#i remember the exact moment i saw this program for the first time

[haticesultanas]

FAVOURITE FIGURE SKATING PROGRAMS

Wakaba Higuchi ( 樋口新葉) - Skyfall (FS, 2017-18)

[deansdelicate]

I CAN SEE YOU

CHAPTER I: YOU BRUSH PAST ME IN THE HALLWAY

seth rollins x fem!writer+producer reader

word count: [5.3K]

warnings: no use of y/n, mild cursing, talks of anxiety, overall feel good chapter with some slight flirting.

🎧 the soundtrack

summary: Your first day on the main roster wasn't something you ever saw coming, but taking risks is the exact reason why you were there. Still, like walking on new grounds, you find yourself on edge, it a miracle that an encounter with a certain someone leaves you feeling a little at ease with the new beginnings ahead.

The pep in your step felt a little different, and so did the air that belonged to a city you’ve never stepped foot in before—but all of that culminated into nothing when you were thrown in with the sharks not knowing what exactly you were getting yourself into.

The corridors were far more confined than you remembered them being when you were a little kid, and the stares you got were almost gawking. So much different from the admiration that used to fill their orbs when you were a little girl running up and down similar hallways in a different state, different city, different night.

But it’s because you knew they didn’t look at you like that little girl anymore. Nowadays, your entire being was shaped by who your mother and father were, plus the prestigious family name you possessed and the legacy you were expected to carry on.

All of it is foreign, like figuring out how to walk again and this time it’s in a world full of larger-than-life characters that even you cannot seem to fathom quite yet. You grew up around all of it, but you never imagined walking in the shoes of those before you and paving your own way.

A way towards what could be the downfall of your family name or the rise of a new era that started with you.

“The evolution of this company lies within the palm of my hand and—shoot!”

Your footsteps came to an abrupt halt, your body meeting a stiff chest that nearly knocked you to your feet if it weren’t for the quick hands keeping you up by the waistline.

The loose paper scripts fell from your hands, cascading across the concrete floors, losing their orderly place from where you were practicing for what felt like the millionth time.

“Shit! Let me help you, I’m sorry.” A deep voice spoke apologetically, making sure you were standing upright before letting up on his grasp.

The man immediately beat you to it, bending down to gather all the papers, trying his best not to mix them up even more than he already did. Tapping them against the ground to get them in a crisp stack, he rose up and met your eyes.

“Thanks…sorry, it was my fault. I wasn’t paying attention.” You apologized, taking the stack of papers he handed to you.

He shook his head smiling assuringly, “I should’ve been more careful,” he paused for a brief moment, tilting his head at you as if he was trying to place you in his memory.

“Are you new here? I haven’t seen you around before.”

You nodded, smiling widely, trying your best to wash away the first day jitters, “Today’s my first day, actually.”

His lips parted in silent surprise before speaking once more.

“Welcome to the team, my names Seth by the way.” He held out his hand, offering it to you politely.

“Nice to meet you, Seth.” You shook his with a grin on your face.

All of him suddenly hitting you like a ton of bricks, realizing that you should’ve known him the second you two caught eyes.

You had been studying the program closely as a part of your preparation for the venture. Your father making sure you knew every face and every name, not just out of respect but to understand the importance of storytelling—something you were about to be a part of in mere hours as the clocked ticked on.

So you were familiar with Seth Rollins. The mastermind behind the toughest faction of all time, the architect behind his success, the very person who was able to redesign, rebuild, and reclaim it, and most recently the Monday Night Rollins that was taking the world by storm.

You introduced yourself to him, leaving out a very crucial part before you felt your phone buzzing in your back pocket. Quickly you released his hand, apologizing under your breath, pulling it out—the screen flashing with messages from your father wondering where you were.

You looked up at him, tucking your phone away.

“I gotta run. Hope to catch you around, Rollins!” You called out, passing him a simple wave before heading off to where you needed to be.

Seth shrugged, continuing on his way to catering not thinking anything much of the encounter. He was versed around the crew. Camera men, mic operators, stage hands, creative personnel, security—the list went on.

After years of being on the road with the same company, he was acquainted with almost everyone. Granted, he got some names confused here and there, but for the most part he knew the faces that were always around.

You happened to be one of the new ones—a pretty one at that. It wasn’t every day that the company expanded their crew, too accustomed to the people who were well seasoned with the type of show they were producing and the talent they needed to get it out to the fans. But he knew if you were here, then you surely knew what you were doing.

“There you are Mr. Monday Night,” Kofi whistled with a smirk, catching the sight of Seth walking through catering wearing a big ‘ole smile.

“Yeah, yeah,” he waved off, going to make himself a plate of food to get himself energized before the show, “You gonna call me that every time I enter the room?” He barked playfully, tossing a little bit of everything on his plate.

Kofi hummed, pulling out a chair for his friend to sit, “What’s the sense of you naming yourself Monday Night Rollins if I don’t seize the opportunity for a nickname?”

“We could always call you Triple R? Redesign, Rebuild, Reclaim?” Charlotte quipped and everyone shook their heads.

“Paul would have a field day with that one,” Dean snorted with a grunt.

Catering was one of the many communal spaces in every arena. Superstars mingling with others before and in between matches, and a lot of them traveling with others to make work feel more like play outside the ring. While the routine may seemed hectic for some, for people like Seth who had been doing it long before WWE, it was second nature, only this time nicer rental cars and occasional business class flights made it less stressful.

The catering door swung open, a stagehand who looked rather frantic eyed the room.

“Have any of you seen Ms. Levesque?”

Seth furrowed his brows, confused as he and the rest of the room answered ‘no’ while the stagehand sighed, communicating into their earpiece and then disappearing.

Stephanie had stepped down from her co-CEO position months ago after her husband Paul took over and while it wasn’t odd for her to pop in every once in a while, it was even odder that a stagehand of all people was out looking for her.

“Since when did Steph drop the Mrs?” He wondered, looking around at his friends who shrugged carelessly, not paying it any mind.

You raced through the hallways, reading aloud every plaque that hung from the doors until you finally came across the one you had been searching for amidst all the twists and turns of the arena. You turned the knob, pushing your way inside to be greeted with your dad looking up from his laptop and rising from his desk with a smile on his face.

“There you are,” He greeted, walking around to greet you with a hug.

“Hey,” You closed your eyes peacefully, holding him tightly before releasing, “Sorry I got caught up with TJ and Dave.”

You waved the still jumbled scripts in your hand, and he chuckled, nodding his head knowing that’s exactly where you should’ve been after he sent some stage hands to search for you. He could feel your anxiety and he could certainly read it in your face—no matter how much he tried to prepare you and let you process it on your own, he knew it was the normal nerves coming out to play.

“Relax kid, don’t get too in your head over this,” He encouraged you, gently nudging your side with his elbow. “The moment you get out there it’s going to come like second nature.”

You rolled your eyes, pinching the bridge of your nose. “Are you really trying to work in a Ric Flair reference right now?”

He laughed out loud, ruffling the top of your head with a grunt.

“You’re lucky you're my daughter you know that?”

“Oh trust me, I’m aware.”

You hung out in his office, getting the scripts placed back into the correct order, reading it over while your dad typed away responding to important emails he didn’t want to bore you with. It was his duty as a father to not stress you with unnecessary business on your very first day, but sooner than later he’d show you the ropes on what he knew you’d take on flawlessly.

After some time passed, a knock was heard on the door. You and your dad looking up in the direction and he called out a reply summoning them in.

It was Samantha, one of the few people you had met prior to your first day. She was the head of social media, running almost every WWE outlet on the internet. She gladly welcomed you, expressing her excitement for the day she got to make a post about you officially joining the company.

“Hey you, it’s your big day!” She congratulated with an embrace that you were incredibly grateful for.

“I’m so nervous. Promise me you won’t post my promo if I botch it?” You said half jokingly, but the fear was still obvious behind your eyes.

“You’re not going to botch it, trust me. Your dad told me you’ve been rehearsing it like every day.” She insisted, waving off your self doubts.

Paul rose his hands in defense, catching your half hearted glare you shot him.

“You know it by heart, but you also know how to make it feel natural and real, which is the most important part.”

Sam nodded her head in agreement, rubbing your arm up and down encouragingly before you plopped back down on the couch. She made her way towards your dad, holding out the reserved social media phone, linked to all of Triple H’s platforms, and displayed the post for one of their social media uploads.

“Speaking of important, I’m going to send out the tweet about the special announcement from your twitter account then I’ll retweet and quote from the company’s main account,” She explained, watching Paul scan through the text before giving an approving nod.

“Send it out.” He gave his approval and Sam promptly hit post, checking out the numbers already begin to fly through the notification tab just a few seconds later.

She looked over at you, shooting you a thumbs up, “You’re going to break the internet tonight, for all good reasons.”

You said your goodbyes to her, checking the time on your phone realizing that doors would open any minute now and time would surely pass faster than you’d like before it was showtime. Your hair and makeup was already done, needing just a little more of hairspray and a reapplication of lip-gloss.

“I should probably get changed, right?” You looked up at your dad who nodded and did some typing on his phone before standing up and strolling over to where you tried to relax your nerves.

“Go get changed and shake out your bones. I’ll meet you out in the ring, okay?” He spoke gingerly, slinging his arm across your shoulders, giving you a loving shake—the same one he always gave you when you needed the push.

“You sure you don’t want to go over it again?” You stared up at him, eyes wide with fret.

He shook his head, pressing a kiss to the side of your head.

“I don’t want you to psych yourself out. You know it well and how to make it yours…that’s more than enough.”

He sent you on your way, but of course not without a request for your ‘personal assistant’ to follow you along. In actuality, it was his personal assistant, a sweet guy named Eddie who you had met times before—sometimes even the one picking up your phone calls to your dad when he was busy in meetings and talent relation.

“Ms. Levesque, your dress has been pressed and ironed. Would you like to change into it now?”

Eddie spoke with an exaggerated English accent, making you crack a laugh, shaking your head and taking the garment from where he held it out to you.

“The English would throw scones at you, you know?” You looked over at him, unzipping the plastic covering to inspect the dress you had picked out for the occasion.

You went simple, but something that still felt like you. A black sleeveless mock neck fitted dress that fell mid-thigh which you were going to pair with a red heels to signify your debut on Raw. Your mother had helped you pick it out a few weeks back and even left a special note strung around the hanger reading:

“Good luck on your first day, sweetie! Kill it and make her-story! - With love, mom”

Eddie snickered, easing up in your presence thankful that you weren’t so intimidating like your father. But Paul wasn’t all that bad. If anything he was the most decent employer he’d ever had, there just were a lot of expectations when it came to making sure the guy wasn’t under too much stress after his heart surgery.

“The dress totally breaks dress code, by the way. If this were any other company, you’d get a warning for indecency.” Eddie shook his head with a faux unimpressed frown on his face.

“Well by all means, let the slut shaming begin.” You giggled, wiggling your shoulders with a shimmy.

He scoffed begrudgingly, opening the bathroom door for you to head inside while he waited outside the door watching for any onlookers.

Fans had already begun finding their way to their seats while the crew finished setting up all the hard cameras and getting the visual prepped for the new graphics that would be displayed when your theme song hit.

Not only were the fans curious of Triple H’s special announcement, but so were the superstars who were caught off guard when producers went around letting everyone know that they would be up on stage for the broadcast.

Seth finished up in catering, making his way towards the nearest bathroom in order to douse his hair with some water prior to changing into his gear for the night. To his surprise, Triple H’s personal assistant Eddie was standing watch outside the door, prompting him to stop just a few feet away.

“Occupado?” Seth sought, to which Eddie nodded with a tight smile. “A quick outfit change,” He informed the superstar.

Seth assumed it was Paul, getting ready ahead of the big announcement. Lately the company had been on fire with him now in charge, giving all the superstars the work environment and creative freedom that they had been dying for. If it was something as big as a surprise that left talent in the dark, then it must have been legit.

The door pulled open from the inside and you fluffed your hair, striking a silly pose as you leaned against the doorframe. The two men turned their attention to you—Eddie bursting out into laughter, while Seth attempted to stifle his own.

“How do I look—oh! sorry, were you waiting long?” You immediately moved out of the way, an embarrassed red flush coming over your cheeks.

Seth shook his head and smiled, looking you up and down, “Nah, you’re fine. You look good by the way.”

“Thanks,” you smiled shyly, glancing over at Eddie who rose his brow at you, holding his arms out to take your folded clothing you once wore.

“Ready to go?” He asked, and you nodded, smoothing out your dress.

“Ready as ever.” You took a deep breath.

You timidly waved bye to Seth, keeping close to Eddie’s side trying to stay out of everyone’s way who were rushing through the halls trying to get ready for the show. Seth chuckled to himself, still wondering what your role was—editor? personal assistant? Surely, he’d find out soon enough.

“You’re going to do great, sucker-punch,” The country twang belonged to none other than Shawn Michaels who reassured you through the loud crowd roaring past the concrete walls.

He was your godfather and one of your dad’s bestest friends in the entire world who had come all the way to watch your big debut. He had been a constant in your life since you were a baby, and it was nice to have another father figure you could look up to, let alone work with down at NXT before your dad thought you were finally ready for the big leagues.

“I just wanna go over it again,” you took a deep breath rubbing your hands together nervously, and he nodded letting you go through the motions with him, “When I step out I pause for a few seconds then the cameras will follow behind me until I get through gorilla position?”

“Exactly that. The hard camera down the ramp will catch the first sight of you. Pause on your mark for a few seconds and when it feels right meet your dad in the ring.”

It was about the hundredth time you asked someone for clarification on the simple segment, but in your defense you were new to all of this and no matter how much confidence you had, you surely didn’t want to screw it up.

“We’re live in a minute and thirty.” The crew called out, making their final adjustments to their equipment.

Shawn gave you a pat on the knee.

“Trust yourself, you got this.”

You flashed him a nervous smile, nodding your head before he shut the limousine door shut, walking out of camera frame to watch from the sidelines.

“Places people!” You heard the crew shout, a stagehand counting down as the limo slowly began to drive forward just in time.

The superstars were lined up on stage, a mixture of Raw and SmackDown superstars in attendance for the special program. Triple H had kicked off the show, making his entrance through the sea of talent before getting into the ring mic in hand.

“I know all of you are wondering what my special announcement is…” He began, and the fans cheered loudly, chanting “yes!”

Paul nodded his head, pacing around the ring coolly, “WWE has entered a new era. And I am flattered to say that all of you have coined it the Paul Levesque Era, though I find it to be a little unoriginal I might say.” He joked lightly, giving the fans and talent a light-hearted laugh.

“But in all seriousness, my era had begun long ago when I forged NXT and cradled it like a baby until it learned how to walk on its own and give all of you some of the most talented and athletic superstars, some of which are standing on that very stage because of their own destiny to be here.”

He slung his arms over the ropes, jutting his chin out in respect to many of the talent whom he had the honor of working with since the beginning of their careers back in NXT, when no one realized what a monumental period it would be for them.

“Which brings me to my very special announcement. You see, I didn’t get here by not taking risks, by playing it safe and going for the sure plan. No, I got here because I see potential, and I am willing to put my money and reputation on the line to carry out the potential I see and make them stars.”

His words were partly a shoot, all the talent and fans aware of the heat that he had faced in the past from wrestling outlets who scrutinized his choices for prioritizing NXT instead of the main roster at the time.

“But I’ve always seen potential when it comes to one particular person. Someone who I think is not just riskier than me, but always takes the long shot, not for praise or notoriety, but because they know in their heart and soul that they can, and when they do, they will succeed.”

“It’s the kind of trait that is rare. One that few possess in this lifetime, which is why it is imperative to me that this individual gets a shot to show it to you themselves…” He gestured up to the titantron where a camera scurried behind a stretch limousine.

You sat back against the leather, doing your best to keep down the nerves as they rolled the live cameras. The driver came to a smooth stop, placing the vehicle in park before making their way out to open your door, allowing you enough space to stick your foot out first.

There was no turning back now. Everything that you had rehearsed and played over and over again in your head was being worked out on live television for all the fans sitting in attendance to see and more startling, the million watching at home to view.

You breathed in the foreign city air, taking it all in before your heels clicked against the concrete, the feeling of the crew trailing behind your every move. The voice in your head reminded you to keep up with the strides—everything from the talk and the walk, made your character and even now when the fans didn’t know your name or face, they could still understand you meant business just by the way you portrayed yourself.

The closer you got to gorilla, the louder the fans got and the realer it all felt. There was little time for you to acknowledge the crew of producers in gorilla, too busy keeping yourself together as your fingertips swept the curtains to the side and before you know it, your music blasted through the building.

Without needing to be told, the superstars split into halves once more, making way for the mystery woman to hit center mark and there the fans finally got to see who it was. Your name lit up on the big screen — the last name alone evoking ovations that were louder than you imagined you’d ever get.

You smirked, holding back on letting the happiness seep completely through. Making your way towards the ring after pausing for the hard camera, your father walked out towards the apron, holding on a hand for you to take before opening the ropes for you to step through.

He handed you a mic, your music slowly dying giving the fans a chance to settle their cheers so you could speak.

“My, my, my, you sure do know how to make a girl feel extra special on her Raw debut,” You charmed the crowd, looking around the stadium full of fans who were on their feet.

“My father Triple H told me that you all are some of the most electrifying fans in the entire world and I can confidently say that he wasn’t kidding.” You looked over towards your dad, who grinned and clapped for you.

“Now I know my presence may come as a surprise, but I can assure you all that I do not mean to do any harm. In fact, my dad is still the big boss around here, but he did mention needing a little bit of help running the place, and I figured with my history and family name I might as well take a shot and give it a go?”

Again the crowd erupted in cheers, happy to see the legends lineage continuing with a new generation that would surely take after her father’s creative outlook.

“You see, I’ve watched this company thrive and flourish into a league of its own. But I’ve also watched it slip through the cracks and make mistakes that would have never happened under my watch. The evolution of this company lies within the palm of my hands and I will not let the slip-ups of the past come in the way of me fulfilling the prophecy of taking this company to new heights.”

You pointed to the stage, where the superstars looked rather impressed by your words.

“So please join me in ushering in the Levesque Era.” You stared into the hard camera with a broad smile, dropping the mic as your music hit once more.

Your father lifted your arm up, circling around every side of the ring, pointing at you proudly, cherishing the moment. He helped you out of the ring, hooking your arm through his as you two walked up the ramp. A few talents exchanging gracious smiles with you as you brushed past them and headed towards the back.

“Holy shit!” You screeched, finally breaking character and covering your face in elation.

Your dad immediately pulled you into a hug, giving you your first pat on your back with the company. It was safe to say he was way more emotional than you, happiness seeping out in tears of joy, while you still struggled to fathom the paradigm shift of your career.

“Now that’s how you deliver your first promo, sucker-punch.” Shawn snuck up from behind you, pulling you into a proud hug making you laugh.

Gorilla quickly began filling with the superstars, heading backstage before the first match started. A bunch of them stuck around to get a turn to meet you, or as they nicknamed you, the ‘heiress’ which you found comical.

You stuck around for a good chunk of the show, keeping your dad company where he sat at the monitors, now and then turning to you as he showed you a few of the different aspects that he handled on live shows. Surely you would eventually get a thorough rundown of future tasks, but your dad wanted you to focus on being a part of the creative team and main roster.

Towards the ending of the show, you parted ways with your dad saying goodbye to him as he would be staying a few hours after holding some meetings with the crew while you got to get some much needed rest at the hotel.

Strolling down to your office, you were stopped by a blonde woman excited to meet you. You had recognized her immediately—Renee Young who was a backstage interviewer.

“Oh, it’s so nice to meet you!” You bubbled, sticking your hand out to introduce yourself.

She beamed, shaking her head at you with astonishment, “The second you came out, I knew immediately, like, ‘this has to me Paul’s daughter’ and then when you started speaking…” she paused, eyes widening as you giggled, “I was like ‘yeah, this is Paul and Steph’s daughter!’ it comes to you so naturally!”

“Thank you so much, you have no idea what that means to me,” You said thankfully opening your arms and pulling her into a small but mighty hug, “I was honestly so nervous, I’m surprised I didn’t croak out there.”

Renee shook her head, resting a warm hand on your shoulder. “You did amazing, and you’re only going to get better the more you do it.”

You and her chit-chatted for a couple of minutes before a male figure strolled up to her side, slinging his arm around her tenderly. She looked up at him, patting his chest and pointing to you.

“Nice first impression you’re sending to our future boss,” she joked, making you giggle.

He looked at you, realization crossing over his face and he swiftly stuck out a hand towards you.

“Shit, I’m Dean. Sorry m’all sweaty. Just finished a match and all.”

You shook your head, reassuring him as you shook his hand.

“Don’t worry about throwing me off. I personally think the whole wrestler's dress code thing is dumb. I’ve seen your stuff on TV a bunch before…great match by the way.”

“Oh thanks,” He nodded with a grin, happy that you weren’t on the uptight side of the company.

You learned that Dean and Renee had been together for years, tying the knot in secrecy a few years ago at their home in Nevada. Your father had worked closely with them before their debut on the main roster—Dean working in FCW before it became NXT, and Renee starting backstage at developmental before your dad requested to have her brought up to be an addition to the crew.

“Mr. Monday Night!” Renee hollered, looking past you towards the figure who was strolling down the hallway.

You turned your head over your shoulder, smiling at the man who came closer immediately taking notice of you. This time around he was dressed in gear, his match for the night already wrapped, and he was heading to the locker rooms to get changed.

“Hey you,” you grinned, sharing a knowing, playful look with Seth that Renee and Dean couldn’t decipher.

Your eyes twinkled with amusement and his face held a mischievous smile that tugged at the corners of his lips.

“Have I seen you around before?” Seth joked, raising a brow at you suspiciously.

Your shoulders rose with a casual shrug, your hands plopping into your lap as you both burst into laugher, echoing in the halls. There was an ease to you both, the kind that made you forget all about the nervousness that you felt at the beginning of the night when scripts scattered across the same ground you both stood on.

“How was my first day?” You proposed, anticipating what he had to say.

“I’m still recovering after butchering my first encounter with the leading lady herself…” Seth admitted, rubbing at his chest sheepishly, sucking in a sharp breath, “but you killed it…you are a complete natural, Ms. Levesque.” He emphasized your last name with a playful smirk.

You nodded thankfully, before waving your hands in the air a kind of tender scolding at the formalness.

“Please, the only people who call me that are people who are afraid of my dad.”

“Ms. Levesque…”

You turned your head toward the familiar voice. Eddie who stood off to the side with your bags and luggage in hand. The three broke into laughter at his formal address towards you, aware that it was merely out of respect, but perhaps also a touch of intimidation by your father.

“We have a car out back ready to take you back to the hotel. All your belongings are here.” Eddie informed you.

You nodded, smiling gratefully at him for going out of his way to carry out a kind gesture like that. Sure, it was probably at your father’s request, but Eddie knowing you for as long as he did, knew you would refuse any kind of help if he didn’t do it himself.

“It was nice meeting you guys…and you again, Mr. Monday Night.” You twiddled your fingers in a playful wave.

“See you around soon,” Seth chuckled, giving you a warm smile that lingered as you walked away.

You took hold of your bags, Eddie rolling your luggage behind him as he lead you to the parking garage where the driver was waiting.

“You two know each other?” Dean rose his brows, looking closely at his friend.

“Barely. I just ran into her before the show and thought she was on the crew.” Seth explained, his eyes still following you as you walked further down the hall.

“She didn’t introduce herself?” Dean pressed, curiosity evident in his voice.

“She did,” Seth looked over back at the pair, “She just left out her last name.”

“Probably didn’t want to be the center of attention.” Renee suspected with a shrug, turning her attention back to Dean and their plans for the rest of the night.

Seth watched you stop a few feet down the hall to shake hands with a few of the crew and members of creative. Your smile was warm and genuine as you quickly said your thank you’s for their kind words and wished them a goodnight. Finally, you were ushered down another turn, disappearing from his view.

He could get used to having you around. He just wondered if you would get used to being the shiny new star in their world.

💌 reblogs, tags, comments, + likes are greatly appreciated! leave a comment and let me know if want to be added to my taglist!! 💌

a/n: if you made it this far, i hope you liked chapter one of icsy!!! i truly had the best time writing this chapter and i feel like you guys are going to love whats to come! perhaps seth and reader are masterminds to their very core huh? we'll find out soon enough!!!

[wethotcrazy]

SYMPATHY IS A KNIFE (vi)

pairing: Yuki Tsunoda x Fem! Driver! Reader

word count: 1267

part 6. just something short and sweet for tonight, as i have to finish uni homework. i hope you guys enjoy. also cant wait to watch quali and the race later the anticipation is getting to me. thats all happy race day everyone

part i part ii part iii part iv part v

The first time Yuki saw YN at the Program, she carried herself like she already belonged in Formula 1. While other drivers tried to make themselves bigger with false bravado, she didn't need to – her presence filled the room naturally. Those intense eyes of hers had sized up every driver, every engineer, silently calculating the challenges ahead.

Yuki remembered the exact moment their friendship began. During a particularly dry briefing about fuel management strategies, he'd muttered under his breath, "If we save any more fuel, we might as well push the car ourselves." The room had stayed silent except for one sound – YN's unexpected laughter. It had started as a snort she tried to suppress, then evolved into a full belly laugh that lit up her entire face. The serious facade had cracked, revealing something genuine underneath that matched the passion in her eyes.

They'd gravitated toward each other after that. Long debriefs became more bearable with shared glances and subtle jokes. They'd stay late comparing data, YN explaining corner entry techniques while Yuki shared brake balance insights. Their competitiveness pushed them both to improve – neither wanted to be outdone by the other.

When they became teammates in Formula 3, it felt natural, like pieces clicking into place. They developed a rhythm – YN's analytical approach complementing Yuki's instinctive racing style. Even their engineers joked they could predict each other's feedback before either spoke. After particularly good races, they'd celebrate with convenience store snacks, sitting on the pit wall and dreaming about their future in Formula 1.

The years when they raced in different series had been strange. Yuki would find himself checking YN's race results before his own, watching grainy livestreams of her races whenever he could. She'd send him detailed messages about his performances, always ending with some variation of "You're going to make it to F1 before me, I just know it."

He still remembered every detail of telling her about his AlphaTauri contract. They'd met at their old favorite chip shop in Milton Keynes, and he'd barely gotten the words out before she'd launched herself across the table to hug him. "I knew it," she'd said, her voice thick with emotion. "I knew you'd do it." When she'd pulled back, her eyes had shimmered with unshed tears of joy, filled with such genuine pride it had made his chest ache.

But then came the reality of Formula 1 – different schedules, different countries, different priorities. Their constant communication dwindled to quick messages and reaction emojis to each other's Instagram stories. He'd still wear her team's cap during race weekends he wasn't driving, and she'd defend him fiercely in interviews when journalists tried to stir up drama. But gone were the late-night data sessions and shared dreams on the pit wall.

Sometimes, during particularly lonely nights in far-flung hotel rooms, Yuki would pull up old photos from their junior days. YN in her first Formula 4 car, both of them covered in champagne after their first Formula 3 podium, the grainy selfie they'd taken the night he got his F1 contract. He'd trace the evolution of her smile in each picture, from the intense rookie with something to prove to the confident driver she'd become.

He thought about texting her more times than he could count, wanting to recapture that easy friendship they'd had. But what would he say? "I miss when it was just us against the world"? "Sometimes I catch myself looking for you in the paddock even though I know you're racing halfway across the globe"? Instead, he'd send another emoji, another quick congratulations, and try to ignore the growing distance between them.

The neon lights of Singapore streaked across Yuki's hotel room walls, casting shifting shadows that matched his restless thoughts. His phone screen glowed with notifications – messages congratulating both him and YN on their double points finish, her first podium dominating F1 social media. P3. She'd finally done it.

The champagne had long since dried on his race suit, but he could still see her radiant smile as she'd stood on that podium, trophy held high above her head. The way she'd looked down at him in parc fermé, eyes shining with accomplishment, had stirred something deep in his chest – feelings he'd tried to keep buried under the weight of professionalism and friendship.

Rolling onto his back, Yuki let his mind drift to that pivotal moment in their junior days. They'd been analyzing data after a particularly grueling test session, YN's hair falling to her face as she leaned over the laptop. She'd been so focused, breaking down every apex, every brake point, completely lost in the pursuit of perfection. When she'd finally looked up, catching him staring, she'd given him that soft smile that seemed reserved just for him. That was the moment he knew – knew that what he felt went far beyond admiration for a fellow driver.

He remembered telling her about his F1 contract, how her eyes had lit up with pure joy, how she pulled him into a fierce hug. Even then, chasing her own dreams, she'd been genuinely happy for his success. That was YN – competitive to her core but never letting rivalry poison their friendship.

When she'd finally gotten her own F1 seat, Yuki had watched her try to navigate the pressure with grace. The media scrutinized her every move, questioning whether she deserved to be there, whether she could handle the physical demands. She'd answered them all on track, letting her laptimes speak louder than words. Still, he'd seen the toll it took, caught the moments when her smile would slip in the garage, noticed how she'd grip her steering wheel a little tighter before qualifying.

Now, lying in his hotel room, Yuki's phone buzzed with another notification. It was a photo from their team – YN kneeling beside her car in parc fermé, eyes closed, forehead resting against the nose cone in a moment of pure emotion. His thumb hovered over the screen, tracing the outline of her figure.

He was proud of her – so proud it felt like his chest might burst. Proud of how she'd fought through the day, how she'd defended against more experienced drivers, how she'd proven every doubter wrong. But beyond pride was something deeper, something that had grown from those late nights comparing data, from shared dreams and inside jokes, from years of watching her pour her heart and soul into every lap.

The city lights caught a drop of moisture on his phone screen, and Yuki realized his eyes had welled up. He wanted to tell her everything – how seeing her succeed made his own accomplishments feel brighter, how her determination pushed him to be better, how sometimes he caught himself watching her in team meetings instead of the presentations. How somewhere between shared convenience store meals and podium celebrations, she'd become more than just his teammate or friend.

But tonight wasn't about his feelings. Tonight was about YN's triumph, about years of hard work finally paying off. Tomorrow they'd be back in the garage, professional as ever, pushing each other to go faster, to be better. And he'd keep these feelings locked away, grateful just to be part of her journey.

He pulled up their old photo from their junior days, the one where they're both covered in champagne after their first shared podium. YN's smile in that photo was the same one she'd worn today – pure joy mixed with fierce determination. Some things, he thought with a slight smile, never changed.

here are some of the tags: @floweringanna, @hiraethberry, @holendernik, @oooom4arie, @burnhampeaches, @dying-inside-but-its-classy

let me know if you want to be added to the list :))

[trashytoastboi]

Silly little dribble drabble of Baker! Nanami

 (Gender Neutral)

> I saw a picture, someone drew of Baker! Nanami and my heart and mind have been FIXATED. This has lived in my brain rent free and I’m interrupting our regularly scheduled programming for it. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Nanami Kento

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

⌚️ Baker! Nanami who quits his work as a salary man and makes the impulsive but best decision to use his savings to open up a bakery 

⌚️ Baker! Nanami who starts learning how to bake and is insanely good at it 

⌚️ Baker! Nanami who starts with artisanal breads before learning how to make anything sweet 

⌚️ Baker! Nanami who knows you as his constant customer who greets him so cheerily and tells him how much you love his breads and what you ate them with. Some were perfect for soup others were perfect for sandwiches, he loves hearing about it. 

⌚️ Baker! Nanami who starts his journey to sweet treats and pastries and uses you as his guinea pig (he actually just wants to give you free things because he likes your energy and your company) 

⌚️ Baker! Nanami who enjoys watching you eat whatever he’s made and giving him honest feedback 

⌚️ Baker! Nanami who ignores his flirtatious customers because he’s just being nice and doesn’t mean anything by his kindness 

⌚️ Baker! Nanami who gives you blatant favoritism whenever you walk into his bakery 

⌚️ Baker! Nanami who even offered you baking lessons as an excuse to spend more time with you. 

⌚️ Baker! Nanami who was genuinely happy that you accepted and now spend every Saturday evening with him after closing while he teaches you to bake all your favourite things 

⌚️ Baker! Nanami who appreciates you still coming in to buy all your favourites even though he taught you how to make them. 

⌚️ Baker! Nanami who notices how you enjoy watching him bake, how he expertly he works his way around his small kitchen and effortlessly does everything

⌚️ Baker! Nanami who doesn’t remember the exact moment when you started coming to see him everyday

⌚️ Baker! Nanami who realizes he’s been on a first name basis with you for a while as if it is the most natural thing. 

⌚️ Baker! Nanami who was asked by one of his elderly customers where his spouse is and his mind instantly thought about you. 

⌚️ Baker! Nanami getting flustered when you popped out of the kitchen wearing his apron and greeting the same customer who was all smiles (and not because Nanami gave her a few extra bread rolls) 

⌚️ Baker! Nanami who wonders when you started helping him out with the bakery whenever you were free 

⌚️ Baker! Nanami who just realized that he’s probably, really, in love with you.  

[paranormalsaga]

Nebulous (Chapter Seven)

Nagode mentally rehearsed what he would say to his mom while the phone rang.

“Hello?” His mom said in Ujamaan.

“Hey, how are you?”

“I’m fine, but I haven’t heard from you in over a week. What have you been up to?”

Nagode looked at the refined office space around him, the Gladiators’ file was still displayed on the television screen. The Paratroopers and Liu had left the briefing room to give him some space. 

“I’m okay,” he said. “Great, actually. I got a new job.”

“What? That’s amazing, congratulations! What is it?”

“It’s a government job,” Nagode replied, feeding her the lie Liu had concocted for him. “I’m going to work in the defense department. I can’t go into detail for national security reasons, but the money’s good. I’m excited.”

“Why am I just now finding out about this? I’m texting your father right now, and I have to tell your brother and sister.”

“I—I wasn’t sure if I had the job until today.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear it. No more Nullifier.”

“No more nullifier,” he echoed, the words put a small grin on his face, but it quickly faded. He hated lying to her about this. 

Liu cracked the door open a bit, checking to see if Nagode was still on the phone. 

Nagode mouthed that he was almost done.

“I want to catch up with you more, but I have some work to finish first.”

“I won’t keep you, but remember to call me, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Oh, and I’ll have to stop by your apartment to visit sometime soon.”

“What?” Nagode asked.

“Are you kidding me? It’s been too long since we last saw you. Yes, we’ll have to come by so we can all go out and celebrate your new job.”

Nagode groaned internally, wondering how that was going to work when his time was consumed being a Paratrooper. 

“Okay,” he agreed, sighing. “This week is busy, but we’ll get together soon.”

“Perfect. Good luck with your new job. I love you.”

“Love you too, mom,” Nagode said, then he hung up. 

He thought back to what Annihilation had said about his telepathy.

“Jonah,” Nagode reached out.

“What the fuck? What is this?”

Nagode imagined how this must feel for him. The voices in his head would feel real.

“Jonah, it’s me, Nagode.”

“Nagode? How is this possible? This can’t be real. My parents were right, the weed must have made me crazy.”

“No, it’s really me. 

“Prove it.” 

Nagode thought about how to do that for a moment, then an idea came to him.

“We went to a club freshman year and these wannabe hood douches made a big deal out of something stupid, so you matched their energy, and then you ran for your life when they came over to confront you. Everyone laughed.”

“Too far, dude, but I get the picture. Damn, so you really can do mind tricks.”

“Yeah. I’m still figuring it out, and that’s actually part of the reason why I reached out to you. I just wanted to give you a heads-up that my parents might be stopping by the apartment at some point soon, so just make sure it looks presentable.”

“What? When?”

“I don’t know, I still haven’t figured out an exact time yet, which leads me to my next point. I’m gonna keep my lease for now, but I won’t be around the apartment nearly as much.”

“Why?” Jonah asked.

“I’m finally quitting the Nullifier, I got a new job and they want to celebrate.”

“Congrats, man!”

“Thanks. I’m gonna tell you all about it, but it’s a long story. I’ll see you soon, okay?”

“Sounds good, just one final piece of advice on your mind trick thing.”

“What’s that?” 

“Maybe just text instead? You know, I could be driving or taking a shit or—”

“Okay, I get the picture. Noted”

“Alright then, peace.”

“Peace.”

…

“His name is Doctor Isaac Magani.” Liu said. “He’s one of the Gladiator Program’s top scientists, but unbeknownst to them, he’s also our inside man. He defected a year ago and he’s been feeding us important information on the program ever since, fighting them from the inside. However, we’ve never been 100% sure we’re getting the full picture. The trouble with using traitors is that you invite them to stab you in the back, but now we have you and we can finally put our fears to rest.”

“What do you want me to do?” Nagode asked.

“We’ll ask him a series of questions while you secretly observe him. You’ll read his mind each time he hears a question, and then we’ll get to know his honest answers. We’re relying on his intel for that job Masquerade mentioned earlier.”

They were walking through the fifth floor of the DPA headquarters, another biometric scanner granted Liu access through the door they arrived at.

“I guess that makes sense,” Nagode said, entering the room.

“Good because we’re about to get started.”

They sat in front of the one-way mirror, they were situated in a comfortable office space. On the other side of the glass, an older, dark skinned man dressed in business casual clothes sat in a room that resembled the one the DPA had kept Nagode in when they first brought him here. It was Dr. Magani. He looked exhausted and he was currently thinking about what he would eat when he got out of this place.

“What year were you born?” Liu asked through a microphone, initiating the interrogation.

“1974,” Nagode heard the man’s thought.

Dr. Magani repeated the same number aloud.

Liu looked at Nagode for confirmation. He nodded.

They continued with a few more normal, preliminary questions before Dr. Emeagwali grew frustrated.

“What is the meaning of this?” He demanded. “I’ve been nothing but helpful to you people. We don’t have much time, the project is getting closer to launching in Corinthia with each passing day and Indira’s getting suspicious. She doesn’t trust me, she knows something’s up, I can feel it.”

Nagode listened to his thoughts. He wasn’t lying, he seemed truly afraid of whoever this “Indira” person was. 

“He’s telling the truth,” Nagode said. 

Liu didn’t respond, he spoke into the microphone again. 

“We’re aware of the urgency, we know what we’re doing. Just answer a few more of our questions and you can go.”

“Ok,” Dr. Magani agreed. 

“Repeat the intel you gave us a few days back.”

“Indira won’t be at the headquarters next Friday, neither will her usual security detail. From sunup to sundown on that day, our research will be at its most unguarded. With the right team, you could take it right from under their noses and leave them none the wiser. This is your best chance to access that information, you won’t get another opportunity like this again.”

Liu looked at Nagode again. All the words seemed earnest. He’d never used his powers to detect a lie before, but he was fairly certain he’d be able to. When he read people’s minds, their immediate thoughts poured out like a stream of consciousness. A liar would need to know what was going on to deceive him, and by that point he would be unable to read their thoughts anyway.

Dr. Magani produced a thumb drive from his pocket. He held it up toward the glass. 

“I’ve recreated the schematics of our floor plan. If you give me access to a computer, we can go over entrance and exit strategies.”

The doctor’s thoughts corresponded with his words. 

“He’s still telling the truth,” Nagode said.

“Okay then,” Liu muttered to Nagode. “Just one last question.”

“Why did you decide to betray your own project?”

A flurry of thoughts raced through the doctor’s mind as he listened to the question. Nagode’s telepathy had never given him this kind of sensation before. He could feel the doctor’s anguish, he bore his guilt as if it were his own. An image flashed through his mind like a fleeting memory, only it didn’t belong to him, it belonged to Dr. Magani. It was an image of a man’s body being remolded, Nagode could tell that the pain was excruciating from the way he screamed. Dr. Magani just stood there, listening to the crack of the man's bones, he watched new skin grow over exposed patches of muscle as the body grew greater in mass until the man was at least a foot taller. Another image flashed in rapid succession. It was the same man being burned alive, stabbed, shot, drowned, electrocuted, microwaved. He survived all of it, nothing could kill this behemoth. Nagode closed his eyes, attempting to block out the thoughts, the pain behind them was too vivid, too palpable. He had trouble discerning his own feelings from the doctor’s.

Dr. Magani took a deep breath.

“Because I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t,” he finally answered.

“It’s true,” Nagode whispered, opening his eyes.

For a moment, Nagode thought his mind was playing tricks on him, but when he turned to his right he found himself facing Masquerade.

He jumped back immediately, knocking over his chair. 

“You’ve got to stop doing that!”

Masquerade smirked but didn’t respond, then she turned to Liu.

“His powers seem to be working. Dr. Magani never lied.”

“Good.”

“You knew she was here the whole time?” Nagode asked Liu.

“What?” Masquerade asked. “Did you think you were the only human lie detector?”

“Um, yeah—kinda.”

“We needed to be certain your powers were working properly,” Liu interjected. “Maya’s clairvoyance allows her to detect the subtle changes in human behavior that correspond with deception, but you actually know what people are thinking, that grants us all kinds of insights no lie detector could. If you knew she was here, it could’ve affected your answers. I needed to cross-reference your capabilities without arousing your suspicions.”

Liu brought Dr. Magani out of the observation room and introduced him to Nagode, it was obvious that he had already met Masquerade. A DPA agent brought a laptop into the room and they hooked the thumb drive up to it. The doctor, Liu, and Masquerade deliberated over the best infiltration method while Nagode sat back and watched them go to work, feeling pretty useless.

Something bugged him the whole time the three of them talked amongst each other. 

“I don’t understand,” he spoke up for the first time in a while. “If Masquerade can turn invisible, then what do you need me for? She can already get into the building undetected by herself.”

“Normally, you would be correct,” Masquerade said. “But this building is different.”

“We have a state-of-the-art security system,” Dr. Magani explained. “It’s almost as good as the DPA’s. No one gets in or out of any room without inputting an acceptable fingerprint scan. She would be undetected when she got there, but she wouldn’t be able to do anything.”

“Unless…” Masquerade said.

“Unless she had a way to bypass the mechanism,” Dr. Magani said, completing the sentence. “If there was a way to make the doors unlock like they would if someone had input an acceptable fingerprint, then she could get in and out without any trouble.”

“And that’s where you come in,” Liu said.

“But I don’t know how to do any of that.”

“We know,” Masquerade said. “That’s what your training is for. It would’ve been rough even before this new deadline came up, but now it’s going to be brutal.”

Liu pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Maya,” he said. “Some truths are better left unspoken.”

She shrugged.

“But she’s right,” he continued. “You’re really in for it now, Nagode. We’ve got no time to waste. Let’s get started.”

Next Part

Last Part

[hot-take-tournament]

ngl kind of breaks my heart to see you used one of those ai bot things after the entire vocaloid debate. i really don't like that you did that and i'm a little disappointed. can you please not do that again?

I know - I do need to address this before anything else, because I fucked up

Please read the whole thing

If any of you don't know the context of this ask;

Basically, a while back I used the program AI Dungeon to generate a hot take for fun;

That's the program they use for those chaotic AI videos you find on youtube, like the ai ace attorney clown case and the sonic destruction scripts, which has some absolutely wild moments like these

I just put in a couple one-sentence questions to see what it would give me, not really expecting anything. But the take it did finally give me was not only completely depraved, but also felt like such a weirdly personal attack on me specifically that it left me genuinely speechless.

So, even though I didn't originally intend to do this, I decided to secretly make a poll for it claiming it was a submission, because I thought it might be fun to see if you guys could guess which one of the polls was the fake one, Blade Runner style.

I generated the take on the same day that submissions originally closed, but I only came clean about it last night because I started to feel super guilty about it after reading the vocaloid discourse - but the way I did it was vague, shitty and insincere.

I know it was 4 in the morning and I said I was going to get some sleep when I made the post last night, but after I saw the asks I immediately got about that post - like this one - I instead deleted it after like 2 minutes and spent the next 4-5 hours scouring the internet for as much information about this as I could find so I could get the full picture. This isn't the first time I fucked up on this blog because I didn't do my research, so I think I massively overcompensated - I really didn't want a repeat of that time the master post accidentally triggered multiple people's OCD; I still feel awful about that.

And as a result, I ended up passing out on my bathroom floor, which is why you haven't heard from me in a while.

I did genuinely read all the vocaloid discourse (asks, replies, notes, all of it) - but since I pulled this stunt ages ago, and the secret poll is already up, it was already too late. And it was because of that vocaloid discourse that I felt like it would just make me a hypocrite if I just swept it under the rug and kept quiet while everyone else was talking about the exact same subject, so I decided to just tell you guys as soon as possible because I'd feel shitty if I didn't - but I still phrased that post in a more light-hearted way because that was what I originally intended this whole thing to be, which was definitely a mistake, and I can't apologise enough for that.

And I know I didn't clarify this in that original post, but like I said, the program I used was AI Dungeon, which was something I remembered having fun with back in 2019/2020, spending hours generating unhinged Ace Attorney cases; and I remembered I still had an account from back then when it was still free to play, even though I hadn't touched it in 4 years - and I realised I would still be able to bypass the paywall using it.

I'd also just watched those snapcube Sonic Destruction videos that I linked above and it reminded me of that. And I dug up those old AI Dungeon Ace Attorney cases that I had generated and then recreated in objection i.o. back when I was 17/18, and had been sitting on my old computer's hard drive for ever since - and they still made me smile a little. So that's how I got the impulse to do this.

And that's also why, even though I knew about the writer's strike and do fully support it, it just didn't occur to me that the AI that gave us that same insane Sonic Destruction script that I'd just watched would be one of the programs the writers were striking over - I just assumed that it was only programs like ChatGPT, that can produce coherent scripts based on the accumulated information users feed into it; because those are programs that could definitely potentially be used to replace human writers. That's something AI Dungeon can't do, because it doesn't retain user input after you shut it down.

So I just saw AI Dungeon as that goofy ass confused AI that I loved as a kid, the one that provides insanely weird responses out of the blue as it desperately tries to cobble together a narrative, and it was used in videos that I still really like. And I thought it would be fine.

That was how I justified it at the time - but in hindsight, given how much I hate other GPT programs like ChatGPT, as well as AI art and all other generated content overall, it just makes me even more of a stupid hypocrite for making an exception for this one simply because I was blinded by nostalgia, and not bothering to look it up back then like I should've done. Because at the end of the day, a GPT program is a GPT program.

SO - Here's what I found online while reading up on it last night:

Because of the outdated GPT model AI Dungeon runs on, it isn't possible from a technical standpoint for it to learn like ChatGPT does. Even though it still uses a dataset, as far as I can tell it genuinely can't add to that dataset from user input except for when it explicitly asks for feedback (rarely, it will generate two responses instead of one, and ask you to pick the best one so it can learn - but you can turn that feature off.) And while it does try to learn while you're using it, it can't carry that information over between sessions. So even if you reload the same page again, it won't retain what it learned last time.

(Here's some information I found while combing ancient reddit threads that explains this better than I can)

But even if all of that is true, it doesn't matter.

Latitude, the developers of AI Dungeon, are super fucking scummy, and you shouldn't support them.

If you want to look up all of the many, many controversies surrounding AI Dungeon, you can - but I won't link them here, because serious content warnings apply.

Do not use this program.

I really hope the anon who sent this ask - and everyone else who called me out on this - stuck around, because I am so, so grateful that you all sent these, otherwise I probably would never have known.

I deleted the post almost instantly (because like I said, it was too light-hearted), and I'm really glad I did. And I swear I won't pull this shit again.

I know a lot of you hate the fact that I did this - that original post genuinely got me blocked by more of you guys than every single one of the polls combined - which is totally fair, and I wouldn't blame any of you for doing the same now.

I really just want to move on from this - but I can't just pretend that it didn't happen.

Support the writer's strike, don't use any AI programs.

I'm really sorry about this, and the fact that I didn't take it seriously enough - like I said, I promise it won't happen again.

</3

[witchofthemidlands]

HAPPY 60TH ANNIVERSARY DOCTOR WHO

My love for Doctor Who & the Whoniverse, the impact it has had on me & how it has shaped me as a person- An Unhinged Essay by witchofthemidlands

I can definitely say in all honesty that Doctor Who has changed my life, it is my favourite television series of all time. There’s nothing quite like Doctor Who & it's spin offs & there’s not enough words in any language to describe just how much I love this show. It has had such an impact on me. Both of my parents are Whovians, my dad has seen it since Patrick Troughton & my mum started watching it when Jon Pertwee was the Doctor, we have Doctor Who coasters & for a long time, my dad even had a framed card collection of the Doctors 1-8 & aliens just around the downstairs bathroom (imagine going to the bathroom & having pictures of all eight Doctors, Davros, a Dalek, The Master, a Cybermen, an Ice Warrior & more staring down upon you 😂)

Through my love for Doctor Who, I have met two of my best friends in the world, my friend from college & my fantastic housemate from uni. It birthed this channel when I became hyper-fixated on series 10, It has helped me through depression, anxiety & has taught me to accept myself. It has also shown me so many beautiful places, I’ve been to three Doctor Who exhibitions, walked down to Durdle Door & I’ve been to Cardiff five times. I was in Cardiff last weekend & saw the place they filmed scenes from Eye of the Gorgon for the first time & it was BEAUTIFUL 🤩 I am so grateful for the existence of Doctor Who, I would not be the same person without it. I’d like to now share a couple of anecdotes from my personal life about the way in which I came to discover this fantastic show.

My first exposure to Doctor Who, was not in fact, to Doctor Who itself. The year was 2007, I was seven years old & I was just at home, after school, watching CBBC when a beautiful program called The Sarah Jane Adventures started to play. It was the episode Warriors of Kudlak & was it the incredible & wonderful Sarah Jane Smith? The fantastic & lovely Maria Jackson, the brilliant & hilarious Clyde Langer? The socially awkward Luke Smith? I’m not sure what it was about this show that made me become instantly attached but I did & from that day on I watched series one of The Sarah Jane Adventures RELIGIOUSLY. I watched it over & over again. Sarah Jane Smith was my hero & I loved her so much, she was clever, fun, looked amazing & I can just remember thinking she was so cool, I just really loved that character, I still do even now, I will always love Sarah Jane. I watched series one of that show until my parents, got sick of seeing it & decided that it was time that I started watching the show that started it all, Doctor Who.

The exact date I started watching Doctor Who was the 5th of April 2008. I was eight years old & my parents had decided that I would be watching the new season of Doctor Who with them. I did not know what to expect, I was used to Sarah Jane. I’d heard of this Doctor of course but I had no idea what I was in store for but all I can say was that eight year old me's mind was BLOWN & I’ve never looked back. I’ve watched Doctor Who ever since. I saw my first Doctor, the Tenth Doctor played by David Tennant & my first companion, Donna Noble played by Catherine Tate & I just loved them. Their energy, their humour, they were fantastic. The scene where they find each other again at the window is just brilliant. There was so much in that episode, every time I rewatch it I keep thinking to myself, no wonder I became the Whovian i am today after witnessing that masterpiece & IT ONLY GOT BETTER FROM THERE!

Of course, I do have to take a moment to talk about my favourite scene in Partners in Crime which is where Wilfred Mott waves Donna & The Doctor off at the end of the episode. Wilfred Mott reminds me of my own grandad in the way he was so kind, how he supported his granddaughter & was just a really beautiful soul. That moment where Wilfred is cheering is so euphoric, it is pure happiness & is what made me fall in love with Doctor Who. It is one of my favourite moments in the entire Whoniverse.

I would have to say that my favourite scene in the Whoniverse of all time is in my favourite episodes of Doctor Who, The Stolen Earth & Journey's End. Nothing has ever quite captured the joy of Doctor Who for me like that scene where The Doctor, Donna Noble, Metacrisis Tenth Doctor, Rose Tyler, Captain Jack Harkness, Mickey Smith, Sarah Jane Smith, Martha Jones & Jackie Tyler (well, not really 😂) are flying the Tardis, bringing the Earth home, Song of Freedom is playing & on Earth Luke Smith is holding onto K9 & cheering, Gwen Cooper & Ianto Jones are holding on for dear life, Wilfred Mott & Sylvia Noble are watching their house shake & Francine Jones, smartest of them all, has got under the table. & then in the most beautiful, happy moment, everyone on the Tardis is embracing at the end of it. Nothing will ever quite match the joy I felt watching that for the first time & the emotions it makes me feel now.

I got my first exposure to Classic Who when I was nine years old & it had been announced that David Tennant would be stepping down as the Tenth Doctor & Matt Smith would be taking his place. Now, I’d seen the transition between Nine & Ten, I knew other people had played the Doctor & I loved Christopher Ecclestone as the Doctor but I just remember being very negative about the Tenth Doctor regenerating & I went through a phase where I didn’t want to watch Doctor Who & went back to just exclusively watching The Sarah Jane Adventures, of course now, I welcome new regenerations, I’m so excited to see what Ncuti Gatwa brings to the table because I loved him as Eric Effiong but back when I was a kid, regeneration was just not something I was keen on at all.

Now my nana had watched it since William Hartnell was the Doctor, my dad had watched the Doctor since he was Two & my mum, since he was Three so they were determined to show me that other versions of the Doctor have been fantastic in the past & they decided on this random Saturday night that I should be exposed to Doctor Who The Movie.

I loved that film, I really did. I haven’t seen it in a long time & I always think that I must have dreamt up some elements of the plot but NO, the plot of that film is something else, it really is. It’s camp, it’s funny, it has the best Tardis interior ever, it’s absolutely balls to the wall unhinged but IT HAS HEART, Paul McGann is THE Doctor & the fact he didn’t get a season after this I don’t know because he was brilliant. Honestly The Night of the Doctor changed me fundamentally as a person when that aired. If the rumours are true about the Eight Doctor coming back for a show, I am going to be the most annoying person on this site. I am going to lose my mind.

Now I genuinely think the reason I have such love for the Seventh Doctor is because my first real impression of this Doctor & Classic Who was Seven getting shot by a gang outside his Tardis 😭 which is I think why in my teens when I went into my local HMV the first Classic Who DVD's I picked up were Third & Seventh Doctor era serials. The Seventh Doctor is a brilliant, Machiavellian scheming little gremlin & I love him more than anything & I just fell in love with Classic Who, I really did because I’d seen the Third Doctor appear in a flashback in The Sarah Jane Adventures, he was also my mum’s first Doctor & I knew I had to see a full episode of his & he was a wonderful, the first time I saw a serial of his properly, he reminded me of Twelve.

Another story I would like to share is a Doctor Who related moment that brought me & my uni housemate to our knees at 2 O’clock in the morning on 27th of January 2020 when I was twenty year old.

I was just getting ready for bed, casually scrolling through tumblr when I saw a post. Now, I will admit I’d sort of taken a short break from Doctor Who in its 12th season after Spyfall because I was busy with uni so I wasn’t exactly up to date but Fugitive of the Judoon had just aired & I was reading that apparently one of my favourite Doctor Who characters of all time, Captain Jack Harkness had returned to the show now this is the first lgbtq+ character both me & my uni housemate had ever seen on tv, Captain Jack Harkness & Torchwood helped both me & my housemate accept our identities & taught us to not be afraid of who we are & that there’s nothing wrong with us. Captain Jack Harkness & Torchwood were the first positive representation we’d been given in our youth. I knew my friend was doing the bins at the time so I just opened the window & screamed down to him CAPTAIN JACK'S BACK ON DOCTOR WHO!

Both me & my uni friend are still apologising to our other housemate to this day for what conspired next. My friend dropped the bags, ran back inside the house & got the episode going. We recruited another friend of his that loved Doctor Who & the three of us sat & watched Fugitive of the Judoon together & oh my god when Captain Jack showed up, the three of us at half past two in the morning were screaming like it was a sports match, we were cheering, throwing things around the living room, hugging & all in all, losing our minds. Yes, we did wake up our non-Whovian housemate who was not happy but it is a core memory for me & really showed to me just how Doctor Who had brought me & my friends together.

On another note, I will always be so grateful to Torchwood because of that, no it wasn’t perfect & no neither was Doctor Who in terms of representation but it mattered to me, it mattered to my friend, it was important for us to see Captain Jack Harkness kiss a man (alien) on our screens when we were growing up, for Ianto Jones & Captain Jack Harkness's relationship to exist, for me to see Gwen Cooper kiss a alien presenting as a woman & to also see Toshiko Sato also kiss an alien presenting as a woman.

When it comes to favourite Whoniverse characters, I love every Doctor there is no version of the Doctor that I don’t love. I’d have to say that the Tenth Doctor is my favourite version of the Doctor & that Donna Noble is my favourite companion because of their significance to me but all in all if I had to choose, I’d say my favourite Doctor is The Ninth & the Tenth, the transitions between the two are so seamless. The fantastic Christopher Ecclestone & brilliant David Tennant will always be my favourite versions of the Doctor. The same way that Catherine Tate as Donna Noble, Billie Piper as Rose Tyler & Freema Agyeman as Martha Jones are my favourite companions. I have a definite soft spot for Rose Tyler because she was my nana's favourite as well, Martha Jones because she’s so brave, clever & beautiful and of course, Donna Noble because she is brilliant.

I have to mention the spin offs because it’s The Sarah Jane Adventures that began my adventures as a Whovian, other than Sarah Jane Smith herself my favourite character was always Maria Jackson. That girl meant the world to me when I was seven, I loved her, oh I loved her so much she was fantastic, kind, clever, amazing & I was DEVASTATED when she & her brilliant dad, the best tv dad to tv dad ever, Mr. Alan Jackson, went to America at the start of series 2. I’ve always liked to imagine that Maria turned out to be a lesbian like I did because I, very much like Maria was also ✨attached✨ to Sarah Jane Smith.

Clyde Langer, Clyde Langer is getting his own paragraph because of how much he means to me. I think I’d had to say that Clyde is my favourite over all because apart from Invasion of the Bane, Clyde was there from the start to the end of The Sarah Jane Adventures & I loved him, he was the funniest character around the stuff he came out with was comedy gold, he was resourceful, sweet & one of the most incredible characters in the entire Whoniverse. He may be my favourite male character in the entirety of the Whoniverse.

Seeing Daniel Anthony as Clyde Langer again in Tales of the Tardis has made the 60th for me, out of everything we’ve been given for the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who, David Tennant & Catherine Tate, new Murray Gold music & RTD back as showrunner, everything I’ve ever wanted & more and yet none of that means as much to me as seeing Clyde Langer again did.

Talking of Whoniverse spin off characters that have my heart in a choke hold I have to talk about my favourite CLASS character. I have to talk to you all about Ram Singh, my SON, my lad who can do no wrong. The sweet boy who loved his girlfriend so much, who suffered more tragedies & pain than any other character in the entire Whoniverse other than the Doctor did in only eight episodes. My guy lost his leg, watched his girlfriend get butchered in front of him, watched another woman get torn apart by an alien in front of him, watched his loving, wonderful dad (who was also one of the tv dads of all time) get killed by an alien & then had to watch his friend kill his new girlfriend who had just professed her love to him. I just love him, I really do, he started off rather mean but he grew as a person over the course of the series.

Now I love EVERYONE in the Torchwood Three team equally, they are fantastic characters who mean the world to me but there’s always that one character who just has something about them that makes me love them the most & that character is Dr. Owen Harper.

I mean this when I say this with my whole chest that Burn Gorman is one of the best actors in the Whoniverse. I mean, I came to Torchwood when I was fourteen for Captain Jack Harkness because I loved him so much & I was so happy to FINALLY get to watch his show but as it turns out, Owen Harper became my favourite character even over Jack who I love more than anything because Owen was just so good. The Dead Man Walking / A Day in the Death storyline is potentially a showcase of the best acting in the Whoniverse. Owen Harper is brilliant, he’s sarcastic, funny, morally questionable here & there, the reason I got into Big Finish, a genuinely good person who did care even if he pretended not to, whose story tore my heart out thew it into oncoming traffic & stamped on it like a herd of wildebeests to the power of mufasa dying in the lion king because oh my GOD the character that Owen Harper was but ABOVE ALL OWEN HARPER IS & ALWAYS WILL BE my favourite ratman. He’s the reason that I met one of the kindest most brilliant people on this site, my mutual, my friend who is so wonderful & WHO UNDERSTANDS the level of feral I reach for Owen Harper & the fact they scrapped his action figure is both of our villain origin stories. @kirstyth you are fantastic, I am so grateful that we started talking, you have shown me some incredible Owen audios & I am on my way to respond to your message now because I haven't done that & I am so sorry but I just wanted to say that I am so grateful that the Whoniverse introduced me to you.

Out of the Classics I would have to say that Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor & Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor own my heart because they were my first Classic Doctors but in this past year I have grown to love the Second Doctor so much, oh he’s just wonderful & so is his companion, Jamie McCrimmon, I mean I’ve only known of this character for a year & I was crying my eyes out during Tales of the Tardis so I can’t even imagine how my dad was feeling watching that when he’d actually seen The War Games when it aired & talking of companions, Ace, Ace McShane, my love. I was still mostly in the closet when I was sixteen & first encountered her but it is undeniable now how much I was attracted to her & I STILL AM! She’s absolutely gorgeous 😍

Of course Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith is my favourite Classic Who companion because she was my first Whoniverse character I ever saw, she was my hero when I was a young kid & quite potentially the reason why I am the deranged lesbian that I am today. I still remember that morning, I was eating breakfast & rewatching The Lost Boy for the millionth time when my mum came in & told me that Elisabeth Sladen had passed away. My mum was devastated too because Sarah Jane Smith was her first companion she ever saw, she’d grown up with her like I had & she’d meant so much to both of us. We were both crying through Clyde & Jo's segment of Tales in the Tardis when they mentioned her. I still haven’t watched Farewell, Sarah Jane Smith in full yet, one day I will.

I can’t finish this essay without thanking Doctor Who for introducing to me to a fellow TimePetals shipper because it is & will always be my favourite Whoniverse ship, the loveliest most wonderful mutual a person could ask for @sallysellsseashellssundays You are brilliant, I am so grateful that Doctor Who brought us together. I love talking to you about Doctor Who & the Whoniverse, it’s one of the highlight of my weeks seeing your messages, they really are fantastic, absolutely fantastic, they are supportive & so kind about my own writing & they are currently writing a fantastic TimePetals fan fiction which has got to be one of the best fanfics I have read in a long time, it’s a masterpiece, they are a genius & one of the greatest writers I know, the way they write the characters & craft the stories are inspired, it’s like watching actual episodes of the show.

Thank you, Doctor Who, I am so grateful that Partners in Crime was the first Doctor Who episode I ever saw & for that (and many other reasons) series 4 will always be my favourite season of Doctor Who, The Tenth Doctor & Donna Noble will always be my favourite Doctor & companion because they were the first & I can’t even begin to explain what it means to me that David Tennant & Catherine Tate are reprising their characters in THREE DAYS TIME 🤩

With all my love to The Sarah Jane Adventures, Doctor Who & Torchwood. I love you so much, thank you for making my life better.

[chloe-caulfield94]

Max and Chloe in a Galaxy Far, Far Away

Max was kneeling in a bomb crater on a mud-covered battlefield. Her hands were metal claws. At the bottom of the crater was a puddle of dirty water, reflecting her visage. She was a machine, with a cuboid torso and long, thin limbs. Her face was an elongated beak with two beady eyes. Her body was covered in beige paint, chipped and scratched in a thousand places by shrapnel and exposure to the elements on countless battlefields across the stars. But on her face ran a strip of fresh, brown paint. She was not alone in the foxhole. Another machine just like her, but with a blue strip of paint covering its face, was lying next to her. The other machine spoke in a most peculiar voice. It was on one hand monotonous, but on the other conveyed a lot of emotions. Somehow it combined sarcastic resignation and naïve hopefulness. “Corporal M4X! Central command has given the order to regroup! You must head to the rendezvous point! But I can’t go with you. My functionality is sub-optimal at the moment”.

M4X looked down and saw the other machine was missing one of its legs. She responded in the exact same voice: “No. No! I won’t leave you, private CHL03! I’m staying! I’ll take care of you!”

“But corporal … Central command has given the order. You have to go. That’s just our programming. We obey. There’s no choice”.

M4X touched the blue strip of paint on the other machine’s face with her claws. Someone heartless might say it was just metal touching metal, but there was tenderness in that gesture. “These colours. You painted me and I painted you. Remember how angry lieutenant D4V1D was with us for doing it? He said we broke army regulations. And on top of that we used a paint designed for starship hulls, so nothing could dissolve it. He assigned us to unload transports of artillery shells for a standard month. Carrying those shells, each bigger than the both of us, we would constantly laugh at how mad he had been. But these colours, that wasn’t just two bored soldiers goofing around. They mean something. They are proof that we both outgrew our programming. We were made to destroy. But instead, I choose to care. To care about you. We were made to hate. But instead I choose to love. To love you, CHL03. I no longer hear the voice of central command in my processor. I only hear a voice telling me that my purpose is to protect you and to be with you. And whatever happens to you, I will share that fate with you”.

“Corporal … I mean M4X! I feel that way about you, too. But I didn’t dare to imagine you loved me back. Now I know. And even though I’m lying in a bomb crater with my leg blown off and I can hear the clones approaching, it’s the first time in my short and dark life that I feel joy. Thank you for that gift, M4X. But there’s nothing we can do. It’s too late for us”.

“There’s something we can do, CHL03. We’re deserting, right now. We owe nothing to our makers. This is not our war. It’s high time we strike out on our own”.

“There are enemies all around us. And once our superiors find out we disobeyed orders, they’ll want us killed, too”.

“There’s a landing strip one klick to the south. We go there, we take a transport ship and we leave all this behind”.

“M4X … My leg …”

“It doesn’t matter. Just lean on me. We go together. We both survive or we both die. We share in each other’s fates. I in yours and you in mine”. CHL03 put her left arm around M4X’s shoulder and in her right hand she gripped her rifle. M4X held her sister-in-arms with her right arm and gripped her rifle in her left hand.

“Ready, CHL03?”

“I rolled off the assembly line ready, M4X!”

They left the foxhole, one machine with three legs, shooting two rifles. The weapons were short, boxy and black, spewing lightning bolts instead of bullets. Their enemies were soldiers clad from head to toe in plates of white armour, with helmets resembling sneering skulls. M4X and CHL03 limped forward, blasting their enemies, who fell to the ground, streams of smoke slowly leaving the burnt-out holes in their armour. M4X’s and CHL03’s robotic reflexes carried them through the fires of battle to the landing strip, where the means of their salvation awaited.

Around them thousands of soldiers, machines and humans, killed and died. They carried flags and shouted the names of countries that cared less than nothing about them. Essentially any war ever fought, no matter the galaxy.

M4X and CHL03 blasted off into space in a captured transport ship. They left behind the battered planet, covered in raging fires so immense, that they were clearly visible from orbit. Swarms of enormous warships hung heavily over the dying world like lead clouds, exchanging broadsides of laser fire from close distance, the lust to kill enemies depriving their crews of any sense of self-preservation.

The two deserters zoomed past the senseless carnage.

They chose a secluded planet with no charted settlements as their destination. They had enough power cells and spare parts on board to last them decades.

During the hyperspace jump, they sat in the cockpit, admiring the blurred stars outside. CHL03, with a brand new, shiny leg already attached, asked: “M4X, who do you think is going to win? The Confederacy or the Republic?”

“I don’t care. It matters that we both have already won. For grunts like us, the only way to win a war is to walk away from it”.

Their metal claws found each other and gripped.

[kaibutsushidousha]

Memory in Children: Mechanical Choices (Sagrada Reset 3) - Chapter 2: Android Girl (2 years later/August 30th, Wednesday)

[INDEX]

The 16-year-old Asai Kei and Haruki Misora sat on the tetrapods under the quiet light of sunset. When Kei opened his eyes again, Haruki was looking straight at him.

"Is the Souma in the photo real? Would pulling this girl outside of the photo really mean resurrecting Souma Sumire?", she mumbled.

It wasn't the first time she asked this question.

Haruki asked this same question when first mentioned the plan to take Souma out of the photo.

(She must be remembering Mari.)

The man-made copy of the dead Kurakawa Mari.

He acknowledged the similarities between the circumstances of Mari and Souma's photo. Both were replicas created by abilities in response to the original's death.

Kei gives the same answer as before.

"I don't know."

Kei didn't know if someone created to be identical to someone qualified as being the same person.

"But Haruki, that's a question that doesn't need an answer. If we see her, we should just smile and talk to her."

He truly meant what he said but he had his misgivings.

He was trying to revive a dead person. And one with Future Sight, no less. Kei knew how a woman with the same ability—the self-proclaimed witch who lost her name—lived her whole life. He couldn't imagine Souma Sumire having a peaceful life after reviving.

(She knew how unsure I'd be right now.)

That's why the Souma in the photo had the MacGuffin on her right hand.

The MacGuffin on her hand was a message to Kei. That tiny rock told him that Souma planned everything. Kei could say for sure that she wanted to be revived.

He still didn't know Souma's motives. Why did she need to die? Why is she coming out of a photo to return to the world? What did she stake her life for? He had no answers. All he knew was that she saw the possibilities of the future and the following events were laid out at her discretion.

(But you know, Souma? I'm a really self-serving guy. I don't care about what you were thinking.)

"I'll pull Souma out of the photo. That's what I've decided to do."

Kei couldn't let her death stay. That was his own selfish and heavy-handed wish.

Haruki nodded.

She agreed with her usual meekness.

"Understood."

(Souma was probably suffering the whole time. She wanted us to notice her pain, which is why she asked that question.)

ー Who is the android?

She was begging them to notice her pain. At the same time, she smiled to pretend things were fine. But that summer, too much of Kei's brain was occupied with Haruki Misora.

(Souma Sumire was strong. Too strong for a 14-year-old girl. That's why she couldn't step off the tracks of her Future Sight. She was unfortunately capable of continuing to walk straight ahead despite it hurting. And she unfortunately reached her goal without anyone realizing her pain. If only she was just a little weaker. She wouldn't have died if she was able to stop a few steps earlier despite knowing that it wasn't optional and it wouldn't lead to the future she wanted.)

That girl, daring, solitary, and capricious like a stray cat, was the human being who least understood the meaning of freedom. It was like she was controlled by a program from the day of her birth to the day she ceased functioning. Souma Sumire was dominated by the Future Sight ability.

"Kei.", called Haruki Misora.

She looked at him with a timid expression.

"Are you crying?"

Familiar words. He heard this exact phrase two years before.

Kei's answer was different from what it was two years before.

"No, I'm smiling."

Souma's revival. Or the birth of a person identical to her. Whichever it was, it was something meant to be welcomed with smiles. He needed to smile, no matter how forcedly.

Much like he imagines Souma was smiling at her last moments, knowing everything that would happen.

[adultswim2021]

Aqua Teen Hunger Force #79: "Gene E." | March 29, 2009 - 11:45PM | S07E01

Look, I made this defiant decision to renumber the seasons of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Long ago, when the internet was young, the first 18 episodes of the show (now considered “season one”) used to be split up as two seasons. I considered the later 18-episode regrouping to be some sort of needless revisionism. At the time I was starting this blog, it seemed novel at the very least, to split from the now-accepted norm. In my heart, season one was always just the 2001 episodes. I guess I just like it that way. I could fix it, but then I’d have to delete this paragraph, and my words are precious. So, if you prefer, this is season six.

Season six (*jack-off hand-motion* or seven) debuted on television on March 29, 2009. But a few months earlier (December 16, 2008 to be exact), the first four episodes of the season debuted on Digital Versatile Disc as part of Volume Six. I’ve enjoyed far fewer repeat viewings of this season than I have previous seasons; I probably watched this episode once on DVD, once on television, and I think I rewatched the series leading up to the 100th episode. That’s all to say that I’ve probably sat through this episode three times. And yet, it was entirely unfamiliar to me on this viewing. 

Shake finds a Genie in a schnapps bottle at the dump. Curiously, he’s in a dumpster at the dump, which seems redundant. It also draws a less-than-ideal comparison to Beavis and Butt-head, in which the boys go dumpster diving and find their own “genie” in a bottle, which is just a dead rat. But the Aqua Boys genie is real, I guess. He prefers to be called “Gene E.” and is clearly hungover. They take him in and he eats one of Meatwad’s sausages he was saving for his birthday. When each of them make a wish, Gene E. simply turns them all invisible, which none of them asked for. 

Eventually they find Carl, who is small for reasons of knowing Gene E. At this point Gene E. has died, and Frylock is desperately trying to harvest his organs hoping to find a genie gland or something that they can use to make an invisibility antidote. No luck. Carl and Shake spend some time in a ladies bathroom trying to be peep on women with their combined powers. They immediately blow it. Frylock figures out that Carl has been turned into a genie, hence his smallness (a fact Carl himself doesn’t seem to know). They race to find Carl, but it’s too late, he has been flushed by Shake and drowned in sewage. 

This one is just okay, and it comes off mildly diabolical when you realize how much easier it must’ve been to animate this episode with three invisible protagonists. Objects float around, and some mildly elaborate scenes occur, but still it must’ve been markedly easier to accomplish not having to worry about character animation. Mediocre Aqua Teen is still an okay way to pass the time. The fact that I didn’t remember this episode despite having seen it multiple times sorta says it all. 

EPHEMERA CORNER: 

The Mighty Boosh #15: “Eels” | March 30, 2009 - 1:00AM

Adult Swim’s foray into acquiring British programming didn’t really result in any kind of new tradition. It’s an experiment that resulted in them airing most of these shows (Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, Look Around You, and The Office) through 2011 and then never again. Boosh had more staying power than its contemporaries, remaining on the block through 2013. 

There was a brief moment in 2010 when a Friday Night Brit block was a regular part of the Adult Swim schedule. I remember liking it. I sorta like the idea of an Adult Swim that has varied enough programming to have more uniquely programmed nights like that.

Adult Swim started with series three, for some reason. It was the first time I ever saw the show, which I think had previously aired on BBC America. I am honestly ill-equipped for this write-up, because it’s been a pretty long time since I’ve seen this show. I like it, but I feel like I’ve never truly loved it. It’s one of those ones I really should revisit. 

The Boosh boys actually rolled through comic-con and put on a show in partnership with Adult Swim. I was there! I intend to cover it in some fashion when 2008 comic-con rolls around, but I don’t know if I’ll actually have much to say about it, so please don’t consider this a tease.

[clarktooncrossing]

Giraffe's Eye View | Prehistoric Planet REVIEW (and Rant+)

Hey there people of today and robots of tomorrow! It is I, Clark, here with a fun fact about myself.

I.

LOVE.

DINOSAURS!

Granted, so does everybody else on the planet, but how can you not? They've been a part of our imagination for so long, an enigma of time we can never fully understand, a chapter of a long forgotten history when titans trekked across the planet, and the inspiration for hundreds of great movies, television shows, video games, comic books, and theme park rides! Ask anyone and they'll tell you the exact moment they fell in love with dinosaurs. For some it was seeing the original Jurassic Park in cinemas back in 1993, shaking in their seats as the T-Rex erupted from its enclosure! For others it was when catching reruns of Walking with Dinosaurs on TV, rooting for Big Al as he desperately tried to survive a harsh world. Maybe Barney stole your heart when you were younger, following him into the Land of Make Believe where he'd remind you that any dream is achievable. Or maybe you're into really obscure crap like Hallmark's made-for-TV movie Dinotopia, the 90s cartoon Denver the Last Dinosaur, Phil Tippet's stop-motion short Prehistoric Beasts, any of the follow ups to Walking with Dinosaur, there's so much dinosaur media out there that it'd take me 65 million years to cover them all! It's why today I'll be covering just one.

I remember how frustrated I was when I first saw trailers for Prehistoric Planet. Not because it didn't look good. On the contrary, it looked incredible! The effects felt like the natural evolution of Walking with Dinosaurs, crafting creatures as realistic as one can make'm. On top of that it featured narration by David Attenborough, the main man behind Planet Earth who can somehow say 'arse' without making it sound silly. Not only was he narrating over footage of breathtaking beasts, he was narrating over a score by Hans Zimmer! Y'know, the guy behind the music of The Lion King? Yeah, that guy! No doubt he was brought over by Jon Favreau, the Iron Man and Elf director turned this show's Executive Producer. If I were to guess, he brought all of the knowledge he accumulated while working in Simba's Pride Lands to the time of ancient reptiles. Unlike that piece of Hakunah Makaka though, I was actually excited for this! So what was the problem?

Apple TV+. This show was exclusive to a platform I didn't have run by a company I barely tolerate. It was bad enough they were hording all the Peanuts specials and Wolfwalkers, but now this? Why did everything I enjoy have to be taken by Steve Job's Apple Store of Doom!? For that matter, why was this service even called Apple TV+? Heck, why does every streaming channel end with a plus now? Disney already annoyed me when they named their service that instead of something more creative like 'The Disney Vault' or 'The Digital World of Disney', now every other company was trying to ride their coattails. Just wait, when we're inevitably charged for going to a public bathroom, they'll call the program Toilet+! In any case, my salvation came via a Pizza Hut gift ad given to me by my family last Christmas. After using the $25 gift card to buy one pizza, the Hut's app offered me a month free trial of Apple TV+. Having a real 'screw it' moment, I elected to try out the free month.

Which is pretty stupid in hindsight considering I got Wolfwalkers and the other two Cartoon Saloon movies on DVD that same Christmas and I already owned Blu-Ray copies of the classic Peanuts Holiday specials. Remember folks, I never said I was smart, I only said I liked dinosaurs. As such, what did I think of this show?

Happy to say; it delivers what the trailers promised. This show is what happens when you mix Walking with Dinosaurs with Planet Earth, Attenborough's narration being a highlight as per usual. He brings a level of class to anything he's commenting on, even a Deinocheirus taking a massive dump. Insert obligatory Jurassic Park joke here.

AND FOR ANYBODY JUMPING AHEAD: NO! THE SHOW ISN'T CRAP. THIS IS JUST FOR A JOKE!

It's also to help illustrate a weird point about this show: they do not shy away from the dino love-making or crap-taking. It's Dinos After Dark! Granted they showed this kind of stuff back on Walking with too, but it was just as disgusting there. Especially since the Deinocheirus eats where he poops. If you're thinking of enjoying a tasty bowl of popcorn while enjoying this, I'd recomend you wait until after Episode 3 aka Freshwater.

Those of you who have seen the Planet Earth series will recognize the naming convention here. Instead of going through the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous to see how dinosaurs evolved over time, this show sticks to the late Cretaceous while showing how far stretched the dinosaurs war. A pack of Secernosaurus struggle to find water in dunes made out of gypsum, we find out the Tyrannosaurs could beat you in a swimming contest, a troupe of triceratops are forced underground, one episode even sees how dinosaurs survived the cold.

I was actually super eager to see this episode, as a friend and I argued over the logistics of over-grown reptiles surviving in a snowy landscape. A quick Google search revealed that these early drafts of birds were indeed warm blooded, so I could totally buy them enduring the cold. Even if they couldn't, it looks freak'n cool! Pun intended, of course.

Really my one complaint about this series is how tame it is. When you watched Walking with Dinosaurs, or really any nature documentary, it's hard to guess what's going to happen. Will the baby antelope escape the hungry lion's claws? Will that one panda find a mate before the season's over? Will future generations have the privilege of ever seeing a rhino again? Most importantly, how did the people holding the camera get these magnificent shots? One cameraman working on Planet Earth had to live in a literal mountain of crap for weeks while filming cockroaches. Thinking about it gives makes my skin crawl. Even then that's nothing compared to the massive undertaking that is filming snow leopards. Not to say I want any people producing this to be in actual danger, but the Walking series at least simulated this aspect by having the creatures interact with the camera. Saliva would coat the lens after a T-Rex roared at it, it'd be knocked over after a adolescent Indricotherium charged at it, that sort of thing. This makes what's happening on screen feel natural. Here it all feels too choreographed and planned. There's no real edge. Still, I'd take this over any of the newer Jurassic Park movies any day. This doesn't make it feel my braincells are being smothered with a pillow before getting repeatedly kicked in their metaphorical crotches.

In conclusion, dinosaur lovers will surely love this. The effects will leave you speechless, David Attenborough's voice is a welcomed boost of nostalgia, and the variety of dinosaurs on display should satisfy any paleontology fan. That is assuming this all is accurate, which is getting harder to judge these days. Just wait, come tomorrow some bone-digging bozo is gonna say T-Rex was actually more of a giant woodpecker or somethin'. Until that happens, take a trip back and enjoy watching how life survived this Prehistoric Planet.

By the way, wanna read more rants against streaming services? Then check out my review of Spy x Family to see me complain about Hulu while gushing over how cute Anya forger is. Until then, may the glasses be with you!

NEXT TIME ON GIRAFFE'S EYE VIEW...

[saraannsworld]

It has been a while since I have posted on here. I needed time to find my balance and heal my soul. I have learned over the last few years how important the health of your soul is. How much you are doing mentally and spiritually. Here is my story of how I got to where I am right now.

During the end of my time in collage I went through a traumatic event that changed the path of my life. Since my way to dealing with it was to put it in a box, not tell anyone and keep going. The trouble with trauma is that it takes over your heart and soul if you do not treat or face it. So that meant I experienced one trauma after another until years later ( 15 to be exact) I was at a point I no longer knew who I was. What I was doing or how I got to this place in life. I was a stranger to myself and in some ways to the people around me.

My PTSD was so bad that my Mom found a trauma therapist for me to see. She was a hour drive away and I think that time to myself ( I was a single parent now) was healing. She was a good therapist but, I knew I needed something different. Something more so, I started searching the web on how to heal from trauma. I found a trauma program not to far from where I lived with my parents and started the best decision and hardest path I had actually decided for myself in years. I learned so much about myself and how trauma lives inside you. My therapist explained trauma in the brain to me one day, and I will never forget what she said because those words changed my outlook on my life so far and my future.

“ If you think of your brain like a file cabinet each part has its own file, body function, hopes and inspirations, expectations, motor skills, ex. But then you have a trauma happen and your brain has no idea how to file it because it has no place that it fits. So I am going to help your brain figure out how to file away your trauma.”

In that moment everything clicked. I had this free radical floating around my brain making it all confused. The more events of trauma I added the more radicals to confuse and break apart the person that I use to be. This was the moment I started to heal. I started to put my life back together. Find Sara again. Create a new path and a new direction from where I was. A year later I was back at a place I had not been in a very long time. I was ready to move forward for me and my son. My soul was finally healing and I needed it to keep healing. To do that I knew I needed to leave Colorado, because to many bad things had happened to me there. I knew I wanted to live somewhere like a smaller town or city. I knew it needed to not be too hard for me to get my son and I to our family’s summer cottage, and back to Colorado to visit family. So I started my search. I knew art and creativity being part of the city was important to me. I first checked out Iowa City, Iowa. It was a college town creative and small. A short tip to the places I wanted to be able to travel to. So with $500 and some food stamps in my pocket I drove out for a 48 hour trip to see what I thought. It was not what I thought I would find. Something about it was off although to this day I don’t know what but it was not it. My soul was not singing.

About a month or so later I traveled up to our family cottage in Conway, MI. I had heard things about Traveres City, MI. It checked all my boxes so I drove down to see what I thought. I remember driving around the neighborhoods. I walking around downtown and saw all the art and local things happening. My soul was singing now. This was where my future would start, where I could live my life again. Two months later my Mom and I had found me a place to live and I was moving in. I got a job in the beginning of Covid when everything was still not back to full working more.

For four years I worked as a Team Lead at Panera. I left in my last year to be an Assistant Manager at in Independent Home. I ended up running everything in the building after being there for two weeks. It was one horrible thing happening after another, and no support from the company. Once it started to make my PTSD come back and my son’s anxiety worse I quite. I went back to Panera. Only this time it was different. I now believed in myself and the full capacity of what I was capable of. After walking into a work day of disfunction, and that underlying feeling that I could do so much better with my time and talents I quite. And this leads me to now.

It has been almost three months since I quite. Money has not been this tight in a very long time but, I have not felt my soul like this maybe ever. I have started my own art line which you can view at www.soulstainedink.org and I have started walking almost every morning ( 5.45 Miles). I am doing Somatic Yoga at night to rebalance myself before sleeping. During the day I create my art and work on my shop. I make some money doing yard work for neighbors and, selling on my Soul Stained Ink shops. I am looking to get certified as a life coach and help others find there path to a place where there soul can smile also.

I hope you continue to follow my journey and can find inspiration or knowledge and if nothing else learn about another humans experience through this thing we call life.

[wheres-rango]

Booze, Americans , and Books of Mormons; first full day, day 2, May 10th

i woke up and took a MUCH needed shower after looking at flights to greece and enjoying the hostel breakfast; theres enough stuff i can eat; and getting last minute rush tickets to the book of mormon. i had around 2 hours to spare so i bought a pub crawl ticket on my way out the hostel and headed downtown. I magically had to walk past Buckingham palace to get to the theatre, and obviously stopped and asked a stranger to take a photo of me. I also got one in front of the canada gate. there were tons of people dressed up in easter dresses and suits but for the life of me i couldn’t figure out why.

as i was walking down the most objectively touristy street i kept getting behind people who lacked spatial awareness and realized i may not enjoy the touristy things as much as i thought due to it, even though i am one. The play was incredible, especially since i got most of the mormon specific jokes (shoutout to the Fisks fr) and there was only 3 times i cringed and watched through my eyes (shoutout to Flyfishing). After the play i had a goal; recreate the photo ive had as my instagram profile picture since i was in london last time, at 14. After finding the EXACT TREE that has grown a tad in the past 6 years i asked a group sitting having a picnic if they could take the photo. the lady who took it did it perfectly and made sure she got the exact angle, even taking one in portrait mode that may become my professional pfp for like… everything. I thanked them and went to another part of the park to sit down for a moment as i was getting tired before getting up and heading towards the pub crawl starting point. i casually passed trafalgar square on the way, so obviously had to stop to recreate another photo, how could i not.

I got to the pub crawl and for a few seconds thought there were only 4 of us; a guy who hit on me as an introduction, someone who was very sweet but very awkward around new people (which is why he does the pub crawls. he looked out for me the rest of the night), and a guy from Uruguay who spoke english enough we could communicate outside, but not really in the bar. turns out everyone else was just outside. i ended up talking to this mom from America who came with her best friend and rest of their kids to visit their sons who just finished an exchange program here. I took their photo outside one of the pubs and she decided i was now one of her kids and introduced me to her daughter who also decided i was now one of them. I spent the rest of the night hanging out with their group. I tried my best to differentiate who everyone one and my best memory is

- Amber, brown haired kids sister, the girl i was first introduced to

- Brown haired kid, whos name might be fletcher

- Maddy, the family friends daughter who was also on exchange

- Liam, the family friends son ( i think )

- Maddy’s new boyfriend ( Liams roomate )

- The fun guy whos name i cant remember for the actual life of me who actually mightve been the roomate now that i think about it… he ordered the most excessively complex drink at the bar on accident and the blokes (word used intentionally) tipped her “for him” then started chanting tip, but the poor guy only had American cash so gave her a $5 bill. The drink took hilariously long and me and him were dying every time she grabbed a new ingredient. I got a rum and coke

regardless, i spent the rest of the night with them, which was amazing feeling safe enough to have a drink or two. it was very crowded and the guys were so used to keeping everyone else safe that i didnt even notice them shooting an arm out to keep someone away when needed or grabbing me before i fell if shoved over. they were all very nice. we stayed as a big group for maybe 4 minutes before we couldnt find liam or the guy whos name ive decided is fletcher. Maddy and i after looking around saw them with girls attached to their hips basically, and one of them came up to me and said “isnt he cute? thats my boyfriend!” i then proceeded to immediately turn and tell maddy this who looked as confused as i did, given that we know they met about 2 minutes ago. not even 5 minutes later maddy and i saw liam make out with her and instantly hit amber to point it out, and in turning to do so saw her brother in the same situation and spent a while trying to look in any direction but left or right. I thoroughly enjoyed watching all of that from the outside perspective. We attempted a photo booth that did NOT like any of our 7 cards we tried, but the 2nd one we found took them. At the end of the night the boys tried to physically detached themselves from their new “girlfriends”, and the dude from wayyy earlier that slightly spooked me came up and grabbed my hand to spin me. without missing a beat after i tapped his leg the single roomate grabbed my other hand and spun me away from him all while sitting. After Amber, not without struggle, got her brother back we headed out. They dropped me at the tube station, which Liam and Ambers brother insisted on walking me to the ticket gate just in case, i gave amber a hug goodbye, and headed home.

it was so amazing meeting them. Maddy sent me advice and basically a whole itinerary for vienna, the boys had just done greece and gave me advice for that, and ambers mom gave me an incredible gluten free cookie recipe

idk who said americans werent friendly when travelling, these guys from maine basically adopted me without question

after making it home i fell right asleep, only to wake up 5 hours later

[badarthistorian-blog]

4/14/24

I'm back.

Well, I guess I shouldn't say I'm back - really, what I mean is that I went back to my alma mater yesterday (undergrad, not grad), sat in the crowd while current seniors presented their final BA thesis papers, reminisced about how much I miss the art world, and left the presentation feeling like I just had to do something to scratch that "why did I ever leave art behind, I need to get back to it right now!" itch.

What hasn't happened in the eight years since I was last here? The 2016 version of me who wrote the few posts that follow did have it rough, yes (it's hard not to look back at those entries and remember how lonely that time of my life was) - but little did she know that she only had a few years left of calling herself an arts professional. Years that I don't think I would redo necessarily, but I might have sunk my teeth in a little more if I could predict the detour my career path would take.

I only lasted in NYC for another month after my last post. I experienced some of the best times of my life in the four months I was there, but damn was it lonely. I was lucky enough to have a very good friend who lived in the city just a train ride away and who was there for almost every one of those best experiences, but my job sucked; my living space sucked; my boss sucked. If even one of those things was better it might have made all the difference, but it wasn't meant to be.

I packed my two suitcases and moved to New England on December 23, 2016. If it wasn't for the friends I'd made in grad school (and, let's be honest, my boyfriend at the time), I'd have no doubt ended up back at home in the Midwest. But I also had an opportunity I couldn't pass up - managing a photography gallery, essentially my dream job.

In the three years I was at the gallery, I saw, matted, framed, shipped, and catalogued some of the best works the history of photo has to offer. I worked a week-long photo show back in NYC and, again, experienced some of the most standout moments of my life (clearly NYC has that power over me; as my uncle would say, "that city has jazz in the air").

I stayed at the gallery for almost three years before one owner retired and the other decided to shift to an at-home gallery - aka, I was out of a job.

And that's how I landed in fundraising. A series of subsequent steps led me back to the Midwest and into a more suitable fundraising position for my personality (research-based, behind-the-scenes, and a bit more covert than asking for gifts). The boyfriend I had in New England is now my sweet husband. We travel, see family often, and are very happy.

But.

Yesterday, I caught up with one of my old professors. My history of photo professor, to be exact. He remembered what I'd shared with him during my last update - from 2017, when I was just learning the ropes of photo gallery management. When he asked what I was doing now, I told him and tried not to sound too bashful about no longer being in the art world. His response was, "That's great, but you were so close - you had your foot in the door." Polite, but disappointed. A not-so-subtle way of reminding me that I was there! I was doing it! I was a successful art (photo) historian!

But then... I left it behind. And I left it behind for all the reasons I started Bad Art Historian in the first place.

I found that the people who worked in the art world full-time weren't much better than the students who went through my grad program with me. Often, they were standoffish. I fairly consistently felt like I wasn't in on the joke, or that I wasn't doing art "right" because I wasn't high brow enough. I was intimidated by the people I indirectly worked with, and as someone who very much thrives on connecting with others, this left me feeling rejected.

That's not to say I didn't try. When my boss told me the photo gallery would be closing, I applied for plenty of art jobs. Assistant curatorships, gallery sitters, program coordinators. None of them worked out. Fundraising fell in my lap, and I wasn't in a position to deny it.

Honestly, It felt like a good change - welcome, in fact, especially when I very quickly realized that the people on my team were my kind of people. Friendly, outgoing, social, and supportive.

Which makes my photo professor's comment all the more rattly, because I had to remind myself that I left for a reason. I still hope that life will lead me back to the arts - but I don't think I betrayed myself by leaving in the first place. Accepting - and being okay with - that choice is difficult, but a worthy endeavor nonetheless.

Anyway. I'm back - maybe? We'll see how long this renewed energy lasts. But in this moment, I'm glad to be here.

[jonwongton]

12/31/22

2022 was probably the adult year that’s had the least direction so far. I knew I would finish my masters in about a year and Korea could only last three months because of the visa, but I had no idea how much I’d have to prepare to find a new job.

I won’t say this was my favorite year so far, but I definitely can’t say it was bad. My role at my current company completely changed after I got the new job offer, I put a huge emphasis on personal fitness, took my family to Korea, and I’m getting better at stepping on arrows at the arcade. But all my investments tanked (thanks economy), I was injured for over half the year, I paid a huge mental tax forcing myself to study for interviews, and Gyuri left the group.

Favorite moment of the year

I want to be able to look back on a year and remember at least one moment where I felt truly happy. I definitely should have at least one moment or I try hard enough to push myself out of my comfort zone and experience it.

This year’s moment is definitely going to be the the first night of the fromis concert when Nakyung teased Hush Hush. She put her hand on her ear to make us scream louder, and then when she put her index finger over the lips, the whole arena was dead silent, and then you could hear the song starting to play. Not only is Hush Hush my favorite b-side of the year, but also they’ve never performed it before so I’m never going to forget that rush of adrenaline when I saw the stage for the first time.

To make up the previous years:

2021: Climbing up Namsan tower and overlooking Seoul during my three month stay

2020: Staying up and hearing Feel Good for the first time after the 15 month hiatus

2019: Seeing fromis_9 perform in Washington Square Park, where I could finally meet them for the first time and they could hear me screaming the fanchants

2018: Getting accepted into my master’s program (I couldn’t pinpoint a single moment when I completely fell into fromis)

2017: Clicking on GFriend’s Neverland on YouTube, which made me fall into kpop and start learning Korean

Kpop and Korea really are what make me happy lol. I hope everyone has something that makes them feel this way.

Milestones

Gained the skills to find a new job (leetcode, how to interview)

Learned how to lift weights (at 125lbs, 135lb squat, 105lb bench press, 190lb deadlift, 65lb shoulder press)

Gained 10lbs

Took my family to Korea for two weeks

Can play 14s in DDR

Kdramas watched:

그림자 미녀 (Shadow Beauty)

그해 우리는 (Our Beloved Summer)

사내 맞선 (Business Proposal)

사랑의 불시착 (Crash Landing On You)

I want 2023 to be another year full of improving myself. If I want a blanket goal, I want to present myself as the best version of my self possible (physically), which means getting my body in shape and dressing well. If I can gain some more muscle, rehaul my wardrobe, and keep my skin clear, I think I can do just that.

Goals for 2023

Continue working out (no exact target, but I want to improve on all four of the big 4 lifts and not hurt myself)

Gain another 10-ish lbs

Put together 20+ outfits for different situations

Be open to meeting new people

Give myself more headspace to try new activities with friends 

Get a 900k on a real 17 in DDR

[harocat]

I posted 3,407 times in 2022

68 posts created (2%)

3,339 posts reblogged (98%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@starrygazingpie

@story-kat

@beltsquid

@queerbuck

@artistefish

I tagged 2,986 of my posts in 2022

Only 12% of my posts had no tags

#queue. - 1,717 posts

#yuri on ice - 582 posts

#katsuki yuuri - 448 posts

#victor nikiforov - 435 posts

#gif - 430 posts

#figure skating - 356 posts

#victuuri - 353 posts

#tgcf - 318 posts

#mdzs - 160 posts

#cats - 158 posts

Longest Tag: 138 characters

#tl;dr if a type of dog can't breed naturally without human intervention maybe that should be the moment you step back and go 'should we be

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

I rag on Nathan's costumes too, but sometimes it gets a little annoying how like... obsessed people are with it? Like if the man wants to wear comfy exercise shirts, let the man wear comfy exercise shirts. If he wants to dress as a flaming hot cheeto, more power to him.

Also stop reading weird stuff into his costumes. Guy just wants to be max comfortable out there and he happens to also have no sense of fashion. Like I said, I poke fun at them too, but lay off lol.

(Being said bring back the Mama Chen made shirt for Rocketman. Bus seat shirt at the Olympics ftw.)

56 notes - Posted January 22, 2022

#4

One thing I really wish I could show everyone is Toller Cranston’s 1986 free skate to the Goncharov soundtrack. He did it at the World Professional Championships, several years after he retired from amateur competition, and it’s absolutely breathtaking.

Toller was known as a skater who pushed artistic boundaries with his work, and his Goncharov was no exception. Portraying the dual roles of Goncharov and Katya, apparent in both costume and choreography, Toller somehow managed to convey, in his language of movement, both the desperate femme fatale that was Katya and the hardened, pained persona was Goncharov. At one point he makes it look as if he is dancing a duet. Is it a dance of a love lost, or of one that never existed at all? Are the two dancers thinking of other people entirely? It’s up to us to decide. Toller gives us no answer.

This program was extremely under-appreciated at the time, and it’s very hard to find, sadly. At the competition itself, figure skating’s conservative judges were tepid on it, and in its place, a showy Scott Hamilton program was the winner. My grandma taped it off tv when it aired, and that’s how I saw it. I still remember watching it years after it aired on that grainy VHS. It was my first experience with Goncharov, and it was so memorable to this day.

103 notes - Posted November 22, 2022

#3

Yuuri Katsuki

Yuuri Katsuki

YUURI KATSUKI

134 notes - Posted August 19, 2022

#2

Join us on October 6, 2022 at 2:30 AM JST (the exact time Yuri!!! on Ice's first episode aired six years ago) for an international hashtag; #MappaWhereisYOI

161 notes - Posted October 3, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

congrats we bullied MAPPA into adding the ring back in!!

(I don't think anyone was actually bullying. All the comments I saw in reply were very nice! But I appreciate them doing it, and I'm glad people can let their angsty headcanon concerns rest now lol.)

814 notes - Posted March 3, 2022

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