITERALLY MADE ME FEEL LIKE MY LIFE WAS WORTH POWERING THROUGH THESE LAST FEW YEARS AND ALSO LIKE IM A GENIUS FOR SPENDING SO LONG POSTING EVERY SINGLE DAY ‘NO REALLY, HE’S THE SECONDARY PROTAGONIST OF THE STORY, ITS ABOUT CHANNEL 5 AS A COMPANY AND THEIR IMPACT ON EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER ENCOUNTERED THEM AND THAT INCLUDES JAGUAR AS WELL AS ULALA HES INTEGRAL TO THE PLOT BC SHE WOULDNT BE ALIVE IF IT WEREN’T FOR HIM’ i feel like it’s really incredible how in this game he has genuinely nice energy and doesnt withhold praise from ulala just to be helpful in a mysterious way later and he like HAS FRIENDS now. like consider how he went from disgraced former ch5 employee who got mad every time he saw them, to kidnapped robot henchman kinda humbled by the fact that now the turns tabled and ulala had to rescue Him, and now 3 years later his bio is all about how he has a new tv show thats super popular and he has a new entourage of ladies who he considers his '’’’’’comrades’’’’’’’ within the station he founded??? AND AFTER 20 YEARS THEY WERE FINALLY ABLE TO GIVE HIS MODEL JUICY ASS CHEEKS??????????????? NO MORE PANCAKE BOOTY???? THE BOY HAD A GLOWUP AND NO I WONT STOP TALKING ABOUT IT

WHEN I SAY MEOW MATCH THE POSE MOTHERFUCKERS THIS BLONDE BASTARD GETS TO BE IN CHARGE OF THE HUNDRED STAGE BATTLE NOW TOO THIS IS THE YEAR OF THE SPACE PIRATES BAYBEE

[spoilersfm]

*   𝗽𝘂𝘁𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝙙𝙞𝙚 𝗶𝗻 𝗿𝗶𝗱𝗲 𝗼𝗿 𝗱𝗶𝗲   :    violence incited on his buddy boys at a denny’s parking lot? he's On His Way! from his lil cousin's bat mitzvah with a borrowed sword right now.     sound equipment bought on sweet ass deals, babey!       a bike only used to make a point.       that one vine that got you in detention for playing loud on accident in class.       a ride at a pier taken one too many times in a row;   bleary-eyed and reminiscing of a better time where he didn't straight up moan after that first bong hit.         the shocker of an earburn through a movie marathon that you can't say shit to because he's hosting.         "let's start a podcast."  "i will find your parents."       the mole you thought was cancer when you were twelve. .     ／        𝗝𝗢𝗘𝗟   𝗠𝗜𝗧𝗖𝗛𝗘𝗟𝗟   𝗩𝗔𝗡  𝗗𝗬𝗡𝗘.   𝗘𝗦𝗧.   𝟭𝟵𝟵𝟴

named  joel mitchell van dyne.       his parents think they’re on some riverdale shite and named his older brother jason and their two dogs jack and jellybean.     their names? robert and goddamn barbara van dyne.       goes by  joel mainly bc fuck else is coming out of that.       jole the eternal gag and the one that will get your feelings hurt,   mole.

born in jersey city, new jersey.       once a minor threat like every other child in the community until he managed to slap on a ankle bracelet and be on house arrest for his fuckshit at sixteen   /   a feral youth. a juvenile idiot tracking down cars to vandalize right in front of god and everyone because the owner tried to ban him and his brother from a theater in a town nearby.         aged  twenty one,  turns twenty-two in rex manning day april 8.     id’s as a cismale with absolutely no rights!       bisexual with no preferences     /   every hole could be a goal.       romantically there but it’s usually these random bouts of fuck mode that cease into a solid period of i don’t exist to anyone, not even to myself but we’ll run mallrats about it in the bg of a dark room,  stoned and sometimes crying just to cry, in two-days old cum-crusted boxers or stark nude with our hair tied up looking like gollum with a sick bush editing vid essays for cash but it’s fine,  he’s fine.       studies  film at lockwood and is on his way into his third year.       wasn’t really his first choice because college wasn’t but he was persuaded  -  doesn’t regret that shit!       resides in peregrines for the sexy wifi situation and later the general comm of it.       community crew member     /     freelance editor for youtubers and local filmmakers.   u want ur shite edited or need the hookups around town,  he’s there, garbage-humored and broke pay him.    

has   somewhat of an unknown legacy online that summarizes his presence     /    made a viral vine that’s basically a 7-secs porn clip but had an audio of guns getting cocked and gunshots over the oh-so-musical sounds of skin and balls slapping and the eventual facial  -  no one knows he did it and he wasn’t high at the time but that post nut clarity sure was a #moment.      "talent" he very clearly misuses.         trust issues but don’t we all.       a knack for not shutting the fuck up throughout films and it worked for once     /     what started as ridiculous themed movie marathon parties hosted at the van dyne’s basement two years ago turned into a movie commentary channel on yt named van dyne and friends*  ( wc )     ━    think pretty much it type content but less quality;   all jokey,  lighthearted but passionate hate watches,  regular guests of close friends who either love or hate certain movies, genres, etc. hosted by joel and his brother and it’s a fully a hobby he refuses to stress over but managed to have it be a source of income thank god;  primary to his freelancing.         no actual reason as to why he picked tatiana   -   his personal onion on her doesn’t count even if it did influence the last decision so it does nvm  -   a dear friend of his ( wc oh wow look we’ve learned ) got screwed somehow and he was like oh word? say no more baby bitch.        a mishandled anxiety disorder if you couldn’t tell by now     /    been a problem he refused to acknowledge and then he was introduced to oui’d at fifteen ish and that worked until he realized how much he used it to regulate his day to the point where he couldn’t eat at all without getting zooted so it’s less of that now.          a liking for the horrific,  the horny and the artistically crackheaded and you’d be distraught as to what he personally categorizes as any of each.      a jersey accent he couldn’t mask if he tried.         a twitter account he barely uses other than to get recs for comm tracks and tweet dumb shit to delete an hour later for the fun of it but he’s fairly active on instagram.               

𝗪𝗛𝗘𝗪.

is this chaos? u tell me. is everything actually written? of course not but it only took me a few days and my remaining four brain cells holding on for dear life and begging me to go the f*ck to sleep to get it out there + there’s always time 2 flesh out shite on the side! wcs are still a process for me to list down but i do have a bunch in mind  /  would love to bounce a few ideas back at ur muses to see what works ! like this post or hmu in the ims or hmu on disco @ clowncore claudia#5377 where i truly shine as a mess xx

[theforce]

how was salem what did you get and do you have any new favorite stores ?

it was great, i think everyone is fully aware of how much i love it there i got a lot of stuff bc me and my friends are planning on doing a bigger trip next year which probably means no salem trip (we go about 3 times a year) 

so anyways i got a lot this is going to be a long post so i’ll do a read more 

stocked up on lavender and cannabis incense, those 2 are my all time favorites and easy to get but they’re usually cheaper in the shops there than they are close to my house, i got some new resin incenses which are handmade and really high quality that i’m excited to try out 

i got hanging bunches of lavender, grabia and rosemary, i think hanging dried herbs and flowers are so beautiful, i separate them in half and tie the 2 bunches back up with yarn i use one half to decorate my meditation/prayer/ritual/spell casting/whatever you wanna call it space and the other half in spells and smudging the best place for these items is coven’s cottage, it’s on essex and it’s one of my favorite shops, if you step a single foot into that store you’ll know why. 

i got a new raw clear quartz and a new clear quartz ring, i’ve been really into clear quartz recently which is odd to me bc i’ve always loved smokey quartz the most but ?? who knows i got my raw clear quartz from coven’s cottage and i got my ring from a wholesaler who had a kiosk set up on the essex (it’s like a street fair this time of year) when i see a wholesaler i make a beeline bc they actually sell jewelry to shops all around the country in bulk so during times like halloween they set up shop for themselves and they’re able to cut out that middleman price so real high quality silver and stones are available for purchase at like almost half the price AND you can ask about their ethical practices which, if you’re into crystals i’m sure you know about the shotty industry, if human rights are important to you, which they should be, it’s important to buy things that are ethically sourced. 

i restocked on my favorite essential oils from my favorite botanical shop called artemisia botanicals which is right across from the hawthorne hotel they have the biggest range of essential oils i’ve found thus far and i use essential oils in everything from cleaning my house to mixing with a carrier for a fragrance, i use them during baths and in diffusers when i don’t want to deal with the smoke candles and incense bring. my absoulte all time favorite is clary sage but i also love rosewood, lavender and sandalwood 

i got a selenite coaster that has a pentacle and moon phases etched into it, my rings fit perfectly on it, my palm crystals, ect, i saw it and needed it nothing too special there, selenite, citrine, kyanite and one other i can’t ever spell are all self cleaning crystals, they have the ability to cleans are recharge themselves and other stones, having a coaster just makes it easier to place various crystals places the moonlight touches i used to have a bowl which was ideal but i left it outside in a rainstorm and it broke

i got some black salt, that’s used to drive away negative energy or just bad things in general, i put it all around my house, i keep some in my wallet and and in my room for heebie jeebie emergencies, i also got some florida water which i use before pulling cards or doing enchantments to cleanse my hands and head, i like alfazema better but it’s nearly impossible for me to get so florida water is still a great backup 

lastly i have been on the LOOK OUT for the enchanted tarot 25 year anniversary edition bc i dont buy tarot cards online and i thought it was a lost cause but i found it and i am soooo excited i love that deck bc it has enchantments for each card which is important for me since i’ve memorized cards and have personal feelings towards them whether those feelings are bad or good can affect the outcome of a reading, i also got blessed be cards which are just random daily blessings which is nice, i really like oracle cards and all of my angel cards were by doreen virtue and .. she went christian so 

[coalessscence]

HOW HAS YOUR CHARACTER DEVELOPED FROM THEIR ORIGINAL CONCEPT ?

IF YOU HAVE A CANON CHARACTER, answer in the sense of what made you want to play them, how you have come to interpret them differently -

(for both MIRA and HERB, who i consider to be my most well-developed OC and CANON muses, respectively) PART ONE. what thing(s) initially inspired your character ?

mira. i was inspired to create her as a character years ago, when the mentalist was still on tv. the seventh season had yet to air, and there were the usual spoilers of questionable validity going around. some blog wrote a “leaked spoiler” article about how they were going to have the seventh season of the show include an “intellectual equal for jane” and the people i knew in the fandom at that time were pretty unhappy about it, imagining how badly it could be handled, and the possibility of a forced love triangle that no one wanted. i decided to try and figure out what kind of character i wouldn’t mind having as that “intellectual equal” and ended up writing a fic about it- and thusly, mira was born. this is why her default full canon crossover verse is set in the post cbi world at the fbi in texas, and also why i arranged her backstory connections the way that i did at the time.

herb. the reason i decided to write herb came when i got sucked into wkrp in the first place. i had always known about it and liked it well enough, thanks to my parents, but hadn’t seen much of it or been very invested. i somehow ended up finding a channel on youtube with almost every episode posted in nearly uncropped sizes. of course, i began to binge the show, and although everyone on it are my children and i adore them all- herb is.... my type. he’s awful, he’s a jackass, he’s everything you’d love to hate, and in the early seasons he’s written like an antagonist sometimes. but he has a character arc- one of the more notable in the show (aside from bailey’s and venus’), he becomes less of a jackass over time. you learn about his childhood and you see the man who raised him, you see how he interacts with people, and how those ways change over time. and you realize there’s a lot more depth to this character than you thought. and for some reason, i just couldn’t leave that alone- i wanted to bring my problematic son to life.

PART TWO.  how has their personality developed from their first concept ?

mira. my initial concepts for her character were all terrible. i won’t go into great detail about them, but i hadn’t done my research or thought anything through that well. i was probably about fourteen. it was not a good thing. however, the fic universe went through remakes and updates, and i kept updating and adjusting her universe and character as i saw my mistakes in hindsight. even now, outside the world of her OG fic, when i made her blog, i gave her backstory, personality, and all the specific timeline dates and details a major overhaul, and made other small adjustments when i later moved her to this blog. originally, she was a lot more... like jane, to be honest. a lot more shit eating and closed off in a different way- reminiscent of the way that he is in the show. she had very little causation for how she had become who she was in her backstory; a lot of facts with no reasons to back them up. she was more flippant, and she was also much younger, in her early-mid thirties. her imagined style of dress was very different- think of the fashion posts i reblog for ruby nowadays, instead of mira’s fashion tag. the way she spoke was a lot more obnoxious- still with emphasis on sounding sophisticated, but without the casual flair. if you’ve ever written with mira, you know that she has no use for formality; she speaks with proper-ness but she throws out procedure in favor of a more real human interaction. in her original incarnation, she spoke with big words for the sake of it, and used sarcasm past a point of her proper tone. i spent half my time googling synonyms for words, and in fact, most of my rewrite of her OG fic was just me fixing her now cringey incorrect dialogue.

herb. when i first started writing him, i think i focused a whole on on the fact that i knew he was an asshole. that was partly because i had just come off of only writing the sweetheart of the nation, lorraine baines. but, it was also because i was very aware that my love for him as a character caused bias, and that i could accidentally end up purifying him in a way that would bring him out of his character. i knew from seeing it in past experience that fandoms can take a character that has a lot of issues at the source of their personality, especially when the character is from a canon that involves a group of people/friends/family/whatever, and victimize them, blaming exclusively outside sources- perhaps even the character’s friend group- for their faults. i was super against falling into that trap, and i think i may have over compensated a bit, forgetting that in the show, herb does canonically display actual, normal human emotion and speak with more openness about some personal situations to other characters than i imagined he did. i have, over time, become very comfortable writing him, however- very aware of his faults and problems, and the things he’s done to himself, but also aware of what qualities of his are actually good. re-centering myself with the actual essence of his character, rather than stereotyping him in my own writing, is something that i think has improved my portrayal immensely over time.

PART THREE.  how has their appearance developed from their first incarnation?

mira. i was thinking that she still looked about the same, but to be honest that couldn’t be further from the truth. i would show you the “face claim” (read: random, unnamed image i found on google one time) i used to represent mira in the thumbnail of the first iteration of her OG fic, but i don’t have it anymore. however, she was wearing heavy eye makeup, she had mid-length brown hair, but it was styled so that it swept straight up at the roots- a very 90s-grunge look, for some odd reason. remember, this was at the same time as i was hc’ing her wearing frilly dresses and heels everywhere like life was a ballroom. it was a mess and i didn’t know what i was doing. as for how she looks now-

she’s gotten older, obviously. her hair is a conservative middle or side part; her face is more angular than i initially imagined it. her hair is just past her shoulders (although not many of my icons do properly represent this). and her makeup is very much an essentials, 50-products-but-it-looks-like-nothing look. also, for those of you who don’t know, her main official FC is rachel weisz.

herb. i’m afraid i don’t have much to say for him in this category? his appearance has always been determined by his canon representation, and that hasn’t changed at all. very plaid. very terrible. although, i really thought about that one episode of the show where jennifer, a coworker, makes him dress super nice and like... Actually Look Good for a day. his clients who come in that day are convinced that he’s not one of them (a sleaze) anymore and pull their business in search of someone else like them. in trying to regain their trust, we hear him promise, “hey, come back tomorrow and- i promise you i’ll have on a suit that will make you airsick!” it’s made me wonder what point in his character arc did he realize that the way he dressed was genuinely horrifying? whenever he’s been affronted about his clothes, he’s defended them heartily, even well into the final season- past the point where he refers to them as able to make you “airsick”. does that man that he’s now just maintaining the act because he feels trapped in it? and if so- how many other, less trivial things in his life are being maintained for the same reasons?

PART FOUR. what do you think most makes your character unique ?

mira. i must admit that other than people writing canon characters from the show, i have not seen anyone writing a character who can be described as a “mentalist”. i think that mira’s “abilities” are part of it, because it’s like trying to write a telepathic character who doesn’t have any supernatural abilities. she’s just a good guesser who’s studied her craft well. i also think that her backstory is probably a part of it. she has come from a very specific place, and it’s effected her thought processes and personality today in a lot of specific ways. she’s been in a few notable situations in her past, and it does give people writing other muses a lot of options to connect with her in a plotting situation. i think the concept that she’s based on, while having grown and changed exponentially over the years, is still one i haven’t seen done elsewhere, and helps to propel her storyline in a unique direction.

herb. he’s the opposite of everything in his presentation- he’s a serial skirt chaser, who actually really loves his wife and family and does not want to cheat. he’s an asshole who actually cares about people and, in subtle, clumsy ways, tries to help them- as long as it remains a secret. he’s a lot of very inexcusable things- sexist, homophobic, etc. it does, in a way, take some commitment to portray him canonically and know the consequences. a lot of people i’ve tried to plot with just really couldn’t like him, and i don’t blame them. he is, after all, a jackass. he’s just... really not as bad as he likes to act as though he is.

TAGGED BY: i stole this from @machinemotion who did it about 500 years ago ???? and i’ve had it in my drafts forever intending to do it cuz it looked fun and now.... here I be bc I FINALLY HAVE THE TIME LOL whoops TAGGING: EVERYONE WHO SEES THIS ummmm @cbipsychic ...... @piper-aileen-lenox .... @peoplesking ... @violetxsilverxstark and uhhh @innocentmanwithabounty and uhhh idk ?? I FEEL LIKE I DONT KNOW ENOUGH PPL LOL BUUT IF U SEE THIS AND U WANNA DO IT TAG ME CUZ I WANNA SEEEEE

[its-love-u-asshole]

Slipping Underneath [Ch. 1]

Pairings: Kuroo Tetsurou/Tsukishima Kei

Summary: Tsukishima was in some deep shit he realized, but common sense told him he should have been rather happy about the discovery he'd just made. Of course, that didn't stop him from freaking out.

"Tsukki? Did something happen?" Bokuto asked. 

Dejected, the blond lifted his head, giving Bokuto the flattest stare he could manage. "The neighbor downstairs hates my voice."

Rating: T

Tags: soulmates, mythology/sirens AU, some iwaoi and bokuaka thrown in bc why not, first meetings, fluff, Kuroo is a nerd and Tsukki can’t help but be charmed, Siren!Tsukki, Siren!Bokuto 

Note: Yes, I know I started another multichapter, I’m sorry, please forgive these sins of mine. I couldn’t resist a sirens/soulmate AU tho?? I had the sudden inspo and ofc this was born, enjoy! <3 Big thanks to @allykat023 and @emeraldwaves for reading this over! 

AO3

The first time he heard the voice, it was because he'd been marooned on the patio of his apartment. His apartment. It was almost more degrading than when he was sexiled to the common room of his freshman dorms. He was a third year now though, this was his own property damnit.

When Kenma had decided to move into a place with Hinata, Kuroo had been forced to room with a certain overly social setter. He liked Oikawa, he really did. Well, when he wasn't being too dramatic or nosy anyways...

They got along fine, great actually. It was only when Iwaizumi visited from his university every other weekend that Kuroo found himself setting up camp on his spacious, yet boring as hell balcony.

At least the glass was thick enough to drown out any noise...

Kuroo shuddered, remembering the time he'd ventured inside for a glass of water, walking past Oikawa's bedroom...

Yeah, no. He'd learned a lot since then, had come a long way from his days as a young fool (three months ago). Now he prepared his food and drink ahead of time, almost like he was going on a picnic. This way, he never had to hear those...sounds come from Oikawa's room ever again. Even worse, Kuroo was not about to deal with Oikawa's smug face in the morning, knowing he heard everything. At least Iwaizumi had the decency to be embarrassed and smack Oikawa across the head.

So yeah, patio.

It sounded crappy, but despite the loud sex Oikawa seemed bent on having, Kuroo didn't really mind being relocated for a few hours. It gave him time to study, since he was without television or outlets. It was exactly what he needed, and he could count on those nights outside to get all his coursework done for the following week. It was a brutal study session, but it was worth it. While everyone else struggled to catch up on assignments during the week, he could go out, and play video games to his heart's content. Oikawa said he needed to get laid; and while it might've been true, Kuroo wasn't compelled to actively look for a partner right then. If something happened, it happened.

So when the usual Oikawa and Iwaizumi sex marathon finally came along one fateful Saturday night later than usual, Kuroo swore it was fate.

Kuroo had taken his usual chair on the patio, satisfied the weather wasn't too muggy for once. Perfect for studying. He had set out all his highlighters and pens, ready as ever for a night of expert note taking, but as he sank into the chair's cushions with his psychology textbook sitting on his lap, he'd heard it.

And oh how he wish he hadn't.

The melody, if it could be called that, invaded his space, punching his ear drums. The pure horribleness of the voice as it sang was enough to make his head shoot up, his ears straining and begging Kuroo to get away. It was awful enough to make him wonder if someone could die from it. The voice was bad, if he was being nice about it; and oh, he was really trying to be nice about it. But it made his brain melt, and all thoughts of studying disintegrated in favor of escape. Even the sounds of Oikawa getting pounded into the bed were a better option than this torture.

Kuroo almost felt guilty. After all, this was just some random soul who wanted to sing on their balcony. Kuroo had no say in it, and it wasn't like Kuroo's voice was anything to brag about. He should just grin and bear it, but...

Jesus fuck.

How could he possibly work through such a horrid sound?

It was a guy's voice, that much he could tell despite the screeching quality of it. As Kuroo stood to try and find the source though, he became confused. There was no one on either of the balconies beside his, and every second the song persisted, the harder it was to trace it. It was like the sound was all encompassing, coming from every direction at once, burning Kuroo's ear canals and twisting his insides. How was no one else hearing it?

There were quite a few guys loitering around down below the apartments, but they looked like they were having a fine time, blissful even.

Where the hell...

Was he getting pranked?

The song continued as he searched, the rough tones pulling Kuroo like a magnet even though his ears were probably bleeding. Oh well, he still had his eyes. Maybe the price of hearing aids had gone down...

Focus man!

Kuroo groaned, trying to employ the problem solving skills he'd spent years cultivating.

Eventually, and mostly because he couldn't take it anymore, he figured the only place it could be coming from was above him. There was one floor up after his, and since the apartments were dirt cheap, there was hardly any space between them. Risks be damned, Kuroo jumped up without hesitation, grabbing hold of the higher balcony's railing and using his strength to pull himself up. It might've been stupid, and shit he definitely could've fallen to his death. However, that song would drive him nuts and kill him anyways if he allowed it to continue.

Please...make it stop...

Kuroo groaned as he found his footing, easily hooking his legs over the rails after doing so. He was out of breath, and he dared not look at how high up he was or think about how the fuck he was going to get back down. He'd made it. He'd figure the rest out as he went.

As soon as he'd plopped down on the railing, the banshee screeching had ceased, and Kuroo thought he was gonna cry in relief.

Thank god.

Wiping the sweat on his brow, Kuroo looked up, scanning the small patio in seconds until his eyes finally landed on the apartment's inhabitant.

And wow, what a sight.

The blond was frozen where he stood, watering can in hand as he moved to rearrange a pot of tulips, one leg stretched out awkwardly in front of him like he'd been mid-step.

Even in such a ridiculous pose, Kuroo could say the blond was nothing short of stunning. Long legs, pale skin, and warm, golden eyes hidden behind black frames.

He was breathtaking, and Kuroo almost refused to believe such an awful sound had come from such a beauty. Kuroo felt his protests and excuses die in his throat, partly from the fact he was standing in front of a god, and partly because his position did not look good.

Here he was, in stained sweatpants and a sweatshirt, looking like some pathetic second rate burglar while his runway model neighbor seemed two seconds away from running.

It would've been hilarious, had the blond not looked like he was debating on whether to stab Kuroo with the nearby trowel before he left.

Somehow, the thought of a death by garden tool shook Kuroo out of whatever trance he was in, because he managed to find his voice a few seconds later.

"Okay," he began, gradually stepping onto the patio, his ears ringing from their previous abuse. "I know this looks bad, but your singing--"

All of a sudden, the blond groaned, his scowl powerful enough to kill a weaker man. Fearlessly, he grabbed the trowel--called it--and held it up in Kuroo's direction, the threat clear. Come closer, die.

It should not have been as hot as it was.

"How many times do I have to tell you people I'm not interested? Fuck off," the blond hissed, his annoyance clear. Although, given the situation, he was a lot more composed than Kuroo expected. If this was how the other responded to break ins, he was a lot better off than he and Oikawa.

The blond lowered his voice to a mumble, speaking almost to himself rather than to Kuroo as the awkwardness between them intensified. "To think not even living on the top floor helped..."

Huh?

Okay, Kuroo had to find his voice right then and there, lest he be charged with trespassing.

"Um wait, I can explain," Kuroo said, raising his hands in a placating gesture. "I was just--ha, I was trying to study...I live below you by the way so uh, hey there. I'm Kuroo Tetsurou."

Kuroo grinned, hoping his charm would help to win the other over, but all it got him was the most unimpressed stare he'd ever seen. The blond's eye twitched in irritation, his aura just as menacing as before.

Yet still so pretty.

"I don't care who you are, get off my balcony," the other demanded, not letting up on his threatening pose.

Kuroo sighed. Today really wasn't his day. To think he couldn't reassure people as well as he used to...

He'd really have to work on his debate skills if he wanted to pass his public speaking class.

"Ah okay, okay! Sorry, I'll leave. I just came up here because your singing...it was a bit distracting and--"

"I don't want a boyfriend," the blond deadpanned, his scowl deepening.

Oh wow alright, that's random.

Kuroo shook his head, trying to decide what was the next best course of action, considering none of what he wanted to say was getting across. Better just to be upfront about it.

"Um okay, me neither. I mean, I'm not opposed, and you look...wow but shit wait--" Kuroo went on uselessly, and he was getting pretty damn tired of tripping over his own tongue. Not cool. Groaning up to the sky, he clasped his hands together, fixing the blond with the sternest look he could muster. "I just came to ask you if you could please stop singing. It’s making it hard to study, and I need to get this work done."

Kuroo said it so fast, he was worried the blond didn't hear him, especially from the way silence seemed to descend on them again, the other blinking at him in shock. Ah shit, there's the guilt.

The thing was, Kuroo couldn't justify himself beyond that. It wasn't that the singing was just distracting, it was downright terrible, but he was way too nice to come out and say it. He prayed the other would stop without asking too many questions.

The blond's face contorted several times, each expression no less attractive on the other's face, no matter how displeased they were. From shock, to anger, and then back to shock. The other's face eventually settled on pure confusion.

The silence was moving into painful territory now, and Kuroo thought he was was better off retreating to his own apartment, Oikawa's atrocious sex moans be damned.

The blond blinked slowly, his hands lowering until the trowel fell to the floor, the loud clang echoing into the night air. "You...want me to stop singing?"

His voice was bland, cold, but Kuroo could pick up on slightest note of disbelief in there too. It made him wince. Great, this was what he'd wanted to avoid. He had to be careful now, the last thing he wanted was a neighbor who hated his guts.

"Yeah...sorry. I mean it's not like I'm a music critic or anything I mean--"

"Why?" The blond's question was sharp, straight to the point, asking the question Kuroo desperately didn't want to answer. Kuroo only prayed this guy wasn't too sensitive about this kind of thing. He didn't want another ex-theater kid lecturing him about how he couldn't recognize true talent. Been there, done that.

To be blunt or to lie...

Damn his own morals. "It wasn't to my tastes...I guess?" It was so painful I wanted to rip my ears off. "But I'm sure it definitely is to some people." Demons. "I for sure can't sing so--"

"You thought it was bad."

It was less curious and more certain, like an observation, and Kuroo started to feel a bit uncomfortable (and maybe weirdly excited) under the blond's gaze. Those golden eyes might as well have been boring into his soul, searching for...well, he didn't know.

Kuroo swallowed. "Well--"

"Yes or no."

The irritation from the blond was more than noticeable now; and whatever, Kuroo had already botched this whole encounter. "Yeah, it...it wasn't great."

So much for getting this guy's number. Kuroo felt himself deflate a little, expecting the other to start coming at him with much deserved insults. Only, it didn't happen. At all.

The blond nodded his head slowly, and Kuroo's fully recovered hearing picked up on his shaky exhale. Kuroo thought he could read people pretty well based on their mannerisms and expressions, but he didn't have a clue what any of that meant. It was like the blond was shocked, but trying his damn best to not show it.

There was another beat of tense silence before the other seemed to snap out of his daze, his scowl returning tenfold. Kuroo stopped breathing.

"Fine, I'll stop. Can you leave now?"

Kuroo blinked, exhaling all at once as the blond turned his back to him. It was a clear gesture, one Kuroo had no problem reading, and yeah...he'd overstayed his welcome.

Definitely not getting that number.

"Yeah, sorry about that. Thanks..." Kuroo trailed off stiffly, sparing the other one last glance and noticing the tenseness of his shoulders. The guilt was back again, but Kuroo knew trying to fix the situation now wouldn't help. He'd apologize properly some other time.

Turning his attention back to the railing, Kuroo scaled down the balcony back onto his own, his thoughts filled with nothing but his neighbor's face for the rest of the night.

--

This was not good.

Tsukishima stared at the wall as the cake on his plate sat untouched, piping exquisite and begging to be devoured. To think he was actually too distracted to eat dessert. Yeah, not good at all. Absurd too, stupid even. There was no reason for him to be freaking out.

In spite, he glared down at his cake, picking up his fork before stabbing the soft sponge and shoveling a good half of the piece into his mouth. Motherfucker.

The cake tasted sweet, moist with rich frosting and just the right ratio of sponge to cream. It embodied everything he could've wanted from a dessert, and yet his face still set itself in a sour expression.

Tsukishima stomped his foot on the floor, as if it would somehow affect the neighbor below him. The one with the atrocious bedhead, the cause of all his problems.

Annoying.

"Tsukishima, is something wrong?" Akaashi's smooth voice, calm and expectant--because yes, he probably knew there was indeed something wrong--forced Tsukishima out of his thoughts.

Tsukishima glanced up to the kitchen island where Akaashi sat, his posture far too elegant for someone wearing owl patterned sweats. It didn't stop him from being observant though. Tsukishima probably should've been more careful about it; but at the same time, he knew the other would find out eventually.

After more prolonged silence, Akaashi prodded further, knowing it was usually the only way to nudge Tsukishima. “Because you know you can tell me.”

For some reason, it made Tsukishima sigh into the space between them, knowing he’d have to get this off his chest if he wanted to stay sane. Plus, there wasn’t any harm in it.

Tsukishima kept his friend group small yes; but that also meant he held a decent degree of trust for each of the people in it. Akaashi was the best person to go to with these issues anyways, since he tended to be the most rational.

Yamaguchi always shed a good light on things, but he was away at another university. And besides, the freckled boy tended to lean more towards an overly optimistic approach which Tsukishima wasn't too fond of pursuing at this point. He had to be sure first, and even then...he didn't owe anything to anyone.

Setting down his fork, Tsukishima fixed the other with the most neutral stare he could manage, lest he give anything away too soon. Tsukishima clenched his fists, his dull nails managing to leave imprints in his palm. This was humiliating, but he needed to know.

"Akaashi," he began, steeling himself as he willed away another scowl. "Would you mind...listening to me sing?"

The other's grey eyes widened considerably, an unusual event when considering Akaashi's calm nature. “Oh, well…”

Yeah, Tsukishima knew the question was unexpected. He didn’t blame his friend for the shock.

Tsukishima hated singing. It was his least favorite thing to do, if it made the damn list at all. Not to say he didn't love music, but singing was a different story. It attracted attention, it brought unwanted advances. He associated singing with everyone's eyes on him, and he loathed it more than anything. Yet, he couldn't help but sing. It came so damn naturally to him, to the point that sometimes he wasn't aware he was even doing it until someone came up to him.

Or climbed his balcony.

Ugh.

That was the thing...

At the end of the day, he didn't have a choice but to sing. He could very well die if he didn't. That's what happened to sirens.

Cursed with fatally beautiful voices, ones which used to lure men to their deaths centuries ago, sirens both thrived and withered due to their gifts. And of course, Tsukishima happened to descend from a community of them. He blamed his mother.

He had been a siren since the day he was born; and his voice had reached maturity sometime in high school, a powerful weapon. Or well, it would've been, had he not lived in the 21st century. Being a siren was pretty useless now, apart from getting hordes of guys to do the occasional bidding, or for winning singing contests.

In addition to his virtually unnecessary gift, being a siren came with a lot of difficulties. If he didn't sing enough, he'd grow sickly and die; and if he sang too much...he could lose his voice completely.

The former was generally what afflicted his kind in the modern age though. And despite his dislike for singing, it wasn't a problem. Tsukishima had grown used to singing in the privacy of his own home to keep healthy.

However...this issue was a new one, one he'd hoped to never deal with. Being told his song wasn't calming to the human ear...it worried him.

If a siren's voice was no longer pleasing to humans, it meant the siren could be dying.

Tsukishima's pulse sped up at the thought, his future goals and achievements flashing before his eyes as he willed himself to not jump to conclusions. He wouldn't panic, not until it was confirmed.

Akaashi was a human, one who knew about Tsukishima's predicament. He'd be honest with him.

Tsukishima took a few more deep breaths, feeling the anxiety subside a bit as he forced himself to make eye contact with Akaashi again.

If his balcony hopping neighbor thought his singing had been anything less than perfect and ended up being right, it could be Tsukishima's life on the line. That or it was the alternative, the only other explanation for his singing being atrocious, and Tsukishima refused to entertain that idea without eliminating the other options.

God, kill me.

"Sure," Akaashi began, stunned at Tsukishima's request. "But, why do you--"

"Hey hey!" Bokuto's voice boomed through the humble apartment, the door frame rattling along with the wall as he slammed the door shut. "What's goin on?"

Ah, great.

Akaashi lit up at the sound of his boyfriend, although it was mostly undetectable to anyone who wasn't used to the other's subtle facial changes. To anyone else, Akaashi probably looked bored, but Tsukishima could see him practically glowing.

They were disgusting.

Regardless, even Tsukishima couldn't deny the fact they were hopelessly in love. He'd known Bokuto since childhood, having grown up in the same small community of sirens in their hometown. Bokuto was just like him, albeit way more optimistic in nature. Tsukishima didn't think he could possibly grow any happier, until he'd met Akaashi.

Tsukishima couldn't complain then either, since he'd grown rather close to Bokuto's boyfriend as well.

Tsukishima watched them as Bokuto's hand slid along Akaashi's arm, both of them comfortable with the touch, leaning into each other as if no one else existed in the world.

The peaceful expression on Akaashi's face remained up until Bokuto started to hum in contentment, a habit he had never managed to break. Then the setter's nose was scrunching up in distaste, his eyes flashing as if he'd been struck.

Ah, and there it was.

Akaashi clutched Bokuto's shirt with unrivaled insistence. "Koutarou--"

Bokuto snapped out of his daze, kicked from his reality while the guilt washed over him. He'd gotten better at being mindful, but well, it was a siren's instinct to make music. He was bound to slip up once in a while.

Bokuto cut the humming, and he cradled Akaashi's face in apology, placing a loud kiss to the setter's cheek while Tsukishima focused his gaze on the cracks in the table.

Again, disgusting.

Bokuto's voice radiated nothing but sincerity as he pulled away. "Sorry Keiji, I forgot. It wasn't that bad was it?"

"Mm," Akaashi said, and he shook his head, his smile somewhat amused. "It wasn't. You stopped."

Bokuto fist pumped at the accomplishment, looping his arm around Akaashi's shoulders after he'd fully relaxed. His eyes were back to their normal brightness, the concern gone. "Yes! Soon I'll have that down!"

Tsukishima rolled his eyes along with Akaashi, but it was full of fondness.

"Anyways, what are we talkin' bout?" Bokuto slouched further into his chair, his wide eyes homing in on Tsukishima's unfinished cake. "Obviously there's a reason you haven't devoured that."

"Tsukishima wants to sing for me," Akaashi said, tone concerned in a way which made Tsukishima feel silly for actually bringing his issue up. Maybe he was overreacting. "Why--"

"Tsukki," Bokuto hissed, standing up so quickly Tsukishima flinched, his golden eyes focusing in on the blond with an almost predator like accuracy. "Are you trying to seduce Keiji?"

The silence between them would've been comical had Tsukishima had any patience for Bokuto that day.

Are you serious?

Sensing Tsukishima's growing murderous intent, Akaashi jumped in, soothing his boyfriend with a touch to the shoulder. "Koutarou...I doubt that's what's happening."

"But--"

"Oh for fuck's sake," Tsukishima said through gritted teeth. "Can you just listen to me sing? I'll explain after."

Bokuto's sharp gaze morphed into puppy dog eyes in a flash, his mouth forming a pout as if he'd been told he'd be sleeping outside. Tsukishima didn't necessarily like making Bokuto feel bad, after all, they'd grown up together. He was used to Bokuto, found his mannerisms to be rather endearing even, but Tsukishima couldn't take any more interruptions.

To say he was freaking out was an understatement. He had to know what was wrong.

Akaashi's brow furrowed, the concern clearly there, and he nodded. Bokuto must've also sensed the rapid mood change, since he sat down without much complaint, eyes never leaving the blond's.

Well, here goes.

It had been years since Tsukishima had sang for an audience, even for Bokuto, one of his own kind, but he couldn't get shy now. Taking a deep breath, Tsukishima closed his eyes, letting the words flow out of his mouth until he spun a melody all his own.

"Take my hand, come towards the sea, and with every wave, you'll be safe with me. Don't fear the crash, don't mind the rocks, just know I'll guide you past it all." 

The notes formed, slow and sure, and the orchestra in Tsukishima's head began to pick up, the assigned parts and instruments knowing exactly where to jump in, where to fit. This song he knew better than any other, had let it travel and burn itself into his soul. The song flowed, the notes amplified. Sometimes they faded into nothingness, lost in the sea of music he created.

And really, this was what he did love about singing at the end of the day. Not putting people under a spell, not enticing men to do his bidding—though in his high school years it had been fun. No, it was the melodies and magic of the song itself. It calmed him, washed away any troubles until he was like the barren shore. Peaceful, cool, but so alive beneath the surface.

Even someone like him, with his rationality and cynicism couldn't deny any of that.

This he could do forever, but his time might've very well been up, and the thought cruelly brought an end to the lightness in his chest.

Tsukishima ceased, clearing his throat as he opened his eyes. Akaashi hadn't asked him to stop the whole time, so he assumed it was a good sign, but who knew. Sometimes Tsukishima got too lost in his own music, he wouldn't have noticed. Maybe it was so bad, the raven had left the room in agony, or--

"Tsukishima."

His eyes snapped up to meet Akaashi's, catching the sight of dilated pupils as Akaashi came down from the high which sirens could elicit. The haze was still there, the spell just barely starting to undo itself. Akaashi shook his head rapidly, attempting to snap out of it for good.

Bokuto sat next to him, pouting with his arms crossed. Baby.

"Sorry, I feel like my brain turned off for a second there," Akaashi said, holding a hand to his head as his mind began to work again. "I'm not sure what you're worried about though. Your singing is as good as ever, as I'm sure you could see from the effects..."

Tsukishima sighed audibly, uncaring of what his friends thought. He slouched in his chair, the tension rolling out of him. He wasn't dying. His voice was appealing to humans. Nothing about it had changed, and he was going to be okay. His life wasn't over.

Tsukishima felt his relief for about two more seconds before the panic set in. The other panic, the one which came from the alternative reason he had to be worried about his voice.

His singing was fine; it had the same effects it had always had. It was enticing, alluring even. The only human who thought otherwise, lived right below him.

No.

That guy, his neighbor, with his untamed hair and impressive strength. The one who had no qualms about trespassing on someone else's property, the one too polite for his own good.

He had hated Tsukishima's voice. He had been physically pained by the sound of it, and that only meant one thing. Tsukishima wasn't an idiot, he knew. He'd been warned about this all his life.

He'd fucking seen it happen. At the thought, his eyes shot up to Bokuto and Akaashi, looking between them like a starved animal.

Oh no. No. No, nope, not happening.

Bokuto turned to his boyfriend, the peeved expression having never left his face. "Hmph, I can sing just as good Akaashi! I--"

"Yes, yes," Akaashi cut Bokuto off with the softest of smiles, though the amusement was apparent. Tsukishima couldn't take any joy in it, or return the smile Akaashi threw him. "I'm sure you can. Too bad I'll never know."

And it was true. Akaashi would never think Bokuto's singing was anything but atrocious, torturous in fact. Such was the way of a siren's soulmate. The one person who couldn't stand a siren's song was the person they were meant to fall in love with.

I'm going to be sick.

"It's not fair! Tsukishima doesn't even know what it's like," Bokuto ranted, unaware of the internal crisis going on right across the table. "I can't wait til he meets his soulmate, and they think his singing is awf--"

"I don't have a soulmate," Tsukishima said, his voice sharp. He'd been unable to stop himself. He couldn't help it. The realization was barely settling in, boiling inside him. It couldn't be. It was a mistake. "There's no way...."

His neighbor was not his soulmate. It wasn't possible. They didn't know each other at all, Tsukishima had no idea if they were compatible in any way, shape, or form. And while Tsukishima's brain unhelpfully pointed out how it was that way for most people, Tsukishima was bent on finding any reason to nullify this new finding.

This guy had just had hearing issues...or something.

Tsukishima put his head in his hands, knowing he was being childish at this point. He heard Bokuto's chair move, a sign he had gotten up, and seconds later he was most definitely crouched at Tsukishima's side, radiating warmth.

"Tsukki? Did something happen?" Bokuto asked, and it was so unbelievably caring, Tsukishima couldn't take it.

Dejected, the blond lifted his head, giving Bokuto the flattest stare he could manage. "The neighbor downstairs hates my voice."

Saying it aloud hit it home, and Tsukishima's body sagged in defeat, his stomach swirling in irritation and...something else he didn't want to think about. He didn't get butterflies. That was not happening.

Despite the part of him which continued to hope this was all a misunderstanding, he already knew how this would go down from Akaashi's shocked expression and Bokuto's excited cheering. This problem was not going away.

Not by a long shot.

--

It wasn't until Tsukishima was getting his mail the next morning that they met again.

"Hey there," Kuroo said, leaning against the mailboxes with no qualms about keeping a reasonable distance between them. Tsukishima jumped slightly, slamming his box shut a bit too loudly for the hour, stunned by the intensity of the other's eyes.

Well, that and whatever was going on with his hair.

Tsukishima debated walking away without responding, but he felt like this guy wasn't the type to let something like this go. He'd climbed a damn balcony after all; he was obviously capable of being quite persistent if he had something he needed to say.

"Morning," Tsukishima muttered, focusing on the various bills and letters in his hand instead of falling into the trap of the other's stare. It was shockingly difficult, and it pissed him off more. He wasn't supposed to like this guy, despite every other indication that he should. Tsukishima was a stubborn asshole sometimes. If this guy was so special, he could prove it to Tsukishima the old fashioned way. The blond refused to make it easy.

Yet, there were some things he couldn't ignore. Tsukishima used pushing up his glasses as an excuse to sneak a peek at the other every now and again, and yeah fine, he was handsome. Broad shoulders, strong physique, a teasing smile...

It was irritating for a variety of different reasons, but mostly because Tsukishima couldn't find it in himself to hate this guy, a complete stranger.

"So look," Kuroo said, his easy going posture taking a turn towards awkward, embarrassed even. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his sweats, rocking on his heels. "I'm sorry if I offended you the other night. I seriously didn't mean to, it wasn't my--"

"It's fine, it doesn't matter," Tsukishima said, his tone brisk. He tried not to let the flush rise to his cheeks, but he felt like he'd lost that battle from the way Kuroo grinned at him. And well, it was true. It didn't matter. Tsukishima was stubborn, but he wasn't about to blame Kuroo for something he couldn't control. Tsukishima's voice was truly painful for him, and he couldn't resist wanting the pain to stop.

The fact Kuroo actually apologized for his rudeness despite that made Tsukishima's stomach flip, a pleasant tingling traveling up his spine. Tsukishima looked up at Kuroo fully then, causing him to flush in a much similar fashion.

God. This was stupid.

"Ah well, cool. Great!" Kuroo cleared his throat, rifling a hand through his hair. Cute. "Because since we're neighbors and all, I wanted to make sure we...got along."

"Oh?" Tsukishima arched a brow, and he felt the corners of his mouth tug upwards involuntarily. "I didn't realize we were school children."

Kuroo faltered, his eyes widening as if he were a child, and Tsukishima had to hide his smile behind his hand. "Oh, well--"

"And it's not like we're roommates, so there's really no requirement for us to get along," he continued, keeping his voice as level as possible, almost bored. What he said was true after all, but he also just wanted to give the other a hard time. Again, Tsukishima was not going to make this easy. This was who the fates had given him as a soulmate, the one who they thought was there to bring out the best in him. If he couldn't handle this, then Tsukishima would know the universe had made a mistake.

Tsukishima wasn't the easiest to impress. He had high walls which took a fair amount of time to climb over, but it wasn't an impossible feat.

As much as the idea of soulmates intimidated him and made him skeptical, he wouldn't push away a connection if there was meant to be one. He'd grown a lot from his standoffish, cold high school days. He had Bokuto and Akaashi, as well as his family, and he cared for them immensely. However, those connections were natural, not forced.

He'd accept nothing less from anyone, not even his predestined lover.

Kuroo stared at him for a second too long in Tsukishima's opinion, analyzing him. He was fairly shameless about it too, considering the few times Tsukishima caught him glancing below the neck.

Kuroo knew it too, from the way he smirked, slow and leisurely. He knew exactly what he was doing, making his flirtiness clear. What a dork. This side of him had been absent when he'd climbed Tsukishima's damn balcony. Although, he'd said Tsukishima looked "wow," so that was a good indication.

Tsukishima felt his cheeks heat up more, and he cursed himself. So unacceptable.

"What if I want to get along?" Kuroo asked, and wow did he wink at me. He fucking winked at me.

"Then maybe you shouldn't have broken into my apartment."

"Hey! It was just the balcony."

"Trespassing."

"I'm a model citizen."

"Leaving the scene of a crime."

"You asked me to leave!"

"And who will the police trust?" Tsukishima shrugged, not bothering to hide a smirk of his own now that he had Kuroo floundering. It wasn't everyday he found someone who he could banter with so smoothly. Kuroo was downright ridiculous though.

"You're evil you know that?" Kuroo's grin betrayed his words as he spoke, and Tsukishima neither confirmed nor denied the accusation. "Wouldn't have expected that from someone with tulips on their back porch."

Tsukishima grunted while Kuroo laughed at his own joke, all too amused with himself. The laugh wasn't full bodied, but it rang genuine regardless, the sound weirdly sweet to Tsukishima's ears whether it was at his expense or not. Kuroo wiped fake tears from his eyes, prompting an eye roll out of the blond.

"Nah, I'm sure gardening is a menacing field. Ha, get it. Fie--"

"I heard it the first time, please don't make me hear it again."

And with that, Tsukishima walked off, all too aware that he was probably now running late for his first class. He glanced over his shoulder, something tugging at him to turn around and look at Kuroo once more.

It was the first of many mistakes. Kuroo was smiling at him, way too fond for someone he'd just met, dopey almost. It stopped the blond dead in his tracks, his breath stalling abnormally. That look...it was neither fair nor logical in any form.

"Hey, what's your name? I don't think I ever asked," Kuroo said with a soft laugh. "Too busy trespassing and what not."

Tsukishima paused, biting his lip. Normally, he wouldn't give the information away, simply because he didn't know Kuroo too well. But part of him felt the weird inevitability surrounding the situation. Not that they'd end up being anything meaningful to each other, but that this wasn't the last time they'd meet.

"Tsukishima Kei," he answered, surprised there was hardly any hesitation there. It was as if it was natural, intimate even, giving Kuroo his name.

So silly honestly, but the fact didn't erase the feeling. Especially not when Kuroo was smiling at him so openly.

"See you around then, Tsukishima."

The blond didn't answer as he turned, but from the way heat traveled to the back of his neck, he figured he didn't have to.

[boba-t-butch]

ive let more people i know irl follow me here so i try not to get into too much detail about my family situation. and ive recently realized a big part of that was conditioning from my parents where they trained me not to tell people abt stuff at home but that's probably to protect themselves from looking like the shit parents they are.

so anyway ima just write this out and i guess i'll delete later if i feel too exposed but its irritating to keep vagueposting or holding myself back on my own blog. also if you know me irl idc if u wanna talk to me abt this id be fine with it. but like dont treat me with delicacy or pity cuz i fukn hate that.

so my dad has bipolar disorder and he's been arrested/ hospitalized for it multiple times throughout my life because he doesnt like staying medicated. he was off his meds for a while and became unemployed almost as a direct result. when i went home over winter break, i recognized that he was becoming more emotionally volatile and was nearing a manic episode.

i understand how medication for bipolar disorder can negatively impact a person's quality of life and i recognize that my dad has the autonomy to choose whether or not to be medicated. but i also feel that when he is unmedicated, he cannot fulfill his responsibilities to me (and my 14 year old sister) as a father. and now that i'm an adult, i also have the autonomy to choose the relationships i maintain in my life. so i decided, even while i was home over winter break, to stop speaking to my dad if he was going to be off his medication.

the subsequent semester, i did not keep in contact with my family and managed to find a way to stay at my college campus over the summer so i wouldn't need to go home. my older sister is an ex-military republican redneck married to a white trump supporter, my little sister is p chill but she used to pass on any info of my life she could find to my parents, and my mom is an extremely emotionally manipulative/abusive alien conspiracy theorist bible thumper. so i just kinda don't keep in touch with any of them if i can help it.

this summer, my dad went manic and intentionally smashed his pickup truck into another car that had people in it. he put his car in reverse and smashed into them again twice. he'd gotten into an argument with my sister and wanted to show her what she made him do by not listening to him/ disrespecting him.

he was arrested for criminal mischief, criminal assault, and assault with a deadly weapon. at this point, i reached out to my other family members to express support and concern. this kind of thing has happened before, we all saw it coming, we all know if he doesn't take meds it's just a matter of time before it happens again.

i encouraged my mom to divorce my dad and take a portion of his assets (bc she has no education and no source of income) so that she can take my little sister somewhere safe and raise her in a stable environment. i told my older sister she doesnt owe it to him to do him any favors when he's knowingly disrupted her life so much. she currently has a newborn child at home with health complications to worry about as well, so it's not her responsibility to clean up his mess, even if he is mentally ill.

instead, my sister convinced a judge to drop all of my dads charges, send him home to my mom and sister, and his main consequence is just that he's court-mandated to take his medication for a few years (i have no clue how). my mom says she owes him too much so she's staying with him and even leaves him home alone extensively with my younger sister. he has continued to take everything my older sister and mom do for him for granted, even continuing to accuse them for making him go manic by not understanding him enough.

i have continued to refuse contact with my dad, though i'm trying to be there for my little sister more. my older sister and i are trying to navigate how to have a relationship as well. my mom though... my mom is now trying to use me as an emotional crutch because i express sympathy for her bc i know she's in a tough situation. but i also feel like she's neglecting her duty as a mother by not protecting my sister more and that she shouldn't be coming to me for this support when she's been a terrible mother to me. lately she sought reassurance from me because she was feeling worthless and depressed and i havent responded at all, which makes me feel cruel and guilty. but i also refuse to play that role for her.

there's a lot of other random shit happening in my life rn too but honestly im too tired to deal with any of it. im too tired to try to navigate complex interpersonal relationships that hardly matter when im already trying so hard to figure out my family situation.

[sunshineweb]

51 Ideas from 2019

Dear Tribe Member,

Trust 2019 treated you well. It certainly was good for Safal Niveshak. The tribe crossed 60,000 members.

Anyways, right before the year ends, I thought I’d share a handful of ideas I’ve learned, re-learned, and wrote about in the past twelve months. Here are 51 of them categorized under the subjects of investing, learning, and life. I hope you find these useful, as much as I did.

I. INVESTING 1. Don’t Be Blind to Alternative Histories Nassim Taleb writes in Fooled by Randomness –

…one cannot judge a performance in any given field (war, politics, medicine, investments) by the results, but by the costs of the alternative (i.e., if history played out in a different way). Such substitute courses of events are called alternative histories. Clearly, the quality of a decision cannot be solely judged based on its outcome, but such a point seems to be voiced only by people who fail (those who succeed attribute their success to the quality of their decision).

We are blind to alternative histories – those silent events that could have happened but didn’t. In the language of behavioural finance this irrationality is known as Survivorship Bias. The outcome which is visible, ‘survived’ and the ones which didn’t survive are hidden. As Taleb writes –

Imagine an eccentric (and bored) tycoon offering you $10 million to play Russian roulette, i.e., to put a revolver containing one bullet in the six available chambers to your head and pull the trigger. Each realization would count as one history, for a total of six possible histories of equal probabilities. Five out of these six histories would lead to enrichment; one would lead to a statistic, that is, an obituary with an embarrassing (but certainly original) cause of death.

The problem is that only one of the histories is observed in reality; and the winner of $10 million would elicit the admiration and praise of some fatuous journalist (the very same ones who unconditionally admire the Forbes 500 billionaires).

Like almost every executive I have encountered during an eighteen-year career on Wall Street (the role of such executives in my view being no more than a judge of results delivered in a random manner), the public observes the external signs of wealth without even having a glimpse at the source. Consider the possibility that the Russian roulette winner would be used as a role model by his family, friends, and neighbors.

In effect, the general belief is that if the outcome is good, the process and decisions made to arrive at that outcome must have been sound. Alas, life doesn’t follow such straight patterns. The randomness and ‘external factors’ play a defining role in life and investing.

2. Give Due Credit to Luck The world of investing, like most things in life, produces success stories and failures. It’s human nature to wish to copy success. However, the ironic truth is this: To accept success at face value without acknowledging the role of luck is a strategy for failure.

But it’s also important to note that luck, like love, is a verb. It requires dedication and effort and the conviction and courage to act. Like the father of value investing, Ben Graham, wrote –

…behind the luck, or the crucial decision, there must usually exist a background of preparation and disciplines capacity.

3. Avoid Ruin You or me are not the market. Earning the long-term returns of the market, of the past or the future, is not in our control. Managing our risks and avoiding ruin, mostly is.

“Rationality is avoidance of systemic ruin,” Nassim Taleb writes.

Trying to avoid the ruin the stock market system enforces upon people who disregard its workings is rational. Believing that you can beat the system at it, by playing the game mindlessly, isn’t.

Peter Bernstein writes in his brilliant book Against the Gods –

Survival is the only road to riches. Let me say that again: Survival is the only road to riches.

4. Obsession with Outcomes is Damaging Most investment experts selling their services always highlight the outcome – so much return in so many months or years – and never the process they used to get this outcome. This is simply because, while the outcome is there for everyone to see (availability bias), investors rarely ask the question whether that outcome was due to the skill of the expert (a proper investment process) or merely luck.

This is not to say that results don’t matter; obviously they are extremely important in measuring success. But if the results have been largely thanks to luck, they may not come in as expected in the future.

What is more, if you focus only on the outcome, you are less likely to achieve it. Instead, if you focus on the process, the outcome will take care of itself.

But then, as published in here –

Despite the problems of using results as a barometer of decision quality, it remains endemic in investment. We use outcomes as a simple indicator and then weave narratives around these views. We take a difficult problem, simplify it (are results good or bad?) and then create a story to justify the outcome. This pattern of behaviour is evident in a range of poor investment decisions, such as: susceptibility to financial frauds, participation in investment bubbles, performance chasing and excessive short-term trading.

5. Seek Wealth, Not Money or Status Here’s an excerpt from an insightful discussion that Naval Ravikant had with Babak Nivi –

Nivi: What’s the difference between wealth, money, and status?

Naval: Wealth is the thing that you really want. Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. Wealth is the factory, the robots that’s cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program that’s running at night, that’s serving other customer. Wealth is… even money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets, and into other businesses. Even a house can be a form of wealth because you can rent it out, although that’s probably a lower use of productivity of land than actually doing some commercial enterprise. So, my definition of wealth is much more businesses and assets that can earn while you sleep. But really the reason you want wealth is because it buys you your freedom.

So, you don’t have to wear a tie like a collar around your neck. So, you don’t have to wake up at 7:00 AM, and rush to work, and sit in commute traffic. So, you don’t have to waste away your entire life grinding all the productive hours away into a soulless job that doesn’t fulfill you.

6. Warren Buffett’s Checklist I recently came across a video of Warren Buffett talking to a few B-School students on his trip to India in 2011.

The host asked him this question – What exactly goes through your mind when you’re actually making an investment?

Buffett’s reply to this question was brilliant for it contained the crux of everything he has said over the years about how to evaluate a certain business and it’s future economic potential (text in bold and brackets are mine) –

Well, if I drive by a McDonald’s stand or a Kentucky Fried Chicken stand I will automatically think to myself “What is this business worth?”

You know, how many customers can walk in the door (demand, scalability, growth potential)? What kind of gross margins (profitability, pricing power) can they have? How many people do they need (scalability)? How likely is it that another chicken stand opens across the street (competition, entry barriers, moat)?

I mean, all of those things. And that’s true of the chicken stand and it’s true of Google or you name the business. I mean, it’s all about evaluating the economic potential, the economic future of a given business. And most of them you don’t know the answer on (say no to most businesses, because you really don’t understand them).

But every now and then you run into one where you know the answer (simple businesses). But that’s all business is.

It’s what Aesop said a long time ago: “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” (well, that’s the definition of discounted cash flow) You know, that was said in 600 BC and that’s now what’s called discounted cash flow and all that sort of thing. But he saw that and figured it out, you know, twenty-six hundred years ago. And all I’m trying to figure out is if I could take that dollar in my hand: When do I get the two dollars out of the bush (timing of future cash flows)? How sure am I of getting it out of the bush (certainty of future cash flows)? Is there some other bush where I can get three dollars out of it instead (opportunity costs, better alternatives)?

I mean, it’s very basic stuff (investing is simple, you see, but only if you keep it simple). And a lot of times you look at it and you say “I don’t know how many birds there will be in the bush.” (complex businesses, or those that undergo a lot of changes due to nature of industry, competition, etc.) So you go in to the next one until you find the answer (you just need a few good ideas in a lifetime).

Buffett, once more, makes it clear that rather than obsessing with the bewildering fusion of news and noise, you should concentrate on a few key elements in stock selection.

7. Know Thyself Taleb again from Fooled by Randomness –

It certainly takes bravery to remain skeptical; it takes inordinate courage to introspect, to confront oneself, to accept one’s limitations – scientists are seeing more and more evidence that we are specifically designed by mother nature to fool ourselves.

One of the most underrated but among the most valuable skills required to succeed in stock market investing is resilience i.e., the ability to properly adapt to stress and adversity – either in the market or in the businesses one is owning.

How easily can you bounce back from a market crash? What would be your reaction to a sharp decline in your stocks’ prices? How many ‘surprises’ can you withstand in quick succession? How safe are your overall finances in light of extreme stress on the equity component of your portfolio?

As Taleb says, we are anyways designed by mother nature to fool ourselves. But don’t forget what the noted financial writer George J.W. Goodman – who used the pen name of Adam Smith – wrote in his wonderful book, The Money Game –

If you don’t know who you are, this is an expensive place to find out.

8. Keep It Simple, Please In stock investing, often we focus so much on trying too hard that either we never start working on the process of picking up great businesses (seeing the enormity of the task), or we start believing that our immense hard work and knowledge gives us great control over the future of stocks we own.

The reality is that, no matter how hard we try to analyze the intricacies of business, we may not be as important to the results as we’d like to think we are.

Like Seth Klarman wrote in Margin of Safety –

Investors frequently benefit from making investment decisions with less than perfect knowledge and are well rewarded for bearing the risk of uncertainty.

The time other investors spend delving into the last unanswered detail may cost them the chance to buy in at prices so low that they offer a margin of safety despite the incomplete information.

9. Investing’s False Positives The field of medicine has a term called “false positive.” It is an erroneous result that indicates that a given condition is present when it is not. An example of a false positive would be if a medical test designed to detect cancer returns a positive result (that the person has cancer) when, in reality, the person does not have cancer.

While medicine’s false positives often create panic about things that turn out to be nothing to worry about, investing’s false positives create euphoria about things that should have been worrisome in the first place.

And the underlying reason is that most people out there in the stock market judge the quality of their investment decisions by one single factor – the short-term price movement of the underlying security. And that’s exactly what they are looking forward to while making the investment, even while talking about the virtues of long-term investing and the need to ignore short-term price movements.

Noted French writer and philosopher Voltaire said –

It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

10. Doing Nothing is Hard The idea of buying and holding high-quality businesses over a long period of time is simple. Everyone knows that, and even those who don’t practice it appreciate that this works with most high-quality businesses as history has proven time and again.

But then, it’s important to understand that the action of not doing anything over such a long period of time involves hundreds of decisions over months and years that lead to such inaction.

Of course, one way is to buy stocks and forget for 20 years and hope to end up with a fortune. There are quite a few such fairy tales you may have heard of. But the other side of the picture is that countless people have also ended with duds in their portfolios, or vanished companies, when they realized their father or grandfather had bought some stocks and forgot about them for 20 or more years.

11. Being Prepared In one of his lectures published in Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Charlie Munger said this –

Our experience tends to confirm a long-held notion that being prepared, on a few occasions in a lifetime, to act promptly in scale, in doing some simple and logical thing, will often dramatically improve the financial results of the lifetime.

A few major opportunities, clearly recognizable as such, will usually come to one who continuously searches and waits, with a curious mind, loving diagnosis involving multiple variables.

And then all that is required is a willingness to bet heavily when the odds are extremely favourable, using resources available as a result of prudence and patience in the past.

What Charlie says here is that it pays to be prepared in your investing life – prepared not just for the risks that may be lurking around the corner, but also for opportunities that may appear anytime.

Ironically, we are often prepared for none, and that is what causes us grief during the market’s ups (when we keep sitting on the sidelines) and downs (when we are enjoying the madness of the party).

Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote in Letters from a Stoic –

Everyone faces up more bravely to a thing for which he has long prepared himself, sufferings, even, being withstood if they have been trained for in advance. Those who are unprepared, on the other hand, are panic-stricken by the most insignificant happenings.

12. Seek Uncertainty Mohnish Pabrai wrote in his brilliant book The Dhandho Investor –

Wall Street sometimes gets confused between risk and uncertainty, and you can profit handsomely from that confusion. The Street just hates uncertainty, and it demonstrates that hate by collapsing the quoted stock price of the underlying business. Here are a few scenarios that are likely to lead to a depressed stock price:

High risk, low uncertainty High risk, high uncertainty Low risk, high uncertainty

The fourth logical combination, low risk and low uncertainty, is loved by Wall Street, and stock prices of these securities sport some of the highest trading multiples. Avoid investing in these businesses. Of the three, the only one of interest to us connoisseurs of the fine art of Dhandho is the low-risk, high-uncertainty combination, which gives us our most sought after coin-toss odds. Heads, I win; tails, I don’t lose much!

While value investors are typically averse to taking high risks, that’s more a reflection of the price they’re willing to pay for any given investment than the types of situations they most often pursue, which are often fraught with uncertainty.

As businesses constantly evolve and change in response to challenges and opportunities, the lack of clarity around those changes. And the risks inherent in the potential outcomes can cause share prices to diverge widely from underlying business values.

The ability to recognize and capitalize upon that dynamic, and understand whether it’s temporary or permanent, is a key element of what sets the best investors apart.

13. Why Most People Will Never Be Good at Investing …because most people in the stock market, most of the time, don’t do investing, which is…

Thinking how markets work,

Understanding how people behave,

Studying businesses,

Sticking only with what is simple and what they understand, and

Buying stocks at appropriate valuations.

Instead, they are busy…

Envying (others making money fast or losing money slow),

Cloning (others’ stock ideas mindlessly),

Predicting (future of markets, stock prices, and economy),

Fearing (missing out on future gains),

Regretting (past mistakes),

Avoiding (accepting current mistakes),

Denying (reality, especially when it’s harsh), and

Indulging (in useless information and noise)

And if that’s not all, these often lead us to –

Trading (frequently, which adds to our costs),

Averaging down (on bad businesses),

Boasting (about our lucky short-term gains), and sometimes

Trolling (other investors on social media, who have not performed as well as us in the recent past).

With such a busy schedule, where is the time to practice investing?

14. Pay Attention In the story The Adventure of Silver Blaze, Sherlock Holmes asked Inspector Gregory to consider a curious incident involving a dog. Gregory replied that nothing happened, and Holmes proclaimed, “That was the curious incident.” This clue enabled Holmes to deduce that the culprit must have been someone familiar to the victim’s dog. Most people would miss this important clue because most people, like Gregory, pay little attention to nonevents.

Now, some information is always available, but some is always silent – and it will remain silent unless we actively stir it up. In investing, such information that remains silent – or that you fail to notice – can be dangerous to your capital.

To pay attention means to pay attention to it all, to engage actively, to take everything around us, including those things that don’t appear when they rightly should. It means asking important questions and making sure we get answers.

Even when you do this, you may not be able to emerge with the entire situation in hand, and you may end up making a choice that, upon further reflection, is not the right one after all. But it won’t be for the lack of trying.

15. Be a Curator of Stocks, Not Warehouse Manager We spend the first half of our lives adding things, and the second half subtracting most of them.

Investing follows life, and this is also what a lot of investors end up doing. They create crowded warehouses of portfolios in the initial years of their investment careers, realize most of their choices were mistakes, and then they start subtracting vigorously.

Lest you lose out on the positive compounding timeframe, you will do yourself a world of good by respecting and practicing this lesson – of saying no to most things, of not adding a lot of unwanted stocks to your portfolios – early.

In other words, be a curator of stocks, not a warehouse manager.

16. Bharat Shah on Investing Successfully One of the best theories I have read on the importance of investing in high-quality businesses in the Indian context comes from Bharat Shah of ASK Group, who has written a book (sad, it’s not available publicly) titled “Of Long Term Value and Wealth Creation from Equity Investing.”

I recently came across his old interview where he shared his insights on value investing and how he formed his investment process and principles. A passage from the interview reads thus (emphasis mine) –

…successful long-term investing calls for two vital technical capabilities or craft and two personality traits. While craft can be honed and refined by observing and absorbing, character traits have to come from within and be developed.

The two essential skills are: ability to comprehend and grasp the true character and the innards of diverse businesses as well as the ability to value them. Till these abilities are developed, one cannot become a good investor.

The two vital character traits are: discipline (or temperament) and wisdom. Discipline lies in investing only into quality businesses and the temperament of not getting carried away by the fads of the markets and buying such quality businesses only at a meaningful margin of safety.

17. Biggest Financial Regrets One of my favourite financial writers, Barry Ritholtz, wrote about the biggest financial regrets people have. This was based on a survey of over 2000 people by American life insurer giant New York Life, and found these as the biggest financial regrets –

Image Source: Biggest Financial Regrets – Barry Ritholtz Barry concluded thus, and I completely agree with this –

The sooner you begin to accept mistakes are inevitable, stop beating yourself up over them, and just fix what is not working, the faster the compounding can start.

18. No Stock is Safe The bulls may want you to believe this, but no stock is safe.

There are businesses that may remain good (earning return on capital greater than cost of capital) for some time, maybe a long time, but you must not attach infinite values to them.

This is because high returns attract competition, generally causing return on capital to move towards the cost of capital. While such companies may still earn excess returns, but the return trajectory is down.

Everything in this world, after all, is momentary. So, your best bet is to just stick with quality (even that is momentary, just for longer moments that allows time for compounding to work its magic).

The good thing about high-quality stocks is that you can pay up for them (never overpay), expensive looking prices, and still do well till the underlying businesses remain good.

With poor quality, most probably, you have no hope.

19. Businesses will Die Death will happen to all of us and to all of our businesses, and that must not worry you. It’s the stagnation and gradual decline that diseases (bad management, capital misallocation, etc.) bring along, that you must watch out for (and try working backward now so as to avoid them, except for bad luck).

20. Equanimity and Investing When it comes to investing, making money in stocks when everyone is making money in stocks isn’t a big deal. Rather, it’s the ability to handle good and bad times with equanimity, combined with courage and decisiveness, that really matters in the long run.

Of course, most of us simply aren’t wired to be equanimous at most of the times, and it’s terribly difficult to rid ourself of the emotions of ecstasy (when things are looking up) and misery (when things are looking down).

And that’s why ensuring that we avoid all of those ways that can cause us wealth destruction – trading, timing, high fee, inadequate diversification, and leverage – is paramount.

Everything, including our triumphs and disasters, anyways shall pass. But the equanimity with which we allow them to pass will keep us sane always.

As Lord Krishna taught Arjuna, as we wade through the ocean of life, it throws up all kinds of waves that are beyond our control. If we keep struggling to eliminate negative situations, we will be unable to avoid unhappiness. But if we can learn to accept everything that comes our way, with equanimity and without sacrificing our best efforts, that will be true Yog.

So, give equanimity a shot, and see what happens.

21. Five Ways We Destroy Our Wealth It’s common if you are wealthy to worry about losing your fortune due to forces beyond your control. Like market meltdowns or economic stagnation.

But what many of us don’t realize is that our own behavior may be the root of significant losses.

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” goes a proverb. The road to investing hell is paved with bad behaviors, and here are the five roads which initially look like paved with gold, but which often take us towards wealth destruction.

Daniel Kahneman was right when he said this –

A human being is a dark and veiled thing…and whereas the hare has seven skins, the human being can shed seven times seventy skins and still not be able to say: This is really you, this is no longer outer shell. So said Nietzsche, and Freud agreed: we are ignorant of ourselves.

We certainly are.

22. Avoid Stress I recently read this passage from Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness that tells something about why we must avoid stress –

…people who look too closely at randomness burn out, their emotions drained by the series of pangs they experience. Regardless of what people claim, a negative pang is not offset by a positive one (some psychologists estimate the negative effect for an average loss to be up to 2.5 the magnitude of a positive one); it will lead to an emotional deficit.

…people in lab coats have examined some scary properties of this type of negative pangs on the neural system (the usual expected effect: high blood pressure; the less expected: chronic stress leads to memory loss, lessening of brain plasticity, and brain damage). To my knowledge, there are no studies investigating the exact properties of trader’s burnout, but a daily exposure to such high degrees of randomness without much control will have physiological effects on humans (nobody studied the effect of such exposure on the risk of cancer).

…wealth does not count so much into one’s well-being as the route one uses to get to it.

23. Why Value Investing Works Jack Schwager, the author of Market Wizards series, when answering a question on whether value investing works, turned to the wisdom of Joel Greenblatt, one of the foremost experts on the subject.

Schwager quoted this from his interview with Greenblatt –

Value investing doesn’t always work. The market doesn’t always agree with you. Over time, value is roughly the way the market prices stocks, but over the short term, which sometimes can be as long as two or three years, there are periods when it doesn’t work. And that is a very good thing.

The fact that the value approach doesn’t work over periods of time is precisely the reason why it continues to work over the long term.

24. Patience Wins Most people participating in the stock market don’t really understand what they are doing. This is especially when making money gets quick and easy, and they are doing great at it.

Like Aesop’s wolf in sheep’s clothing, they play a role contrary to their real character, which often leads them to the slaughterhouse.

However, the lack of patience of such people to invest with a long-term horizon creates the opportunity for the few committed to long-term holding periods.

In the battle between impatience and patience, the latter wins.

25. Eternity and Investing The Heilbrunn Center for Graham and Dodd Investing created a wonderful video in 2013 titled ‘Legacy of Ben Graham,’ which contains bytes from some of his students on how Graham’s teachings changed their lives.

Marshall Weinberg, one of the students from Graham’s class said that the biggest lesson he drew out of that class was on long-term thinking. Here’s what he said –

One sentence changed my life…Ben Graham opened the course by saying: ‘If you want to make money in Wall Street you must have the proper psychological attitude. No one expresses it better than Spinoza the philosopher.’

When he said that, I nearly jumped out of my course. What? I suddenly look up, and he said, and I remember exactly what he said: ‘Spinoza said you must look at things in the aspect of eternity.’ And that’s what suddenly hooked me on Ben Graham.

Spinoza actually said, “Sub specie aeternitatis,” which translates to “under the aspect of eternity,” or “from the perspective of the eternal.”

Critics of this idea may believe that with such thinking, there is no reason to believe that anything matters. But where Spinoza may be coming from is the idea that, in the larger scheme of things, nothing matters, which leads us to put our pains and struggles – including, as investors – into perspective.

26. Types of Managements People come in different shades, and managers are people.

Here are three different types of management (there may be more, but let’s go with these three for now), and my thoughts on how you may want to deal with them when it comes to investing in the businesses they manage.

Most of us overlook the human aspect of operating a business, yet, in most cases, the future success of a business is directly tied to the quality of the people managing its affairs.

27. Skin in the Game Having skin in the game means being exposed (equally as other stakeholders) to both positive and negative consequences of an outcome which was made possible by your decisions/actions/approval.

Superficially, the concept of ‘skin in the game’ may look like a case for morality in human transactions but if you go deeper, you will find that it’s a wonderful trick for improving our own decisions.

When you own 50 stocks and one goes to zero, your portfolio isn’t going to move down by more than 2 percent (assuming you had equal allocation for each stock). Which means you’re not really bothered about a couple of bad decisions for it’s not going to create meaningful damage to your net worth. However, when you run a relatively concentrated portfolio of 10 stocks, you’d be more careful about choosing those stocks. Won’t you?

28. It’s Not Supposed to Be Fair Warren Buffett had high regards for David Sokol. Over the years Sokol established a reputation inside Berkshire Hathaway as Mr. Fixit. Buffett often referred to Sokol as a terrific manager, a brilliant dealmaker and a huge asset to Berkshire.

In 2011, Sokol abruptly resigned. It was speculated that his resignation was because of insider trading allegations. For a second put yourself in Buffett’s shoes and imagine how you would feel when one of your most trusted business partners who has worked with you closely for decades behaves in a totally unexpected and undesired way? Like Sokol did.

When asked in one interview if he had felt betrayed by Sokol’s behaviour, Munger replied —

It’s not my nature … when you get little surprises as a result of human nature … to spend much time feeling betrayed. I always want to put my head down and adjust. I don’t allow myself to spend much time ever with any feelings of betrayal. If some flickering idea like that came to me, I’d get rid of it quickly. I don’t like any feeling of being victimized. I think that’s a counterproductive way to think as a human being. I am not a victim. I am a survivor.

The world around us is largely a soup of random events loosely connected by a few broad patterns. And one of those patterns is that the universe doesn’t care for any individual’s personal agenda.

If your investment journey has thrown a few bad apples your way, if you feel that the world is not fair then be reminded that the world is not supposed to be fair. It’s not supposed to be fair in your favour or in anyone’s favour.

29. Avoid Multiplying by Zero Two academicians were debating on the superiority of their respective fields of study.

“What would you do if I brought Alexander The Great’s army in front of you?” The history professor challenged.

The mathematician rolled his eyes and replied, “I’ll enclose the army in a bracket and multiply by zero.”

In an additive system, each component adds on to one another to create the final outcome. Such systems are unaffected when they encounter a zero. Multiplicative systems, on the other hand, are non-linear because anything times zero must still be zero, no matter how large the string of numbers preceding it. A zero can wreak havoc on multiplicative systems. Like it did to Alexander’s army.

Shane Parrish, on his excellent blog, explains the functional equivalent of multiplicative system in the world of business –

Most businesses, for example, operate in a multiplicative system. But they too often think they’re operating in additive ones: Ever notice how some businesses will add one feature on top of another to their products but fail at basic customer service, so you leave, never to return? That’s a business that thinks it’s in an additive system when they really need to be resolving the big fat zero in the middle of the equation instead of adding more stuff… General Motors, founded in 1908 by William Durant and C.S. Mott, came to dominate the American car market to the tune of 50% market share through a series of brilliant innovations and management practices, and was for many years the dominant and most admirable corporation in America. Even today, after more than a century of competition, no American carmaker produces more automobiles than General Motors. And yet, the original shareholders of GM ended up with a zero in 2008 as the company went into bankruptcy due to years of financial mismanagement. It didn’t matter than they had several generations of leadership: All of that becomes naught in a multiplicative system.

Benefit of looking at the downside or what can go wrong is efficiency, writes Peter Bevelin, “Take investments as an example – If you first eliminate what doesn’t work or what won’t achieve what you want, you don’t have to spend a lot of time and attention of analyzing the company. If there is a huge downside – for example a catastrophe risk of the key factors that are needed for success aren’t there or any other disqualifying factors like no sustainable advantage, bad and untrustworthy management of something else – just say ‘no thank you.’”

II. LEARNING 30. Being Average in the Age of Alpha Our society and culture values high achievement in every area of our lives. We want to become alpha men and women, have the brightest careers, accomplished children, ideal bodies, investment performances that beat everyone, and financial prosperity that leads us to possess more stuff than others.

Amidst this, being satisfied with having “enough” is considered shameful. Being unambitious is considered lazy. Thinking “I have enough” is a sin. “Average” is a dirty word.

I recently read an article written by one Krista O’Reilly, which echoed exactly what I have felt about being average all my life –

The world is such a noisy place. Loud, haranguing voices lecturing me to hustle, to improve, build, strive, yearn, acquire, compete, and grasp for more. For bigger and better. Sacrifice sleep for productivity. Strive for excellence. Go big or go home. Have a huge impact in the world. Make your life count.

But what if I just don’t have it in me? What if all the striving for excellence leaves me sad, worn out, depleted? Drained of joy. Am I simply not enough?

31. Two Big Lessons from History I believe there are two things that have stood the test of time, and that apply to everything we do in life, investing, work, everywhere –

We have much less control over the future than we hope, and that it will always surprise us (surprisingly!). We can’t control what would happen to us or our investment portfolios, we can’t control what people around us would say or do, and we can’t even fully control our own bodies, which would get damaged and sick and ultimately die without regard for our preferences. In fact, much of our unhappiness is caused by thinking that we can control things like these that, in fact, we can’t.

We have far more ability to make an impact than we expect. And this ability is more important than we can imagine. All it requires for us is to be learning and adapting machines, be sensible in our decision making, keep things simple, and trust the role of sincere hard work. Some people are aware of it; most are not. Frankly, it is easier to sit on the sidelines and whine about the stuff we can’t control (like stock prices) than to own up to what we do control (like our process of investing).

In short, while we can’t control the future, we can be courageous enough to jump into life with both feet and take responsibility for how we would like to mold it (without trying to control it), and how we would react to what happens to us on the way.

No success guarantees here, but history proves that’s how the world has always worked.

32. A More Beautiful Question Since early childhood, most of us learned that our parents did not like us asking many questions and that only authority figures – most grown-ups – had the right to ask them. The result was that we stopped questioning things and accepted what we saw, heard, and were told with meek acceptance.

Sadly, this approach worked well in the industrial era, but proves futile in the knowledge era, because it compromises our ability to think and understand deeply.

In his book, A More Beautiful Question, which I glanced through recently at a bookstore, Warren Berger led me to the importance of asking thoughtful, ambitious “beautiful questions” — the kind that can help us grow into happier and more useful human beings. An insightful passage from the book reads thus –

We’ve transitioned into always transitioning…In such times, the ability to ask big, meaningful, beautiful questions – and just as important, to know what to do with those questions once they’ve been raised – can be the first step in moving beyond old habits and behaviors as we embrace the new.

In the modern era, we must use unfamiliar tools in our attempt to take on new challenges without clear instructions, and with the clock ticking. In such times, Berger writes –

…questioning…will be even more important in helping us figure out what matters, where opportunities lie, and how to get there.

“Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers,” said Voltaire. Now, more than ever, the quality of our lives depends on the quality of our questions.

33. How Not to Bet 90-year-old Jeanne Louise Calment struck a deal with a forty-seven-year-old lawyer named André-François Raffray. Raffray agreed to pay a low monthly subsistence payment of 2,500 francs to Jeanne in exchange for the right to own Jeanne house when she dies. The ninety-year-old French woman had already exceeded the French life expectancy by more than ten years. She could die any day.

Ms. Calment turned out to be the biggest outlier in human history. When she died aged 122, her age at death exceeded the lawyer’s age at this death by forty-five years. He ended up paying Calment the equivalent of €140,000. That was more than double the apartment’s value.

Where did Raffray go wrong? His blunder was in taking the statistics and applying it to a sample size of one.

Legendary investor, Howard Marks relates a funny story his father told him about a gambler who bet everything on a race with only one horse in it. How could he lose? “Halfway around the track, the horse jumped over the fence and ran away. Invariably things can get worse than people expect.”

Jeanne and Raffray’s story has a valuable lesson for investors. Never bet the farm on a single stock no matter how certain you are about the outcome. You never know when the luck hands you the equivalent of a crazy horse or a supercentenarian.

34. Possessing Vs Pursuing I believe our lives are not defined by what we possess, but by what we pursue. History has ample proof that it is not what people (like Alexander and Hitler) have tried to possess, but what people (like Einstein and Gandhi) pursued that brought meaning to their lives and to those around them.

“I enjoy life,” Seneca said, “because I am ready to leave it.”

In his book On the Shortness of Life, Seneca wrote this –

As far as I am concerned, I know that I have lost not wealth but distractions. The body’s needs are few: it wants to be free from cold, to banish hunger and thirst with nourishment; if we long for anything more we are exerting ourselves to serve our vices, not our needs.

Imagine if we can unburden ourselves of 90% of our worldly goods, it should not be difficult to leave the remaining 10% behind?

35. What Stories Do You Believe? A story is a very effective tool to package any message or an abstract idea. Stories themselves are unimportant. What’s more important is the idea the construct of a story is enclosing inside it. An idea doesn’t stick well if it’s not packaged in the form of a story.

Our experience of the world is almost completely derived from the stories we have told ourselves.

Celebrated historian Yuval Noah Harari writes —

Over the years, people have woven an incredibly complex network of stories. The kinds of things that people create through this network of stories are known in academic circles as ‘fictions’, ‘social constructs’ or ‘imagined realities’. An imagined reality is not a lie. Unlike lying, an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world. Most millionaires sincerely believe in the existence of money and limited liability companies. Most human-rights activists sincerely believe in the existence of human rights.

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.

Take a pause and question yourself, “What stories do I believe in about the reality and have they served me well?”

36. Writing is a Thinking Tool Writing, apart from being a communication tool, is a thinking tool too. Famous author, Dan Pink, recommends – “write things to figure out your thoughts”.

Writing is a powerful weapon for focusing thoughts. The more you write, the more precision of thought you build. It allows you to take fuzzy thinking and distill it into precise line of thought. If you want to think better you have to start writing your thoughts.

When Michael Mauboussin posed the question to Daniel Kahneman, what is a single thing an investor can do to improve his or her performance, he said –

…go down to a local drugstore and buy a very cheap notebook and start keeping track of your decisions. And the specific idea is whenever you’re making a consequential decision, something going in or out of the portfolio, just take a moment to think, write down what you expect to happen, why you expect it to happen and then actually, and this is optional, but probably a great idea, is write down how you feel about the situation, both physically and even emotionally. Just, how do you feel? I feel tired. I feel good, or this stock is really draining me. Whatever you think…When you’ve got a decision-making journal, it gives you accurate and honest feedback of what you were thinking at that time.

Writing is a thinking exercise and it acts as a shield against the mental rust.

37. Opposite of a Good Idea Both Amazon and Apple are technology companies with close to trillion-dollar market cap each. Amazon sells products as cheap as possible. Apple prices its devices as expensive as possible.

In marketing, there are two equally potent, but completely contradictory, ways to sell a product. Luxury goods offer the promise of owning something which can’t be owned by everybody, i.e., a scarcity bias informs the worth of the product. And we also find comfort in buying stuff which has been rated high by millions of others, i.e., we look for social proof in making our decision.

Similarly, two opposite points of view can both be rational without violating any laws of logic or physics.

Remember, situations where we get two accounts of the same event, but the versions are dramatically different, it’s because they’re informed by different facts and perspectives.

In other words, understanding the context is very important before announcing your verdict on what’s right or wrong.

38. Curiosity Kills the Cat, but You’re not a Cat Sometimes, when you’ve figured out the answer to a question, you realize that the path between the question and its answer was more interesting than the two endpoints.

Which means the journey that your curiosity takes you through becomes more rewarding than the end result. And the great thing about following your curiosity is that no one can stop you and you can keep going.

Follow the process. And the process is — keep scratching the itch of a probing mind and never letting the fire of inquisitiveness to die down.

Put simply, it doesn’t matter what question you begin with. What matters is —

How rigorously you chase the clues,

What assumptions you make to simplify a complex problem and transform it into a more useful one, and

How long you’re willing to remain discontent with your discoveries.

To expect to begin your quest with only intelligent questions could be overwhelming and you may never get started.

So, start small, start stupid and let your curiosity take you places.

39. Risk of Avoiding the Non-Risk In 2014, an AirAsia flight crashed into Java Sea killing all 162 people on board. Investigations revealed that it was caused by a pilot error because he performed a non-standard reset of the onboard flight control computers. Why did he do that? Because he wanted to get rid of a non-critical warning light that was flashing on his panel.

The gap between what’s risky and what feels risky is significant. The perception of risk is often misplaced in most people’s head.

Nick Maggiulli writes —

…you can hold 100% bonds and experience little short term volatility (i.e. low risk right?), but you now risk not having enough principal in the future after your portfolio battles against the scourge of inflation for multiple decades…remember that you are always taking risks. The key is understanding what risks you are taking and when you are taking them.

Risk and the perception of risk are two different beasts. What doesn’t seem to hurt in the short run lulls people into complacency and just when they feel the safest the storm of accumulated risk arrives with no advance notice and causes the blow-up.

III. LIFE 40. Weathering Life’s Storms In Kafka On The Shore, Murakami wrote –

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You’ll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

41. Dealing with the Scary World In Aaron Thier’s wonderful new novel, The World Is A Narrow Bridge, there is a scene where Eva and Murphy, the two young prophets of the god Yahweh, are sent on a mission that terrifies them. As they begin the mission, Eva and Murphy are approached by Satan, who has been sent by Yahweh, to give them their final instructions. After Satan gives the instructions, he begins to leave for his next mission:

“You have to go so soon?” says Eva. “Right away?”

She looks devastated. Murphy, too, is unhappy. Satan frowns and chews on his lip. He doesn’t like to leave them like this.

“I’ll teach you a trick,” he says. “I’ll teach you an incantation that will protect against despair. If things are dark, and I’m not around to help, you can repeat it a few times and it’ll help.

It would go something like this: ‘The world is a narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to be afraid.’”

Murphy and Eva both repeat this very slowly. Eva says, “That’s lovely.”

Satan nods. “Just repeat it to yourself when things are bad. You could try different translations too. ‘Do not make yourself afraid, the whole world is a narrow bridge.’

The point is this life we’re living—this world we inhabit—is a scary place. If you peer over the side of a narrow bridge, you can lose your heart to continue. You freeze up. You sit down. So too with life. If we think too much about the journey we have to make, the one that begins with the trauma of birth and ends with the tragedy of death, the one that is so perilous and unpredictable, we’ll never make it.

The important thing is that we are not afraid. That we don’t overthink things. That we don’t give way to fear, as the Stoics tell us over and over again. Just repeat it to yourself—The world is a narrow bridge and I will not be afraid—and keep going. Like the thousands of generations who have come before you.

42. Life’s Purpose and Meaning Tuesdays with Morrie was one of the best books I read in 2019. In one passage, the author wrote something that resonated well with me –

So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important. This is because they’re chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.

43. Hope and Fear Seneca wrote –

Limiting one’s desires actually helps to cure one of fear. ‘Cease to hope … and you will cease to fear.’ … Widely different [as fear and hope] are, the two of them march in unison like a prisoner and the escort he is handcuffed to. Fear keeps pace with hope … both belong to a mind in suspense, to a mind in a state of anxiety through looking into the future. Both are mainly due to projecting our thoughts far ahead of us instead of adapting ourselves to the present.

44. Power of Meditation Yuval Harari, the author of Sapiens, wrote this beautiful passage in his book –

According to Buddhism, the root of suffering is neither the feeling of pain nor of sadness nor even of meaninglessness. Rather, the real root of suffering is this never-ending and pointless pursuit of ephemeral feelings, which causes us to be in a constant state of tension, restlessness and dissatisfaction. Due to this pursuit, the mind is never satisfied. Even when experiencing pleasure, it is not content, because it fears this feeling might soon disappear, and craves that this feeling should stay and intensify.

People are liberated from suffering not when they experience this or that fleeting pleasure, but rather when they understand the impermanent nature of all their feelings, and stop craving them. This is the aim of Buddhist meditation practices. In meditation, you are supposed to closely observe your mind and body, witness the ceaseless arising and passing of all your feelings, and realise how pointless it is to pursue them. When the pursuit stops, the mind becomes very relaxed, clear and satisfied. All kinds of feelings go on arising and passing – joy, anger, boredom, lust – but once you stop craving particular feelings, you can just accept them for what they are. You live in the present moment instead of fantasising about what might have been. The resulting serenity is so profound that those who spend their lives in the frenzied pursuit of pleasant feelings can hardly imagine it. It is like a man standing for decades on the seashore, embracing certain ‘good’ waves and trying to prevent them from disintegrating, while simultaneously pushing back ‘bad’ waves to prevent them from getting near him. Day in, day out, the man stands on the beach, driving himself crazy with this fruitless exercise. Eventually, he sits down on the sand and just allows the waves to come and go as they please. How peaceful!

45. Karma One of the best books I read this year was No Shortcuts to the Top. This is an autobiography of Edmund Viesturs, wherein he documents his 16-year journey summitting all 14 of the world’s eight-thousander mountain peaks (more than 8,000 meters above sea level), and his strategies to manage risk in extreme environments.

In one beautiful passage from the book, Viesturs wrote –

Although I remain uncertain about God or any particular religion, I believe in karma. What goes around, comes around. How you live your life, the respect that you give others and the mountain, and how you treat people in general will come back to you in kindred fashion. I like to talk about what I call the Karma National Bank. If you give up the summit to help rescue someone who’s in trouble, you’ve put a deposit in that bank. And sometime down the road, you may need to make a big withdrawal.

46. Widening our Circles of Compassion Long before Carl Sagan wrote of compassion as our only mechanism for moving beyond “us vs. them,” Einstein wrote in 1950 –

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

47. Humility In The Apology, the Greek philosopher Plato wrote that the oracle at Delphi had pronounced Socrates the wisest man in Athens.

No one was more astonished and disbelieving than Socrates himself. So, he immediately set out to disprove the oracle by finding a wiser man. Here is what Socrates found as he met a few supposedly wise men –

I went to one who had the reputation of wisdom, and observed to him – his name I need not mention; he was a politician whom I selected for examination – and the result was as follows: When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and wiser still by himself; and I went and tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me.

So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away: Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is – for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him.

Then I went to another, who had still higher philosophical pretensions, and my conclusion was exactly the same. I made another enemy of him, and of many others besides him.

In the end, Socrates discovered he was indeed the wisest man in Athens. Not because of how much he knew, but because he was the only one who understood how much he did not know.

Knowing that you don’t know is the dawning of wisdom.

Knowing that you don’t know, accepting it and not being ashamed about it is the start of a continuing journey of wisdom.

Recognizing the darkness is the prerequisite for bringing on the light. Only when the darkness is brought out of hiding does the light have the opportunity to illuminate it.

48. Meaning of Life One of the best books I have read on the pursuit of the world’s highest peak, Mount Everest, is George Mallory’s Climbing Everest. George was possibly the first man to summit Everest (nobody knows whether he did it), almost 30 years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay began their ascent. It was during his third expedition to the Everest that he lost his life, last seen about 800 feet from the summit.

Anyways, all his writings on climbing are collected in Climbing Everest, which started out as letters to his wife Ruth. One of my favourite parts from the book is when George shared his response to one question asked by a journalist about why he would risk his life to attempt to reach the Everest.

His profound response outlines an undeniably powerful way to perceive life –

People ask me, ‘What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?’ and my answer must at once be, ‘It is of no use.’ There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron…

If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go.

What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.

What a beautiful, inspirational thought!

Life is never perfect. And as George wrote, living is not just about eating and making money.

Facing adversities and challenges head on, and stepping away from what is comfortable and familiar to us and into the unknown, is what often brings us real joy.

That’s what gets us life’s real worth.

49. Triumph and Disaster One of the most life-changing books I have ever read is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. The book is a chronicle by Frankl of his experiences as a German Nazi concentration camp inmate during World War II.

In this book, Frankl describes his psychotherapeutic method, which involved identifying a purpose in life to feel positively about, and then immersively imagining that outcome.

The central theme of Frankl’s book is ‘survival.’ Although he witnessed and experienced horror, the book focuses less on the details of his own experience and more on how his time under Nazi rule showed him the human ability to survive and endure against all odds.

As Frankl wrote, he saw the lowest parts of humanity while in the camps. He saw fellow prisoners promoted to be in-camp guards turning on their fellow prisoners. He watched as they beat their lifeless, malnourished campmates. He watched sadistic guards treating them as if they were lower than animals. But he also saw individuals rising up like saints above it all.

The part that impacted me the most from the book was this –

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves…Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Life (investing included) isn’t easy. And unlike, what we imagine in both scenarios of triumphs and disasters, life isn’t supposed to move in a straight line of happiness and smiles, or sadness and pain. It’s not supposed to stay the same, just like you’re not supposed to stay the same.

Life is evolving and changing. It is a constant surge of ups and downs, twists and turns, and as Rudyard Kipling said, “…triumphs and disasters.” Like you have your happy and blissful moments, you are supposed to feel pain, get hurt, and experience losses occasionally. And some of them can be really bad!

Now, that does not mean that you deserve every bit of the sadness, defeats, and tragedies that life hands over to you. It’s just part of the journey that we are walking through. It’s just part of what makes us human.

50. Meditating on Mortality Meditation on mortality (that we are going to die one day) is one of the oldest practices in all Buddhist traditions. In the words of the Buddha, “…of all the footprints, that of the elephant is supreme. Similarly, of all mindfulness meditation, that on death is supreme.”

But why should we contemplate our own death while we are still alive?

“It cures you,” the Bhutanese say. Not just the Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, even Stoicism talks about Memento Mori that is the practice of reflection on mortality, especially as a means of considering the vanity of earthly life and the transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits.

Now, the thing about meditating on your own mortality is that it doesn’t make life pointless. Instead, knowing that you will die one day creates priority and thinking about it helps you live with a more positive perspective. So you can focus on what’s important.

Death is, however, a subject mostly shunned by our cultures and societies. Nothing explains this resistance better than what the American actor and comedian Woody Allen said in one of his movies, “It’s not that I’m afraid of dying; it’s just that I don’t want to be there when it happens.”

51. What Papa Taught Me I lost my father late this year. Papa was a genuinely good man – good in a pure, innocent, unfailing way. He wanted, more than anything, to do good in the world, to always do the right thing. That is one attribute I picked up from him, and I thank God I did that.

Another thing I learned from Papa was that the best life one could live was not one in which a person did big, great things that influenced the lives of millions, but one in which you made a difference in the part of the world you touched, no matter how small.

He said that a life in which you helped only one person because that was the only opportunity you had to help someone else was just as great a life as that of someone who changed the lives of millions.

Perhaps the best way I can celebrate Papa’s life is to try as hard as I can to walk in the world with the same compassion, humility, love, and joy that he carried with him so that the light of his life will not extinguish even after the passing of his mortal body.

“Your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life,” said Chuck Palahniuk, the noted American fiction novelist.

Papa, I realize now, gave me his life. I hope I stand up to it.

Thank You Before I close, let me share with you the Serenity Prayer that has helped me a lot in facing my personal, professional, and investing turmoils. I am sure if you keep this prayer close to your mind and heart, it will help you face your own turmoils well, including those related to your investing.

The Serenity Prayer

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.

~ Reinhold Niebuhr

I wish you a happy, healthy, and peaceful 2020.

With respect, Vishal

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