#i feel bad for it doing so poorly in the box office

[the-californicationist]

he opens the mail

Captain Price opens a package, thinking it’s intel, but it’s a sex pollen. The only cure? Your pussy, apparently.

Warning: sex pollen tropes, extremely dubious consent, attempt at satire?, angry john price

“We’re never going to make this deadline. Laswell’s gonna kill me,” you complained, burying your head in the pile of envelopes and packages strewn over your desk. 

“Did this to yourself, lass. Shoulda been keepin’ up with intel duty. Wee bit at a time, ‘s what I say,” Soap patted you on the shoulder, feigning pity. 

You spent hours combing through the documents, and by the time everyone had gone to bed, your fingers were covered in paper cuts, and your vision was blurry from squinting at the poorly scrawled Cyrillic words. 

You thought you were alone, and as you stood up to stretch and refill your coffee mug, Captain Price opened up the office door, scaring you half to death. 

“Oh, hey Corporal,” he smiled and then furrowed his brow, “What are you still doing here?”

You sighed, pointing to the piles of documents,

“Laswell’s intel backlog. I’m the only one with a Level 3 linguistics cert for Russian, so here I am. Gonna be an all-nighter.”

He closed the door and sat down across from your seat, digging into the pile, 

“I’m Level 3. Let’s finish it.”

“Captain, you don’t have to do that. I’m sure you’ve got more important things…”

Price shook his head, taking off his hat and hanging it on the chair back,

“Nah, tha’s alright, love. I’ll help ya. Get us a tea, yeah?”

You knew how he took his tea, and you hated that you did. Secretly, you were obsessed with him. He was always around, smelling like balsam wood and tobacco, looking like a gladiator, huge and capable in the most masculine way. It was hard to concentrate when he was nearby. Now that he had offered to help, you had to grin and bear it. 

You worked together for a while, chatting, even laughing. It was nice. You had so much in common, the conversation flowed easily, and you found yourself much more at ease. Finally, three packages remained. You opened the first one and found little more than phone records for a local library. Unhelpful to say the least. Price opened a water bill, and he recognized the address of a recent Konni base location. Any intel at this point felt like a celebration. Then, the final box. 

“Go on then. Show us the ending,” he smiled, handing it to you. 

“Couldn’t take the joy of ripping up the last letter, Captain. Be my guest,” you smiled. 

He chuckled, tearing into the envelope. In a flash, bright pink powder sprayed him directly in the eyes, and he writhed in pain, pinching them shut, his whole body going stiff. 

“Fuck me!” He shouted. 

“Hang on,” you ran over to the sink in the kitchenette, “Here’s some water. Get that shit out of your eyes.”

“Don’t,” he moved away from you like you were on fire, “Don’t touch me. Might be contagious.”

Your chest was rising and falling with your labored breathing, and you were immediately worried. You reached for your phone and called Laswell.

“Laswell, Price got anthraxed by one of the intel letters. What do you want us to do?”

She gasped, 

“What? Shit. I’m on my way.”

She hung up on you. You watched Price slowly try to open his eyes. They were stained hot pink from the powder. 

“You alright?” You asked him. 

“Yeah, love,” he sighed, “Doesn’t hurt anymore. Feeling strange though. Laswell said she’s coming?”

You nodded,

“Yeah, just in case.”

He nodded, running his hand along the inside of his collar. The captain was sweaty and a little pale. 

“Captain, are you okay?”

“Mmm, no,” he shook his head, “Something’s not right, love.”

He stood and went to the sink, washing as much of the powder off as he could. You moved away from him and stationed yourself across the room, praying for Laswell to hurry. 

Price was in a bad way. He took off his shirt, and he was still dripping with beads of sweat. You tried not to stare, but his temperature wasn’t the only thing heating up. His huge cock was making a prominent tent in his pants, but he was in too much pain to bother hiding it. You felt yourself blushing, and you willed yourself to pull it together. 

“…fuckin’ hell,” his hand went to his crotch to squeeze his length, trying to find some relief, “Sorry, love.”

“It’s okay,” you said politely, trying to breathe normally, but feeling the slick rush melt between your legs. 

“It’s makin’ me…feel…bloody hell. I can’t hold it off. Can…can you…? No! No, what the fuck am I sayin’? No,” he shook his head, rubbing his hands down his face, hot and very bothered. 

You inched closer to him,

“If I haven’t been affected yet, I’m sure it’s okay. How should I help you?”

“No! No, stay back. I’m not…I can’t think straight. My mind’s got one thing on it,” he shoved his hands beyond his zipper and began to jerk himself off, his dick making lurid noises with his hand. 

You hated seeing him so helpless. You moved to his side,

“Cap, it’s okay. Let me help you.”

His hand was around your throat in milliseconds. Price shoved you against the wall and began to kiss your mouth, furiously laving his tongue against yours. 

“No, no, no,” he whispered through his kisses, not bothering to pull away as he spoke his lamentations. 

You made the mistake of putting your hands on his chest to steady yourself. He moaned, trembling beneath your touch,

“Ahh, careful.”

“Sorry,” you pulled your hands away, still trapped in his firm grip around your neck, “did I hurt you?”

“No, doesn’t hurt.”

He said it in a way that darkly implied your touch was igniting a different kind of fire. You put your hands back where they were, and his eyes shot open, piercing through yours with a lustful rage. Unexpectedly, he ripped off your shirt and lay you down on the black leather couch in the corner of the office. He crushed you with his weight, kissing you deeply. 

Then, your phone rang. He didn’t allow you to pause, so it went to voicemail. It rang again. You were getting just as hot as he was, and you weren’t that interested in who was looking for you in the middle of the night. Until, however, the door to the office burst wide open and Laswell and Gaz burst through it. 

Price snarled. You’d never heard a man make that noise before. Laswell put her hands on her hips while Gaz tried to shield his face in shock. Laswell rubbed her forehead, frustrated,

“Are his eyes pink, Corporal?”

You escaped his jaws for a moment, 

“Yeah, why?”

“It’s a sex drug. Forces the user to fornicate as it is only passed through the body in seminal fluid, dissolving in the heat of another person’s body. Are you volunteering here? What happened?”

Her tone was so matter of fact, it was a little humorous, if Price’s length wasn’t rutting against you in earnest, you might've laughed. You tried to explain as much as he would allow,

“Got too close… just… happened. How…” you moaned as Price pulled down the strap of your bra and helped himself to your nipple, “How did you know?”

She sighed, typing something into her datapad,

“Checked the incident log from this afternoon. Four more cases of this have popped up in intel collections. Gonna have to screen for it next time.”

She turned to walk out of the office with Gaz, and you called after her,

“Hey, wait! How long does it - oh, fuck… how long does it last?”

Laswell had the audacity to smirk at you, raising her eyebrows and cutting her eyes at Price’s swollen cock, lolling out of his pants, scraping itself against you. 

“Eight hours. Looks like you’re in for a rough night, Corporal. Maybe next time you’ll be more careful.”

Part 2

[one-beer-is-not-enough]

I'm finally posting my first bully OC! I'm planning to draw his siblings and parents too. Huge lore dump and quotes after the outfits. Also would love interactions, asks or anything :DD

The preps' pet freak

Started working as their cleaner and errand boy because his father refused to give him any money. Nobody believed his family was rich at first

Was homeschooled poorly and regularly abused by his father after his mother's passing, so he's socially stunted. Super blunt and rude

"I could buy your house if I wanted to" <- $0.2 in his wallet

A simp for Derby. Exhibits kicked-puppy levels of pathetic

They accepted him into the clique because Derby said so <- hated Marcel's guts at first but slowly got attached. Host and parasite type of relationship except they're both the parasite lol

Silly character sheet!! The outfits and lore under the cut:

You will quickly notice that my style is even more inconsistent than my upload frequency :)

Anyway, some bits of lore:

Beefing with Bif (haha), who routinely annihilates him during boxing matches. Marcel throws rocks at him after

He's great at cards and gambling in general. Dreams of owning a casino when he's older. Unfortunately, his father will force him down the lawyer or surgeon career path to help in his line of work

His sister Sofia is a jock and cheerleader. She's a monster at dodgeball. They have a fierce sibling-rivalry, but they team up to protect their younger brother Rafael

Marcel likes drawing, but sucks big time at it + is delusional about his skill

Obsessed with old gangster movies, huge Robert de Niro fanboy. Verbal tics: 'wise-guy' and 'marone'. Only knows a bit of broken Italian, because his grandparents immigrated to the US before his father was born

One time Damon was harassing Tad by the fountain. Marcel, because of pent-up stress, crash-tackled Damon into the water and proceeded to pummel his face 'til he busted the jock's nose. It's been on sight with their clique ever since. Sofia essentially maintains the peace when he's on their turf

Commiserates with Tad about family to the point they become close friends

Wanted to join the greasers at first, but got called a poser. Has a bad grade in shop class because he's constantly paranoid about getting jumped

Hates the nerds because some of them stalked and leered over Sofia. Also because they remind him of how weak he used to feel

The bullies kept folding him in his first couple of weeks before he had the revelation that he's on equal grounds with other students and can actually defend himself unlike back home

Befriended the local homeless guys. Broke into a liquor store once for the drunk Santa in exchange for a few bucks

He's on pretty good terms with the townies since they're his alcohol and cigarette suppliers. Most of them can't stand his prep status, though

Their father owns a hotel chain but the siblings are sure it's a front for money laundering. It became obvious when feds would show up at their doorstep with warrants, and shady men came around the house to drop off envelopes full of cash. Any last doubts were erased when Marcel tried to steal from a store once, but got caught by an officer on patrol. He let Marcel off with a mild warning and asked him to say 'hello' to Mr. D'Argento

Sneaks into the library at night to play Mafia I. Got stuck on the car race mission for weeks

Got arrested a few times but his father has the whole police department and school faculty bribed, so he gets away 'without consequences' (He always gets paid a 'visit' after being released)

Blasts Sinatra and Dean Martin albums at night, annoying absolutely everyone

Some in-game quotes:

"Do that again and see what happens, wise-guy."

"Will the alarms go off if I smoke in class?"

(Quoting de Niro) "You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me?"

"I hope Derby likes these flowers… Whatever they are."

(Losing) "Ugh... Fighting is all you Neanderthals know anyway!"

"I think Bif put itching powder in my gloves again…"

"Maron', now I have to wash all my clothes, you stupid idiot!"

"Oh man, I should play cards with the bullies again. Robbed 'em blind last month."

"Gord and Pinky dragged me to Aquaberry the other day. They made me carry their bags. Again."

"Derby bought me this watch. He's wonderful, isn't he?... Huh? What was that?... Yeah, it better be 'nothing'!"

"Hal threw a wrench at my head in shop class today!"

(Requesting errand) "Listen, I can't actually pay you for this-- Hey, where are you going?"

(Starting fight with greaser) "I can smell that cheap hairspray a mile away."

(Starting a fight with jock) "You want your nose broken too?"

(Starting fight with nerd) "Ever heard of deodorant, Einstein?"

"Sniffle Please don't send me back home... Sobbing"

"You'll never make anyone proud, you pathetic loser!"

If anyone stuck around to this point, thank you for taking the time to read through :D I have a lot more to post about this creature, like relationship charts, theme song, in-game portrait etc (I swear I'm normal) And again, would be super excited for interactions and even art with you guys' ocs!!!

[rhynestonez]

BY THE BOOK ( PART 1)

Congressman! Bucky X Assistant! Reader

Summary: Freshly fired and desperate, you apply to a poorly written government job—only to end up assistant to Congressman James Barnes, a quiet war hero with no clue how to run an office.

You knew something was off the moment you stepped into the office.

Not the usual “It’s-Monday-and-everyone-hates-their-lives” kind of off. No, this was quieter. Tighter. Like the whole floor was holding its breath and pretending not to look directly at you. Hallie from HR waved at you with a little too much teeth. Greg didn’t make his usual awkward dad-joke at the coffee machine. And your boss—well, he hadn’t shown his face at all.

The silence followed you all the way to your desk, cubicle 3B. You sat down, booted up your sluggish desktop, and tried to shake the feeling crawling over your skin. Maybe you were just paranoid. Maybe Hallie had finally figured out that you stole her granola bars from the break room and this was her revenge.

Or maybe you were about to get fired. “Hey..” came a voice from above you, making your stomach drop. You looked up. It was Jason—your supervisor. Clipboard in hand. Nervous energy oozing off him like sweat.

“Could you… come with me for a sec?” And there it was. The death knell. The walk to the conference room felt like a funeral procession. One that only you had RSVP’d to.

You passed by desks you used to joke around with. Smiled tightly at coworkers who suddenly became very busy with their spreadsheets. The same people you shared frozen yogurt with two days ago now wouldn’t meet your eyes. It was like being a ghost at your own job. Still here, but already halfway gone.

Jason opened the door for you. There were two people inside.

HR Hallie and one of the senior managers. The manager smiled sympathetically, like he’d just euthanized your childhood pet and wanted you to know he felt really bad about it.

You sat down. And they began.

Something about restructuring. Budget cuts. A shift in departmental focus. You were “valued.” and “appreciated.” and “not being let go because of performance.” but the bottom line was the same.

You were being released back into the wild.

You nodded a lot. Smiled even more. Signed the papers they gave you without reading them. You felt numb, like your brain was trying to protect you from registering the slow-motion collapse of your paycheck, your routine, your health insurance.

“Do you want a moment to gather your things?” Hallie asked gently, as though you might burst into tears.

“No, I’m good.” you said too quickly, already rising to your feet. “I don’t even have that much stuff.”

Another lie. You had so much stuff.

Back at your cubicle, the walk of shame began. You grabbed the cardboard box someone had thoughtfully left on your chair. You avoided looking up, knowing what you’d see- coworkers pretending to be busy while stealing glances, faces frozen in sympathetic guilt. The worst kind.

You packed in a fog. Mousepad. Desk cactus. Your favorite pens. The ceramic mug you stole from the supply closet. The birthday card everyone signed last month with forced little messages like “You’re crushing it!” and “Don’t forget us when you’re famous!”

Well. You wouldn’t have to worry about that.

Jason hovered awkwardly nearby like a shadow. “You sure you don’t need help carrying anything?”

“Nope. Just my dignity.”It slipped out before you could stop it. He gave a stiff chuckle. You wanted to melt into the floor.

You made your way to the elevator like it was the final scene of a dramatic indie film. Box in arms. Head held high. Pretending this wasn’t the most humiliating day of your professional life. The elevator doors opened. No applause. Just an old man coughing inside.

Perfect.

You got home two hours later. Kicked off your shoes, dumped the box on the floor of your living room, and collapsed on the couch like a deflated balloon. You stared at the ceiling fan spinning lazily above you.

And that’s where you stayed. For the rest of the day. And most of the next.

You ate chips straight out of the bag. Watched reality TV you’d never admit to enjoying. Didn’t shower. Only left the couch to grab more snacks or charge your phone. You were spiraling—but it was a soft spiral. One wrapped in blankets and denial.

Eventually, shame crept in like an uninvited guest. You opened your laptop. The screen glowed like an accusation. You pulled up a job board. Your search history from last time was still there: “office jobs near me.” “remote jobs for introverts.” “do I really need health insurance if I’m careful.”

You scrolled.

Most listings made you want to evaporate. Corporate jargon. Unrealistic qualifications. $40K salaries requiring six degrees and willingness to be emotionally abused. You were about to close the tab when something caught your eye.

“ASSISTANT NEEDED – GOVT JOB”

No punctuation. No detail. The kind of post that practically begged you to ignore it.

So naturally, you clicked.

“Man needs help. With papers. Office stuff. Maybe coffee sometimes. Not illegal. Good pay. Please have experience with Microsoft… the word one. And fast typing. Not too fast. Just normal. Must be trustworthy. And not annoying.”

You stared. You re-read it. You laughed. Out loud. For the first time all day.

“This has to be a joke..” you muttered, mouth curled into a tired grin. The name at the bottom just said: Congressman J. Barnes.

You weren’t sure if it was real. You weren’t sure you cared. You clicked “Apply.” Attached your outdated résumé. Wrote “Available immediately” in the cover letter box. And hit send. “God help whoever’s desk that lands on.” you muttered, already tossing your laptop to the side.

You figured you’d never hear from them again. But the next morning, your phone rang. Unknown number. You squinted at it.

Half of you wanted to let it go to voicemail. The other half wanted to believe in a miracle. You answered.

“Hi, is this..?” a chipper voice asked, trailing off a little like she was reading your name off a list. “This is Gemma, from the Office of Congressman Barnes. He’d like to bring you in for an interview.” You blinked.

“…oh.”

-

You stood in front of your closet like it had personally offended you. Somewhere between the third blazer and sixth wave of panic, you realized you had no idea what to wear to a government job interview.

Especially one that might’ve been posted by a man who thinks Microsoft Word is called “Microsoft the word one.”

“I don’t even know what I’m applying for..” you muttered to yourself, yanking out a wrinkled blouse that hadn’t seen daylight since your cousin’s wedding. “Is this for a desk job? A CIA field mission? Coffee courier to a congressman with a mysterious past?”

Because let’s be honest—you Googled him.

Congressman James B. Barnes. And let’s just say the results… were not what you expected.

There were official headshots: clean-cut, classic suit, stoic stare. But then there were older photos. Grayscale. Battle-worn. Like something out of a history book. You clicked deeper into the rabbit hole and discovered enough chaos to make your resume feel wildly underqualified.

War hero. Former assassin. Reformed government weapon.

Now… congressman?

“This man needs more than an assistant-“ you muttered, buttoning your shirt with trembling fingers. “He needs a therapist. Maybe a nap.”

And then there was that job description. The weirdly direct, charmingly awkward message that had made you laugh harder than you had in days.

“Man needs help. With papers. Office stuff. Maybe coffee sometimes.”You could not imagine this man typing that. But you kind of wanted to meet whoever did.

The morning of the interview arrived far too quickly. You barely slept. Your nerves were frayed. Your eyeliner was uneven.

You triple-checked your bag: résumé (printed on fancy paper you borrowed from your neighbor), breath mints, water bottle, emergency chocolate, and a sticky note with the name Gemma – Front Office Contact written in panicked caps.

The Capitol Hill building was less intimidating than you expected. Smaller. Like it didn’t quite get the memo that it was hosting a literal congressman. Security was tight but polite. The guard at the front desk glanced at your visitor badge, then up at you.

“You here for Barnes?” You nodded. He snorted. “Good luck.” You opened your mouth to ask what that meant—but he waved you through before you could.

Great. Definitely not ominous at all.

The elevator dinged open on the third floor, revealing a hallway lined with framed press clippings, black-and-white photos, and one strange oil painting that made your eyes sore.

You approached the office door and hesitated for exactly one soul-crushing moment.

You could still turn around. Blame traffic. Say you got the wrong building. But instead, you knocked. “Come in!” a bright voice called.

You opened the door and were immediately greeted by a perky woman in a lavender button up—Gemma, you assumed—who smiled like she just saw a long lost friend.

“You made it!” she said, motioning you in. “Right on time. I love that. He’ll love that. Timeliness is kind of… a thing.”

You smiled nervously. “I’m a big fan of clocks.”

God. You were already spiraling.

Gemma didn’t seem to notice. She gestured for you to sit in a sleek waiting chair beside a bookshelf stacked with…well. Mostly military history. And something called ‘how to overcome being antisocial’ which honestly felt like a cry for help.

“He’s just finishing a call-“ she chirped. “Shouldn’t be more than a minute.” You nodded. Hands folded tightly in your lap. The silence stretched.

Then you heard it. A low voice. Just beyond the closed office door. Rough. Steady. Calm like a storm cloud.

You couldn’t make out the words—but something about the tone made your skin prickle. So this is him.

James Barnes.

Your potential boss. War hero turned congressman. Possibly the worst job poster in the history of the internet.

You felt a laugh catch in your throat and swallowed it back. This was fine. Normal. You were in control. “Can I ask..” you whispered to Gemma, leaning slightly closer. “Did… he actually write that job post?”

She blinked, then smiled guiltily. “I… typed it. But he dictated it.. I suggested we workshop it but he said—and I quote—‘If they’re the right person, they’ll understand what I meant.’” Your stomach did a weird little flip. “Right.” You mumbled, eyebrow twitching slightly. The door opened. You straightened instinctively. And there he was.

Tall. Broad-shouldered. Hair slicked back neatly. Navy-blue shirt rolled at the sleeves. One hand in his pocket. The other—metal, unmistakable—still adjusting the watch on his wrist.

He looked up. Eyes like winter. And when they landed on you… he actually smiled. Just a little. Not the polished politician kind. The real kind. A bit tired. A bit curious. A bit… surprised.

“You’re early.” he said. Voice just like you imagined—low, quiet, steady. “That’s good.”

You opened your mouth. Nothing came out.

Your brain offered nothing useful except: Holy shit he’s hot.

Gemma, bless her soul, stepped in. “This is the applicant we spoke about.” He nodded. Extended a hand. You shook it, startled by how warm the metal felt. Strong but careful. Like he knew exactly how much pressure to use.

“Nice to meet you.” he said. “I’m Bucky.” You blinked, then instinctively gave your name. “-but I’m sure you already knew that from my application..” He huffed a soft laugh. Not unkind. Just amused.

“Well-“ he said, stepping aside and gesturing to the door behind him. “Let’s talk.”

His office was quiet. Not the peaceful kind—more like the kind of silence that follows a bomb going off. Thick, slightly tense, and filled with the unspoken energy of “I didn’t plan for this.”

You sat down as Bucky gestured vaguely at the chair across from him and lowered himself into his own, the leather creaking under his weight. He didn’t speak at first—just opened a drawer, pulled out a pen, then closed the drawer again. Looked at the pen like he forgot what to do with it.

You smoothed your blouse, the long skirt you wore and cleared your throat lightly, trying to keep your posture professional. His office was cluttered but lived-in, stacks of folders on the floor and two mugs on his desk—one clearly from yesterday. Or possibly last week. You couldn’t tell.

He opened a folder, blinked at the blank sheet inside, then closed it. Then looked up at you. Then back down. Then exhaled through his nose like this was already too much.

You offered a polite smile. “Should I… begin?”

He cleared his throat. “No—I mean. I’ll start.”

You folded your hands in your lap, waiting. Silence. He tapped the pen against the desk. Slowly. Then, after a beat too long.

“…Why do you want this job?”

It came out flat. Hesitant. Like he wasn’t sure it was the right question but figured it sounded interview-y enough to work.

You sat up straighter, shifting into the persona you’d practiced in the mirror. “Well, first and foremost, I believe I can bring organizational cohesion and administrative fluidity to your daily operations. I have extensive experience in interdepartmental coordination, and I thrive in high-pressure environments with adaptive logistics.”

Bucky blinked. His brow furrowed. “…Right.”

You smiled, trying not to panic. “Also I’m really good at, you know, keeping things… tidy.”

He nodded slowly. “Okay.”

You saw him glance at your résumé—upside down—and then make a noise deep in his throat. His eyes scanned the desk like he was searching for help. Or divine intervention.

Another long pause. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Then tried again: “Do you… type fast?”

You hesitated. “Yes. Around 85 words per minute, depending on format.”

He nodded like that meant something. “Cool.”

You both sat in the silence of that word for a second too long.

“…Are you… looking for someone with any particular certifications?” you offered, trying to help. He blinked again. “Hm?”

“Like government clearance, or scheduling software—”

“Oh. Uh. No. I just need someone who… knows how to do things. Like calendars. Paper stuff.”

“Calendars and paper,” you repeated with a kind smile. “Yeah.” Another pause. He fiddled with the pen cap, then tossed it onto the desk like it had personally betrayed him.

“Have you ever worked for someone…as an assistant?”

You straightened a little. “I’ve worked in team dynamics with various communication styles, so technically no, but I’m adaptable. I understand how to read nonverbal cues and maintain effective workflow even without constant direction.”

Bucky stared. He tilted his head a little, like he was trying to decipher a foreign language.

“…So you’ve never done it before?”

You smiled again. “Correct.” Oh god..

“Okay.” More silence.

You could see the panic just barely behind his neutral expression. It sat in his shoulders, in the way his fingers tapped against the desk like Morse code. He clearly hadn’t expected to do this himself. Or at all.

You tried to fill the space.

“I uhm- also have experience managing travel itineraries, liaising with constituents, and handling confidential information with discretion. I’m extremely punctual, digitally literate, and can operate independently.”

He gave you a slow blink. “…You sound like a brochure.” You froze. “Oh. Sorry.”

“No—it’s fine. I just. Didn’t catch… half those words.” You flushed immediately. “Sorry—I’m nervous. I didn’t mean to—”

“No, it’s—it’s not bad.” He shifted, one hand rubbing the back of his neck. “You’re just… a lot more professional than I thought.”

You tried to laugh. “Well, your job posting did say ‘not annoying,’ so I figured I should overachieve.” That actually made the corner of his mouth twitch. Not a smile. But close.

“I actually didn’t write that part.” You lifted a brow. “Oh?”

“I said ‘don’t hire anyone weird.’ Gemma translated.” You laughed quietly, the tension cracking a little. Then he rubbed his chin and asked, out of nowhere.

“…Do you like cats?”

You blinked. “Um—yes.” He nodded slowly, like this was very serious. “Good.” And then nothing else. You waited.

He leaned back in his chair, clearly out of questions. After a moment, you gently asked “Would you like to know about my references-Or work history?”

“No.” he said. Then added “I read the résumé.” You could see it sticking halfway out from under his coffee mug.

“I don’t really know what to ask.” he admitted finally, voice lower, quieter. “I’ve never had an assistant before. I usually just… figure things out alone.” There was a flicker of something vulnerable in that. Something human. And tired.

You softened. “I can help with that.” He looked at you for a long moment. Then nodded once. “Okay.”

You blinked. “So… am I hired?”He stood up abruptly. “Yeah. Tomorrow. Eight a.m.” You scrambled to your feet. “Right—great! Should I bring—?”

“Coffee. If you want.”

You tilted your head. “How do you take it?”He paused. Shrugged. “I don’t know. Gemma makes it.” You laughed despite yourself. “Guess I’ll improvise.” You reached for the door, and with a nervous sigh you stepped out.

The door clicked shut behind you. Bucky exhaled slowly. Then sat back down in his chair like he’d just returned from war.

He stared at the coffee mug on his desk.

“Calendars and… liaisoning.” he mumbled under his breath, brow furrowed. “What the hell is a liaison.”

Right then, the door cracked open again—without knocking—and Gemma poked her head in like a cartoon squirrel.

“So?” she asked, too brightly.

Behind her, Jace from accounting and Maya from policy hovered in the hallway, definitely pretending they weren’t listening.

Bucky glanced at them all. “What?”

Gemma stepped inside fully. “How’d the interview go?” He shrugged. “Fine.”

“Just fine?” she asked, moving closer. “You’ve had that same piece of pen cap in your hand for twenty minutes.” He looked down. He had, in fact, snapped it clean in half.

“She was really impressive.” he said, almost defensively. “Said a lotta smart stuff. Big words. I think she knows what she’s doing.”

Jace leaned into the doorway. “Did you ask her that weird cat question again?”

Bucky squinted. “It’s a valid question.”

“Sure-“ Maya said, sipping from a mug. “Because nothing says ‘professional screening process’ like ‘Would you feed my cat if I forgot.’”

Bucky muttered something under his breath and grabbed the crumpled receipt off his desk, folding it in half.

“She’s not annoying.”

“Oh well then.” Gemma grinned, hands on her hips. “Hire her immediately, let’s throw a party.”

“I did.” Bucky said flatly. They all stared. “You what?” He shrugged. “She starts tomorrow.”

Jace whistled. “Hope she brings her own chair. The spare one in your office still has three screws missing.”

“I can fix it.”

Maya blinked. “Really now?”

“I’ll try, she’ll be a good addition here..”

Gemma raised her eyebrows. “Wow. High praise already.” Bucky ignored them, turning back to his papers—but not before glancing once toward the door you’d just walked out of.

“Aw-“ Gemma teased. “Are you flustered, Congressman?” He didn’t respond. But his ears did go a little pink.

“Get out.”

[1nkwe4ver]

So here’s the theory. I think I’ve got it

I still think what Lumon is doing is bigger than giving rich people the chance to sever off their bad experiences. And I think Helena is actually a big hint to understanding whats going on with Gemma.

They act like Cold Harbor is going to be a religious revelation to the world, and I don’t think it’s just “eliminate all your troubles with Severance!” Like okay so if you’re not immediately existentially horrified by it, that might sound kinda cool, but what’s the big miraculous reveal they keep referencing with Cold Harbor? That will change the world? Make everyone join the cult of Kier? Why all the goddamned secrecy and hiding Gemma underground? Obviously people already know about severance and about using it for your inconveniences, people are already doing it. People are severing off worker bees for their 9-5. Rich people are using it to give birth.

So I have a theory of how this is bigger than that

First of all, some of the questions they asked Gemma. I felt like they were checking on her mental functions and memory as herself, as an Outie. “Where did you go?” And “Would you be more afraid of drowning or suffocating?”before she even starts her rooms for the day.

The next key I think is in things like MDR. They are finding the scary numbers and refining them into the boxes labeled with tempers(if that’s not what they’re labeled with it’s something like that). Mark’s first file matched the name of Gemma’s Christmas Thank You Note room, I think. Implying his finishing that file had something to do with the formation of that room. The room resembles the way one of their actual Christmases was set up, so I feel it’s implied they were drawing from his memories. Possibly one where they were feeling crappy because of all their failing to get Gemma pregnant.

Okay. So even if you accept that Lumon categorizes all bad feelings into the “tempers”, why does Lumon need this to make a room for Gemma’s Innie to experience this temper? Why bother personalizing it to Outie Gemma’s experiences in such a weirdly intimate way? After all, Innies aren’t supposed to have that kinda connection to their Outies.

And even beyond Mark, what is the rest of MDR doing? Why have them craft these weirdly personalized rooms to isolate tempers so intensely? If all they wanted was to let Innies do the dirty work for the Outies, surely they could come up with rooms doing the basic premises for themselves- eternal dentist offices and chores.

Also, why fucking plane crashes and Thank You Notes? Yes, Gemma hates thank you notes, but that Innie didnt hate thank you notes until she was subjected to that room over and over. You can’t tell me they’re going to sever so many innies into the average brain that someone is going to have one set aside to turn on just in case a plane crashes. Irl, a persons going to want to call their family if they have the service. They’re going to want to experience their last moments in case they die. They can’t trust the Innie to actually behave like a person on a real life plane rather than a simulated one. I also highly doubt someone will really get another brain surgery just to do a petty thing like Thank you notes. Will they delegate it? Sure. But even if I’m buying into the system of brain slaves thing, I’m not going to schedule the time and take the risks to have another severance done. If im that rich and petty I’m sure I have a personal assistant doing that shit anyway.

So how does Helena Eagan shed some light on this?

Remember after Irving nearly killed her, she speaks with Drummond. They say something along the lines of, doctors say her tempers will rebalance promptly. But if she’s still feeling poorly they can treat her. She insists immediately and firmly that she is fine.

I know it’s implied Helena wasn’t severed until she got her job on the severed floor. So what if that’s the point of severance?

Stay with me here. Kier has to be the core of whatever’s going to be revealed with Cold Harbor and Gemma. The beginning. They’re crediting everything to him. Praise Kier. His work will finally be realized and everyone will rejoice. But Helena has confirmed that Jame is the one to come up with the severance procedure.

So what did Kier do? He identified the tempers, for one. What does Lumon actually do with the tempers? All we’ve heard mentioned is people getting them in balance, or out of balance.

Helena’s situation implies two things-

One- followers of Kier approach larger medical issues, physical and mental, with doctors who rebalance their tempers as opposed to other remedies.

Two- Even Helena fucking Eagan isn’t really willing to undergo whatever the fuck you have to do to get your tempers back in balance under a doctor’s supervision.

So my theory is- Kier’s original method of balancing the tempers, the basis of Lumon’s ideology, is some variation of what they’re doing to Gemma, traditionally without severance. Obviously, because severance didn’t exist till a few years ago.

My theory is that they believe every illness/lack of wellness is an imbalance of the tempers. More often than not, a lower amount of one.

To raise this temper, they dig into you psychologically, maybe with normal therapy or something, take something that stimulates a certain “temper” and make you experience it over and over, to the point of torture. In their view, this ultimately realigns the temper and once youre done, you recompartmentalize the Dieter in you that’s experiencing that shit, and you’re well again.

The issue was, well- patients either left their cult or lost their minds. Kier died and I’m sure his personality, which had probably drawn and kept many in, lost many followers with it.

So the Eagans and their remaining followers have to accept that things aren’t going right. They have to change their approach. Make things a business to keep their power and influence, and back off from the things that make them look like wackjobs in the public eye.

I mean, obviously, Kier could never have been wrong, he was right. The problem is the world. The masses cannot handle his wisdom for some reason. We have to approach this differently.

So they need to do two things to make Kier’s word acceptable to the mainstream, really. They need to prove, as they believe, that balancing the tempers can heal pretty much any fucking thing under the sun. And secondly- they need to make a way to make the process usable on the masses. Something an average person could make it through without losing their mind.

In comes Jame Eagan.

He has the best idea. Kier always compartmentalized his time “balancing his tempers.” He put it all on Dieter(if Dieter was a real brother, excuse me, but I’m going with the ‘he was a metaphor’ interpretation for this. If you disagree, just take my references to Dieter to be personified portions of yourself you’ve compartmentalized to deal with traumatic situations). But Kier was pure. He was superior. The average person may need help to do that! Let’s section off a portion of their memories, so they don’t have to remember going through treatment! We create these people’s Dieter’s for them, because as long as the tempers in their body are balanced, they will experience the healing effects of Kier’s treatments. So what if those versions of them are in continuous loops of torture? Nobody cares about the states of those minds. Those are Dieters. Those aren’t real people. And then the real people get to be whole again!

Okay, but how do we convince the masses that this isn’t crazy bullshit? We need a real, solid example of how surreally magical and intense Kier’s treatment can be.

Well, the doctor says- with such strong mental barriers as this procedure will give us, I believe we could rebalance the tempers in anyone. Could do anything.

You know what it could do? We could raise the dead.

So- I think Gemma did die. Physically. I think they took her corpse, which Mark identified early on, and quickly swapped it out for them to bury a different one.

Then they used crazy technology to resuscitate her. I think she was on the edge of death and miserable and a shell of herself. Probably hardly functioning. Hardly reacting to the questions they asked. Who knows what her mind and body were like when she was recovered. She was her, but if she’d been allowed in a normal hospital, she would have long been pronounced dead, and if they somehow resuscitated her as Lumon originally did, so late, no one would have let her live how they resuscitated her to be. Gemma being brought back to herself as we’ve seen her would be a miracle.

That’s why they need MDR to unconsciously choose what they will use for the formation of the rooms. They are making sure the rooms will spike the sharpest reactions of her tempers possible. It is necessary to have a raw, unconscious human response dictate this. It is helpful to draw from Mark’s memories because they’re not trying to test Gemma’s Innies ability to withstand dealing with the rooms, they’re trying to restore Gemma’s tempers to the levels they were at before her death. Other people’s experiences can work for some general things, like anxiety at the dentist office, but it makes sense that Mark is so essential here in that context. He is the refiner that can’t be fired because to really get Gemma back to Gemma, we need situations that will stimulate her from the life they shared. They have a general idea of where her old tempers were, I think because they measure it in the blood. And they had a lot of access to Gemma medically before her accident. She went to Lumon blood drives. She went to the Lumon fertility treatment, where that doctor who worked on this hell floor was seen in the background. I’m guessing they believe they have an idea of her “tempers” pre-death because of that.

This also lends itself to a late stage Uno reverse from Cobel or Helena, trying to get Mark on their side. Hell, it might late stage be the only reason Mark finishes the goddamned Cold Harbor file.

Because we’ve seen how tortured Gemma is right now, so in our heads, right now, it seems like nothing could make us sympathize with these crazy evil folks. Makes us hate Lumon drones we’d come to like, like Milchik and Cobel and Helena afresh. But what if Gemma really was dead before all this? What if she really was a barely breathing corpse when they started this work on her? It wasn’t their right to take her body, but now she is back and she is her

If you hear, Milchik, Cobel, and them really are so devoted to this company because they’re working on bringing people to perfect health with a health framework that is so superior it can bring people back from death, you want to say that they’re deranged and wrong, but ignoring whatever got them into the company in the first place, what about what they’ve potentially seen with Gemma? Maybe it’s still wrong to be so cruel, but if you’ve really seen this company bring someone back from death to essentially herself, wouldn’t that inspire your devotion? Wouldn’t you think you should probably toughen up as opposed to getting out? Wouldn’t you be a little reverent? Wouldn’t you have committed to breaking society’s rules already? And if you wouldn’t be, can’t you imagine someone else being so? Like that is wild. Cobel has been in this company since she was a child and now she’s literally a part of them doing one of the most miraculous things anyone ever said she was crazy to believe they could do.

This also puts Cobel’s obsession with Mark and his family into perspective, because it’s not just screening things for a sign he might get away, keeping control of the situation, a weird sense that she’s entitled to be close to him- it was also originally probably a recommended route to getting more info on Gemma. How many times did Selvig bring cookies for Mark and gently coax him until he told her stories about Gemma? How many pictures did she pull up and ask questions about? How many little pieces of furniture, like the candle, did she steal, to help personalize Gemma’s experiences further? How much info did she get from getting to know Ricken and Devon?

Also, another thing about Helena, which is just occurring to me as I write this- I’m thinking back to early season 1. When we still don’t know her full identity, but we see her side of her first day at Lumon.

I originally attributed this to them being unsure what they were going to do so early on, but I’ll say, Helena seems genuinely happy and pleased when we see her side on the outside of her first day severed.

Nowadays, when we see her in the outside, she’s cold and reserved, in large part I think because the experience has gone so wrong. And I think people have just written off that early episode as just them keeping her behavior vague- she’s being polite, going through the motions. Based on her behavior now, we might think she never wanted to be severed in the first place, was always forced.

But I think of like, when they show her smiling and talking about it, almost nerding out while they’re doing the procedure. Nervous, but genuinely a bit excited. And what is there to be excited about? You’re not gonna remember what goes on. I don’t take anything she said for the videos at that party in the finale as real.

But this theory, about the Kier cult and balancing tempers for health purposes? I think that really makes it make sense.

Helena was raised in all this, and she seems to scoff at some parts of it. I’d say it’s implied on some level, she knows it’s bullshit. She is stressed and firmly denies she needs to go to the tempers balancing doctor after Irving tries to drown her. She starts giggling at the dramatic story about Kier masturbating. It very much seems like she doesn’t drink her own Kool Aid.

So, if shes really just a business mind in all this, not a real spiritual believer, I think she’s excited to be severed because she’s stuck in this system. Every time something in her life happens to her- she gets hurt, she gets attacked, she undergoes a traumatic experience- she gets sent into the waking nightmare of the doctors who dig into your psyche and rebalance your tempers. What they’re doing to Gemma, without Severance. Torture. She’s an Eagan, it’s not supposed to bother her, she of all people is supposed to be superior, but she fucking hates it with all of her being.

So she is excited to be severed because it represents finally not having to fucking deal with that.

She is ready and willing because before Helly, she saw severance as her way out of hell. Her way to finally create a Dieter she didn’t have to deal with. To not experience them carefully crafting experiences to torture her in the name of “rebalancing her tempers.” Severance was finally going to let her compartmentalize all the shit she couldn’t stand about being an Eagan and focus on being herself. Everything she’d been taught about it said she didn’t need to worry about Innies, they weren’t people.

But then she takes the severed job- and Helly keeps trying to run out the floor. She threatens to cut off Helena’s fingers. Helena is supposed to walk in the elevator and come out never knowing more than an echo of Helly’s pain- and one day she walks in the elevator, and the next moment she’s being hanged.

So her hopeful little smiles before going in are just gone. She still feels trapped. She never wants Helly triggered again, I highly doubt she wants to create a system of others. But of course, she’s still an Eagan, and she has to still finish the realization of Kier’s wishes, and they still have a woman nearly brought back to life in their sub-basement. And they still want Helena Eagan’s severance as a publicity stunt.

So yeah. I think we’re going to find that Gemma DID die in that car accident, and was brought back to life using an extreme combination of Kiers principles and balancing of the tempers, a process which she can only handle mentally because the parts of her dealing with the individual bits of the torture are severed off.

Mark’s contributions in unconsciously creating the rooms are essential because they need to make sure her tempers are balanced back to the way Gemma originally had them. I’m not sure exactly what the Cold Harbor file is, but once the room is done and used, Gemma will be “completely” brought back. And Lumon intends to use this as proof to the world that the Rebalancing of the Tempers is the cure for everything, as Kier always said.

[corazondebeskar-reads]

you know you never stood a chance - chapter one

you know you never stood a chance series

one: you know you never stood a chance

series masterlist | next chapter

qz!Joel Miller x f!reader

Word Count: 2k

Summary: When QZ!Joel finds out you're planning to take up prostitution to earn enough rations for your sick sister, he makes sure he's the first one to pay you a visit.

Warnings: Prostitution, dub-con due to power imbalance, Joel Miller is bad at feelings, kind of mean!Joel, p in v sex, unprotected sex, oral sex (f receiving), inexperienced reader, mention of cordyceps, brothel

Originally written for Kinktober 2023 - Day 9: Cumshot/Prostitution from this list by @absurdthirst

also on aO3

“Come in,” you called through the door, trying for your best laid-back, confident voice.

It wasn’t very successful. Joel rolled his eyes and opened the door. You were knelt on the bed, looking soft and demure—except for the way you were wringing your hands.

And the way the sweet look fell off your face when you saw him.

“What are you doing here?” You snatched up a pillow, hugging it over your torso like he hadn’t already got a good look at you through the sheer fabric.

“Gardening. What do you think I’m doin’ here?”

“This isn’t funny, Miller. Get out.” You grabbed another pillow and threw it at him.

He deflected it away from his face. “Jesus, woman.”

“You’ve had your laugh; you can go now.” You stared at the dingy Berber carpet of the shitty old motel room. It had probably been shitty before the whole world fell to pieces. The peeling wallpaper had sickly yellow stains to match the cigarette burns that pockmarked the single tufted armchair in the corner.

“Didn’t laugh,” Joel said gruffly, tossing something at you.

You had to drop the pillow to catch the bottle of water, nearly fumbling it, and looked up at him. “What’s this for?” you asked warily.

“It’s for drinkin’.”

“Ha ha. Look, can you not—don’t fuck with me right now. Why’re you here?”

It’s then, as you took a careful sip from the bottle, that Joel got a good look at your outfit.

Periwinkle tulle had been sewn roughly into an approximation of a dress, like something out of a Victoria’s Secret magazine had been poorly described to a seamstress who had never heard of lingerie. Actually, now that he thought about it, there was a good chance that was exactly what happened.

It had crooked, lacey ruffles on the top and bottom and did not suit you in the slightest. “What the hell are you wearin’? You raid a JoAnn’s?”

“Hey, I tried my best,” you said, bottom lip quivering.

“Ah shit, sweetheart, I didn’t—”

But you smirked. “Wow, you were really about to apologize, weren’t you? I shouldn’t have cut you off; go on, I want to hear Joel Miller say ‘sorry.’”

“Wasn’t gonna,” he scowled.

“Right, sure. Anyway, nah, they got a box of this shit in the office. I don’t know who makes it, but they want us to look extra dolled up or something.”

“Take that shit off. I can’t do this with you lookin’ like that.”

The smirk slid off your face. “Can’t do what?”

“Can’t fuck you, sweetheart. Isn’t that why you’re here? I paid for ya’, after all.”

Your stomach churned like the angry sea you had only read about in Moby Dick. You felt about as well as a sailor might have, too. It’s not like you had any misunderstandings about what would happen if you worked a shift at a whorehouse. But with your sister sick and unable to work, you’d been out of food for two days. So.

He looked at you with something too close to pity, so you pulled the dress over your head and threw it on the floor, staring right at him and daring him to say anything. And he did, but it wasn’t what you were expecting.

“You got pretty tits, sweetheart.”

“Thank you… ?”

“What was your plan here? What if it wasn’t me? You just going to let some old creep come in here and do whatever he wanted to ya?”

“And you’re not an old creep?”

He rolled his eyes and sat down on the chair, tugging at his boots. “This ain’t your first time, right?”

“Obviously not,” you snapped. It wasn’t. But he didn’t need to know there had only been the one time. You hadn’t found the experience worth repeating, but the guy seemed pretty happy so you figured you could just lie there and let them do whatever.

“You know how to suck cock?”

You flushed and shook your head. He rested his elbows on his knees and put his head in his hands, rubbing at his forehead for a few seconds.

“Okay, alright. ‘Nother time, then.”

You were too nervous to clock what he said. He rose and walked over to the bed. You looked up at him with wide eyes, and he knew he had to wreck you. He couldn’t walk out of this room without ruining you for every other person who dared to lay hands on you.

He set his hands on your hips, and you flinched, so he rubbed soothing circles with his thumbs until you relaxed a little. When you had adjusted to the weight of his heavy palms, he slid them and cupped a breast in each.

“Damn, sweetheart. These are real nice.” He fondled them like that for a minute, enjoying the heft in his palms, before rubbing his thumbs over your nipples. He was rewarded for his efforts when a small moan slipped out of you.

He tore his eyes away from your chest to check your expression. Though your lips were parted and eyes glazed, you still looked afraid. “S’all right, honey, I’ll go slow.”

He leaned down and took one nipple into his mouth while he rolled the other between his fingers. You moaned again, louder this time, and he took that as permission to give the other breast the same treatment. When you finally started to ease up, to lean into his touch, and he felt more assured that you weren’t about to cry, he stepped back.

“Turn around, hands and knees.”

The apprehension filled the lines of your face quickly, but you turned around, relieved he wouldn’t make you look at him.

He ran a hand across your bare back, pushing your shoulder blades down with one hand and your knees apart with the other until you were arranged how he liked. You tensed, holding your breath and waiting for him to push in.

Instead, you felt a gentle hand on your mound. He cupped it before parting your lips, sliding his fingers through. You were damp, but nowhere near wet enough to take him. Not without a whole lot of pain, at least.

“Got a real pretty pussy, too. You’ve been holdin' out on me.” He circled your clit with the pad of his middle finger for a few seconds, watching you squirm, before he pulled his hand away.

“Anyone ever tasted you? You ever taste yourself?”

You shook your head.

“Shame.” It was a puff of hot breath over your cunt, followed closely by the warm, firm pressure of his tongue.

You wailed. You might have been embarrassed if it hadn’t been the best thing you’d ever felt, beating the record he had set seconds ago with his finger.

He didn’t ease you into this. It took no time at all for his skilled tongue and thick fingers to pry an orgasm out of you. He had worked one finger in you by the time you fell apart, but it wasn’t going to be enough.

You wriggled when he didn’t let up, trying to lurch away, but he pulled you back with a hand on your hip. “Hang on, let me open you up good.”

It was intense, and you were loud, swearing up a storm. When he eased another finger inside, you pushed back against his hand, grinding your hips. He sucked on your clit, flicking it with his tongue, until you came again, this time with a low groan pulled from deep in your chest, sinking back onto his fingers. He slid another one in, pumping furiously until the second orgasm turned into a third, and you were shaking apart.

“That’s a good girl,” he murmured, stroking soothingly along your spine and drawing his fingers from you. He wanted to push them between your lips, to watch your eyes go wide as you sucked your juices from him, but decided he better not push you too far. Not today, at least.

“You ready for me?” he asked, unzipping his jeans and letting them fall around his ankles.

“Please, Joel.”

And goddamn, if that wasn’t the sweetest sound. “Yeah? You want my cock now?”

“Please, please fuck me, Joel.” You were pushing back against him, grinding your ass against his erection.

“Alright, sweetheart, I’ll take care of ya.” He held you in place with one hand and notched the fat head of his cock at your entrance.

You cried out as he pushed in slowly. “Oh my god. What the fuck. Why are you so fucking big?” You didn’t even mean to be complimenting him. The one dick you had before had certainly not felt like this, like you were being pried apart.

“You gotta relax, sweetheart, you’re gonna hurt yourself.”

“That’s easy for you to say; you’re not being — oh fuck,” you broke off as he pushed in further.

“Not being what, honey? I didn’t hear ya.”

“Not being fucking split in two by some fuckin—”

He knocked whatever insult you were gearing up for out of you in a strangled breath as his hands gripped tight to your hips and pulled you back on his cock.

“Almost there, don’t worry. I gotcha,” he murmured, reaching around to rub at your clit. It didn’t take much to get you off again, and when your body shook and convulsed, he slid his cock in all the way.

He had planned on giving you a moment to adjust, but you started gently rocking yourself back and forth on it like a fuckin’ handwritten invitation. He began pulling almost all the way out before slowly sinking in, letting you part around him. His groan had you arching your back.

You thought he’d fuck rough. It might have been easier if he had. When you realized he was serious about it, that he had paid real fucking ration cards for access to your body, you figured he’d use you, cum, and leave.

Instead, he took you apart with precision. You wondered if he was a musician before, the way his fingers seemed to know right where to go, just how to thrum your body to draw out sounds you didn’t even know were inside you.

The rhythm he set was fluid and deep. You felt like you might explode, each stroke leaving you with fewer coherent thoughts. He hefted you against his chest, thrusting up into you and reaching around to your breasts.

It was a little overwhelming. Your whole body electrified, just the brush of his arm against yours sent waves of too much too much coursing through. All the while, his hips rolled into you, and yours mindlessly sought him back.

He was getting close, his thrusts a little sloppy. He held you to him with one hand cupping a breast and slid the other down to press against your clit. “Cum on my cock,” he growled in your ear.

It didn’t take long with the steady pressure and the way his cock nudged something inside you that made you twitch with every thrust. When you came, he shoved you down into the mattress, pulling out to cum over your ass.

You must have dozed off for a minute, because the wet washcloth landing on your back brought you abruptly into the world.

“Clean up, drink that, and get outta here.”

You glowered at him, head spinning from the sudden shift. He made you off-kilter and vulnerable, which was not an option, so you snarled back, “What, you think you’re my only client? I’ve got other men to fuck today, Joel.”

He finished tying his boots and stalked over to you, bending down to get in your face. “No, you don’t. You’re gonna go home like a good girl. And next time, you come straight to me. Understood?”

“What?”

“You still cockdumb? Poor thing.”

“Fuck off, Joel.”

He pressed the water bottle into your hands. “Next time you need cards this bad, you don’t come here. You come to me.”

“I’m not taking your handouts, Miller.”

“I’m not offerin’em. But you keep comin’ here, doin’ this? You’re gonna catch something worse than fuckin’ cordyceps. Or get yourself knocked up. We can make this same little arrangement if you need to.” He tilted your head up to face him. “Understood?”

“Fine,” you spat.

He stood up. For a moment, you thought he might say something else, but he just shook his head and left.

next chapter

*title from "Stood a Chance" by Taking Back Sunday

[epicbuddieficrecs]

Weekly Recap | August 12th-18th 2024

Little bit late, but I hope you enjoy it!

Complete

Right Here, Right Meow by carpediaz/ @sofa-king-lame (Getting Together | 1,7K | General): The one where Buck gets a cat and ropes Eddie into looking after her. Not that Eddie needs much convincing, he'd do pretty much anything for Buck at this point.

plugged in by PretentiousSwanQueen/ @hotcinnamonsunset (Secret Buddie, PWP | 2,5K | Explicit): or: Buck and Eddie are secretly together and grabbing drinks with the team and decide to have a little fun with butt plugs along the way.

prove it by PretentiousSwanQueen/ @hotcinnamonsunset (Getting Together, Post-S7 | 3K | Explicit): or: when enough is enough, Eddie and Buck watch When Harry Met Sally because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible. And you know. Blow jobs to follow.

🔥 Perfect Fit by Inell/ @inell (Post-S7, Friends to Fiances | 3K | Teen): Buck drops by to talk to Eddie after his break up with Tommy ends up with an unexpected offer. Eddie realizes that it’s time for him to finally make his move before it’s too late.

First Date Nerves by Inell/ @inell (First Date, PWP | 5K | Explicit): Buck and Eddie are on their first date, both nervous about taking their friendship to the next level. Neither one wants the date to end, though, so they continue it at Eddie’s house.

the cost of doing business by PretentiousSwanQueen/ @hotcinnamonsunset (Ravi POV, Secret Buddie | 5K | Teen): It happens like this: he had been this close! like, minutes away from printing out a new tenant lease! when the prospective renter in question calls the leasing office and mentions that she won’t be needing the 1 bed, 1 bath walk up in Faircrest Heights any more because she snagged a 2 bath loft downtown that seemed like a once in a lifetime opportunity.

🔥 I'll Make This Feel Like Home by cairparavels (Post-S4 to S6 | 5K | Not Rated): Buck keeps calling Eddie's house home, and its making Eddie rethink a lot about his life. (Five times Buck refers to Eddie's house as his home plus one time Eddie does.)

🔥 Where You Go (I Go) by blueberrytwoberry/ @blueberrytwoberry (Post-S7, Getting Together | 7K | Explicit): Eddie stood before an open cupboard. He had a big cardboard box on the counter beside him. As Buck stood there, feeling as though he’d been turned to stone, Eddie put a stack of plates into the box. A stack of identical cardboard boxes sat by the kitchen table. Buck looked across all of it, his heart lurching painfully in his chest, and managed to ask, “What are - Eddie, what are you doing?” OR: Eddie's decided to change his living arrangements; Buck takes it poorly.

🔥 Vibrant by blueberrytwoberry/ @blueberrytwoberry (Soulmates AU | 8K | Teen): Color flooded into Buck’s world between one jump and the next in the middle of the tight, pressing crowd of a concert when he was twenty and making a pit stop from running somewhere - anywhere - away from where he’d been. He wished like hell, afterwards, that it had happened anywhere else at any other time. OR, Buck meets his soulmate, misses them, and tries to deal with that.

Right. Down. Medical. by blueberrytwoberry/ @blueberrytwoberry (Post-S7, Canon Typical Catastrophe, Getting Together | 8K | Teen): Buck hadn’t expected to end up in a disastrous accident when he boarded a train - the Pacific Surfliner - for what should have been a relaxing trip down the coast to enjoy some beautiful scenery and just relax, but if he had - and maybe he should have, considering the way bad luck and trouble seemed to follow him - he’d have expected something normal, you know, like a derailment. OR: Buck has some realizations about his life after an accident on a train.

like a vision reaching down to you by blueberrytwoberry/ @blueberrytwoberry (Post-S7, Crack | 8K | Teen): “You ever notice how a lot of the calls we go on seem kind of, I don’t know, predictive?” Buck asked, when the game they were watching cut over to a commercial, his voice an anchor dropped right in the middle of the spiral of Eddie’s thoughts, dispelling it. OR: The crew at the 118 realizes that the universe is, possibly, trying to tell them something via their jobs.

I never meant to fall for you but I was buried underneath by smilingbuckley/ @smilingbuckley (Canon Divergent Probie Buck | 9K | Teen):  Buck is the new probie at the 118 and Eddie.exe stops functioning.

🔥an inch away from more than just friends by allyasavedtheday/ @littlespoonevan (Post-S7, Getting Together | 10K | Teen): In which Buck has a clipboard and a list and is about to romance the hell out of Eddie Diaz. (Part 2 of Eddie vs Romance)

🔥From the Ground Up by blueberrytwoberry/ @blueberrytwoberry (S3, Animal Transformation | 17K | Mature): Eddie’s life had gone to shit in roughly every possible way. He felt about two seconds away from breaking every hour of every day, like someone had stepped up in front of him, shoved him down, smashed the life he’d been working on, and left him to rebuild from the ground up. And so, really, the last thing he needed when he got home at the end of a long shift was to find a massive, weird-ass dog curled up on his front porch. And yet, there it was.

Lost 'Til I Found You by JJK/ @trenchcoatsandtimetravel (911/MCU Crossover, S3 | 20K | Teen): A 9-1-1 x Marvel crossover where Buck is a genetic son of Steve Rogers because the doctors the Buckley's used to make their saviour baby were also experimenting with the super soldier serum.

WIP

����Where there's smoke by rainbow_nerds/ @rainbow-nerdss (Multiverses | 18/31 | 22K | Teen): His eyelids are heavy. His lungs ache. The smoke is dense and thick, slowly suffocating him. Eddie feels himself drift as Buck’s voice penetrates the smoke, cuts through the fog in his brain. “Eddie, stay with me. Stay with me, Eds.” Eddie wants to stay. He wants to open his eyes and see Buck. He doesn’t want to leave. But he’s so tired, and sleep is calling him. Maybe it will be okay. Maybe his dreams will be sweet. Maybe there’ll be peace, there. And maybe, if he just rests for a little while, he’ll be able to find his way back.

Gentle On My Mind by Daisies_and_Briars/ @cal-daisies-and-briars (Canon Divergent, Shannon Lives, Buck/Eddie/Shannon | 1/? | 6K | Explicit): In which Shannon lives, tells a lie, and sends hers, Eddie's, and Buck's lives down a very different path.

go and kill, go and die by Daisies_and_Briars/ @cal-daisies-and-briars (Zombie Apocalypse AU | 3/14 | 12K | Mature): The 118 are a group of survivors in a small California town in the wake of a zombie apocalypse. For months they've been isolated and safe. But the arrival of some new players, the search for some missing loved ones, will shake everything up and put their little team in jeopardy.

🔥 Long Death by Daisies_and_Briars/ @cal-daisies-and-briars (Post-S7, Vampire AU | 13/15 | 62K | Explicit): In the summer of 2024, a never before seen form of vampirism breaks out in Los Angeles. Just as Eddie is about to get his son back. Six months later, Buck's life is permanently changed.

Podfic

🔥 [podfic] to hurt, to heal, to hope by be_brave13/ @djemsowhat // fic by brewrosemilk/ @gayhoediaz (Post-S7, Getting Together | 10-20min | Teen): "I'd love to be more of a gentleman about this, and I mean this in the most abstract and metaphorical, and least possessive way possible, but in the spirit of not wasting any more time than we already have, Buck..." the words follow each other quickly through a single, whispered breath. "...you're fucking crazy if you think I'm letting you go on that date." "Eddie, you think I'm going anywhere, you're fucking crazy."

🔥[podfic] Advice Wanted by be_brave13/ @djemsowhat // fic by cairparavels (Social Media Fic | 45-60min | Teen): Eddie Diaz takes to Reddit to figure out why he hates his best friend’s new boyfriend so much.

[mulders-too-large-shirt]

s6 episode 17 "trevor" thoughts

today’s episode is not about a shapeshifting wolf, but instead, a guy named trevor. who can pass through solid matter, i guess. as far as superpowers go, this seems to be fairly convenient, if only for preventing your own death by a car accident. 

(author's note: that statement aged poorly)

i wonder what will happen today? i don’t really have any predictions, tbh. the last few episodes have been really good, so i’m feeling like i can maybe- JUST MAYBE- trust that this one will be, too. however, you can never let your guard down. you never know when an evil nursing home or alien chupacabras will show up.

post-episode thoughts: you’re never going to believe this, but trevor was NOT the titular character, and instead only appears two-thirds of the way into the episode. i know. i was as shocked as you are!

and also, this episode didn’t really do anything for me, except for give us a few silly moments. which is fine. some episodes are kinda eh, and this is to be expected. it was darker than i typically care for in tone with none of the deep character exploration that makes super heavy episodes worth having, imo.

so let’s go!

we open in a prison in mississippi. it appears a tornado or something is about to arrive. which was probably hard to film

this man is saying that they really ought to be digging a hole instead of putting up walls. but he gets mad at the other guy when he doesn’t support his hole idea.

OH SHOOT. the hole guy gets a nail stabbed though his hand for wiggling the wood he was supposed to hold still around.

a guard tells rawls- nail guy- to put down the hammer. and then he gets sentenced to the box for his crimes. rawls tries to say you can’t put me in the box, there’s a storm coming, but the boss doesn’t care. he says he isn’t responsible for acts of god. damn. boss is evil.

he gets locked in a wooden outhouse looking thing as the tornado rolls by. he screams for help and is ignored. after the tornado, we see the box has blown away entirely. 

a prison guard goes to see the boss. and he is dead on the floor!!! like sawed in half!!! EWWWW.

that was gross. he looked like a sausage. 

intro time. 

and it was the full thing… nature is healing.

scully is here!! it’s autopsy time!! she is taken aback by the fact he is cut clean in half. mulder is gagging.

LMAOOOO SCULLY: “should we arrest david copperfield?” and mulder’s response: “yes, we should… but not for this” <- BAHAHA, she’s so funny 

scully is poking around into the crumbly body of the dead prison boss. he died during the tornado. scully thinks that perhaps it was an acid used to cut him in half. but mulder says there was no acid in his locked office.

“spontaneous human combustion”, she suggests. LMAO. HIS FACE???? BAHAHAHAHAAAAAA

she was just trying to guess his theory and our man is over here BLUSHING 

BAHAHA, I WAS WONDERING WHEN HE WOULD SAY THE LINE I HAVE SEEN IN SCREENSHOTS: “dear diary, today my heart leapt when agent scully suggested spontaneous human combustion”

okay, when i saw those screenshots though, i could not imagine he was saying it directly TO HER 💀💀💀 bro isn’t even trying to hide how down bad he is anymore!!!

she’s just considering that there are SOME well-documented cases…. and he nods… THEN SHE TELLS HIM TO SHUT UP!

oh, she was mad as hell.

i love when she doesn’t have a hypothesis and she's grasping at scientific straws, so she turns it around on him. “okay, what do YOU make of this?” 

he doesn’t have a theory!! but he says he knows who does

they go to talk to the guard, who insists that somehow it was rawls that killed the boss. rawls was in the box, though. and the box was blown far away. so scully asks: his ghost did this? guard man says idk, you figure that out. which is fair enough, i suppose.

mulder is playing in this doorway. i see him fidgeting. do not think i missed this. 

he thinks rawls is still alive. but SHE’S SENSITIVE!!! “at the risk of further ridicule…” and she dives into more spontaneous combustion theories. DON’T TEASE HER >:(

mulder is walking around thumping the walls. average behavior for him. aha! he finds something!!! a weak spot. and he pushes the wall right open!! so… how did it stay up during a tornado if the wall was that flimsy?

they look through the stuff from his bunk. he stole $90,000, and it was never recovered.

mulder finds a whole bunch of what looks to me like condoms and shows them to scully, saying “ouch”. is that a size joke? hey? is this appropriate workplace behavior??

or maybe they’re not condoms. in which case, i know not what they are. 

(author's note: why was this a part of the episode... was it supposed to be some sort of hint to the nature of his powers and how they can be stopped? because rubber? was it just to introduce some weird MSR undertones? am i unable to identify what condoms look like? many questions. i am turning them over in my head and gaining no answers)

regardless, it provokes no reaction out of scully, who is pondering the evidence before her and used to mulder's shenanigans. they do find a photo of rawls with a woman, and mulder says he wonders who she is. so i suspect we shall learn of her later. 

oh. or we shall learn of her right away. this lady is pouring a guy some tea. and trying to show a man named robert some wedding catalogs. oh no. she's trying to get him to propose. but robert says the news is on about the tornado. she learns about the deaths at the camp, including rawls, and she spills her tea. 

her name is june, btw. if you were wondering. 

ANOTHER jump to an entirely different scene. now a cop is arriving with a flashlight to look at some stuff. it’s rawls he finds!! putting on socks and shoes he stole from the store. 

the cop tries to handcuff him, but i anticipate this not ending well. oh, he’s not a cop, he’s supermarket security. my apologies.

but rawls just walks out of the handcuffs!!! and he steals the security car and drives away!!!!

he is very bold. 

scully and mulder ask the security man if the guy he saw was rawls. and he says maybe! it was pretty dark! somehow, he just disappeared.

mulder walking past scully and placing his hand on her waist…. and her looking up at him… yeah. i clocked that. you can’t get this stuff past me. 

mulder asks for the handcuffs… and they crumble apart in his hands!!! what?! does rawls make stuff pliable?? somehow??

rawls goes to a house and starts throwing stuff around. there’s a guy in the house, though. the guy knows him!! 

he’s looking for june!!!! this other mystery man, who tells him the news says he is dead, says she is gone. and she has been for 4 years. oh, his name is bo. 

rawls says he “wants what is mine”, which is horrible, btw, and bo says he might have her address. but bo pulls out a gun!!!

rawls is not scared. bo shoots the whole clip into him!!! but nothing happens!!! he just goes forward and attacks him.

soon after, the agents are on the scene. and mulder is in his sunglasses. i see this. i notice all.

they kick the door down and find the dead bo slumped up against the wall. and his head is all caved in and crumbly like the prison guy’s body was!!! 

scully says he has a pistol in his hand, there are shells all over, and no bullet holes. she’s in detective mode. this is not surprising for her, but still wonderful how she notices these things despite a faceless dead body looking right at her.

ooo, they pull out the photo of june and rawls again for reference, and she’s in front of the house they are currently in!! scully calls around to try and find out who the mystery woman is. and mulder pulls out a knife and pokes at some black marks on the wall. finding stuff that crumbles in his hand. are those the bullets??

funny that he’s a knife guy. one of those dudes that keeps a knife on him. i mean, i guess it’s part of the line of work. but still. knife guy.

scully finds out who june is!! but there is no record of her since 1996. maybe she changed her name, mulder proposes.

he says the composition of the bullets has been changed, just like the handcuffs and the prison wall. and my heart is skipping beats because scully looks so beautiful. oh my god. sometimes this happens, and i just can’t focus on the plot. ohhhh my god.

and mulder is looking handsome himself as he proposes that rawls can just… change the composition of stuff. including bodies. 

scully asks: where is the science in all of this? and mulder says perhaps it is something to do with the tornado- she was talking about the tornado and its effects, and he’s gesticulating as he quotes her- and she says she’s sorry she even brought it up. live your truth, queen. if you think that spontaneous human combustion is possible, i promise i will not judge you for it. i love your mind and your freckles.

but mulder refocuses them from their disagreement, something i always find interesting when he does, because it doesn’t happen much considering how they disagree on almost everything all of the time. it is a successful handling of opposing views when he does take the time to do it. they agree on looking for june. and how can they do that? scully has her sister’s address!

ooh, it’s the woman from before, who wanted robert to propose and spilled her tea! june!!! jackie (the sister) calls and asks if it’s a good time, to which june says it NEVER is. but jackie reports that the police called asking for her. she says to call rawls- just in case he isn’t dead. 

poor jackie. her sister never wants to talk, and now she learns she might be in danger. she’s shaking as she holds a cigarette. looking sad as she sets down the phone. when her door slams!!!

she gets on the floor and grabs a knife, shaking as she walks down the hall. it’s rawls in her house!!! and she runs away, locking the door, trying to barricade it. 

why did he take his shirt off…. i mean, getting in the locked door through the power of making things pliable is one thing, but did he have to do it shirtless? no. i don't think so.

ahh!! scully and mulder arrive at jackie's place this very moment!! the house is silent…

AHHH. rawls wrote on the door “i want what’s mine” <- I HATE THAT!!! I HATE THAT!!!

and the door is able to be kicked through. they find jackie on the other side, who says he left. she claims he walked right through the wall.

oh! scully says they have to go now- they found june!!! 

RAWLS GOT IN THE TRUNK OF THEIR CAR??? AND HE IS JUST LAYING THERE??? WHAT????

they pull up to june's house. robert from before answers, and doesn’t now about her old name at all.

she comes to the door, asking if rawls is alive. 

oh, robert is MAD as june explains to mulder and scully that she knows rawls- they used to live together. and she recounts a story of him following a guy who cut him off on the highway for 62 miles and then cracking his skull open with a picket fence. 🤯

mulder asks if he wants the money from the robbery- she says she found it by accident, and then took it. she used it to buy the house and the decor. to have another chance for herself. well. can't say i really blame her. she made the best out of a bad situation.

they place the couple under guard, and robert is furious. he says he’ll go to his own place. and the agents reluctantly let him do so. mulder seemed to know he would be powerless against this dude's rage.

AHHH! mulder takes june’s things and puts them in the trunk of the car. i was expecting a rawls jumpscare, but there wasn’t one! there is, however, a rip in the car like it’s paper!!

mulder demands the keys, and says to get june out of here- rawls was in the trunk, and they took him right where he wanted to go. rawls is inside, shirtless still, looking for money. and in comes mulder!!!

(does he need to have his shirt off to go through the stuff? i don't get it. there's a lot about this episode i don't get)

but rawls manages to vanish!!!

mulder is searching through the house, when scully calls for him. NO! NOT MORE CREEPY WALL WRITING!!!!!!!!

it seems rawls burned the message into the wall somehow. but he stopped near a mirror. mulder has ideas based on this revelation.

BAHAHA, he asks her why objects don’t usually pass through other solid objects and she answers with “electrons”. okay, physics major!!!

mulder thinks that maybe his ability has to do with electricity. maybe an insulator, like glass or rubber, could prevent his… powers.

i’m imagining a big rubber room and agents in rubber suits trying to catch him. it’s a silly visual.

scully plays along- okay, even if he CAN walk through walls, why is he doing all this over $90,000 he could get from somewhere else?? it always makes me smile when she goes along with this theories despite the lack of belief. but mulder says it isn’t about money.

OH SHIT!!! scully says he was probably looking for this, and pulls out hospital bills. and since she can speak fluent hospital, she knows the code on the bill is for a c-section. he is looking for a child!!!!! that was born right after he was sent to prison!!!!

is jackie’s son actually june’s son?!

the news is carrying the story of rawls not being dead and instead being on the loose- everyone PLEASE keep an eye out. june is in the safe room with a guard, and she wants to call jackie, but the guard says no calls. so she lights up. and then gets yelled at by him and pinches the cigarette out.

BUT AUGH!!! SOMETHING IS DESCENDING FROM THE CEILING!!! IT’S RAWLS!!! CRAWLING LIKE A SPIDER!!! NASTY!! NASTY NASTY!!!!

the guard is found dead soon after. and rawls took june with him. 

scully does that thing where her and mulder wordlessly communicate and walk over to the side of the room to discuss out of earshot of everyone else. and she says that their best bet is to probably go through state records to try and see if the child was adopted, even if it will take some time. mulder just tells the other cops he needs special equipment. okay.

rawls has her pulled over on the side of the road, playing music as he sits in silence. june is terrified, saying she’s sorry about the money, she’s terrified, please say something, she can pay him back. 

she asks “what’d you have”, and then calls her a “dumb bitch” for not knowing what he’s talking about. A BOY OR A GIRL? she says she had a boy. and he repeats this over and over. 

oh, THE CHILD is trevor!!! and rawls tacks his own last name onto "trevor andrew" that to see how it sounds. he says he heard about him from a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy, which means god wanted him to know. and now he’s here- god’s will. 

she’s crying as he commands her to take him to the kid.

scully and mulder are trying to figure out wtf went down, making phone calls- finding out it’s a boy and nothing else. no records. maybe they went through unofficial channels. maybe a friend or a relative…

(they realize at the same time….)

we see trevor, who just wants to smash some cars about. jackie is cooking dinner while the phone rings. it’s mulder on the phone, but she opens the door before hearing his message and sees june!!! and then rawls bursts in, asking where his boy is. 

and he sees the kid. saying he appreciates jackie for taking care of him. she’s a good mother- better than some, he says with a pointed look at june.

he’s approaching trevor like he’s a wild animal, but the kid is just sitting there looking at him like, who tf is this guy… 

trevor says hi to “aunt june”, which sends rawls into a rage, and he grabs her, telling her to shut up, locking her in the closet. and then demands jackie make the kid sit back down and have his supper. 

he sits down with the boy, trying to convince him he’s not going to hurt him. even though he just hurt his aunt directly in front of him. while jackie eyeballs the boiling soup on the counter. a plan is forming.

poor kid is freaked tf out as rawls tries to introduce himself, saying he’s going to take trevor on a trip. and he asks if he needs to pack some things. when trevor doesn’t want to do that, he yells at jackie to make him.

and once trevor gets up to get his things, she launches the soup at rawls, but it has no effect!!!

jackie yells at trevor to run, and rawls starts beating her with a pot. screaming for trevor. who is hiding behind a tree and super visible. 

AH!! he runs right into scully, who must snatch him away while mulder says he WILL shoot rawls!!!

he shoots him with a riot gun- rubber bullets, the special equipment- 4 times, and he falls back!!! and then mulder runs inside to find jackie on the floor. meanwhile scully has this small child and is sprinting to the car, trying to tell him everything will be okay. 

but he’s staring into the distance…. and rawls somehow followed them despite the rubber bullets knocking him over. he reaches his hand out to trevor… and scully is still…

and then they BOOK IT!!! and she runs with the kid into a phone booth- i think it is a phone booth- and SLAMS the door shut. aha, clever scully thinking. he cannot burst through glass.

he punches on the door, trying to break through the glass, which i guess he can burst through- just the old-fashioned way, using a brick rather than his strange abilities. and he finally gets through…. but the kid is scared. 

he stares…. and then walks away. and all of a sudden, june hits him with her car. at first it does nothing- he just seems to clip through- but then… splat. 

scully is still guarding the kid as mulder approaches with his special gun, and june sits in the car, covered in his blood. saying she had to do it, or else he would have hurt trevor. 

she asks what he wanted, and mulder says maybe another chance. she sobs. and thus ends the episode.

well, damn. that was a dark one.

i don’t even have that many thoughts on the subject. 

whenever there’s a case with kids i get a little emo. both in the sense that our agents usually have to comfort these traumatized children which gets me emotional in predictable ways, and it also makes me just generally sad and therefore less analytical when it comes to the character development that actually went down. because i’m thinking the whole time, damn. kidnapping kids has less entertainment value to me than werewolves. 

not sure exactly why mulder said that “another chance” line at the end because rawls clearly proved that he isn’t deserving of another chance. i mean, yeah, he wanted one. but he also tried to kill the boy’s family to get it. so that doesn’t mean he ought to GET one. it just seemed in poor taste to say that. but maybe mulder was trying to be radically honest and was not indicating that rawls actually deserved any sort of redemption. because. well. clearly he didn't. and mulder of all people would know that.

huh. what else is there to say?

well, points must be given for the creative use of rubber bullets. 

tbh, not enough mulder and scully time for me. not enough character exploration. just a lot of case. which is fine in its own way, but not really what i watch the show for. although scully knowing the hospital codes, reciting electron facts, and proposing combustion (and then getting self-conscious for doing so) was deeply enjoyable to me.

the reverent way mulder said her name when she voiced that thought… well. that was something, wasn’t it? he said it like it was holy. and that smile… whew, boy.

if it was an episode that just quite didn’t do it for me, i can only really highlight the things i enjoyed and move onto the next one. i can give it room to grow on me, but i’m not sure i really see that happening. 

shrugs. let's see where we go next.

[seriousfic]

Furiosa And Its Response: A FAQ

Q: What’s Furiosa about?

A: Ironically, for all the claims prequel Fury Road wasn’t ‘about’ Max, Furiosa isn’t entirely about Furiosa. The first hour or so features Furiosa as a child, kidnapped from the Green Place (an idyllic oasis whose people live in peace and abundance, zealously protected against the post-apocalyptic depredations of outsiders) and then becoming the prisoner of Dementius. Dementius is sort of the villain protagonist of the movie’s first half while Furiosa is on the sidelines.

He seems like the last gasp of the savage warlords like Toecutter and Lord Humongus that we saw in the Mel Gibson Maxes. He is entirely about increasing the size of his horde while taking and consuming any resources he can find. He comes into conflict with Immortan Joe (the villain from the ‘sequel,’ Fury Road), who is more of the iron fist in the velvet glove, and one of the interesting points of this movie is how Joe seems like a reasonable administrator in contrast to Dementius. He’s an awful person, obviously, but at least he keeps the trains running on time.

Furiosa grows to adulthood caught in-between Dementius and Joe’s feud, eventually moving to escape and return to the Green Place.

Q: Is it as good as Fury Road?

A: Not quite. It has a new cinematography look that tends to give things a plasticky CGI sheen, like Attack of the Clones or something. I know that they did a lot of the effects practically and that Fury Road used a lot of CGI itself, but yo, what's the point if it looks fake?

Also, towards the end, Dementus gets into this "we're not so different, you and I" deal with Furiosa that feels like a reach, considering he hasn't seemed to be motivated by revenge at all throughout the story, just bog-standard ambition and lust for power, so trying to make him a dark mirror to Furiosa now seems like a strain for profundity.

Q: Is it woke?

A: I’d say not unless your definition of woke is so expansive that it’s basically meaningless. The themes of the movie are too universal to belong to any one political movement.

-Rapists, tyrants, and warlords are bad.

-In a radioactive wasteland, it’s good to live in a self-sufficient oasis.

-Good people try to avoid violence when possible and want to live in peace.

It does have a female protagonist, but so do Aliens, Terminator, Kill Bill, and a buttload of Michelle Yeoh movies. If you say that you’re fine with female protagonists, just not with poorly written ones, then I don’t see how that’d be a problem here.

In fact, it’s stated that the reason Furiosa is so badass is because a straight white man, Imperator Jack, saw her core toughness and mentored her. He’s not at all a simp and is treated as a paragon of masculinity—reasonable, respectful, self-controlled, and hypercompetent. He and Furiosa are in an implicitly romantic relationship.

That’s right. Furiosa is so cool because a boy fell in love with her and taught her everything she knows.

Other men help out Furiosa on her quest and some women are enthusiastically villainous. In that respect, it’s even less ‘feminist’ than Fury Road was.

Q: Okay, how’s it doing at the box office?

A: Not well.

Q: Why is that?

A: Opinions vary. Some say it’s because, despite the movie’s quality, it’s getting caught up in a backlash against ‘gender-swapped reboots’.

Q: Is it?

A: Possibly. I should note it isn’t meant as a ‘passing the torch’ ‘legacy’ ‘rebootquel’, just as a spin-off. The next movie that director George Miller wants to do is a prequel to Fury Road focusing on Mad Max, entitled The Wasteland. So this movie is more like if, between Batman movies, they made a movie about Catwoman going on a solo adventure.

Q: It can’t be doing poorly because it has a female protagonist, the most successful movie last year was Barbie!

A: You’re telling me female audiences showed up for a wacky comedy with a big showstopping musical number, but not for a gritty action movie focusing on death and revenge, despite both having female leads? It’s almost like girls like girly movies while men like manly movies (most of Furiosa’s audience is male—and I wonder how much bigger it would be if they’d advertised Imperator Jack’s presence instead of keeping it a secret).

Q: All movies are doing poorly this year!

A: Godzilla X Kong did well, as did Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Dune 2, The Beekeeper…

Q: It’s been a long time since Fury Road came out, people forgot about it!

A: It was a long time after Beyond Thunderdome that Fury Road came out.

Q: Well, people are only going to the theaters for big event movies!

A: Chris Hemsworth and Anya Taylor-Joy in an epic action movie follow-up to Fury Road isn’t a big event? Look, I’m not saying these aren’t factors, but I remember seeing a movie before this came out and overhearing an elderly couple looking at a poster for Furiosa and muttering, in a disgruntled fashion, words to the effect of “Oh, great, they made Mad Max a girl.” I think it’s very possible that Hollywood has killed the market for female-led action movies by making people think they’ll get a deliberately assaultive product every time they try their luck.

Q: But aren’t woke people turning consuming politicalized product into a secular religion?

A: Umm… maybe? I think most people who are fans of anything get pissed off when quality work goes ignored while slop (reality TV, Michael Bay movies, Call of Duty games, comics about Batman) get hugely appreciated. Everybody should probably not take the box office so seriously, since the important thing is that we have a fun movie to enjoy, even though it is frustrating that we could’ve had a whole trilogy of Rocketeer movies if just a few more people had bought tickets. Jennifer Connolly, in her prime, playing a thinly veiled Bettie Page!!!

Q: Then you think I should see it?

A: Yes. You don’t have to if you don’t want to, obviously, but if you like action movies or prior installments in the franchise, it’s hard for me to believe that you won’t get your money’s worth here.

Q: Does it have good disability representation?

A: Uh. I guess? It’s in the context of people having birth defects owing to radioactive fallout from nuclear war, but sure. Why not?

[sweaterkittensahoy]

JackBucky

So I don’t even know if you accepts prompts or anything but I’ve read your JackBucky fics and I can’t get these out of my head so I’ll write them down and just leave them here! You don’t have to write any thing!! I just wanna get it out of my head!

- in which Jack finds out that Bucky is alive, (later POW list) and Blakely, Crosby and the others figure out what their current and former air execs have been up to.

- In which a newly free Buck thanks Jack for writing to Bucky and keeping him sane, with something to look towards

- In which a poorly healed eye socket and trying to build his old level of fitness results in a head knock and a migraine for Bucky, the 100th from Stalag Luft III trauma bonded level caring for Bucky and Jack taking care of his man

- Sub drop Bucky, Jack taking care of his man, bottom!Bucky, his brain just going quiet! Maybe some like hair pulling etc???

Love your work so much

(I went with the migraine one because, well, I know the exact feeling of one of the ones you get from a head injury. My eye sockets are all fine; I got kicked in the head so hard in martial arts I nearly passed out, and then years later bounced my head off a hardwood couch leg. AKA Gayle did you get two concussions and not know until years later when a friend who boxed laughed his ass off and told you they were concussions? Yes. Anyway, to the story you're here for.)

Jack isn't sure what to do when he hears Clea yelp from outside his office door and then Crank comes rushing into his office without any protocol at all. He's wearing his PT gear, and he's covered in bits of grass. Jack stares as Crank fights to catch his breath. 

"Egan," he manages. "Hospital."

Jack's up like a shot. Clea waves him by when he steps out of his office, obviously having heard Crank's words. Jack leads the way to his Jeep and drives like hell to the base hospital while Crank finishes composing himself. 

"We were exercising," Crank says. "Like we've been. But halfway through pushups, he just…" 

Jack glances over as he pulls the Jeep to a hard stop next to the hospital. Crank's got that ghost look in his eyes, like he's seeing things no one's ever witnessed before. All the boys who were in the Stalag get it sometimes. Jack gives Crank a slap on the back, then climbs out of the Jeep. There's a whole cluster of the fellas by the hospital doors, all in their PT gear. All having come back from the Stalag over the last few weeks. Only Buck's missing. He's on his way to Holland again. Jack hopes he doesn't have to give him bad news when he lands.

"Boys," Jack says, and they all turn towards him. They're still gaunt to the last man, but they're starting to show signs of healing. Benny and Brady had organized their group workouts, swearing they'll all be back to Army trim by the time the war's really over. "I'm sure it's fine."

He gets a lot of ghost looks for that, but he ignores them. Lays his mouth in a flat line and walks into the hospital, scared down to his toes that something awful has happened but determined not to show fear. 

It's not hard to find John. The hospital's empty these days. John's the only man taking up a bed. He's in his PT gear, but his shoes are laid next to the cot. He's propped up on four pillows, and his eyes are closed. Doc Smokey is just finishing hooking an IV into his arm. 

"Major Kidd," Doc Smokey greets quietly. "Major Egan overdid it, best we can tell."

"I'm fine," John mutters, though he doesn't open his eyes. 

Jack stands by the bed, hands on his hips. "Dehydration?" he guesses. He can't imagine why John would be getting an IV otherwise.

"Headache," Doc Smokey replies. He turns the valve on the IV and pats John's arm. "Migraine, if I had my guess. It's not uncommon after head injuries."

"That was ages ago," John grumbles.

"Do you mind if I take it from here?" Jack asks before Doc Smokey can say anything. "I know this part."

"Sure." Doc Smokey gives Jack a quick smile and sees himself out. 

Jack sits on the edge of the cot and reaches for John's hand. John squeezes his fingers hard, and Jack watches him slowly open his eyes. "Be careful," Jack can't help but say. 

John tries to smile, but it doesn't stick. His eyes are only half-opened, but he's not wincing. "Should have listened to you last night," he says. 

Jack snorts. John had come in from the previous day's exercise complaining of a mild headache. Jack had given him aspirin and water and rubbed his neck a little. The headache hadn't gone away, and Jack had guessed maybe John's body was protesting from so much exercise after so long without any. Suggested John skip a day with the boys. 

"None of them are complaining," John had said. "I can't have them think I'm worse off than they are."

The thing is, Jack's read John's report of his time in the Stalag. And the time before it. Running from the Germans, nearly getting lynched, getting hit so hard he cracked his eye socket and was presumed dead, or near enough to bury, at least. 

Jack hadn't reminded John of all that, just rubbed his jaw where he was holding it tight and got John to bed early. 

Now, Jack leans in and kisses John's forehead. "Crank scared the hell out of me," he says, wanting to show John a little of his own weakness with John admitting his. "He came into my office so fast it made Clea yell, and I thought you'd been hit by a Jeep or worse."

"Headache's probably as bad as getting creamed," John replies. He closes his eyes again. His fingers go lax in Jack's hand. "Sorry. Think the medicine is making me sleepy."

Jack lays John's hand on the cot and stands up. He leans in and kisses John softly on the mouth. John tries to return it, but he's clearly mostly asleep. "I'll be back later," Jack says. "Rest up."

He can't help but glance back as he gets to the end of the room near Doc Smokey's office. John's absolutely out of it, jaw hanging open a bit. In the late afternoon light, he looks hollowed out in his cheeks and at his neck. But he's breathing. Jack can see it all the way across the room. He's breathing and under clean sheets, and he'll be okay. 

"Doc," Jack says as he enters the office. "Anything we can do to mitigate the headaches?" 

"Hard to say," Doc Smokey says. "It really depends on the patient. Based on Bucky's coming from a head injury, there's really no telling if or when they'll stop, but once he's out of pain again, I'll see if we can't figure out some early warning signs that could tell him to slow down before he takes himself out again."

Jack nods. That seems reasonable, if not perfect. But Jack can deal with reasonable. "Thank you," he says. "When can I retrieve him?"

"Tomorrow after breakfast. I expect the medication will keep him out until at least midnight. I won't stop you from coming back, but I honestly doubt he'll need the company." 

"Okay," Jack says. He'll come back at 0030, just to make sure John isn't awake and bored. "I'm heading out. Ring my office if I'm needed."

"Will do."

Jack walks outside. Every single man from the Stalag PT group is still waiting by the doors. "What the hell?" he says. 

"We didn't want to barge in," Benny says. "So, we figured we'd wait until you came out." 

"All of you?" Jack asks. 

Benny shrugs. "It's…it's hard to explain, Jack."

"Stalag shit," Jack says. It's what John says when any of their group do something that makes Jack ask why. He sees a few of the boys grin, and he wonders if they use the same term or are just amused to hear Jack curse so casually. "He's fine," he says, and the wave of relief feels like a physical force that hits him square in the face. "It's a bad headache. He had a head injury when he made it to all of you–"

"His eye socket," Crank says. "Doc at the camp said it healed up a little funny."

Jack feels a desperate sense of relief that the boys clearly know about the injury, if not how John got it. He's never been sure, and he's never asked. John had promised to say everything in interrogation and that way at least Jack could read it. So, Jack did. More than once. And he's wondered how much of the absolute terror any of the boys know. He thinks probably none of it, but the eye socket was apparently unignorable. "Well, Doc Smokey didn't say anything but that old head injuries can cause headaches, so that's all I know," Jack replies. "And however funny it healed up, it doesn't seem to usually bother him, right?"

The feeling of relief goes up another notch as everyone nods. Jack wants to laugh or tease them, but he can't. It's not fun, really, the way they seem to be holding each other together by frayed strings he can't see. But he'll respect them. It's what got them all back here. It's what got John back to him, and if that means Jack's got to calm down a whole big set of mother hens for the rest of his life, well, he'll do it. "He'll be out tomorrow morning. Doc expects him to sleep straight through."

"Want me to tell Cleven, Sir?" Crank asks over the general murmur of happiness that breaks out.

Jack honestly can't believe this is the same man who stormed into his office not a half hour ago looking more panicked than Jack had ever seen him. "Yes, please," he says. 

"And, uh, could you tell Lieutenant Jacobs I'm sorry for bursting in the way I did? I think I spooked her, and she's not easily spooked."

"No, she's not," Jack replies, "and I'll pass it along."

"Thanks."

Jack goes back to his office and delivers Crank's apology. Clea looks amused and assures Jack it was more the speed than Crank himself.. Jack tucks that away to share with John later. It'll make him laugh. He gets back to work, then he has dinner in the mess. Buck joins him, a small frown on his face. 

"Red says the drop was perfect," Jack says because Buck rarely talks first when he has that look. 

"Went just fine," Buck agrees. He eats a few bites of potatoes. "Crank says it was the head injury that caused it."

"Apparently," Jack says. "He should be up and around tomorrow morning."

"Crank said that, too."

Then what's your problem, Jack wants to snap, but he doesn't. Just because Buck got back first doesn't mean his time in the Stalag wasn't just as bad as the others. Jack's read his interrogation, too. 

Buck eats the rest of his potatoes and cuts his meat. "Doc at the camp didn't have a whole lot to work with," he says to his green beans. "Wonder if he had if it could have stopped this headache."

"No clue," Jack says because he really doesn't know. Because telling Buck it isn't his fault the Germans skimped on prisoner needs up to and including a decent ability to care for broken bones isn't going to actually make Buck feel better. They had to send three boys stateside the moment they got back for mis-treated broken bones; last Jack heard, they all had to have them rebroken to get them set right. He's grateful that it wasn't needed in John's case, but Buck's not one for that sort of pep talk, so Jack doesn't try.

*

Jack goes to the O-Club and has a whiskey. Rosie sits with him and lights up the whole damn room talking about going on the run to Holland. The way everyone waved and cheered like they have everywhere else. It makes Jack feel good to hear it. He'll go up for one soon enough, but he's hoping John will be up to being his co-pilot. He wants him to see the happiness Rosie always describes. Wants him to understand that all those people on the ground know he's a hero.

Jack chats with Harry, then listens to Blakely and Douglass try to tell a story at the same time. Tatty goads him into a dance, and then it's nearly 2300, and Jack knows John will likely still be fast asleep, but he gives in to what he really wants to do and goes to the hospital. 

Solly's at John's bedside. He's reading a book. He looks up when Jack walks in. "He's still asleep," he says. 

"Thanks," Jack replies. He sits on the cot like he had earlier. The IV bottle is gone. The IV port is still in his arm, but it's covered with a bandage. There's a glass of water by the bed. "Why are you here?" he asks. 

"My turn," Solly replies. "Then it's Hambone, but I'm not sure who after him."

"Doc really seems certain he's fine," Jack says. 

Solly shrugs. "Stalag shit."

Jack nods. "Ah. I see." He takes John's hand. Solly goes back to his book. 

Hambone comes in at five minutes to midnight. He nods hello to Jack and takes Solly's seat as the other man stands. Solly leaves. Hambone pulls out a book. He and Jack don't talk. 

Just after 0030, John grunts, and his eyes flutter, and he grumbles, and then he's awake in that hard, quick way he's had since he came back to Jack. He doesn't jerk around like he does sometimes, just blinks at Jack, then glances at Hambone. He looks confused for a moment, then grins. He turns the grin to Jack. 

"Stalag shit," he murmurs.

Jack squeezes his hand and nods. "Can you feel your head?" he asks. 

John concentrates for a moment. "It's fine," he says. He yawns. "When do I get to leave?"

"After breakfast," Jack says. "I'll come get you myself."

"Heh," John huffs. "You hear that, Ham? Air Exec's gonna be my personal escort."

"You need one," Ham replies. "Can't even do ten push ups without fainting. You need a big, strong man."

John beams and swats at Hambone. He misses by a mile. "Yeah, I'll show you ten push ups," he says. 

Hambone grins. "Sure," he replies. "Can't wait." He looks at Jack. "We'll be here all night, Sir," he says. "One of us will come to you if you're needed."

"I'm sure all you'll need is a break when he gets restless," Jack says, though he can tell John's already about to fall asleep again. He leans down and kisses John. It's not much more than a press of lips, but it's more than he usually does when the boys are around. He's tacit by nature and not prone to general public displays, but he doesn't care today. The war's nearly over. A whole pack of his boys came back in one piece, and they brought John with them. If anyone deserves to see him be a little soft, it's them. "Goodnight," he whispers to John. "Sleep well."

"'Night," John says. His eyes are soft and unfocused when Jack pulls away, though if that's medicine or being tired or being clearly pleased, Jack isn't sure. He doesn't care, not really. John's feeling better, and he's got so many people who love him and want him safe. Jack's glad to leave it to the Stalag group to keep an eye on John tonight. He knows they'll do it well.

[georgiapeach30513]

It’s interesting how Honey Don’t went from a movie that not many if any people really cared about then as soon as the trailer dropped it was suddenly 👀👀👀👀 I’m up!!! Haha

From a marketing standpoint, I have to say the trailer was 🔥.

I also started watching drive away dolls last night and let me say, I chuckled quite a bit. The writing is actually pretty good but I think the story feels a bit lackluster. I think that’s why the movie did poorly at the box office and with critics and audiences. Even with the arguably more stacked cast: Consider Matt Damon, Pedro, Colman, and Margaret and Geraldine and Beanie Feldstein, this film should have been bigger than it was, and if it was a better film, it probably would have been. But.

If I was Ethan and Tricia. I think I would have started the trilogy with a Honey Don’t type of story and a stacked cast, then ease into the goofy Thelma and Louise story for the sequel(s).

Because if you look at the online reactions alone, people are already warmer to HD even if they felt burned by DAD. People still are a little unsure of Honey Don’t because DAD was so meh, but it seems that people like the idea of a crime noir Nice Guys type of story mixed with the campy coen antics and hot stars, vs just two people on a road trip with some coen antics on the side.

Ethan, I’m crossing my fingers for you. I hope this one works!!

I know within the fandom we were all excited about Priest Dean, now Reverend Drew. Several of us talked so much about him and his special scenes. We've been waiting for this day!! But I do love that it seems people in general are excited about this movie.

I agree, I think the trailer is amazing!!

I have yet to fully watch Drive Away Dolls, I know, but it just didn't interest me. I'll watch it before I watch Honey Don't, but I wouldn't say I'm looking forward to it. I think that they relied on their cast more than they relied on the substance. You have huge names and then everything just fell flat.

I am curious to see what is the third act of this trilogy. I know that the Coen brothers aren't for everyone, and I think Ethan solo is even more wishy washy, but again, that trailer looks amazing. Apart from having Chris in it, it captured me, and I would watch it regardless. Chris is an added bonus.

I do think that DAD put a bad taste in people's mouths for HD, but it seems that it's being made up for it. I mean, 6 days later and the views on the trailer is double what DAD was over a year ago. I think that's a good sign. And I do love a good campy movie. I know that there's mixed reviews on Chris' performance, but I became a fan because of his campy acting in NATM, so I actually quite enjoy that. However, I hope that Sacrifice is not as campy.

[danganronpasurvivoraskblog]

chiaki, thoughts on concord?

Okay, now this is a real tragedy, because Concord is symbolic of just how difficult it is to be a gamer in this day and age.

2024 has been a year full of disappointments. Most recently, the $15 million budgeted Borderlands movie made only $18.5 million at the box office. Considering that doesn't even pay for the marketing expenses, it's a catastrophe.

Undoubtedly, it's a bad film, but in the realm of video games, we currently have a failure named "Concord." And it's surprising to me that people even remember this game, despite it's recency.

Now, for the record, what I'm about to say is something that makes me genuinely sad. Like...ACTUALLY really sad. So...bear with me.

For those who are unaware, Concord was a generic hero shooter that was released less than 30 days ago, similar to Overwatch or Valorant. Except it had a five-times slower pace, it combined all the worst aspects of earlier hero shooters. The game's movement was really slow; it felt like you're playing on a treadmill. The gameplay was excruciatingly slow and annoying; it seemed as though you're trapped in a slow-motion Zack Snyder movie.

The game was really generic, but it was neither terrible nor unplayable. But at the same time it wasn't really unique, and if someone enjoys this genre of game, there are at least fifty more that are superior. The fact that Concord costed $40 rather than being free to play, like the majority of other multiplayer shooters, is what made it especially foolish. It was destined to fail from the beginning, and today it only managed to launch with a little over 650 users on Steam.

To put that in context, more people played some of the worst failures in gaming history when they first launched. Redfall and even Babylon's Fall, which was such a failure that it was removed from Steam, had more players than Concord had. Compared to Lord of the Rings: Gollum, another huge failure that forced its studio to close, Concord had only a little bit more players.

Now, you must have noticed by now that I've been talking about this game in the past tense, and there's a reason for that. Concord was such a massive failure, that the servers were shut down two weeks after its launch, with all sold copies being refunded. That is a HUGE FAIL.

Concord was a big-budget game that must have cost millions to produce, but nobody wanted to play it. Although I don't personally have strong feelings on the matter, I do find it puzzling how these games are approved in the first place. Everyone sighed in agreement when they saw the first trailer, which made it obvious that this was another hero shooter in an already crowded industry. It's difficult to determine who this game is intended for, especially considering that even fans of hero shooters won't rush into a $40 game when there are more enjoyable free options, like Fortnite, or Overwatch 2.

It's unbelievable that this disaster was released considering how predictable it was. Even then, it didn't make sense to invest in a game that is sure to fail, even if it appeared to be a desperate attempt to recover part of the production costs. It's unfortunate since I have no doubt that brilliant developers worked on this out of necessity rather than choice. Seemingly, they attempted to make another hero shooter, believing it would be a simple victory, but they didn't realize that no one wants to see more of them, especially not for forty bucks.

I HATE being negative. I hate being negative more than I hate anything else in the world. But this is a flop that's hard not to laugh at, which is why I wanted to talk about it. I don't see why anyone would pay such a high price for this when there are better free options available, despite the fact that it has largely great reviews.

Considering how poorly Concord performed, especially for a high-budget game, is astounding. The majority of games, including the most popular ones, never start with fewer than a thousand players. I felt compelled to address this as it's uncommon for a game to fail so miserably.

[eradicatetehnormal]

My Zoomer Ass Watched Pink Flamingos For the First Time

So, I think? I enjoyed that. My taste in media is what most would consider garbage, but relatively safe garbage. Stuff that's garbage in the sense that it's poorly written or executed, not in the sense that it's genuinely filthy. I mean, 90% of my blog is dedicated to a video game series with anime and Disney characters, so yeah, I was really out of my element here.

So first off, I really like the way the movie characterizes Divine in the beginning. The standout scene for me was her putting raw meat between her legs. I didn't get it at first, but I read an interpretation of that scene where the writer said that Divine is meant to be, well, filthy. She shits on femininity and leaks nasty body fluids. She would always prefer to have flesh touching her, even if it's raw meat. That's genius characterization, imo.

The central plot of the movie is very entertaining, as well. I love the concept of two rivals duking it out to see who's the worst. We get some great moments out of it like Divine receiving a box of shit or her and her crew killing and eating those officers.

The main reason this movie has been on my mind is because a Youtube channel I'm starting to fancy, Anthony Gramuglia, recently made a video about how we need more bad queer representation, a sentiment I agree with. I'll always have more of an interest queer content that isn't about two, skinny, white boys from upper-middle-class neighborhoods talking about the pressures of being in the closet *bleh!* I'm just sick of seeing that shit hyped up.

But it was interesting. This film was one of the main examples of how unsanitized and offensive queer media used to be. That it wasn't as concerned with making queer people look good. Don't get me wrong, the character of Divine is anything but inoffensive, at the same time though, I feel like this movie makes her out to be the lesser of two evils. I mean, yeah Divine is gross, blowing her son, shitting in public, and cannibalizing people? That's pretty nasty, but she never reaches the heights of people who run a sex trafficking ring and flash themselves in public consistently ('cause I mean like, you gotta clean up the police bodies somehow, you can't have that stinking up your property. Also, that was arguably self-defense, the people at the party weren't really doing anything wrong.). She even does something somewhat heroic by letting the two women locked in the couple's basement free and get revenge on their rapist. I thought she was going to kill the two afterward.

Maybe that's the point, though. That there's a difference between being filthy and being evil. Also, Divine's revenge was just way better. Burning down a trailer and your ops aren't even inside? Cowardly.

This was an interesting watch. I can't go into detail about how much of a landmark this was on queer cinema and cinema in general. I just know that it was. On a scale of personal enjoyment, I'd give this a 7/10. And yeah, kill everyone now, condone first-degree murder, advocate cannibalism, eat shit. My final message. Goodbye.

[pbandjesse]

I just got done my ceramics class. And I have such a nice time. I used almost all of my clay. Literally had like three little teeny tiny pieces the size of a quarter left. I gave them to Sandy because she had a reclaim bag right there and I just feel really nice right now. I am very excited to go home though because I'm so tired.

I didn't sleep well again last night but it's really just because I can't breathe. I wake up in the morning and I can't breathe out of my nose and I just feel so tired. I don't know what I can do to make myself breathe better at night. I'm either too hot or it's too dry. Ridiculous.

So because of that I let myself sleep an extra hour. And I did benefit from that greatly. Wednesdays are great because I can do that. And I just tried to not cry. James left a little bit before I got up for real. They had laid it with me for a little while but honestly I was just not in a good spot and I was just really frustrated.

But they left and I pulled myself together. I got dressed and I felt pretty good. My hair is very dirty and my head is itchy but it looked nice. And I just pulled myself together and I left and I went to work.

I was still thinking about the house a lot. And I I'm still thinking about it now. But I tried to put it out of my head and think about other stuff because focusing on and isn't going to help me much.

So I got to camp and I got to work on fixing some of the things on the schedule. Cuz that is just going to be a project I'm going to continuously tinker with for the next 3 months. I worked on starting to write down the lessons and ideas I have for the new programs that we're trying to develop. It was a good time.

But very quickly I became very bored. They're just wasn't enough for me to do today. But it was also way too cold outside to do anything. On my drive in it started to flurry which was so nice and it was so pretty. But I left my gloves at home and so being outside was too painful. Thankfully I have an extra sweatshirt in the car so I was able to layer later in the day when it got doing colder. But I did not want to be out in the world doing much. I wanted to stay in the office where it was at least warm.

I was very distracted this morning though I was just thinking about the house and I was working on lesson plans and I was playing on my phone and eventually I walked up to the art building and I did put some stuff away and I spray painted a pallet easel box I have that someone had poorly painted. So I would go up there twice to do a couple coats. And then I put away all the stuff that we got from the attic. But then my hands hurt really bad so I went back to the office.

I was so bored that I just was eating all day. Just trying to keep myself awake. I had my lunch early and I just tried to have a nice day because it was very difficult when I was so bored.

Eventually I would go up to arts and crafts and get some of my beating stuff and brought that down to work on just to have something to do.. periodically Heather would have something for me to change your ad on the schedule so I kept fussing with that and working on my lesson plans. And eventually we got an email from Harold about the house.

Apparently the current owner, seller, got a home inspection done in September. I guess in preparation for putting a house in the market. And there are issues. A lot of issues. It's hard though because there are two codes essentially there's orange and there is red. And the orange ones are kind of all over the place. Like some are stuff that is concerning to me and stuff that I'm just like oh well like that's fine. Like for instance some of the orange ones are about the length of the handrails. And then others are about the gutters touching electrical wires. And this has issues. It will need work if we get this one. Some of it bigger than others. But honestly I don't know if it dissuades me from this particular house. I'm going to kind of lean on our realtor on this one and kind of take his advice at this point because any home inspection we get is going to have these problems because we're looking at houses that are old. But even the house is that are old but flipped are not flipped well so they're also going to have issues. So it's really hard to know how much money it's going to take to fix any of these places. And like yesterday I watched a TikTok about someone who just bought a brand new house and it's leaking all over the place and it's just got water coming from every pipe essentially and they've had to replace the entire flooring and so many things have gone wrong. And honestly I think that's probably going to be the case in any place we end up. They're all going to have the potential for catastrophe. And you got to hope that it's not going to happen and be proactive and I think that's one of the things that's nice about the home inspection because now at least we know and we can start attacking those problems. I just need to believe in myself that I wouldn't take on something that I don't think I can handle either by fixing it myself or financially.

But honestly getting that home inspection just made me more stressed because now I don't know what the right answer is. There's so many things I like about this house but I still think I want to see the couple more. I am more secure in what my overall budget is though and what I'm comfortable with taking out lone wise. I don't want to be stupid about it but it is not a buyer's market and I am also being realistic about that. It's really hard to know what the right call is in the end

I just focused on my beating though and tried to finish out the day. Chris would come up from his house to have a meeting with Alexi and me him and Heather talked a little bit. I told him he's going to be leaving a program and he was like haha and I'm like apparently you were supposed to do it beforehand so I'm going to make you do it this year and I think it will be good for everybody. I hope that I can actually make that happen. And I chatted with Heather after he went into his meeting and we talked about enthusiasm and getting people on board with stuff and the things that we hope to do and it was really nice.

Me and Heather were also laughing because earlier in the day I had found someone had posted two of our badges / awards on eBay for like 40 and $50 a piece. that is hilarious. Which one of our people are doing that because that is so funny. What I think happened is something we donated had a patch on it and it ended up in somebody's hands that thought it was worth something and was vintage and put it online. But these things are modern and it was really funny to see.

But it was time for me to go. And annoyingly I wasn't really hungry anymore but I knew that I should eat something where I was not going to make it through my class. I said goodbye to everyone and decided to drive out to cockeysville to go get Taco Bell. But you didn't really make my stomach feel amazing. I accidentally got two different potato products. But it was okay. I ate my car and watched a video and then I went to my class.

And it was a really nice class. We only have one more after this and I'm really glad I took this class but I still don't think I really like throwing on a wheel and if I did a ceramics again I would just want to be a handworking class. They do have other types of classes at the millville and so I'm going to look into those because I think I would still enjoy taking something. Periodically but weekly I think might be a little bit much for me right now. I'm just a little stretched thin.

I started the class by finishing waxing the bottoms of all of my fire pieces to get ready to be dipped. I chose a couple colors I haven't done before and when I have. I am really excited to see how they come out and I really hope they come out well. And then I trimmed the pieces I made last week. I decided I really liked the rough texture so I left a lot of that natural roughness to them and I think that they will come out very interestingly in the end. And then it was time to start working on my Christmas ornaments!

I really like to doing the Christmas ornaments with cookie cutters. I thought I would enjoy the temporary tattoo underglazes more but it just didn't do anything for me. Like I made a couple that I think will be nice gifts but I really enjoyed making the cookie ones and then I wanted to paint them like actual cookies. My favorite ones I made look like the Little Debbie's Christmas tree cakes. And I'm really hoping they come out nice because I just think that they were a really good idea and I am very excited about them.

I still had some clay left so I rolled that out and I cut a whole bunch more cookies and I did drop a wooden tray on the ground of some of them and squished them so I had to start those again. But it was fine. I talked to Lindsey about finishing them next week since I'm going to have stuff to glaze but that's not going to take very long and I want to have something to work on so I have a few pieces that I'm going to let continue to dry in the next week I'll under glaze them and then she said even though the class is over we can come back and do clear dip places on all of our pieces if we need to. Very very nice of her.

I didn't have much clean up because I never turned the wheel on and so I was able to pick up pretty quickly and now I'm on my way home. It's very cold outside and I kept my clay covered sweatshirt on under my jacket. But I'll be home soon and I'm going to wash my hair and try to sleep better tonight. Fingers crossed. Tomorrow me and Sarah are hoping to go up to the art building to do some crafts but we'll see what happens. It's so cold up there I can't really see us being very comfortable doing that but we will see. I just hope it's a good day. And I hope that we get to see some houses tomorrow. Maybe it'll give me a little bit more clarity.

I hope that you all sleep well tonight. Be safe out there. Until next time. Wash your hands.

[sunsetzer]

Not to get all tin foil hat-y, but isn't it just a little bit sus that the animated movie about standing up to the 1% who have ripped autonomy away from the working class and gaslit them into thinking it was always this way was marketed poorly and failed in the box office?

That wouldn't happen to have anything to do with the fact that impressionable children were for sure going to see Transformers One and might start seeing parallels to the current state of society, would it? 🤔

There was truly no valid reason for the marketing for TFOne to be so laughably bad. There was no valid reason for it to end up like this- it's a phenomenal movie; possibly the best Transformers movie ever made. Certainly better than the lazy remake slop Disney keeps pumping out and making billions of dollars on.

And yet, inexplicably, the marketing for this movie was so abysmal that Hasbro decided to stop funding movies based on their IPs. It was so bad that people who weren't into Transformers didn't even know there was a new TF movie. Even people who were into Transformers didn't know (I had no idea until I let a 90 second YouTube ad play, and the ad was way more silly and lighthearted than the actual movie).

If I want to be generous I could say they might have been trying to subvert expectations and catch people off guard with the actual plot of the movie being quite dark, or maybe they were trying to prevent parents from not letting their kids watch it, but they really should have just advertised it the way people were going to see it. If people knew it was a genuinely serious movie with a plot that is relevant in the current sociopolitical climate and therefore so emotionally gratifying to watch, I know for a fact that it would have done so much better in the box office. The millions of streams it has online doesn't compare to the impact a successful box office release has on a movie, unfortunately.

Considering money is the ultimate goal of any company, if Paramount does decide TFOne can have a sequel, I imagine it would be a Paramount + exclusive on release. Even though it got a ton of attention after it left the box office and became available to stream, they might not want to take that risk again. Hell, they might not even bother making another TF movie ever again, considering Hasbro isn't funding it at all.

Honestly the whole situation being as bad as it was feels like it was entirely preventable, but someone somewhere wanted it to play out this way. It feels like it had to have been a case of someone actively not wanting the movie to be successful, because there's just no other explanation that really makes sense.

[jcmarchi]

Applying the Web Dev Mindset to Dealing With Life Challenges

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/applying-the-web-dev-mindset-to-dealing-with-life-challenges/

Applying the Web Dev Mindset to Dealing With Life Challenges

Editor’s note: This article is outside the typical range of topics we normally cover around here and touches on sensitive topics including recollections from an abusive marriage. It doesn’t delve into much detail about the abuse and ends on a positive note. Thanks to Lee for sharing his take on the intersection between life and web development and for allowing us to gain professional insights from his personal life.

When my dad was alive, he used to say that work and home life should exist in separate “watertight compartments.” I shouldn’t bring work home or my home life to work. There’s the quote misattributed to Mark Twain about a dad seeming to magically grow from a fool to a wise man in the few years it took the son to grow from a teen to an adult — but in my case, the older I get, the more I question my dad’s advice.

It’s easy to romanticize someone in death — but when my dad wasn’t busy yelling, gambling the rent money, or disappearing to another state, his presence was like an AI simulating a father, throwing around words that sounded like a thing to say from a dad, but not helpful if you stopped to think about his statements for more than a minute.

Let’s state the obvious: you shouldn’t do your personal life at work or work too much overtime when your family needs you. But you don’t need the watertight compartments metaphor to understand that. The way he said it hinted at something more complicated and awful — it was as though he wanted me to have a split personality. I shouldn’t be a developer at home, especially around him because he couldn’t relate, since I got my programming genes from my mum. And he didn’t think I should pour too much of myself into my dev work. The grain of truth was that even if you love your job, it can’t love you back. Yet what I’m hooked on isn’t one job, but the power of code and language.

The lonely coder seems to free his mind at night

Maybe my dad’s platitudinous advice to maintain a distance between my identity and my work would be practicable to a bricklayer or a president — but it’s poorly suited to someone whose brain is wired for web development. The job is so multidisciplinary it defies being put in a box you can leave at the office. That puzzle at work only makes sense because of a comment the person you love said before bedtime about the usability of that mobile game they play. It turns out the app is a competitor to the next company you join, as though the narrator of your life planted the earlier scene like a Chekov’s gun plot point, the relevance of which is revealed when you have that “a-ha” moment at work.

Meanwhile, existence is so online that as you try to unwind, you can’t unsee the matrix you helped create, even when it’s well past 5 p.m. The user interface you are building wants you to be a psychologist, an artist, and a scientist. It demands the best of every part of you. The answer about implementing a complex user flow elegantly may only come to you in a dream.

Don’t feel too bad if it’s the wrong answer. Douglas Crockford believes it’s a miracle we can code at all. He postulates that the mystery of how the human brain can program when he sees no evolutionary basis is why we haven’t hit the singularity. If we understood how our brains create software, we could build an AI that can program well enough to make a program better than itself. It could do that recursively till we have an AI smarter than us.

And yet so far the best we have is the likes of the aptly named Github Copilot. The branding captures that we haven’t hit the singularity so much as a duality, in which humanity hopefully harmonizes with what Noam Chomsky calls a “kind of super-autocomplete,” the same way autotune used right can make a good singer sound better, or it can make us all sound like the same robot. We can barely get our code working even now that we have all evolved into AI-augmented cyborgs, but we also can’t seem to switch off our dev mindset at will.

My dev brain has no “off” switch — is that a bug or a feature?

What if the ability to program represents a different category of intelligence than we can measure with IQ tests, similar to neurodivergence, which carries unique strengths and weaknesses? I once read a study in which the researchers devised a test that appeared to accurately predict which first-year computer science students would be able to learn to program. They concluded that an aptitude for programming correlates with a “comfort with meaninglessness.” The researchers said that to write a program you have to “accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test, the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact.”

The realization is dangerous, as both George Orwell and Philip K. Dick warned us. If you can control what words mean, you can control people and not just machines. If you have been swiping on Tinder and take a moment to sit with the feelings you associate with the phrases “swipe right” and “swipe left,” you find your emotional responses reveal that the app’s visual language has taught you what is good and what is bad. This recalls the scene in “Through the Looking-Glass,” in which Humpty Dumpty tells Alice that words mean what he wants them to mean. Humpty’s not the nicest dude. The Alice books can be interpreted as Dodgson’s critique of the Victorian education system which the author thought robbed children of their imagination, and Humpty makes his comments about language in a “scornful tone,” as though Alice should not only accept what he says, but she should know it without being told. To use a term that itself means different things to different people, Humpty is gaslighting Alice. At least he’s more transparent about it than modern gaslighters, and there’s a funny xkcd in which Alice uses Humpty’s logic against him to take all his possessions.

Perhaps the ability to shape reality by modifying the consensus on what words mean isn’t inherently good or bad, but in itself “meaningless,” just something that is true. It’s probably not a coincidence the person who coined the phrases “the map is not the territory” and “the word is not the thing” was an engineer. What we do with this knowledge depends on our moral compass, much like someone with a penchant for cutting people up could choose to be a surgeon or a serial killer.

Toxic humans are like blackhat hackers

For around seven years, I was with a person who was psychologically and physically abusive. Abuse boils down to violating boundaries to gain control. As awful as that was, I do not think the person was irrational. There is a natural appeal for human beings pushing boundaries to get what they want. Kids do that naturally, for example, and pushing boundaries by making CSS do things it doesn’t want to is the premise of my articles on CSS-Tricks. I try to create something positive with my impulse to exploit the rules, which I hope makes the world slightly more illuminated. However, to understand those who would do us harm, we must first accept that their core motivation meets a relatable human need, albeit in unacceptable ways.

For instance, more than a decade ago, the former hosting provider for CSS-Tricks was hacked. Chris Coyier received a reactivation notice for his domain name indicating the primary email for his account had changed to someone else’s email address. After this was resolved and the smoke cleared, Chris interviewed the hacker to understand how social engineering was used for the attack — but he also wanted to understand the hacker’s motivations. “Earl Drudge” (ananagram for “drug dealer”) explained that it was nothing personal that led him to target Chris — but Earl does things for“money and attention” and Chris reflected that “as different as the ways that we choose to spend our time are I do things for money and attention also, which makes us not entirely different at our core.”

It reminds me of the trope that cops and criminals share many personality traits. Everyone who works in technology shares the mindset that allows me to bend the meaning and assumptions within technology to my will, which is why the qualifiers of blackhat and whitehat exist. They are two sides of the same coin. However, the utility of applying the rule-bending mindset to life itself has been recognized in the popularization of the term “life hack.” Hopefully, we are whitehat life hackers. A life hack is like discovering emergent gameplay that is a logical if unexpected consequence of what occurs in nature. It’s a conscious form of human evolution.

If you’ve worked on a popular website, you will find a surprisingly high percentage of people follow the rules as long as you explain properly. Then again a large percentage will ignore the rules out of laziness or ignorance rather than malice. Then there are hackers and developers, who want to understand how the rules can be used to our advantage, or we are just curious what happens when we don’t follow the rules. When my seven-year-old does his online math, he sometimes deliberately enters the wrong answer, to see what animation triggers. This is a benign form of the hacker mentality — but now it’s time to talk about my experience with a lifehacker of the blackhat variety, who liked experimenting with my deepest insecurities because exploiting them served her purpose.

Verbal abuse is like a cross-site scripting attack

William Faulkner wrote that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Although I now share my life with a person who is kind, supportive, and fascinating, I’m arguably still trapped in the previous, abusive relationship, because I have children with that person. Sometimes you can’t control who you receive input from, but recognizing the potential for that input to be malicious and then taking control of how it is interpreted is how we defend against both cross-site scriptingand verbal abuse.

For example, my ex would input the word “stupid” and plenty of other names I can’t share on this blog. She would scream this into my consciousness again and again. It is just a word, like a malicious piece of JavaScript a user might save into your website. It’s a set of characters with no inherent meaning. The way you allow it to be interpreted does the damage. When the “stupid” script ran in my brain, it was laden with meanings and assumptions in the way I interpreted it, like a keyword in a high-level language that has been designed to represent a set of lower-level instructions:

Intelligence was conflated with my self-worth.

I believed she would not say the hurtful things after her tearful promises not to say them again once she was aware it hurt me, as though she was not aware the first time.

I felt trapped being called names because I believed the relationship was something I needed.

I believed the input at face value that my actual intelligence was the issue, rather than the power my ex gained over me by generating the reaction she wanted from me by her saying one magic word.

Patching the vulnerabilities in your psyche

My psychologist pointed out that the ex likely knew I was not stupid but the intent was to damage my self-worth to make me easy to control. To acknowledge my strengths would not achieve that. I also think my brand of intelligence isn’t the type she values. For instance, the strengths that make me capable of being a software engineer are invisible to my abuser. Ultimately it’s irrelevant whether she believed what she was shouting — because the purpose was the effect her words had, rather than their surface-level meaning. The vulnerability she exploited was that I treated her input as a first-class citizen, able to execute with the same privileges I had given to the scripts I had written for myself. Once I sanitized that input using therapy and self-hypnosis, I stopped allowing her malicious scripts to have the same importance as the scripts I had written for myself, because she didn’t deserve that privilege. The untruths about myself have lost their power — I can still review them like an inert block of JavaScript but they can’t hijack my self-worth.

Like Alice using Humpty Dumpty’s logic against him in the xkcd cartoon, I showed that if words inherently have no meaning, there is no reason I can’t reengineer myself so that my meanings for the words trump how the abuser wanted me to use them to hurt myself and make me question my reality. The sanitized version of the “stupid” script rewrites those statements to:

I want to hurt you.

I want to get what I want from you.

I want to lower your self-worth so you will believe I am better than you so you won’t leave.

When you translate it like that, it has nothing to do with actual intelligence, and I’m secure enough to jokingly call myself an idiot in my previous article. It’s not that I’m colluding with the ghost of my ex in putting myself down. Rather, it’s a way of permitting myself not to be perfect because somewhere in human fallibility lies our ability to achieve what a computer can’t. I once worked with a manager who when I had a bug would say, “That’s good, at least you know you’re not a robot.” Being an idiot makes what I’ve achieved with CSS seem more beautiful because I work around not just the limitations in technology, but also my limitations. Some people won’t like it, or won’t get it. I have made peace with that.

We never expose ourselves to needless risk, but we must stay in our lane, assuming malicious input will keep trying to find its way in. The motive for that input is the malicious user’s journey, not ours. We limit the attack surface and spend our energy understanding how to protect ourselves rather than dwelling on how malicious people shouldn’t attempt what they will attempt.

Trauma and selection processes

In my new relationship, there was a stage in which my partner said that dating me was starting to feel like “a job interview that never ends” because I would endlessly vet her to avoid choosing someone who would hurt me again. The job interview analogy was sadly apt. I’ve had interviews in which the process maps out the scars from how the organization has previously inadvertently allowed negative forces to enter. The horror trope in which evil has to be invited reflects the truth that we unknowingly open our door to mistreatment and negativity.

My musings are not to be confused with victim blaming, but abusers can only abuse the power we give them. Therefore at some point, an interviewer may ask a question about what you would do with the power they are mulling handing you —and a web developer requires a lot of trust from a company. The interviewer will explain: “I ask because we’ve seen people do [X].” You can bet they are thinking of a specific person who did damage in the past. That knowledge might help you not to take the grilling personally. They probably didn’t give four interviews and an elaborate React coding challenge to the first few developers that helped get their company off the ground. However, at a different level of maturity, an organization or a person will evolve in what they need from a new person. We can’t hold that against them. Similar to a startup that only exists based on a bunch of ill-considered high-risk decisions, my relationship with my kids is more treasured than anything I own, and yet it all came from the worst mistake I ever made. My driver’s license said I was 30 but emotionally, I was unqualified to make the right decision for my future self, much like if you review your code from a year ago, it’s a good sign if you question what kind of idiot wrote it.

As determined as I was not to repeat that kind of mistake, my partner’s point about seeming to perpetually interview her was this: no matter how much older and wiser we think we are, letting a new person into our lives is ultimately always a leap of faith, on both sides of the equation.

Taking a planned plunge

Releasing a website into the wild represents another kind of leap of faith — but if you imagine an air-gapped machine with the best website in the world sitting on it where no human can access it, that has less value than the most primitive contact form that delivers value to a handful of users. My gambling dad may have put his appetite for risk to poor use. But it’s important to take calculated risks and trust that we can establish boundaries to limit the damage a bad actor can do, rather than kid ourselves that it’s possible to preempt risk entirely.

Hard things, you either survive them or you don’t. Getting security wrong can pose an existential threat to a company while compromising on psychological safety can pose an existential threat to a person. Yet there’s a reason “being vulnerable” is a positive phrase. When we create public-facing websites, it’s our job to balance the paradox of opening ourselves up to the world while doing everything to mitigate the risks. I decided to risk being vulnerable with you today because I hope it might help you see dev and life differently. So, I put aside the CodePens to get a little more personal, and if I’m right that front-end coding needs every part of your psyche to succeed, I hope you will permit dev to change your life, and your life experiences to change the way you do dev. I have faith that you’ll create something positive in both realms.

[tnlbarth-blog]

Nov. 20 2024 - 12:03pm

Trigger Warning: Talk of sexual assault. Talk of abuse. Talk of suicide. Talk of self harm.

Warning: All people places and things resembling any real people places or things are merely coincidence and are not to be taken as such.

The guilt is eating me alive. Growing up I was not a good person and I have only just come to that realization. I am 33 years old. I think I always knew but I was in such denial that I believed that I was a good person. I mean sure at my core like most people I was good. We don't start out bad or toxic. We grow into it as a way of coping with life and surviving the homes and families we were brought up in.

Even if we take into account that I was possibly Autistic I behaved poorly and believed that I was good. No one could tell me how I was. Or who I was.

I had a bad temper. A temper developed possibly to be heard and seen. Growing up being the middle child with two siblings didn't leave you much room to be heard. We were never given the proper tools to communicate effectively.

I was a very frustrated little girl. But I always masked it at school with smiles and acting as innocently as I could. I had a lot of very valid things to be frustrated about. I was bullied every day for two years by a boy who called me fat starting in first grade. We didn't know what that meant but we both knew it was hurtful. I was abused at home. From all directions but it was so normal that I didn't realize. Paddled for disobeying. Yelled at for being a minor inconvenience. Being beaten by my sister. Were poor and starving most days and even lived out of our van for a while. I was raped by the elementary school principal. Bullied by kids at school for wearing dresses and glasses and for playing with Barbies. Bullied on the bus for simply existing. All without the tools to confront them. All without tools to tell my parents what was happening and even if I did they didn't really believe me. My best friend moved away before second grade. I was alone for several years before making friends again. And on top of all this I peed the bed from third grade to the sixth grade. I was miserable.

I needed help. I needed a therapist or counselor. I needed someone to see me. I needed someone to give me love. But instead I got nothing for years.

I was so angry all the time. It began to manifest in my behavior. I acted out. Nothing super terrible. Nothing that got me put in juvie. Though I am certain I should have been. Maybe it would have helped. Or maybe not.

I started standing up to my sister who was hitting my brother and I and hit back. I started talking back to my teachers. I started shouting at my parents. I refused to do anything. I stopped working on school work. I refused to go to school feigning illness.

I started stealing from the school office and the teacher's desk. I stole from the UNICEF box that I collected money for. (Never all of it) And I rationalized it heavily that It would go to me anyway since I was so poor. I feel so super horrible for that. I stole from the lost and found. Eventually the stealing did stop.

I started throw fits. I'm pretty sure they were meltdowns but I didn't know what that was back then. The meltdowns started pretty young. I would throw my hands and feet around. And I would throw objects and shout. Mostly due to over stimulation.

At some point I realized the meltdowns helped me get what I wanted and then I would "use" them to do just that. Not okay. These were the more obvious behaviors.

The not so obvious things. I would tell people what was wrong with them called what I did "giving people the hard truth". I would make jokes at others expense. I would "accidentally" hurt people. Example; my friend had a broken foot and I "absent-mindedly" put my hand down on her foot while she had it elevated knowing I'd probably hurt her. I am not proud of that. I would play little pranks on people that were kind of harmful. Though that stopped when I pulled the chair out from under my sister as she sat down. I thought it would be funny because I saw someone do it on TV. It was not funny. I immediately felt bad and I got into trouble on top of it.

I forced my friendship onto people. I don't know if they really liked me or not. If not I honestly don't blame them. Especially since I told them what they did wrong all the time. And never took accountability for the way I acted. I DARVOed (Deny Attract Reverse Victim and Offender) people all the time. Of course back then I didn't know what that meant. I manipulated people. I shifted blame. I avoided accountability all the time. I lied. I snuck around. I looked down on people.

All these things happened before I graduated high school.

After high school I dated a guy and he abused me. And I abused him too. It was with him that I learned a lot about my own behaviors toward others. But I was still in so much denial. I lost a lot of people during that relationship and I blamed him for it for a long time. But I realize now that even though he was part of it I was a horrible person and those people should have left, it was the healthiest thing to do.

I did learn about myself and grow. But not enough. After him I only really had one friend who had stuck by my side. My best friend who endured my crap all the time. She saw the good in me I am sure.

After that relationship I moved in with my mom and brother and tried to work on myself but I didn't know where to begin. But I tried.

Then I met my next boyfriend. He helped me learn some things because he too was trying to improve himself. This had been a really good relationship for a long time. Then my sister moved in with us and she opened up something in me. Or reawakened some unresolved and unhealed problems in me. And I was miserable again. I was doing so well but I backslid because I hadn't done any actual work. I was repressing things and pretending I was okay.

I became that hate filled angry little girl again. And I felt trapped in my room because that was the only way I knew that I could avoid fighting again.

Then on Christmas eve of the first or second year she lived with us. I had another meltdown. Ending in me locking myself in my room and cutting my wrists with scissors and swallowing every pill I had.

I went to the hospital on Christmas chauffeured by my boyfriend of the time. Then I was ambulanced to the mental hospital where I stayed a week. Where I finally learned something helpful. That was the true beginning of my changing.

All this to say that I was not a good person and all those people who had to deal with me knew it. But I didn't want to believe it.

There are so many other things I did but I cannot remember them all.

I ended my relationship with my most recent ex boyfriend the same year I ended my relationship with my best friend.

I don't know how bad they really were. I know that a lot of bad things happened to me via my ex boyfriend's father. Which made me bitter toward my ex.

I thought I knew why I was breaking up with the people I broke up with. But I am pretty sure I was wrong. I think I was letting my jealousy and fear take over. It was probably best for them anyway.

I never wanted to be alone. But here I am. Alone. And maybe that is best. I've only really started to change five years ago. It took me too long to come to terms with how horrible I was. I don't know how bad I am now. I suppose I'll have to watch and see.

But I do know that I have the tools necessary to change and I am actively doing that.

I feel major guilt for everything I did growing up. And the only thing I can do to make up for that is to change who I am to be better than I was.

I will probably be in denial of a lot of things in my future. I seem to have a problem with that. But I think that I am doing better at taking accountability for my actions.

I just wish I would apologize to the people I've wronged. But I am too fearful of what they will say or do to me. If they forgive me I don't feel deserving of that. If they don't I understand but I don't think I can handle it.

I don't expect anyone to feel bad for me. This is not something I wrote to gain pity or praise. I just don't have anyone to talk to. I don't have anywhere to put my thoughts.

I expect you to hate me. I would look at another person saying all these things in disgust. I would judge them.

I really hope I am not that girl anymore.

Regards

TNL Barth