#like maybe its having been a writer for a while mow and writing my own novels where im trying to make everything come together

[borealing]

squid game 2 was written for people like me specifically who want to take every single crumb of the story and deconstruct it and look at the way it was put together and then write essays about how everything was intentional and has implications and a deeper meaning. tbh my attitude to people who didnt like it and write long posts about how it was boring is that they missed the point like

[vaspider]

So this gets at a lot, but the core thing that I feel like it doesn't take into account is that D&D was based on war gaming. There's been a lot of attempts to make it more friendly to the people from Group B over the last several decades, but it was always made for Group A.

The other part of the conversation that I think the above kinda misses is that D&D is such an overwhelming force in the TTRPG space that it's almost a sort of mental kudzu. Its overwhelming presence in the space makes it extremely difficult for literally any other game to get a foothold.

And so you have this game that actually isn't made for Group B on the one hand, and you also have a megacorp that has historically, repeatedly, and very recently mowed over its players and independent creators. WotC is not only actively bad for the biodiversity of TTRPGs but they're also apparently so terrible to work for that I've heard working for/on D&D called "the revolving door outside Seattle" in conversations with other TTRPG writers.

When you attempt to make D&D, specifically, work better for Group B, that takes an awful lot of work. It would be much easier for Group B to pick up a game that is made for that style of play, just the same as it is much easier for three adult people to ride one of those boardwalk pedal cars than to all pile onto a BMX bike sized for a 9 year old. Could you maybe make it down the boardwalk, all 4 of you, on Timmy's BMX? Well, maybe? But wouldn't it be more enjoyable to use a vehicle actually suited for your purpose and designed to be comfortable and fun for everyone at the table?

So while it's true that you've got these two groups who look at the game differently and thus there is a clash of understanding on that level, it's also true, and very important to understand, that a lot of other things go into people begging others to play anything - anything - other than D&D:

TTRPG biodiversity is supported by people playing (and buying!) other games, leading to a sustainable industry which can support lots of game options

WotC having such a large market share is actively bad for gaming (this is not the same thing as #1) and anything that spreads out gaming dollars is good

Jesus please just buy games actually developed by diverse authors and not also owned by fucking Hasbro instead of trying to make another mod of a war game created by TTRPG's original Sex Pest DM

please, we're so tired, please, just try the boardwalk pedal car, Timmy's BMX is rusty

Like, yes, that's true, you could possibly turn that screwdriver into a paintbrush, but the sixteenth time you ask your painter friends how to turn a screwdriver into a paintbrush after the last fifteen times you've asked them and later complained about how hard it was to get your landscape to come out looking good when you wouldn't just BUY A FUCKING PAINTBRUSH LIKE I TOLD YOU TO, MAN, they're probably going to start getting annoyed.

For disclosure's sake, I have a vested interest in people trying other games because I write for RPGs that aren't D&D, and the company I own works with @theonyxpath on merchandising for their games. (In fact, there are 4 days left on crowdfunding for a very awesome JRPG game that @impernious developed & for which my company is fulfilling the enamel pins that we developed with OPP.) So. 🤷🏻

(Also, today was an extremely long day, and I ended it slightly sunburnt and dehydrated, so maybe I'm missing something here or wildly missing the point, but I do think those pieces are important to understanding why people get so confused and frustrated in these conversations.)

Seeing @thydungeongal constantly wrestling with people interpreting her posts about D&D in ways that seem completely alien to me has convinced me that there are actually multiple completely distinct activities both being referred to as "playing D&D" Before we begin, I want to stress that I'm not saying one of these groups is Playing The Game Wrong or anything, but there seems to be a lot of confusion and conflict caused by people not being aware of the distinction. In fact, either one works just fine if everyone's on the same page. So far, I think I've identified at least two main groups. And nobody seems to realize the distinction between these groups even exists. The first group of people think of "Playing D&D" as, well, more or less like any other board game. Players read the whole rulebook all the way through, all the players follow the instructions, and the gameplay experience is determined by what the rules tell each player to do. This group thinks of the mechanics as, not exactly the *whole* game, but certainly the fundamental skeleton that everything else is built on top of. People in the second group think of "Playing D&D" as referring to, hanging out with their friends, collaboratively telling a story inspired by some of the elements in the rulebooks, maybe rolling some dice to see what happens when they can't decide. This group thinks of the mechanics of the game as, like... a spice to sprinkle on top of the story to mix things up. (if you belong to this second group, and think I'm explaining it poorly, please let me know, because I'm kind of piecing things together from other people saying things I don't understand and trying to reverse engineer how they seem to be approaching things.) I think this confusion is exacerbated by the fact that Wizards of the Coast markets D&D as if these are the same thing. They emphatically are not. the specific rules laid out of the D&D rulebooks actually direct players to tell a very specific kind of story. You can tell other stories if you ignore those rules (which still counts as "playing D&D" under the second definition, but doesn't under the first)And I think people in both groups are getting mad because they assume that everyone is also using their definition. For example, there's a common argument that I've seen play out many times that goes something like this:

A: "How do I mod D&D to do [insert theme here]?" B: "D&D is really not built for that, you should play [other TTRPG] that's designed for it instead" A: "But I don't want to learn a whole new game system!" B: "It will be easier to just learn a whole new system than mod D&D to do that." A: "whatever, I'll just mod D&D on my own" And I think where this argument comes from is the two groups described above completely talking past each other. No one understands what the other person is trying to say. From A's perspective, as a person in the second group, it sounds like A: "Anyone have some fun inspirations for telling stories about [insert theme here]?" B: "You can't sit around a table with your friends and tell a story about that theme! That's illegal." A: "But we want to tell a story about this theme!" B: "It's literally impossible to do that and you're a dumb idiot baby for even thinking about it." A: "whatever, jerk, I'll figure it out on my own."

--- Whereas, from B's perspective, the conversation sounds like A: "How do I change the rules of poker to be chess, and not be poker?" B: "uhhh, just play chess?" A: "But I already know how to player poker! I want to play poker, but also have it be chess!" B: "what the hell are you talking about? What does that even mean. They're completely different games." A: "I'm going to frankenstein these rules together into some kind of unplayably complex monster and you can't stop me!" ---

So both people end up coming away from the conversation thinking the other person is an idiot. And really, depending on how you concieve of what it means to "play D&D" what is being asked changes considerably. If you're only planning to look through the books for cool story inspiration, maybe borrow a cool little self contained sub-system here or there, then yeah, it's very possible to steal inspiration for your collaborative story from basically anywhere. Maybe some genres are kind of an awkward fit together, but you can make anything work with a little creativity.

If, however, you are thinking of the question in terms of frankensteining two entire board games together, then it becomes a massively difficult or even outright nonsensical idea. For example, for skill checks, the game Shadowrun has players roll a pool of several d6 at once, then count up how many rolled above a target value to see how well a character succeeded at a task. The whole game is full of specific rules about adding or removing dice from the pool, effects happening if you roll doubles, rerolling only some of the dice, and all sorts of other things that simply do not translate to rolling a single d20 for skill checks. On a basic level, the rules of the games work very differently. Trying to make them compatible would be much harder than just learning a new game from scratch. Now, neither of these approaches is exactly *wrong*, I guess, but personally, I find the rules of TTRPGs to be fascinating and worth taking the time to engage with all the weird little nuances and seeing what shakes out. Also, the first group, "TTRPG as fancy board game" is definitely the older and more widespread one. I kind of get the impression that the second group largely got into D&D through actual play podcasts, but I don't have any actual data to back that up. So, if you're in the second group, who thinks of D&D as basically a context for collaborative storytelling first and a game second, please let me know if I'm wildly misunderstanding how you approach D&D. Because I'm pretty sure it would save us a whole lot of stupid misunderstandings.

[djmarinizelablog]

A Conversation with the Author of City Comma State, kippielovesyou/ForcedSimile

Had a short interview with the author of City Comma State, @kippielovesyou/ForcedSimile and asked her if I could share our conversation online---she said yes!

Did you know that Hange and Levi in her work was based on Spongebob and Squidward's interactions?

Read the entire transcript below:

-------------------------------------

djmarinizela (D): if i may ask, where and how did you learn to write so good? what inspired you to write city comma state?

kippielovesyou (K): i don't mind at all! it's genuinely just years of practice. i've been scribbling stories since kindergarten (i had a long standing multi part series in first grade about all my classmates). i think one thing is certain: having a strong understanding of characters whether you borrow them or they are your own is pretty key.

a lot of points [in Isayama's story] could have been better thought out or tighter. however, we all love his characters. a weak plot (or in the case of city comma state: no plot) can be ignored or forgiven if everyone loves the characters

i'll be honest, i spend a lot of time trying to understand why a character does things or reacts a certain way. and yes, sometimes, that means i act out scenes in my car while driving. it's embarrassing...

there's a lot more to it, but to me that's the most important thing

as far as how city comma state came about: i wanted to do a slow burn romance centered around levihan, but I also wanted to show how all these characters care about and support each other. i knew in the confines of the AoT world, anyone could die at any moment and that didn't work with the softer feelings i wanted people to enjoy. how can you enjoy the friendship between mike and hange if he dies? it's possible, but it upends all the warmth we were enjoying. so i wrote an AU. i wanted to keep levi with a rough background with many walls, and i wanted hange to have her own issues that they can work through together. and i love the idea of them adopting/supporting the 104th kids without the fear of sending them out to war

D: your answer is so profound and helpful, thank you so much! I can honestly say you pretty nailed it when it comes to character development---everyone has a character arc in your fic! [my next question] is about the gender discourse in your story. I know you started City Comma State pretty early in 2014, but even back then, the nonbinary identity wasn't widely known before. How were you able to flesh out the discourse on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum and play it out on the dialogues and backstories?

K: it's pretty funny, a lot of the LGBTQIA+ has always been discussed i my family. we've had gay, lesbian, trans, gnc, bi and asexual people in my family for generations, as far back as the 20s (that we're aware of). hange's gender being debated made it a prime opportunity to write such an experience, some of which is borrowed from my own life. when i read older chapters i see certain slips in dialogue where i could have made an effort to be more neutral. we're in such a binary society that sometimes even if you feel in between, it slips in. in fact, i'm sure some people might take issue with the fact that i stuck with she/her for hange. i'm not sure i'd make a different decision today. i like this version of hange the way she is, and i hope hange's nb/gnc status comes across in more than just pronouns. hange's full identity is so much more than that and that is what i wanted to explore. and i think no matter where you fall on the whole LGBTQIA+ spectrum, you are more than just the label you've chosen. yes, in this story levi is bi/pan. but i don't think he ever says that explicitly, and he avoids labels. it seems fussy to him, which feels levi. discourse would not be his thing. i think even having a debate about whether or not he was bi or pan wouldn't be something he would want to engage in, he just wants to do what he wants. instead it's heavily implied. i think we forget since so many of us experience this discourse online and want to label things that there are people who don't want to involve themselves in it. it goes back to how would this character act. for instance, based on how levi is in canon, i can see many ways to interpret his sexuality. there's cues for a lot of different takes. but levi doesn't seem like the type that would need a definitive label in order to be happy. there's many ways to interpret hange's gender (and i've written several takes, some where they're more insistent on their pronouns), but i think hange's more excited to explore life than worry too much about much about how they're addressed or how someone talks about them. maybe another character might be more caught up in labels but hange and levi not so much

D: No, don't be sorry, I am more than thankful for your answer. I really appreciate it! I don't get to have these kinds of conversations with other writers, so I am grateful for your insights.

K: a really funny anecdote for you: i loosely based the idea of my levihan off of spongebob and squidward. you know, since they start out as neighbors and hange is more invasive than levi is used to

D: that's.... a stretch. but thanks for the tidbit! was the annual star wars contest also something that you do in your family? that part as well as all the geeky references won me over tbh!

K: it was an extremely loose inspiration! but hange mowing her lawn in the middle of the night so levi wouldn't be mad at her is on par with a spongebob move. and um...my family, while they can be a little nerdy, is not nerdy enough to do the star wars tournament! i made that up entirely

i just imagined hange having eccentric family, so they have very unusual traditions that none of the children question

i'll be the first to say a lot of city comma state is unrealistic and a little bit of a domestic fantasy. there's a lot of problems with money, employment and such that hange and levi SHOULD have but that's a little too real and not what i want to be the focus of this story. like hange landing a job that gives her a day off and she doesn't suffer a severe pay cut as a result? unrealistic. but i have other things i want to tackle. plus, in canon we have humans that turn into giants and 3D maneuver gear which would probably kill its user in real life. i think making certain parts of this fanfic a little idealistic is okay

D: are there other works that influence your writing? or authors that inspire you to write?

K: There's too many influences to count. reading is so important and even things that are bad are helpful. i actually was trying to read a YA series that seemed really cool and i had to stop reading because so many things were so annoying (I won't reveal which, since i think it has a small but dedicated fandom and i don't want to rain on their parade, it is purely a taste thing to some degree). instead of being upset and thinking that I wasted my time, i took note of what made me stop reading (that is a long list of things i didn't like so i won't bother to outline each one). even if it's something as small as a fanfiction that you had to click out of, ask yourself why you stopped. Especially with fanfiction: you already like these characters, what you're looking for is usually pretty specific (a pairing, an au, a specific scenario, etc). why, when this author has ticked all your superficial boxes, did you stop reading? and when you love something as yourself why. Ask yourself why you love the source material even! do you really love the plotlines and the world or do you love the characters? Is the dialogue strong? something to also pay attention to: people in general. how do they speak, gestures, facial expressions. really listen to how people talk (Youtube podcasts are really good for this!).

i think people would be surprised, a lot of what i really like to read is very all over. from surrealist novels, to classic literature, to science fiction aimed at children (i'm finally reading animorphs after almost 20 years!). and what i write for original fiction doesn't reflect what i'm probably best known for.

D: thanks for this, Kippie! looking forward to reading more of your works!

K: i'm still amazed at the response! writing is so solitary to me and i don't really look at my numbers. it never occurred to me that people would be discussing my fic!

-------------------------------------

If you haven't read Kippie's Levihan fic yet, here's the link to get started: City Comma State

[hotpinkhoshi]

long hot summer (m) | jinyoung

as part of the pleasure chest: a got7 cringe collaboration

pairing: jinyoung x f reader genre: smut warnings: terrible innuendos, second hand embarrassment, explicit sex, light choking word count: 4.8k

summary: it’s been a long, hot summer, and you’ve got your eye on jinyoung, the sexy gardener your dad hired back in june - and when you’re left alone with the house to yourself for a whole week, you devise a plan to finally get what you want. when daddy’s away, his darling daughter will play…

a/n: hehe hi guys! this was super fun to write, even though i played myself by waiting until the very last minute to write it. for that reason, it is mostly unedited so cut me some slack if you see any weird typos hahaha. anyway, thank you to the other writers in the collab for such a fun experience! i’m so glad i got to be a part of this! enjoy!

You awoke on Thursday morning with the same excitement that you’d had on Christmas morning when you were ten.

Today’s the day!

For weeks, you’d schemed and planned, researched and daydreamed. And now it was time to put all of your preparation to good use and get yourself the one thing you’d been wanting for the last two months.

Today, you were going to seduce your gardener.

Well, your father’s gardener, to be specific. You’d had your eye on him since the first day he pulled up in that forest green, beat up pickup truck with the giant lawnmower in the bed.

He was young, maybe a year or two older than you, but you weren’t sure. Your dad told you his name was Jinyoung and he’d started his own business after graduating high school, mostly just maintaining the massive yards of the upper middle class citizens of your neighborhood.

That was all fine and dandy, but most importantly, Jinyoung was hot.

He always wore the same thing—a plain white t-shirt tucked into a pair of jeans, and you didn’t even care that they were light wash and could use a tailor’s touch. The way he rolled the sleeves up to his shoulders, showing off the corded muscles from years of manual labor, made you forget all about his hideous jeans.

Every Thursday, Jinyoung rolled up in his truck and took care of your dad’s lawn while you stood in the kitchen staring out the window like a peeping Tom. You were completely aware that you were objectifying him, but it had been quite a while since anyone had watered your buds, and you had become shameless.

But this week, this week you’d decided to make a move.

Your dad was away on business for five days, leaving you with the house completely to yourself. You had put your time to good use, clicking away and devising a plan to get into Jinyoung’s pants.

Your research began on Monday when your best friend, Jongin, had come over. You had a strange relationship, but that was to be expected when you had known him since diapers. He also happened to have taken your virginity, but it wasn’t as awkward as one would think.

“Guys like it when a girl takes charge,” Jongin told you, reaching for a slice of pizza off the coffee table. You laid on the floor, staring up at the ceiling while taking mental notes of everything he told you.

“Take charge how?”

“I don’t know, like, make the first move. Just get on top of him and…” Jongin gestured vaguely with his hands, squeezing the air.

“And what? Grab his boobs?” You pursed your lips together, tossing a spare chunk of crust at him.

“If that’s what he’s into,” Jongin defended with a playful smirk on his lips. “Look, I’m just saying, it’s hot when you know a girl is into you and you don’t have to guess.”

Chewing your lip, you stored the information away for later. “What should I wear? Like, should I just walk outside in my bikini?”

Jongin snorted. “You could, yeah. Some guys are simple like that.”

“Hmm…” you propped yourself up on your elbows. “He doesn’t seem simple. He’s like, mysterious and quiet.”

“Doesn’t matter, I bet he’ll still stare at your ass while you walk away.”

You smirked. Luckily, you had stayed committed to your squats this summer.

“Okay, so I make a move. Then what?”

Jongin looked at you like you had two heads. “What do you mean, then what? Then you guys do the deed.”

Sighing dramatically, you flopped back onto the floor. You wanted more than that—you wanted him to end the day thinking about how sexy you were, how it had been his hottest experience ever. You wanted him to tell his friends about it at parties.

The next night, you continued your quest for knowledge with some visual aids. You got yourself all comfy and tucked in bed, laptop resting on your lap while you scrolled through Pornhub.

Jongin was right—it was hot when the girls took charge. Sure, there was something to be said for the submissive, meek girl that dropped to her knees on command, but you wanted control.

As you got deeper into the black hole of XXX websites, you found yourself becoming more and more nervous. You didn’t look like the girls in these videos, with their perfectly trimmed pubic hair and their toned physiques. Your boobs were less than half the size of some of these women.

You also didn’t find yourself naturally sexy, comfortable approaching a man and throwing yourself at him. But you wanted Jinyoung, and all of that trumped any kind of insecurity you could feel. Soon, you’d be back at college and you couldn’t live with yourself if you let the opportunity pass you by.

Cut to now—standing in the kitchen in your teeny tiny workout shorts and an equally revealing tank top, your yoga mat rolled up and tucked under your arm. You saw Jinyoung outside, kneeling in front of one of the flower beds and giving you the perfect view of his side profile.

When you were just about to slide open the glass door and put your plan into action, your phone vibrated on the kitchen table. You jumped and went to answer it promptly after you saw who was calling.

“Hi Daddy,” you said, setting your yoga mat on the floor.

“Hi love, how’s it going?”

“Good,” you answered, eyes still locked on the back yard. Jinyoung sat back on his heels, bringing his forearm up to wipe the sweat off of his forehead. God, he was the finest man you’d ever seen.

“Hey, I forgot to tell you, make sure you give Jinyoung the check I left on the counter for the week. And be nice to him, it’s hot outside today—invite him in for a glass of water or something.”

Your lips curled into a devious smile. “I’ll be nice to him. Don’t worry.”

“That’s my girl.”

Your dad talked your ear off for a bit longer, telling you all about his flight and something about conference calls, blah blah. All the while, you were entirely focused on something else.

Jinyoung had lifted the front of his shirt up to his face, wiping his sweat once more and revealing his washboard abs. It was only a few seconds, but you felt yourself come close to flatlining right there in the kitchen.

Your phone beeped against your ear, the alert tone signaling that you had a missed call. You glanced at the screen to find Jongin’s name on the notification.

“I have to go, Jongie called,” you told him.

“Oh alright, tell him I said hello. And be good,” your dad said.

“I will. Bye, Daddy.” You took the phone from your ear, returning Jongin’s call with a few taps.

“Hey ugly, how’s it going?”

“I’m going to fuck his brains out,” you answered simply.

Jongin choked on the other end. “Like, right now?”

“No,” you answered, going over to the fridge to pull open the door. “But I’m about to go out and start seducing him. He’s here and he’s so hot. I’m gonna go out, do some yoga, and see if he needs help… with his hose.”

Your best friend snorted. “Don’t say that.”

You grabbed two water bottles, both ice cold, and tucked them between your arm and your chest. “I want him to know that I want him.”

“Okay, well, if a girl referred to my dick as a hose I’m pretty sure it would shrivel up. Just go flash your tits and call it a day.”

Sighing, you shook your head even though he couldn’t see you, letting the fridge door shut behind you as you turned away. “No, that’s not sexy. Don’t worry, I’ve got this. I’ve been watching porn for two days straight.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ. Fine, just… look, just one little word of advice. Don’t make that face you made with me, the one when you came.”

You stopped in your tracks on your way back over to the door. “What face?”

Jongin cleared his throat. Your first time had been a long time ago just before graduation after a bottle of tequila and your confession that you didn’t want to go to college a virgin. He’d taken one for the team, giving you exactly six minutes of pleasure before finishing on your bedspread.

You hadn’t come, then, you’d simply faked it for his benefit. But still, you hadn’t realized anything you’d done had been unattractive. What if you did make a weird face when you came?

“You know what, nevermind. I don’t want to know. Goodbye, asshole.”

“Good luck, slut.”

With a sigh, you hung up and placed your phone back on the table. When you glanced outside, Jinyoung had moved further down the flower bed, giving you a nice view of his broad back, his shoulder muscles moving under his shirt with every move he made.

Be sexy. Don’t be weird.

You grabbed your mat by its strap and pushed open the glass door, walking out onto the concrete of your back patio and onto the grass. Your yard wasn’t as big as some of your neighbors’, but there was still a good amount of distance between you and Jinyoung. It wasn’t too awkward for you to lay your mat down across the freshly mowed grass, in direct sunlight.

When Jinyoung glanced back at you, you felt your heart jump in your chest, warm from the sun and his gaze. Fuck. Words, what were words?!

“Need some water?” you asked, holding one of the full bottles out in his direction. “You’re hot. I mean, it’s hot.” You gulped and prayed he hadn’t noticed the slip of your tongue.

Jinyoung stood from his knees, utterly silent, as he seemed to look you up and down. It was hard to tell with the sun in your eyes, but it almost looked like he had been checking you out.

He was quiet, still, even as he began walking towards you. As he got closer, you were desperately trying to keep your drool inside of your mouth. He reached out to grab the water bottle from you, surprising you with a dimpled half smile.

“Thanks.”

And then he walked away.

Fine, then you’d have to resort to plan B.

— x —

Plan B was a bust.

You’d laid out there for half an hour, sprawled out on your yoga mat as you contorted your body into several positions and stretches that had you aching in the worst of ways. Every time you looked at Jinyoung, he was focused on his job, pulling weeds or planting soil or whatever it was that he got paid to do.

With an exasperated sigh, you slammed the glass door shut behind you once you were back in the kitchen. Stupid boys. No, he wasn’t a boy. He was a man, and maybe that was the problem.

Grabbing your phone, you opened Jongin’s text thread.

You [12:07pm]: UGH. fuck this. Jongin [12:08pm]: no dick yet? You [12:08pm]: no. i basically turned myself into a pretzel and he couldn’t have cared less. my rose petals were in plain sight and he didn’t even look once Jongin [12:10pm]: LOL show him ur boobs

You groaned and furrowed your brows, fully prepared to explain to Jongin that you didn’t think anything would work at this point, when you heard the glass kitchen door slide open.

Jinyoung walked through, sweat dripping deliciously down his temples and down the vein lining his neck. “Hey, just need to wash my hands. I’ll just be a minute.”

Then he was so close to you, you could smell his cologne, mixed with the earthy scent of the garden he’d just had his hands buried into. He stared down at you, licking his lips while his gaze bored into you like he wanted something. No, needed something.

Maybe the tables had turned.

“Can you move?”

You blinked. “Huh?”

Jinyoung tipped his chin. “I need to wash my hands.”

You hadn’t realized it, but in your angry pacing while texting Jongin, you’d ended up standing right in front of the kitchen sink.

“Oh,” you breathed, and still didn’t move for another moment until annoyance flashed in Jinyoung’s eyes. You side stepped and watched as Jinyoung took your place, reaching to pump some soap onto his hands.

“So…” you started. All you needed to do was strike up a conversation, and it would be easy from there. “Do you need any help?”

Jinyoung glanced at you. “...Washing my hands?”

“No, like…” You used your shoulder to nudge towards the back yard. “Out there. I could help you, um, empty your hose.”

Oh, god. Jongin was right. It wasn’t sexy at all.

“I mean,” you tried again. “I could lend you a hand. If you know what I mean.”

If Jinyoung knew what you meant, he didn’t show any interest. He just shrugged and focused on scrubbing the dirt from his fingernails. You gulped at the way the veins on the back of his hands flexed. You wanted those hands on you, ASAP.

“Jinyoung,” you said, scooting an inch closer as you leaned back against the counter. “What I’m trying to say is…”

“I’ll stop you there,” he said, turning off the faucet. “I know where this is going. You’ve been staring at me all summer, and I know you’ve been trying to get my attention all afternoon.”

You blinked in surprise. Had you been that obvious? Well, of course you had. That was the goal, anyway. Jongin had told you it was sexy when a girl was obvious…

“I’m just trying to do my job,” Jinyoung said, reaching for a kitchen towel to wipe his hands. “Not looking to get murdered by your dad for defiling his perfectly innocent daughter.”

It took you a minute for his words to sink in, for you to realize that he hadn’t said he wasn’t interested. He wanted to defile you.

Just as Jinyoung went to leave, you grabbed his wrist. “Wait.”

Jinyoung sighed, turning back to you with dark eyes. “Let it go. Don’t test my patience.”

Something about the look in his eyes sent a shiver down your spine, images flashing through your mind of other ways that he could look at you, how you could get him to do more to you.

“Don’t you want to…” you bit your lip, emulating those girls you’d seen in videos, trailing your fingertips up his chest. “Touch me? I’ve prettied my flower up, just for you…”

Jinyoung gave you a look somewhere between uncomfortable and turned on. His hand came up to wrap around your wrist, his thumb pressed to your pulse point. “I said let it go.”

Warmth spread your entire body as Jinyoung gazed down at you, his callused fingers gripping tightly onto your wrist, stopping your fingers on their path up his chest. Something told you he wanted you, maybe just as bad as you wanted him, and it had quickly turned from a fantasy into a reality.

“Make me,” you told him.

When he didn’t respond, just swallowed hard and tensed his jaw, you reached with your free hand for his tool belt. You hooked your finger into the loop of the belt, pulling his body closer to you.

“Touch me, Jinyoung.”

“Don’t,” he growled, the sound shooting straight to your core.

“I’ll be a good girl. My dad never has to know,” you tried once more, looking up at him through your lashes. His breathing had gotten heavier and his eyes narrowed as they locked on yours. It felt like a bomb was about to go off, just tick-ticking away until he exploded.

“You have three seconds.”

Three.

You closed the gap between your bodies, sliding your hand from Jinyoung’s belt to find his free hand.

Two.

Wrapping your fingers around his hand, you led it to rest on your lower back.

One.

His hand, entirely on its own, slid from your lower back down along the curve of your backside to grip your ass. You swallowed, running your tongue across your lips. You felt like a woman starved and Jinyoung was your only source of a meal.

Finally, Jinyoung let go of your wrist and instead gripped your chin between his thumb and forefinger, pulling you close until he could slam his lips upon yours. You whimpered at the rough contact, but your whimper quickly turned to a moan as soon as he brought your bodies together.

It was a blur after that.

You found the clasp to Jinyoung’s belt and quickly unbuckled it, letting it fall to the ground. You ignored the sound of the tools clanking against your kitchen floor, making a mental note that you’d have to sweep the dirt off the tiles before your dad got home.

Jinyoung made no move to take your clothes off--it seemed he was more than satisfied with kissing you and squeezing your ass. But you wanted more, you had been thirsting after him for so long, you wanted to cut to the chase.

What would those girls have done? They would take charge.

So you pulled back from the kiss and grabbed Jinyoung’s forearm, leading him without a word out of the kitchen and into the living room. The cleaning lady had already been here earlier, so you didn’t have to worry about Jinyoung catching sight of your half eaten bag of pretzels or the many issues of Cosmo you’d flipped through in these last few days.

You shoved him down to sit on the chair and knelt between his legs, shoving them apart so that you could occupy the space instead. Your fingers practically tore open the button and zipper of his jeans and you reached into his underwear, freeing his erection.

“Whoa, whoa, slow do-” Jinyoung started, but the words died on his tongue as soon as you got your mouth on him.

You bobbed your head, relishing in the feeling of his cock filling your mouth, the tip easily reaching the back of your throat each time you went down. You gagged and coughed, knowing how much guys loved that. You’d been told once, by Jongin of course, that all you needed to do to give a good blowjob was to be sloppy and enthusiastic.

“Mm,” you mumbled as your lips wrapped around the head, opening your eyes to stare up at Jinyoung. He was breathing hard, hands gripping the leather arm rests. You pulled off of him, replacing your mouth with your hand as you jerked him off. “You like that? You like… my mouth around your dick?”

Jinyoung groaned but reached for your hand, halting your efforts. He slid his other hand into your hair, pulling you away from his cock and making you look at him.

“Slow down, slow down.” He guided you with his own hand, creating a slow pace with your fingers wrapped around his length, his eyes still locked onto yours. “Fuck. Yeah, like that.”

“I wanna…” you thought for a moment, trying to recall all the dirty things you’d heard in all those videos. “Wanna fuck your cock. Want you to fuck me. Right here, just let you, uh, make me scream.”

You found yourself stuttering through it, not sure if you sounded so awkward because you’d never talked dirty in your life, or because you were just that turned on.

Jinyoung’s brows furrowed as he stared down at you, his expression getting less aroused and more confused as you continued to tell him all the things you wanted him to do to you.

“Hold on,” Jinyoung said, hand halting your movements once more. “I’m sorry, but what’s with the dirty talk? You sound like you stepped out of a sex hotline commercial.”

“Um,” you replied and felt your cheeks flush as you looked away, pursing your lips together. “I thought you’d like that. Guys like it when a girl takes charge, right?”

“Sure,” he answered. “But we aren’t in a porno. And something tells me you’ve seen a few too many of those.”

He had caught you red handed. Oh, maybe that was a poor choice of words when you currently had both hands gripped around his cock, steadily jerking him off.

“I-” You swallowed, lifting your eyes up to lock back onto Jinyoung’s. “Maybe I watched a few… to prepare for this.”

Then Jinyoung smiled. You stared up at him, confused, before he started to laugh. Not the best reaction you wanted while you were on your knees in front of a man, but this day was ending up a lot more uncomfortable than you had imagined.

“I see what happened here. Stand up,” he told you, and you obeyed, dropping your hands off of him down to rest at your sides. He pulled you down onto his lap as you rested your thighs on either side of his hips, his hands immediately sliding up the back of your shirt.

“I’m not going anywhere. There’s no reason we can’t take it slow, enjoy it. And trust me,” he said, his fingers gripping your sides as his thumbs grazed your rib cage. “I want to enjoy this.”

Jinyoung lifted your shirt above your head and tossed it to the side, revealing the baby blue sports bra that offered no support whatsoever, and you’d been grateful to finally have an excuse to wear it.

“Wait, watch this,” you told him, leaning back with an excited smile. You reached with one hand to the center of your chest, taking hold of the zipper that went straight down the middle of the bra. You pulled it down, freeing your breasts from the bra. “Surprise.”

Once again, Jinyoung laughed at you, but this time he had this fond look in his eyes that gave you a different type of goosebumps. He had a cute laugh, and an even cuter smile--you liked the little whiskers that formed next to his eyes.

You didn’t have much time to think about that before Jinyoung was leaning forward, trailing kisses across your chest, lips making a pathway to one breast. You moaned as soon as he sucked your nipple into his mouth, arching your back towards him.

Your hands slid into his hair, needing something to hold onto while he flicked his tongue back and forth. He pinched and squeezed the neglected nipple between his index finger and his thumb, earning a squeak out of you at his ministrations.

Out of all the guys you’d been with, you had never had one pay this much attention to you right off the bat. They’d all been immature college boys, ones that didn’t bother taking your bra off before fucking you. You’d only ever reached an orgasm during sex once or twice, and you’d only been half as turned on as you were now.

You moaned his name, grinding your hips down against his lap. You felt his hardened length pressing against your thigh, and all you wanted was to feel him inside of you. You were soaking through your underwear with arousal, core clenching around nothing in desperation.

He pulled away from your chest, kissing a line up to your collarbone and along your neck, nipping your jawline before he was kissing you again. You couldn’t get enough of him, wanting to feel and touch every inch of his body.

The fantasy idea you’d had in your mind was nothing compared to this. Jinyoung was an incredible kisser, his lips perfectly plump and surprisingly skilled. He was intense, licking into your mouth and nipping at your tongue, but you loved it. You wouldn’t have minded if he swallowed you whole, at this point.

For a few minutes, you just kissed, your hands roaming each other’s bodies. Jinyoung showed his appreciation for every curve of your body, no matter how different they were from the women you’d been imitating all afternoon. He seemed to like you just as you were.

You pulled away, briefly, to yank his shirt over his head and tossed it behind you. Your eyes widened as they traveled over his skin, mouth watering with desire. He was absolutely perfect.

“Stand up,” Jinyoung told you, hands gripping your hips. He slid his thumbs into the waistband of your shorts, waiting until you stood up to slide them down your legs along with your underwear.

“Condom?” you asked, trying to ignore just how bare you felt under his gaze.

Jinyoung’s eyes snapped from your body up to your face, an expression full of regret. “Shit. I don’t have one. Do you-”

You’d already scurried off, hurrying over to the closet where you kept your jackets, purses, and extra shoes. After some shuffling around and shoving your hands into the pockets of all the jackets, you finally found the small foil square you’d been praying for.

“Yes!” you squealed with happiness, practically running back over to where Jinyoung was waiting for you. You held up the condom as you climbed back on top of him. “I was a girl scout, you know. Always be prepared.”

Jinyoung shook his head with a chuckle as he took the condom from you, ripping it open. You watched as he slid the condom over his length, licking your lips. It was happening, really happening.

“You wet enough for me?” he asked, licking his thumb before he slid it down between your legs, circling your clit. You gasped, hips bucking towards him for more.

“Please,” you whimpered, placing your hands on his shoulders for balance. “I need you.”

With an easy movement, Jinyoung took his hand from your clit and gripped your hips, lifting you up to hover over his length. You reached down, lining the tip up with your entrance. You let out one long sigh as you lowered yourself down, feeling him fill you up completely.

“Fuck,” Jinyoung ground out and tipped his head back against the chair. “Good girl.”

You kept your eyes on him as you began moving your hips, tiny gasps and moans filling the room each time you came down on him again. You quickened your pace bit by bit, reaching for one of Jinyoung’s hands and guiding it to your throat.

You were no longer trying to replicate any videos you’d seen or follow any advice from your idiotic best friend, you simply wanted Jinyoung and were completely acting upon your own desires.

Jinyoung opened his eyes, previously closed in bliss, and stared up at you. He licked his lips and clenched his teeth, adjusting his hand to wrap around your neck. He kept a gentle grip as you bounced on top of him, the volume of your moans reaching higher and higher.

“Oh, oh,” you cried out, breathless, as Jinyoung squeezed your throat. “Don’t stop.”

Your pace began to slow out of pure fatigue, but Jinyoung didn’t miss a beat. He planted his feet on the floor and thrusted into you, the tip of his cock hitting even deeper inside of you than he had before.

Now, you were practically screaming as Jinyoung fucked you, your entire body bouncing and jolting up and down from the sheer power behind his thrusts. All you could do was hold onto his forearm as he pounded into you.

It didn’t take much longer for the heat to build inside of you, the intense pleasure bringing you closer and closer to the edge. You felt hot all over, as if flames were licking at your whole body the closer you got to your peak.

“That’s it,” he told you, his other hand sliding to your ass to grip the flesh as he drove into you as if determined to completely unravel you. “Come for me. Let go.”

You squeezed your eyes shut, your entire body tensing. You were completely helpless to him, loving the way his skin slapped yours each time he thrusted inside of you. With one final cry, your body began to jerk as waves of hot pleasure washed over you in an unending hurricane.

Vaguely, you registered the sound of Jinyoung groaning through his teeth, his fingers tightening around your neck for a few short seconds before he emptied inside the condom. He thrusted inside of you a few more times, panting from underneath of you.

You finally opened your eyes after you’d come down from your orgasm, finding Jinyoung looking equally exhausted after his own climax. You sighed as he dropped his hand from your neck and you took a gulp of air.

“Holy honeysuckle,” you said, body falling forward to rest against him.

A few quiet moments later, Jinyoung was stroking his hands up and down your back, a surprisingly tender action for someone that had just fucked all your brain cells out. He was so warm, and it felt so natural to have his arms wrapped around you like this.

You lifted your head from his chest and stared down at him, searching for the words to say to break the silence.

“Well,” you started, lifting one side of your mouth into a smile. “Your hose is empty.”

Jinyoung grimaced and groaned, playfully nudging you away from him. “Aaaand now you’ve ruined it.”

[blankd]

Thoughts on The Mitchells vs the Machines

I watched it a while ago and kept forgetting to post my thoughts on it, but some posts here on tumblr recently reminded me.

I disagree with the majority takeaways I see but is that not the spice of life?

As a standalone movie its inoffensive and the writing of it will likely exit my brain in a few months.  However I can appreciate that the visual style was different from the typical fare and the mixture of 2d elements for visual embellishments were mostly enjoyable and well-suited for Katie as the POV character.

It's a bit "hyper" for my liking, but that's fine, it's likely intended for an audience that's accustomed to the flood that is the current norm of the internet.  It was probably made with GIFable moments in mind and that is the most frequent content that is shared about it, so it certainly succeeded in that regard.

My more critical take is that jokes are delivered at the expense of what could be more authentic themes.  Quips are made that draw attention to character flaws or undercut questions the movie should try to answer, but inevitably they are ignored to move onto the next joke or story beat.

The rest would fall more into spoiler territory, so read more for that.

--"They Were Both In the Wrong"

I personally disagree heavily with the thrust of how "both sides" were wrong when the degrees are disproportionate.

I've seen claims that Katie was "as in the wrong" as her father, but she's incredibly patient to the man who does her material harm.

I've yet to have seen someone say specifically what Katie did *wrong* to her father that is at all on par with the *years* he at best hasn't been able to interact with her or worse, actively refused to engage with her interests.

I would generously venture that her flaw was that she was more willing to communicate her feelings to strangers, but she easily talks to her mother and brother- her brother even helps her with her movies and she happily engages him with his own interests, which pivots the point back to how her father is physically/emotionally unavailable and led to the erosion and distance between the two of them.

Due to this, MvM comes across more as Kaite having to do so much more to guide her father rather than a more mutual learning experience for the both of them.

--"Technology that [Dis]Connects"

It's probably beyond the scope and intent of the film, but I was surprised there was no examination about why technology can be more alluring than interacting with physically present people.

For better or worse, the internet can be used as a means of supplementing the validation and acceptance of family.  It can also lead to no longer connecting to people around them because of the validation high of appealing to a constantly 'awake' sea of strangers- the spotlight is warmer than the cold reality that they are not the internet image they have cultivated.

For example, the rival 'perfect' family was never revealed to be a carefully constructed highlight reel that Mrs. Mitchell envies, they really were actually that perfect- because that provides an easier punchline than an examination or acknowledgement of how the internet can create unhealthy expectations.

I also can't expect MvM to acknowledge the reality that LGBTA+ people who are rejected by their family resort to seeking a new one through the internet because it would be much harder to redeem/rehabilitate a man defined by being tethered to "old values" if he was homophobic instead of "overprotective" and apprehensive at his daughter's departure from home and her dubious art career.

But hey we got that quick line at the end that Katie likes a girl, so that's a diversity win or something.

(To be clear I'm not expecting a whole parade or even an A or B-plot dedicated to it, but I think it should be acknowledged that this kind of "surprise inclusion" is very easily erased with a change of audio and would be completely unsurprised if this were the case for countries that are homophobic.  People can be happy about it, but it is dishonest to pretend that this is a bolder statement than it is.)

In that sense, I do and don't hold MvM to taking a "safer" route about how family always has your back, but this still feels like an important omission considering the focus on technology and its dynamic with the Mitchells.

I will also say that it was also bizarre, to me at least, that the obvious route that her father sees the value of home videos didn't become an active point between him and Katie.  Or that Mr. Mitchell's carpentry never really amounts to anything despite having a sentimental wooden moose.

Lastly, I think it's an unintentional, but it's interesting that Katie going to college to pursue her passion is viewed as a Terrible Thing by her father even though if he had his way, he'd be ostensibly living in the woods away from everyone else except his wife.

This isn't a problem, people are a collection of contradictions, but It's fascinating to see what the *narrative* treats as a difficult sacrifice while simultaneously pulling at heartstrings when PAL cites how children ignore their mothers.  There's an unexamined comedy that Mr. Mitchell's losing out on his 'passion' to live in the woods away from people is treated as tragic despite the movie's insistence on staying connected with your blood family.

--"The Inconsistent Personhood of AI"

PAL is rightfully angry at being discarded for something new; it's provided as a glimpse of what Katie will do when she finds 'her people' at college.

This in of itself is a good hook, because there is no one universal answer to when a flawed relationship should be mended with compromise or if it's better off being broken for the wellbeing of the ones involved.  Family and relationships are not programming, it's a choice and a gamble for whatever it brings but is nonetheless something that must be mutually worked upon.

Initially I thought that PAL was being set up as an exaggerated parallel to Mr. Mitchell.  PAL and Mr. Mitchell did their best to provide for their family.  PAL and Mr. Mitchell are in different stages of being 'discarded' by their family.  PAL and Mr. Mitchell both retaliate at their lack of power in the scenario by using the power granted by their roles to infringe on the autonomy of others for selfish reasons.

PAL even gives a 'chance' for her plan to be halted with, I had assumed this was being set up as the thesis of the movie, about humanity and the value of family, relationships, etc. being used to help someone who is already hurting.

But despite Katie looking at the camera and explaining herself, it is never actually directly resolved or challenged because a punchline was deemed more desirable for this narrative climax.

This begs the question of why PAL bothered with the pretense that she could be reasoned with, especially since this is not some question leveled at all of humanity, just two people.

I'm curious how the writers came to the conclusion that this was the best execution of the scene or if Katie's speech was considered immune to any challenge from PAL.  Would anyone have accepted this outcome if PAL were not an AI but instead a person?

It's not necessarily bad writing they went this route, but I doubt anyone would consider this good writing either.

By the end of the movie, PAL is no longer a 'person' who was betrayed and is lashing out, she is an object to be destroyed because the movie has to wrap up.  No compassion or chances are spared to this AI that did literally everything asked of her except take being discarded quietly.

Did PAL deserve a redemption arc? For this length of movie, probably not.  But it could have concluded with a commitment to doing no further harm.  Instead it is an accidental glimpse at how easily the pretense of compassion can be quickly discarded and mostly unexamined with the right framing.

A likely unintentional example is the conditional humanity given to Eric and Deborahbot who are adopted as "family" while the rest of the robots are mowed down without another thought.  Some are even beaten and broken while begging for mercy, because again, it is a funnier punchline.

Far be it for me to advocate that the murderbots needed 'a second chance uvu' but for a movie whose conceit rests on 'sticking by family' and 'giving chances', the writers certainly made a choice in deciding which AI get honorary humanity and spared violent death- perhaps PAL had a point about humanity's callousness after all.  Bad robots are discarded, good robots get to live.

Even the CEO who realizes he enabled this mess (easily the most unrealistic part of the movie, honestly) is given another chance and he manages to take away a completely wrong lesson.

Speaking of-

--"Maybe I Shouldn’t Have Used Tech Like This"

There's a particular image/gif set posted about MvM with the CEO apologizing for the machine uprising, attributing it to unchecked technology and monopolies.  I've always seen it accompanied by people congratulating the scene as if any of this is at all relevant to the movie.

Charitably, these are people who haven't watched the movie and don't know that PAL is a phone AI single-handedly doing this, but most take the stance that this scene is proof the movie is not saying technology is bad, only corporations are.

The speech isn't technically wrong but it is so utterly divorced from what happens in the movie that it's surreal to see people congratulate it as anything but a moment of soapboxing.

None of the datagrabbing was used at all as part of the takeover.  It's all magical kid-friendly terminators with no relevance to what anyone's browsing history is.  If the company was one that produced robot assistants instead of a being a super tech monopoly, there would be no narrative difference.

The closest to a predatory tactic that is used in MvM is the offer of free wifi which is used to lure most people into their cells which they happily comply with. Curiously this... commentary of people’s mindless addiction to technology is not acknowledged by the Tumblr Court with the same intensity as the CEO’s speech.

But more constructively, I do feel it’s a missed opportunity that Katie who's supposed to be an extremely online person apparently never said any bad things about her family or made any petty vent films for PAL to weaponize.  Instead an in-media audio at one of the outskirt locations was used to accomplish its Traitor Revealed moment.

IN CONCLUSION

MvM is a movie that involves topics that ought to be touched on and explored properly in media and chickens out on all of it due to possible concerns with age-appropriate handling or because it was more committed to its comedy than whatever it has to say about family, change and how technology affects people.

It also reminded me that I hope media will finally graduate from the trope that if you spec into any ‘outdoorsy’ hobby you are incurably afraid of technology.

[docholligay]

These are messy, disorganized, and ANGRY thoughts for Holocaust Remembrance Day (Israel) .I don’t get sad about this, I get fucking angry. If there’s anyone I could insult, or blame, that would hurt your feefees, I highly, highly recommend you not click on this. I am not responsible for how you feel. Got it? 

Given the preamble I feel I shouldn’t have to say this, but do NOT reblog this, I’m not having this conversation with some 21 year old with an anime icon who’s never met me. 

There’s a cloud over every Jewish head, and it’s always the goddamn crematorium. 

Today is Holocaust Rememberance Day.  I light a yahrzeit candle every year, and I say Kaddish, every year, and I always do it alone, because I think if God wanted me to have minyan to say it with he shouldn’t have let so many of us die. 

One third of the Jewish population on earth was murdered. Think of three Jews you know, if you even know of three of us, and imagine that one of us, gone. Imagine your friend’s Jewish family of six, and imagine knowing that soon it will be four. Imagine. 

It was worse in some places. In Poland, it was ninety percent of us. A family of ten, with one left, that was the story of the Polish Jews, told over and over again. 

But get over it. It’s fine that we’re talking about the collective trauma of an indiscriminate virus, of the idea of losing ten percent of us, but losing one third of your people is something that you shouldn’t be pulling out anymore. Never mind that we were directly targeted, never mind that this was not the first time and will not be the last that the call to arms is against us specifically. Jews just love to complain. The trauma should be long past. 

And I think the numbers were inflated anyway, and other people were killed too, it wasn’t just the Jews. Never mind that the numbers probably are inaccurate as some of us were mowed down into ditches in Poland by the side of the road, and who knows how many there were, never mind that in Russia they lacked equipment and hired farmers to drown us by hand, and they happily took the money. Never mind that I sat in a second grade classroom as we passively discussed how people wanted to murder me, and how my teacher reduced it to a few hours where kids with brown eyes weren’t allowed to use the water fountain. Never mind that they burned us, against our laws. 

“Jews never stop bringing up the Holocaust” but my great grandmother only ever said of Ukraine, “There is nothing left.” I knew she meant no one, but that to say that was too hard. Better to think of the buildings, of the oxen. 

People love dead Jews. Dead Jews can be exactly the pawn you need them to be, proof of whatever it is that you’re saying is right, and it was the way the other guy thinks that killed the Jews. It’s so easy to make someone the big bad, to remember Jews as weak and simpering mice who simply went to their deaths. That’s how people like us, weak, and dead, a cliff note in history. Something to be used.

They accuse us of relying on the Holocaust, but I’ve spent my whole life watching goyim trot it out whenever they fucking feel like being dramatic. Poor Anne Frank is never going to know rest, the spectre of a child who never got to discover who she was and so is the most convenient Jew of all. Her father was criticized for stripping out parts of her diary that contained sexual thoughts, but he knew what I know, that to make Jews worth protecting, we must be stripped of inconvenience, or complication, or difficulty.  As long as we keep burning, there will always be something to keep them warm. So long as we can be refined to the pile of ash they can mix with any material they wish to build their argument. 

Live Jews are inconvenient. They are a messy and complicated and difficult people. They can still fuck up. They can, and will, disagree with you, with each other, and they won’t be quiet about it. Sometimes, we’re unkind to each other! I more than once have accused another Jew of being judenpolitzei, of siding with those who would let us be destroyed for their own ends. On both side of the aisle. We don’t behave. Supporting us doesn’t give you enough points. 

I can hear the crackling, the burning. It’s been in my chest since I was a child, 

I’m so angry, all the time. Anger has been my bondage for years and years, and I try to remind myself that anger can itself be a form of idol worship, and that anger can cause us to become something we don’t want to be. 

Besides, Jews aren’t allowed to be angry. We’re supposed to be quiet and agreeable and patient, and nod along with however the right or the left wants us to be. We have to have the right opinion on Israel, on the mining of our culture, on Anne Frank, on the Holocaust and its causes, on what is Anti-Semitic, and these are the same for the right or the left. All these topics, a goy will tell you how you should think, and Jews that agree with them are the good Jews to protect, and Jews that disagree with them are the bad Jews. I am fucking tired of only deserving protection when I’m agreeing with someone. 

I remember a few years ago, Giles Coren, a Jewish English food writer of Polish extraction, getting into trouble for saying, essentially, “fuck the Poles’. Essentially but also, literally. I remember reading that, and how immediately I thought that he had told one of our secrets, and it was terrifying and gratifying all at once. I’ve been in Jewish groups more than once where someone quietly admitted “I don’t care what happens to Poland,” the names of every family member they would never know unsaid.  I remember feeling pride at how hard Coren went, how he got nasty, how he was angry, how he brought up that the Holocaust was so successful in Poland because Poland already hated Jews. It my first time ever seeing that bitterness, that desire to hit back, to be filled with that flame. Not making it a quiet secret.  I went and found the direct quote from the whole thing that stuck with me forever, because I knew it was true, and I knew it was what would happen when the whole thing started. "I wrote in passing that the Poles remain in denial about their responsibility for the Holocaust. How gratifying, then, to see so many letters in The Times in the subsequent days from Poles denying their responsibility for the Holocaust." He was so angry. People hated him for it. 

I remember being afraid, too. Shut up, Giles. This is going to come back to bite us in the ass. We aren’t allowed to do this. We aren’t allowed to hate the people that murdered us, even though some of them are still alive, even though Poland murdered the survivors who came back. We aren’t allowed to be angry about it. We have to be good Jews. We have to say we forgive them, oh how they fetishize survivors who say they forgive. Please, don’t tell them about that burn inside of us, like whiskey in your chest. Don’t tell them my great grandmother watched Russia’s horrors unfold with a smile on her lips. Don’t tell them she said they got what they deserved. We aren’t allowed. 

Don’t get angry about America sending a ship full of refugees back in 1939, don’t get mad about Ireland only letting in refugees who agreed to convert, calm your fury about Jewish children being taken into Catholic homes, never to be returned to Jewish communities. The British government stopping a trade that would have saved a million Jewish lives. Of course it’s tragic. But there’s no need to be angry. There’s no need to yell. There’s not need to shame anyone over their culpability. 

We have to cry about what happened to us. We are not allowed to rage about it. 

Besides, if it’s everyone against you, you cannot be mad at the whole goddamn world, Holligay. 

There’s a part of Indecent, a play tumblr and facebook reduced to “lesbians!!” while completely missing the point of what it was about, about Jewish identity and struggle, the search of legitimacy and the role of stories. Sholem, the writer, goes into a deep depression, and is sitting in a doctor’s office, while all of them are acting like this is so clinical, and he snaps. How can he not be like this, in a world where to be a Jew is to be like this? I felt that same flush, that acknowledgment of fury, of the world never getting it. 

Even writing this, I feel I’m letting some secret out. They’ll hate us if they know.  They’ll hurt us if they know. Smiling Anne Frank, who believes people are truly good, that’s what we have to be. Shut up, Doc. This is going to come back to bite us in the ass. 

I light the yahrzeit candle and realize there’s no match in my hand, that somehow it has been kindled from my own anger, from my own white-hot hate. It burns me, too, and the pain of it pricks my eyes with tears. I do not often generalize, about Jews. This is because I actually know them, and we evade an easy box to be put in. We are an asterisk of a people. But I guarantee damn near every Jew you know has this burn inside them, that they might not even themselves understand. Maybe it’s quieter in Jews who got out early, whose families don’t carry the burden of knowing there’s a burnt patch of earth where your family stops. But I don’t think so. 

I think we all know it could happen to us, at any time. And every goy who thinks they are so brave would do nothing in the face of true danger. They would turn you in without a second thought, because that’s what their families did. 

I guarantee some of y’all reading this have your back up right now. Why is she so angry at people who could not have themselves done it? Isn’t she just as bad? Shouldn’t she just let it go? 

Exodus tells us that children and their children will be punished, to the third and fourth generation, and if all God can scrape up is my anger as a punishment, 

My rage is inconvenient to me, too. I tell myself things of all the Jewish philosophers I’ve read, about how we must love mercy, about how the world is desperate need of our loving attention, about how rejoicing in someone’s pain and failure is to spit in the face of what God has made us for. I tell myself these things all the time. I want to find a place where I can hold the truth of this anger, and not let it burn those who hold the community shame of the past. I want to use this fire to warm, and not to burn.

But I will also be honest with you. 

I do not want to hear a single solitary argument against my anger from any Non-Jew. 

You set me on fire. Now you have to let me burn.

[ladyreapermc]

Fic: Your racing heart (Julian Mercer x Fem!Reader)

Summary:  after fainting, you’re taken to the hospital and Julian is your doctor.

Author’s Notes: It all started when I saw this post  and my brain went ‘write this right now!’ Also, I thought Julian deserved a little love since he’s such a great character and canon treated him like crap. Don’t worry baby, I’ve got you! Thank you @caryled​ for being beta and all around great friend!

Warnings: fluff! Lots and lots of fluff! 

 You let out a long, annoyed sigh as you watched the big hand of the clock on the wall slowly make its way towards 12. You’ve been in that hospital for two hours and all you wanted was to go home, but your grandma insisted on bringing you there after the little incident this morning.

She said you fainted, but you only remembered feeling dizzy and stumbling on the front steps of her house after a long morning of doing chores under the scalding summer sun. If you did lose consciousness, it wasn’t for more than a few seconds, a minute at most. It wasn’t bad enough to warrant a trip to the hospital, much less getting a specific doctor to come in on his day off just because she didn’t trust anyone else to see you.

You tried to argue, explain that you were fine, that you didn’t need to a doctor, but there was no reasoning with her. No wonder your mother would always say you got your stubborn streak from your father’s side of the family and your grandmother was just proving her point.

After another ten minutes of staring at the wall since you weren’t allowed to use your phone while in the infirmary and your grandmother wasn’t allowed in, the curtain isolating your bed was pulled revealing one of the most gorgeous men you’ve ever seen.

He was tall, with strong broad shoulders, but a slim frame. His hair was dark, curled a little by his nape and framed beautifully his kind brown eyes. When he flashed you a smile as he stepped closer to your bed, you felt butterflies in your belly.

“It’s Y/N, right? Cecily’s granddaughter?” he asked, picking up your chart. “I’m Dr. Julian Mercer.”

“Yes, hi,” you replied, suddenly feeling like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the air around you.

You shifted on the bed, fidgeting with the hem of your shirt, which made you realize you were still wearing the old shorts and oversized t-shirt you had picked for tending to your grandmother garden and lawn. There were dirt and grass stains on your shirt and your hair still sweaty and in a messy ponytail. 

Why did you always have the misfortune of meeting cute guys when you were such a mess?

“Nice to meet you.”

“You too.” He settled the chart on the bed and picked a penlight from his whitecoat. “So, you fainted?” Dr. Mercer asked, flashing the light in your eyes.

“Maybe. I don’t think I actually passed out. I just got really dizzy and fell down.”

“Do you know if you hit your head?” He inquired, pocketing the penlight again.

“I caught myself,” you replied, showing the friction burns on your hands and Dr. Mercer winced in sympathy. “It wasn’t that bad. They didn’t have to call you.”

“I don’t mind,” he reassured you. “Cecily’s one of my favorite patients.”

Dr. Mercer smiled at you as he took your wrist, his hand was a little rough and warm against your skin. His touch careful and gentle and your heart sped up. Held held onto your hand for a moment as he checked your pulse, his smile widening a little.

“Your resting heart rate is a little above average, but nothing to worry,” he commented letting go of your hand to pick up the blood pressure monitor.

All you wanted was for the ground to swallow you whole. Not only did he notice how nervous you were, he also knew why.

You avoided his gaze throughout the rest of the exam, replying to his questions monosyllabically, wishing the entire thing to be over so you could die of embarrassment in the safety of your grandmother’s home.

“Y/N, when was the last time you ate?” Dr. Mercer asked and that caught your attention as you thought about it.

The whole reason for you to come to your grandmother’s house this summer was to finish the first draft of your novel. You’ve been working for a publishing house for the last three years and finally got a chance to publish your own stuff, which had been your dream for so long.

So, you packed a bag and headed to the Hamptons to seek some inspiration and to stay with your grandma while your parents traveled Europe for their thirtieth anniversary.

Once you were there, you decided to help out with a few chores around the house: mowing the lawn, repotting some of her flowers, repainting the railing of the front porch…And maybe you skipped breakfast to get an early start and since you had dinner with your grandmother and she was always in bed by nine, the last meal you had must have been around six or seven last night.

“That long, huh?” he commented when you took a little too long to answer. “Give me a sec.”

Dr. Mercer moved away, only to return a few moments later with a wheelchair. He helped you to get on it and wheeled you through the hallways of the hospital until the two of you reached a vending machine.

“Peach or grape?” he asked, pulling out a couple of bills from his wallet.

“Grape,” you replied a little confused until he handed you a purple juice box.

“My favorite too,” he said with a wink that nearly made your heart stop, before grabbing a juice for himself and a package of saltines.

Then, he wheeled you to the hospital garden, parking your chair by a bench. Dr. Mercer took a seat by your side and opened the crackers, offering it to you.

“Low blood sugar and overheating can cause dizzy spells,” he explained. “So, make sure not to skip any meals from now on, ok? Cecily shouldn’t be worrying too much considering her heart.”

“Yeah, I know,” you replied with a sigh, a little ashamed of your behavior.

All of this because you wanted to be done as quickly as possible and return to your book. Not only you gave your grandma quite a scare, you were making Dr. Mercer miss his day off.

“She really shouldn’t have dragged you here for this, Dr. Mercer.”

“Julian,” he corrected with a smile. “Truth is, I was glad for the call. I always feel like I’ve reached a new low whenever I’m watching daytime TV.”

You couldn’t help but smile at his awkward little chuckle. He was handsome and charming. That was an irresistible combination for you.

“That is bad,” you commented. “I’d think a guy like you would have better things to do in his day off.”

“I might’ve been avoiding running into my ex,” he confessed, giving you a sideway glance. “She’s in town with her new husband.”

“Bad breakup?” you asked, sipping your juice. You tried to picture a scenario where anyone would dump a guy like Julian and came up empty.

“No, just…” he sighed and shrugged. “So… Cecily told me you’re a writer?”

“Not officially, but soon. Hopefully,” you replied with a grin. This was the first time anyone called you a writer. In front of you at least. It sounded really good. 

“What’s your book about?” Julian asked, turning to face you, resting his elbow on the back of the bench and watching you with soft smile as you babbled about the general idea for your story.

From there the two of you talked some more about favorite books and movies and bands. Julian surprised you by being a fan of both romantic comedies and punk rock, which was a nice contradiction. And he teased you for loving trashy horror movies. It was light, fun and comfortable and both of you lost track of time, too involved on each other.

It wasn’t until one of the orderlies came around looking for you that you realized you and Julian had spent the last half-hour talking, oblivious of your grandma still waiting and other appointments Julian might have.

“I should probably take you back and discharge you,” he said, standing up and maneuvering your chair towards the door. “I bet you’re getting sick of this hospital.”

“I don’t know,” you said, feeling less nervous around him. “It has its perks.”

You smiled at Julian who smiled back as he wheeled you to your bed in the infirmary. He took out his prescription pad and wrote a quick note before handing it to you.

“That’s to avoid another dizzy spell,” He said as you looked over his vitamin suggestions and instructions to eat every three hours.

“And this is for when you need to relax… if you’re interested.” Julian flashed you quick smile as he handed you the second note.

He picked up your chart again and signed your discharge papers.

“Feel better, Y/N,” he said, before walking away.

It wasn’t until you were in the car with your grandma on your way back home that you looked at the second note Julian gave you and grinned at his phone number.

xxx

[getyourvitamin-bri]

Super-Mega-Foxy-Awesome-Hot Klance Fic Recs!

One-Shots

Sweet Quiznak - CheckeredCloth Read if your into hurt/comfort and humor, an odd mix but this fic does it awesomely. Summary: "You're really into him," Hunk mutters, and wow, Lance's face is on fire. Hunk is killing him. "Look, read into how you like, Freud, just make sure that if I die Keith knows I totally would've mowed his ass like grass. That way, I can laugh hysterically at his emotionally-constipated expression from the afterlife." Rated Teen & Up

Love Bug Stuff - WhatTheBodyGraspsNot @whatthebodygraspsnot I’m such trash for Love Bug fics, this one in particular is stellar. Summary: Keith is bitten by an alien love bug that makes him fall in love with the first person he sees. And just guess who the heck that first person is? Rated M

Never Saw You Coming - dimpleforyourthoughts @dimpleforyourthoughts Read if you love angst, slow burn, mutual pinning, and hurt/comfort aka read if you love being put through all the feels :) Summary: Three months in space on his own would have been fine. Three months in space with Lance McClain is a whole other fucking story. Rated M

nothing’s quite as sweet - dimpleforyourthoughts There is cute cats and cute klance, need I say more? Summary: Keith is a barista who hates his job. Lance works at the cat shelter across the street. Rated Teen & Up

Muy Lindo - flipfloppandas - I’m trash for shy adorable keith and this fic delivered. Summary: In which Lance must learn how to navigate through a relationship with a Keith who is surprisingly shy, but it’s okay because Lance honestly freaking loves it. Not Rated.

implosion (the lines we cross) - pidgeotto_gunderson Some well written hard core angst if your up for it. Summary: The adrenaline is pumping through his veins - this is what he needs, what they both need. To yell and scream and hurt each other before they can mend.Fix-it fic for s7e6, imagining if Lance and Keith fought things out while they were all lost in space and it led to Lance finally spilling about his insecurities. Rated Teen & Up

Crest of White, Bow Down - 2towels @2towels I totally went “awwww” while reading this fic, its so adorable, it will definitely make you smile. Summary: “I don’t know what I need to do to prove to you that I haven’t thought about leaving, but I haven’t.”Without hesitating, Lance lifted his good hand to rest on Keith’s cheek and stroked his thumb across it, silently appreciating his pouty features as he swallowed. “Tell me every day you love me more,” He finally demanded dramatically and breathlessly, flitting his gaze down to Keith’s shoulders instead of the intensity of his eyes, “maybe that would work.”“That wouldn’t even be a challenge.” Keith said quietly.--Five times Lance is swept off his feet, and one time he falls. Rated Teen & Up

Kodachrome - HoddieMaine @joinmeinthishell , Ninke_A @collector-of-hats Wow this is such a beautiful story, its really well written, read if you love pinning and fluff. Summary: Keith has been at a loss for a while now. His job is terrible, his passion for photography has waned, and his pseudo brother has moved to some little town and keeps insisting he visit.When Keith finally does go, he ends up on a little street full of quaint shops. He intends to simply spend time with Shiro but ends up in a record store across the street. With a very attractive man, who signs instead of speaks. Rated E

Thinking ‘Bout You - BleuSarcelle @bleusarcelle, Queerklancing   @queerklancing I got a cavity from the fluff in this fic :) Summary: That time Keith had a voice in his head singing and found out he had a quite unique soulmate link. Rated G

Rose-Colored Boy - melancholymango  @melancholymango Read if you enjoy angsty lance, langst, & to experience all the feels. Summary: “I missed you, you know.”“Yeah?” Lance sighed, warm and giddy, clearly not absorbing how serious the words truly were. “Yeah.” Keith said, more certainty in his voice now. He reached down, hesitantly threading his fingers through Lance’s and giving his hand a squeeze. Lance tensed next to him. “I still do.”“I mean, I’m right here.”“Are you? You still seem pretty far away.” Rated Teen & Up

Blue Christmas -  melancholymango  I loved how keith and lance were written in this fic, its just overall super well written. Summary: The team decides to celebrate the holiday season in space as nostalgia gets the better of them, but reflecting on the past hurts Lance more than it helps and Keith doesn't have any memories to reflect on. AKA the one where Keith and Lance hate the holidays together, only to realize that they were actually celebrating all along in their own Keith and Lance way. Rated G

Multi-chapter

Not That Bad - varelsen @lvtvr Yeah this fic gave me lot of feelings, their relationship builds beautifully. Summay: “Am I really going to have to explain this to you?”“No, I’m totally fine with you shutting up right about now.” Hunk cups his hands around his mouth. “You. Are crushing. On Keith.” Or, a college AU featuring coffee shops, silly rivalries, motorcycles, arcade games, friendships, and lots of warm, fluffy feelings that are both confusing and delightful all at the same time. Rated M

Entangled - Purpleneutrino (mackerelmademedoit) @purpleneutrino I found this fic super interesting to read, and literally could not put it down. Summary: When Keith found himself mentally linked to Lance of all people, he never thought that it would end in anything but irritation and misery on both sides. He certainly never imagined that it would be a useful asset in team Voltron's fight against the Galra Empire. Now if he can just keep his feelings in check, they might actually have a chance at defeating Zarkon. Needless to say, when he'd wished for a 'bonding moment' with Lance, this wasn't exactly what he'd had in mind. Rated M

Hearts Don’t Break Around Here - klancekorner @dimplesandcurlsss Yeah I stayed up till 4am reading this and it was glorious, I finished at 3am and just thought about it for another hour, so awesome! Summary: Lance and Keith have been best friends since first grade. Lance’s brain is always on overdrive and Keith’s blunt, realistic ass can never keep up. They both come to realize that sometimes you can learn a lot about loving yourself by loving someone else. Rated M

Something just like this - klancekorner A summer romance sundae with a friends to lovers cherry on top. Summary: Keith reluctantly becomes the counselor for the Red Cabin at Camp Voltron, a summer camp in the middle of buttfuck nowhere that his older brother Shiro has worked at for years. Already unhappy with the current position that he is in, Keith prepares himself for a boring, sweaty, miserable summer; and his frustration only grows when he meets the counselor for the Blue Cabin Rated M

You and I Collide - idratherhaveyou @itsthegameilike If you looked up cute in the dictionary, this modern apartment au would be the definition. Summary: Lance likes to sing in the shower. Keith lives in the apartment next door and the walls are not very thick. And you can bet when Lance wakes him up at 7:30 in the morning, Keith has something to say about it. Rated M

I’ve Got You - DragonofFernweh @dragonastral Keith comforting lance is my aesthetic, this fic is my aesthetic. Summary: Keith isn’t great at the whole comfort thing, he doesn’t have a way with words, nor does he have much experience in way of affection. Still, when Lance hurts, Keith wants to do something to help. Otherwise known as; five times Keith comforts Lance, and one time Lance comforts Keith. Rated G

it’s easier for you to let me go - welcometothehumanrace  Should be called 6 times I went AAJKSCNSKDCNSJ because of how fluffin’ cute keith and lance are. Summary: Keith did not think Lance's arms were anything to get excited about. Or his shoulders. Or any general part of him. Just everything about him was unexciting as a whole.Obviously. Or 5 times Lance put his arms around Keith and the one time Keith really wanted him to. Rated Teen & Up

The Message - shipstiel @shipstiel-writes Wow this wrong number fic is just glorious, I laughed, I went “awwwww”, I just had such a good time reading this. Summary: Keith is texted by accident by some idiot one day, and honestly he's not even sure why he responds. Or why he keeps responding. Yet somehow he finds himself drawn in, and okay, so maybe this fool is mildly entertaining after all. Who would've thought. Rated Teen & Up

Homesick at Space Camp - K0bot @k0tron So awesome...just a fucking great fic. Its got fake relationship/married, its got angst, its got ballroom dancing, its got so much fluff, do I need to say any more? Summary: Lance realizes he's been an asshole to Keith, and on a diplomatic mission to a key planet for the Voltron alliance he... overcompensates.

Fake It Till You Make It - nikkiRA @aravenlikeawritingdesk I’m a sucker for Fake/Pretend Relationship fics and this one is the fic that started that particular habit. Summary: “What Keith here means to say,” Lance says, and although his voice is steady, he is gripping Keith’s fingers so tightly it’s painful. “Is that we can’t mate with your people, although we, um, appreciate the offer, because, well. We already are. M-mated, I mean. With, you know. Each other.” Rated M

I hope you love these fics as much as I did, they are some of my fav fics of all time. It took me forever to finish this post because I sorta, kinda, maybe, totally re-read a lot of them while making it :) Shout out to fanfiction writers, thank you for putting so much of your time into these stories for free, your all amazing! 

Check out my blog if you would like >>> @getyourvitamin-bri

[stompsite]

Autopsy: Mass Effect Andromeda

Games are like dogs. You want to call all of them “good boy” and pat them on the head and tell them how wonderful they are all the time, because everyone’s a lot happier when you do, but some games are bad dogs, and you’ve got to take them out back behind the barn and shoot them in the head.

Games are difficult to make. Unlike a film, where you’re photographing what already exists, or a book, where you only have to use words to make things happen, a game requires loads of people to work extremely hard to build an entire reality. As a developer, you have to create spaces. You have to create physics. You have to control lighting. When two objects touch each other, you, the developer, have to ensure that they don’t simply clip through each other. As a developer, you might slave away for years of your life, working impossible hours alongside dozens, even hundreds, of other people, to ship an entire hand-crafted universe.

Games are places you get lost in, and places you call home. Only in games can you travel places, talk to people, and live the impossible. It’s why you mow lawns in the summer, saving up enough cash to buy that new graphics card so you can run the biggest hit. It’s why you wait, shivering in the midnight cold, outside a tacky GameStop to pick up the sequel you’ve been waiting years for. It’s why you draw fanart and write fan fiction of your favorite characters. It’s why you part with your hard-earned cash. You want to go there. You want to live that. You want to experience something new.

Mass Effect Andromeda is a bad dog, and I hate that I have to say that. Hundreds of people  put five years of their lives into Andromeda, but the end result was a disappointment. Due to a lot of complicating factors, they weren’t able to make the game they wanted to make. There’s a tendency among gamers to criticize bad games harshly--when you’re eating ramen every day in college, you want an escape. You save up. You budget. If the game is bad, you have no recourse. Good reviews don’t necessarily mean you’re happy with what you got; after all, there’s often a big disconnect between reviewer tastes and player interests.

So it makes sense to lash out. It makes sense to want to have some fun at the expense of the game that caused you so much trouble. It makes sense to want to joke and mock and scream about just how bad it is, and how mad you are that you wasted your time on a game that the publisher spent years promising you was amazing as fuck.

The Witcher 3 is one of my favorite games. It was so good, I found myself swimming around the game’s oceans, just trying to lose myself in the world, performing every task, no matter how repetitive or mundane, so I wouldn’t have to leave. I didn’t want it to be over. With Andromeda, I finally gave up on the side quests, focused on the critical path, and installed as quickly as I could after the credits rolled.

Developers have a tendency to be defensive, and it’s completely understandable. No one wants to feel like their time was wasted. The secrecy of development mean a lot of myths arise. Sometimes leadership makes poor decision, technology doesn’t work like it ought to, pressures to hit deadlines lead to compromised work. You, the individual developer, do not have nearly as much power to make or break a game as players think you do. It’s a miracle any game gets made. Even something like “opening a door” is incredibly complex. And there’s no guidebook, no science behind it, no easy way to simply have an idea and make it work.

I say all this because I want set the ground rules. We’re here to talk about why a game didn’t work. We’re not here to vent our frustrations, as justifiable as that may be, and we’re not here to complain about the developers. It’s human nature to want to blame someone for something bad, and it’s just as human to want to avoid the blame. I’m going to avoid human nature, cut through the bullshit entirely, and try to diagnose the product.

Andromeda had a metascore of 72. It sold so poorly that it went on sale today for $15--that’s 75% off in less than six months after its release, something that only happens for games that sell poorly. If you’re one of the two people I know who loved the game, I’m not asking you to stop loving it, but I am asking you to acknowledge that the game didn’t work for most people. I think we ought to find out why.

This is not a review, this is an autopsy. I am not here to tell you whether or not you should buy the game. I’m here to explore why it failed. In order to be clear and informative, I’m working on the assumption you haven’t played the game, but I won’t be avoiding spoilers either.

So, now that we’ve set the stage, let’s look at the game.

1. Narrative

Mass Effect Andromeda is a clean break from the Mass Effect series. There’s some overlap in the lore--little references here and there--but for the most part, it’s completely its own thing. You, a human, and a bunch of aliens from the Milky Way have flown to the Andromeda galaxy in search of a new home. It took 600 years for your ships to get there.

Somehow, the Andromeda Initiative--that’s the organization running everything--had the ability to see what the Andromeda galaxy looked like at that point in time, despite the fact that light takes about two million years to travel between the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies. At some point between the time you set off and the time you got there, a catastrophe occurred, and some weird, uh… like… energy coral spread throughout space.

On one hand, it’s sci-fi, so we don’t need everything to be perfect. On the other hand, Mass Effect has always leaned a bit more towards hard sci-fi than most games. They acknowledge relativity frequently throughout the series--ships can’t travel between worlds without using these big ‘mass relays’ that were seeded throughout the galaxy millions of years before the story starts. Bioware created an element, Element Zero, to explain how how a lot of the tech in their universe functions. It was internally consistent.

Andromeda suddenly decides that ships can fly at something like 4200 times the speed of light, we can see a galaxy in real-time somehow (but only looked once), but we can’t use quantum entanglement to communicate with Earth any more, even though that’s a technology that’s been in the series since the first game. Andromeda breaks a lot of the series’ own rules to get to where it is.

This alone does not make Andromeda a bad game, but it does do a good job of illustrating a big problem: everything feels thoughtless. I’m not sure how a game spends five years in development and has a script that seems so… careless. Nothing in Andromeda feels logical or natural. In writing, there’s this idea called the ‘idiot ball.’ It comes from the writer’s room for The Simpsons, where one character would get to hold the ‘idiot ball’ one week, making bad choices that lead to the story’s drama. It works in a comedy. Not so much in a game that wants us to take its narrative seriously.

The idiot ball is why the crew of an Andromeda Initiative Ark, the Hyperion, wakes up next to a planet that wasn’t inhabited 600 years ago to discover that the planet is now uninhabitable and the aforementioned weird energy coral thing nearly destroys their ship.

Scientists are generally pretty careful. Don’t get me wrong, they take risks, and they occasionally do stupid things like licking test samples, but you’d think that the Andromeda Initiative might have done some recon first. Maybe, I don’t know, stopping just outside the galaxy, using their recon tech to see if anything had changed in six hundred years? Heck, why not stop outside the solar system to see if it had been colonized, or situations had changed? Of course they end up in a bad situation, because everyone in the game holds the idiot ball.

This isn’t a new problem for the series--remember when a giant robot attacked the Citadel and destroyed most of the Council fleet, and the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, on the Citadel saw it and the robots murder lots of people… and then pretended the giant robot threat wasn’t real? Mass Effect, starting with 2, has always had stupid people making stupid decisions that make no logical sense.

But--and this is incredibly important--they still worked, because they created dramatic moments.

Drama is the tension created by the conflict between a character, their goal, and the thing keeping them from attaining that goal. It’s difficult in the best of conditions to maintain the right amount of tension; a player who is constantly being told they’re the savior of the universe while only being tasked with hunting for wolf pelts is going to feel that the experience doesn’t match the premise. Great drama has stakes that feel important and make sense. Characters who constantly make poor decisions lose sympathy, which reduces dramatic tension, and we, the audience, stop caring.

The Council’s ignorance in Mass Effect 2 is awful writing, which isn’t surprising, since the entire game is a terribly-written mess. But at least it rings true! We can believe the government would ignore an imminent threat to our lives (see: global warming), and it makes us feel like we want to take action. Mass Effect 2’s “Oh yeah? You don’t believe in an alien menace? Well, I’m gonna prove it to you!” is exactly what makes a game work, even if the setup is poorly done. As long as it delivers its dramatic payload, it works.

Andromeda has nothing like that. Everything is twee. There’s some guy on one planet, named The Charlatan, and it’s obvious who he is as soon as you meet him, even though he plays it coy. This Charlatan fellow vies for control over a tiny little spaceport on an uninhabitable planet. He’s trying to wrest control away from a forgettable evil space pirate lady who spouts cliche lines in the vein of “guards! Seize them!” I don’t remember why I cared. I can remember every quest, every reason for doing anything in the first Mass Effect (Saren bad, Protheans cryptic, learn more about protheans, find Saren’s base, interrogate Saren’s sidekick), but in Andromeda, uh…

Yeah. I just finished the game and I’ve forgotten why I did anything. This is because the game never did a good job of making me care about things. Don’t get me wrong, it had situations that I ought to care about, but it made the Bioware Mistake.

What’s the Bioware Mistake? Okay, imagine that some guy walks up to you and says “hey, it’s me, your brother! I’m being chased by ninja assassins, and I need your help!” You wouldn’t believe him. It’s a case of someone telling you that they’re important, rather than the person actually being important to you. I felt nothing saving the Earth. I felt a lot more when I lost Mordin Solus in Mass Effect 3. Bioware makes this mistake frequently in its A-plots, but it usually makes its character interactions matter so much more in the B-plots that we can overlook the main plot shortcomings.

Andromeda does the A-plot thing: everyone’s lives are at risk unless you, the single most important human in the story, save them all. It just forgets to do the B-plot thing. There are nice little conversations between characters on the ship and in your party, as you might expect, but conversations with the characters are a drag.

It’s a problem with the game’s dialog on the whole. When you talk to anyone, they… well, they remind me a lot of that great liartownusa photoshop of a fake Netflix movie, “The Malediction Prophecy.”

“It's been 3,000 years since the Malediction, the spirit-plague created by The Order, a fabled army of immortals seeking to unravel the genome of the were-shaman Erasmus Nugent, who seeks to rebuild La Cienega, a bio-weapon capable of stopping Honcho, the deathless vampire king who sseeks to conquer the Fontanelle, the mythical fortress of demon hybrid Gary Shadowburn, who seeks to unleash angel-killer Larry Wendigo Jr., who seeks to release the Bloodfroth, a terrifying evil that seeks ot return the world to darkness.”

People don’t talk like people talk. They talk like fanfiction writers write. Have you ever seen one of those cringe-inducing tumblr story ideas that is just so bad, because everyone’s got these cutesy nicknames and the premise is super goofy and very “I’ve only ever read YA fiction in my entire life”?

Andromeda’s like that. People talk weird. They say things like “excuse me, my face is tired,” and make jokes without charisma. I have this urge to be really critical of the writing team, because they had, I presume, five full years on this game, and they work at a company that is literally built to make story-driven games, and the end result is an experience worse than Dragon Age 2, a game that was rushed through development in 18 months.

I don’t know how this script made it through editing.

This is the kind of writing we tore apart in our sophomore screenwriting classes back in the day. I can understand narratives not working on a larger, more plot-based level, because that requires a lot of coordination between a lot of teams. But basic dialog? How is it so bad?

Seriously, what is this? How did someone write this scene and go “yeah, yeah, this is good stuff.” How did this make it past animators and editors and marketing? How did this scene make it into the final game?

When your father sacrifices his life for you in the opening of the game, bestowing his role as Most Important Person to you, a character, apparently his friend, demands answers. She looks like Marge in that episode of the Simpsons where Homer uses a shotgun to apply makeup to her face. She asks you “what happened?” Your character, for some unknown reason, replies “to who?” Addison responds “it’s ‘to whom, and your goddamn father.”

I cannot envision a world where someone would: A) not understand that The Most Important Guy’s Death is the topic, B) correct grammar, or C) say “your goddamn father” in that context. It reads like someone trying to write charming and badass, but the situation is “a dude we all care about just died.” It makes no sense. What emotion was the writing team striving for? Did the voice actor ever think to go “uh, this makes no sense”? What the hell happened? How did this make it into the game?

The game presents us with a myriad of unlikable characters who do nothing but screw things up--Tann, Addison, Kelly, and so on. I can understand that disaster can stress people, but I also know that, in the face of disaster, most animals, humans included, have a powerful tendency to stick together in order to face off against a greater threat. In the case of Andromeda, the vast majority of living beings you encounter in the game are Milky Way characters who chose to abandon the colony and become criminal scum in the process. That Sloane Kelly lady, whose name I only remember because I just looked it up? She was the chief security officer of the program. No one should be more highly vetted than she is, but no, after a few months, she cracks and starts a criminal empire.

Why is this story important? Game design is the art of getting players to perform specific tasks that bring about some form of emotional fulfillment. In other words, it’s about establishing motivation. When the premise is stupid, the stakes are meaningless, and the characters unbelievable, it’s hard to compel players to keep moving. What is there to enjoy? What do I gain by playing a game where everyone’s an idiot?

How does a game, from a studio known for its stories, suck this bad after five years of development time? How does that happen? I’m exasperated with the game. I feel insulted by the script. I genuinely want to know how this game got as far as it did, because so many core ideas feel rotten from the get-go.

2. Technology and Presentation

Much has been made of Andromeda’s many animation glitches and bugs.

So, uh, just watch this vid if you want to understand how the game ended up:

Personally, I struggle with Frostbite, as an engine. EA’s doubled down on it, pushing the tech across all their studios, and I think for the worse. It seems like EA’s development times have skyrocketed since switching from Unreal to Frostbite, and developers have complained at length about the engine. That Kotaku piece linked earlier indicated that wrestling with Frostbite was a big reason Andromeda took so long to develop.

On my computer, Frostbite games are among the buggiest, most unstable games I have. People complained about the load times in the Unity-powered ReCore, but I’ve yet to encounter a Frostbite game with shorter load times. It’s a big issue with the engine. The lighting seems to work really well in the hand of DICE artists, but nobody else seems to have the hang of it.

Suffice it to say, the technology has been called out by a lot of people by now. The animations--in a game that was in development for five years--look worse than they do in an Unreal Engine 3 game from last gen. From a technical perspective, Andromeda needed more time on the cooker. Maybe six months of crunch would have done it, but that team was crunching for a while as it was. The end result was a game that simply does not compete with any other AAA game on the market.

But then there’s the art.

Great fiction often relies on the power of its iconic imagery to engage the audience. Star Wars movies always feel like Star Wars movies. There’s nothing quite as distinctive as the Lord of the Rings movies. Studios like Bungie and Arkane thrive on creating visually distinct universes. Even Bioware’s first three Mass Effect games were fantastically realized.

Mass Effect Andromeda seems like generic sci-fi art you can find anywhere. The alien Kett have some really cool Geiger-influenced stuff, but I couldn’t begin to describe the other two alien species. One’s a robot race that has lots of squares and blocky shapes in their art design, and it feels like I’ve seen it a million times before. The other species, which looks like bad Farscape fan art, looks, uh… pretty normal. Nothing you haven’t seen before.

It’s all incredibly forgettable. If you played Dragon Age: Inquisition, then the vast desert worlds and limited selection of geographical oddities won’t surprise you. Seen the Giant’s Causeway? Someone at Bioware sure loves it. Hexagonal rock pillars are everywhere in Andromeda, some natural, some not.

Again, I don’t really understand how, in five years, the art design ends up looking like… well, this. You know how people made fun of the suit design in Bioware’s other sci-fi series, Anthem, for looking like the bad CG models you see on off-brand GPU boxes? Andromeda has the same problem. It’s weird going from a game like Destiny, where every location feels distinct and fresh, to Andromeda, where it feels like the art just doesn’t have any creativity put into it.

And it sucks to say this.

It sucks to be so harsh. I wanted this game to be great. They were saying the right things about trying to nail that sense of exploration, and early plans for the game, as mentioned in the article I linked earlier, make it sound like they were going for a much more ambitious, exciting game, but they were hamstrung by the technology. That doesn’t explain the writing or the art design, though.

As some of you may know, I’m working on an indie game codenamed G1. I created it, wrote the plot, did most of the design work, stuff like that. Anyways, I wanted to create a really cool, distinct sci-fi universe that sticks in players minds as strongly as Star Wars or Half-Life does. Being a volunteer-only project for the time being (I’d love to pay people, but I am so poor I literally went homeless this summer and am now staying with some family members who are in danger of losing their home as well!), we’ve seen some interesting people come and go. Way back in the day, we had some guys who really wanted to change the game’s entire setting to a much less interesting, more generic environment. Later, we had some guys who were big fans of Ghost in the Shell and wanted to make our character art reflect that instead.

My point is, I get that a lot of people want to do what seems and feels familiar, but I think, for a big, AAA video game, distinctive is what people remember, especially in sci-fi and fantasy. Nothing looks like The Witcher 3, or Dishonored, or Halo, or the original Mass Effect trilogy, Half Life, or… well, you get the idea, right? Distinctiveness rules. Sameyness drools. And for whatever reason, Andromeda is the least-inspired AAA video game I’ve seen in a long, long time.

3. Design.

This, for me, is the big one. I can deal with bad storytelling in a game, because almost all game storytelling is garbage. I can put up with bad technology, because I grew up gaming on the PC, where modding could often turn my games into an unbearable slideshow, and sometimes, I’ve found games that were fantastic despite their poor presentation. But if the design is bad… then we got a problem.

And the design is bad.

As much as I want to speculate on why the design is bad, the truth is, nothing productive can come of that. I don’t know why it’s bad. I don’t know who made what designs, or how much the technology is to blame, or anything like that. All I know is that the design is bad, and I’m going to tell you what makes it bad, so if you decide to develop a game in the future, you at least can be armed with the knowledge of what Andromeda got wrong, and hopefully avoid it yourself.

If you asked me to use one sentence to describe Andromeda, I’d probably call it “a waste of time.”

I mean this literally. I’ve never played a game that wasted more time than Andromeda. Like… holy crap. So much time wasting. People complained so much about certain time-wasting aspects of the game, Bioware patched some of it out.

Here’s an example, and I’m going to italicize it so you can skip reading the whole thing if it gets too boring. Because it is super boring.

If you want to go explore the planet of Kadara, you have to go to the star system, which involves an unskippable cutscene as you ‘fly’ from where you are to where you were. Then, in the star system, you click on the planet, and you fly over to it. You fly too close to it, then zoom back out (this happens every time you move between planets in the game; I have no idea why). Then you rotate the planet on your display until you can select the city, which is on the opposite side of the planet from you.

Now click on that landing zone. You must then verify your loadout, because the game won’t let you change it without seeking out a loadout station, rather than just letting you open your menu and swap gear. You will be faced with an unskippable cutscene showing you landing on the planet. Then you will spawn somewhere that’s nowhere near where you want to go. Turn around. Click on the machine behind you, and select the “go to slums” option.

You will now be around 100 yards away from the slums and the mouth of the cave. Run out of the cave. It’s a big, empty field, so this takes like 20 seconds to do. Jump over the fence. Run another 100 yards or so to a big terminal that lets you summon your car. Congratulations, you have finally spawned. Now spend ten minutes driving wherever you need to be around a planet that’s a pain to drive around.

Every planet is this bad. You’d think they might let you spawn wherever you’d like, and maybe even set up a few different spawn zones on the planet, but no, that’s not how it works in Andromeda. It takes way too long to do basic things. Fast travel points aren’t in convenient spots, but there’s nothing interesting to find other than some crates with trash you might as well break down. Any time you spawn in a base, you’re usually quite far from the person you actually want to talk to. You’re going to spend a time walking across flat surfaces to get to where you need to go.

Contrast that with a game like Destiny 2, which has multiple spawns on each planet, and keeps the social areas with vendors nice and small, so there’s not a lot of down time simply getting between points. Usually, these spawns take advantage of the game’s joyful movement system, as opposed to the flat, empty space in an Andromeda.

There are other ways it wastes your time as well. Consider the UI, which decides to put everything in a list. I do mean everything. There are something like 10 distinct tiers of weapon, for every single weapon in the game. Like the Dhan? Cool, your crafting list will include the Dhan I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, and X, which is weird, because it’s a straight upgrade every time, so there’s literally no point to keep the Dhan I blueprint around when the Dhan X is craftable.

Chances are the Dhan X won’t be craftable, because there’s no reliable method of farming research (I did almost all the quests on all the planets and scanned as much as possible and couldn’t get beyond the Dhan VII), but still, it’s weird that they’d put literally all the guns and their ten variations in one gigantic list of the 20-30+ guns in the game. That’s like 300 something entries in your crafting menu, and you can’t sort between any of them.

Gun mods? Same thing. Rather than letting you, say, sort mods by location type (barrel, magazine, etc), you’re just stuck with a gigantic list, and for some reason, you have to carry them on you, even though the game only lets you swap them out at various stations. Wouldn’t it make more sense to store the mods in the stations themselves?

You end up wasting so much time just navigating menus, trying to find the one thing you want, or being forced into seeking out the physical locations in game that will let you access the menus, because you can’t swap items out at will… it’s frustrating.

There’s this weird fascination with diegetic UI in games, and it sucks. Seriously, there isn’t a single game that benefits from having you go somewhere to access basic menu options. I don’t want to have to go to a terminal to swap out my guns. I’d much rather just press a button, open a menu, and swap my loadout there. Destiny got it right. Fable 3 did not. For some reason, Mass Effect Andromeda wants to be like Fable 3, if Fable 3’s weird menu space had huge amounts of dead space where nothing interesting occurred between the menus.

It’s awful. And I don’t know how the game shipped like that.

But the worst thing of all is the mission design. If you've played Dragon Age: Inquisition, you know that the mission design was extremely repetitive. Every location you went to would have the same few basic missions, no matter where you went. It got predictable. Andromeda is the same way. Go to two big towers on the map, solve a puzzle, go to a vault, press a button, run to the end of the vault, voila, you’ve done it. Scan a bunch of corpses on a planet. Pick up some rocks and plants. Go find the glowing orbs on the planet, and you’ll be rewarded with a poorly written cutscene. Fight the exact same boss on every planet, but don’t look for the variety found in Inquisition, where every dragon had something unique going on that made it kinda cool.

On and on it goes. Every planet, the same thing. There’s a point in the game where you have to go to a place called Meridian, and you go to some ancient alien city, and it’s not actually Meridian, but you don’t know that until you get there. To proceed, you must go to two different towers, solve two puzzles, and then go to a third puzzle, and do a new thing. When you fight the final boss, you will have to engage two similar phases, followed by a third, more unique phase. Every single fucking quest in this game seems to be “do two things, and then the third thing will be different.”

Find out who did a thing? Talk to two colonist, then the third one will say something different. Get artifacts for a museum? Three things. Every quest. Every single quest. Do three things, then move on.

I don’t want to be the generic internet gamer type here and accuse the developers of laziness, but I can say that the end result feels lazy. I remember, years ago, a Bioware writer saying on their forums that Bioware had decided that three was the ‘perfect number’ or something, and so they did everything in threes. Well, sorry, dude, but you’re wrong. Doing everything with the rule of threes sucks.

You know why? Because it robs the player of dramatic tension. Yeah. It all comes back to that. When you teach your players that they’re going to do two meaningless things for every quest, the player stops giving a shit about your game. When you claim to be making a game about space exploration, but there’s settlers on every single planet you visit, and the quests are the same every time, it doesn’t feel like you’re exploring, it feels like you’re a space janitor.

The rule of three makes everything predictable. Great games don’t have it, unless they disguise it really well. Bad games wear it on their sleeves.

If players can predict what’s going to happen in your game, the tension is lost, and the desire to continue is dampened. Word of mouth dies, nobody recommends your game to their friends, and your sales dry up and you can’t even justify making DLC for your game.

Rule of three design is garbage. It is that simple. There is no case where it is great game design, ever.

I have no idea why Bioware decided to make a game with nothing but rule of three design, but they did. And even when they try to make it interesting, it’s not interesting. One quest had me go to a location, where a person told me “I need a thing,” giving me some absurd reason as to why I couldn’t help them another way. I went where they sent me. Turns out the thing wasn’t there. That’s two places where I wasted time not completing the objective. At the second place, I was told about some big bad gangster dude at the third place. I killed the big bad gangster dude without even realizing it at first. Got the part, went back to the first location, and ended the quest.

The stakes never matter in Andromeda. You’ll always be forced to do something pointless before you can do the thing that does matter. Once, I found a place on a map, but the door was locked, and I could not get in. I finally found the quest that let me in that location, but I had to go to someone’s office. I went there. I tried to interact with a crate that obviously had loot in it, but I could not. Scanning something else gave me a map marker to the original location. I returned there. The door was open. It wasn’t like I’d found a key or anything, the door was just open. Then a vendor from the other side of the map showed up. We had a conversation. The next quest step was to see her… all the way on the other side of the map. Couldn’t we have had the conversation while she was still at the first location? No? Anyways, it was only after this point that the chest became interactive, and I could sift through its contents.

Contrast this with Divinity: Original Sin 2, where my excessive exploration has got me into numerous areas I shouldn’t be in. Look at a game like Skyrim, where someone can say “yeah, take the reward, it’s in that box over there,” but you stole it hours ago while you were sneaking around.

The game forces you around empty and pointless maps for no real reason at all. At least Bethesda places its objectives far across the map as a means of taking you through interesting and distracting landscapes. That’s part of the reason that Bethesda is such a popular developer. Their worlds are easy to get lost in.

I’m not gonna lie, I’d love to sit down with some leads at Bioware and talk about how to make their games better, because right now, their games seem formulaic as hell--Dragon Age Inquisition and Mass Effect Andromeda are virtually identical games in their broad strokes, with the only real differences being the result of the setting.

If you’re a professional writer, you’re probably going “why is Doc using so many words to say things he could be saying much more simply?” Well, I’m being a dick and using this rhetorical device of wasting your time to give you the idea of what it’s like to play Andromeda.

It’s a waste of time, and it’s broken on the conceptual, writing, design, presentation, and technical levels. Nothing works here. Everything is broken. I don’t know how this game made it this far without being canceled. I don’t know how the writing standards for this game were so lax. I don’t know why anyone recommended this game to me, because it is quite literally the worst AAA gaming experience I have had in years.

Ultimately, it comes down to drama. Nothing Andromeda does is dramatic. It tries to use dramatic music and awful cliches to make things feel dramatic, but it doesn’t earn anything. The art isn’t inspiring, the stakes are rarely, if ever, high, the quests are so predictable that all tension is gone.

And it sucks that I feel this way. It especially sucks because the game actually starts out being interesting, making you curious, prompting you to ask lots of questions. By the second planet, you realize just how predictable it all is. By the end of the game, you’re wondering why you stuck with it this long. That 40-or-so gigs of hard drive space would be better off empty.

There are so many other problems with the game. Why do most mods either have negatives that outweigh their positives, or positives so miniscule there’s no point to using them? Does a 5% recharge timer in a 5 second timer really matter? Does a 3% damage boost on a gun with three shots have any perceivable effect? Nope. We could dive into the problems with dozens of quests, more specifics about the writing, and so many other things. There’s so little good to find in this game. It wastes all its time thinking it’s better than it is.

Drama is everything. Use your mechanics and your narrative to create drama. That’s what gets players playing and talking. That’s why they spend money. If you’re not going to do that, don’t bother making video games.

[plumpburgers]

SKYRIM PROMPT

I never really played video games coming up. Everyone had video games but I didn’t. I preferred books, cartoons, movies, and the like. That’s not to say I’m not familiar with video games. Growing up I was a writer, I still am, and I liked to dissect the storylines of games. Love Portal, love Kingdom Hearts, love Subnautica. I really appreciate lore. But there was one game that I really appreciated for its complexity. Basically, I’m 17 and a few weeks ago for the first time ever in life I started playing Skyrim. I’m about level 21 now, but around 15 I started hunting word walls. I’m at the point where all undead are re-dead in maybe 5 hits or less (save bosses) I’ve got some daedric artifacts and completed the College of Winterhold questline and similar basic stuff, I’m holding off on heading to Skuldafn just yet. And I just love how no matter your skill, people like bandits and forsworn still try to run up on you.

Honestly I just want someone to write me a story where a group of Bandits have taken over a mine and that’s their center of operations. They go out on raids periodically and they bring back some good loot and they just love their wild lives and everyone has their own complex little relations and you’ve got dating within the group and a couple bandits that think they’re hot shit just because they know a little magic. One of them even brags that they could have gotten into the College at Winterhold if they wanted to.

-And then I want to read a first person account of how one day this random stranger wearing a mask, with this warrior woman following along beside him/her, just wanders up the pathway accidentally and stops at their camp to get their bearings.

-The Bandits intercept them, everyone’s rowdy and sarcastic, and they all get ready to gather around the two of them and pick off their stuff.

-They keep it light, they tease them, say the iconic “You picked a bad time to get lost friend” and start to move in. A couple of them draw their weapons. Others in the back are calling dibs on the cool mask. Looks almost like it came off of a real Dragon Priest. Then out of nowhere this loner stranger fucKINGG SHOUTS GIBBERISH AND FULL ON ENCASES FOUR GUYS IN ICE

- The dudes fall to the ground and everyone is fucking shook but they regain their composure and collectively decide to rush this pair because they’re a family.

-Then the woman runs forward and charges them and wait…IS SHE WEARING DWARVEN ARMOR?

-She’s wielding a Dwarven mace too?! Who are these guys? She easily takes out 2 or 3 people in a snap.

-Already everything’s going to shit. Now the first stranger, the one who Shouted, is crackling with magicka. Our POV sees someone they never really got along with, running toward the stranger. One bolt of lighting. Two. Suddenly their fellow Bandit fam is a pile of glowing ash.

- They stand there mesmerized. Too much is going on. One of their mage buddies comes running from the mine, already casting frostbite. It slows down the woman, who has already mowed through 9 of her clan.

-Another mage friend comes out, casting fire at the Shouter. Then there’s a burst of purple/black light and…is that? It can’t be. An Atronach?! From Oblivion? I’m gonna be sick.

-Both mages pale as this guy’s personal fucking daedra starts taking out their archers.

-The Shouter is only getting started, he runs to his companion, flash of light and her blue skin is restored to a healthy glow, then he whirls on his heel and shouts again. This time a wall of fire rushes to take out the mages.

- They were brothers. They always made awful puns.

- The mine doors burst open and higher ranking bandits rush toward them. Hope! They’re really good fighters. Seconds only to the chief.

-By now our POV has snapped out of it and brandishes their sword. They charge screaming at his back, half hysterical, when he shouts again.

-Our POV is relieved to see the Seconds okay, but their weapons have been torn away and tossed out of reach by this stranger’s VOICE.

-They falter. Should they scramble for their weapons or try to overwhelm the two of with numbers. The daedra is gone and there are a few straggling archers hiding out in concealed lookouts.

-In their hesitation, the woman runs into the fray and starts destroying.

-Our POV is a little impressed because DOES SHE STOP TO BREATHE? Chief would love her.

-While they’re distracted the Shouter prepares another spell. What is it? Another daedra? Please not another daedra.

-Not a daedra, but it’s worse.

-One of the mage brothers is reanimated. He moans, turns on the others and starts casting frostbite.

-Our POV is definitely going to be sick

-With the warrior woman drawing the attention and the Shouter picking people off with lighting, the higher ranks are reduced to nothing. The ice mage drops to the ground, the spell having expired.

-Our POV releases a silent heartbroken squeak

-Now it’s just our POV, and the strangers. The woman starts to step forward and the Shouter stops her. “Wait Lydia,” he says. “I just learned this new one.”

- The POV doesn’t know what to do. They’re confused. They just stand there. The Shouter directs a shout their way and POV is overcome with fear. The kind of primal fear that means the difference between life and death. Their legs are moving before POV realizes and they can’t carry them fast enough. They run down a path and hide in a cluster of rocks. They can just see the edge of the hill, the mine entrance obscured.

-Only one person is left to fight Lydia and the stranger

-She can just hear the chief’s voice. Rage and anguish. His rag tag family. His volunteer army. His merry band, gone.

- The chief is out for blood and POV hears the clang of Dwemer metal on banded iron.

-A shock that probably sears the chief’s skin is heard. But the fight goes on.

-Then another shout. This one is impossible not to hear. Loud doesn’t describe it. It’s even more primal. The ground trembles and the air explodes with something like focused thunder. FUS RO DAH

-POV can just see the chief’s body sailing through the air, over a low ridge.

-POV hopes the crunch was imagined.

-They crawl out of their spot as the twisted fear wears off. The strangers are coming back down the path. We consider these two random strangers who ruined POV’s life in 10 minutes. These walking hurricanes. These monsters! Bandits are an accepted part of Skyrim, everyone else accepts it! Why didn’t these two? Why did it have the be their clan. POV is completely alone now. They fight back tears.

- “-don’t know why they always do this Lydia,” the Shouter was saying, “I just wanted to check the map. They attacked US. This literally always happens. I just want to live”

-“I agree my Thane. Perhaps one day we can relax and train at our own pace, without the threat of death. Maybe with the Blades. I hear the wine in Markarth is-”

-POV comes out and interrupts, poorly blinking back sorrow,“You’re a Thane? Wearing that?! Who even are you?”

-Lydia looks fierce but the other Shouter removes their mask and looks POV in the eyes. Their face is surprisingly tired and kind.

-They ask our POV a question

-“How fast would you say news travels in Skyrim?”

-“About as fast as anyone can talk,” POV responds. A hard exterior forming. It will now be necessary after all.

-Yet you haven’t heard of the Dragonborn?

OH THE POSSIBILITIES!!!!!!!!

[noramoya]

My Childhood, My Sabbath, My Freedom ~ By Michael Jackson "In one of our conversations together, my friend Rabbi Shmuley told me that he had asked some of his colleagues–-writers, thinkers, and artists-–to pen their reflections on the Sabbath. He then suggested that I write down my own thoughts on the subject, a project I found intriguing and timely due to the recent death of Rose Fine, a Jewish woman who was my beloved childhood tutor and who traveled with me and my brothers when we were all in the Jackson Five. Last Friday night I joined Rabbi Shmuley, his family, and their guests for the Sabbath dinner at their home. What I found especially moving was when Shmuley and his wife placed their hands on the heads of their young children, and blessed them to grow to be like Abraham and Sarah, which I understand is an ancient Jewish tradition. This led me to reminisce about my own childhood, and what the Sabbath meant to me growing up. When people see the television appearances I made when I was a little boy--8 or 9 years old and just starting off my lifelong music career--they see a little boy with a big smile. They assume that this little boy is smiling because he is joyous, that he is singing his heart out because he is happy, and that he is dancing with an energy that never quits because he is carefree. But while singing and dancing were, and undoubtedly remain, some of my greatest joys, at that time what I wanted more than anything else were the two things that make childhood the most wondrous years of life, namely, playtime and a feeling of freedom. The public at large has yet to really understand the pressures of childhood celebrity, which, while exciting, always exacts a very heavy price. More than anything, I wished to be a normal little boy. I wanted to build tree houses and go to roller-skating parties. But very early on, this became impossible. I had to accept that my childhood would be different than most others. But that's what always made me wonder what an ordinary childhood would be like. There was one day a week, however, that I was able to escape the stages of Hollywood and the crowds of the concert hall. That day was the Sabbath. In all religions, the Sabbath is a day that allows and requires the faithful to step away from the everyday and focus on the exceptional. I learned something about the Jewish Sabbath in particular early on from Rose, and my friend Shmuley further clarified for me how, on the Jewish Sabbath, the everyday life tasks of cooking dinner, grocery shopping, and mowing the lawn are forbidden so that humanity may make the ordinary extraordinary and the natural miraculous. Even things like shopping or turning on lights are forbidden. On this day, the Sabbath, everyone in the world gets to stop being ordinary. But what I wanted more than anything was to be ordinary. So, in my world, the Sabbath was the day I was able to step away from my unique life and glimpse the everyday. Sundays were my day for "Pioneering," the term used for the missionary work that Jehovah's Witnesses do. We would spend the day in the suburbs of Southern California, going door to door or making the rounds of a shopping mall, distributing our Watchtower magazine. I continued my pioneering work for years and years after my career had been launched. Up to 1991, the time of my Dangerous tour, I would don my disguise of fat suit, wig, beard, and glasses and head off to live in the land of everyday America, visiting shopping plazas and tract homes in the suburbs. I loved to set foot in all those houses and catch sight of the shag rugs and La-Z-Boy armchairs with kids playing Monopoly and grandmas baby-sitting and all those wonderfully ordinary and, to me, magical scenes of life. Many, I know, would argue that these things seem like no big deal. But to me they were positively fascinating. The funny thing is, no adults ever suspected who this strange bearded man was. But the children, with their extra intuition, knew right away. Like the Pied Piper of Hamlin, I would find myself trailed by eight or nine children by my second round of the shopping mall. They would follow and whisper and giggle, but they wouldn't reveal my secret to their parents. They were my little aides. Hey, maybe you bought a magazine from me. Now you're wondering, right? Sundays were sacred for two other reasons as I was growing up. They were both the day that I attended church and the day that I spent rehearsing my hardest. This may seem against the idea of "rest on the Sabbath," but it was the most sacred way I could spend my time: developing the talents that God gave me. The best way I can imagine to show my thanks is to make the very most of the gift that God gave me. Church was a treat in its own right. It was again a chance for me to be "normal." The church elders treated me the same as they treated everyone else. And they never became annoyed on the days that the back of the church filled with reporters who had discovered my whereabouts. They tried to welcome them in. After all, even reporters are the children of God. When I was young, my whole family attended church together in Indiana. As we grew older, this became difficult, and my remarkable and truly saintly mother would sometimes end up there on her own. When circumstances made it increasingly complex for me to attend, I was comforted by the belief that God exists in my heart, and in music and in beauty, not only in a building. But I still miss the sense of community that I felt there--I miss the friends and the people who treated me like I was simply one of them. Simply human. Sharing a day with God. When I became a father, my whole sense of God and the Sabbath was redefined. When I look into the eyes of my son, Prince, and daughter, Paris, I see miracles and I see beauty. Every single day becomes the Sabbath. Having children allows me to enter this magical and holy world every moment of every day. I see God through my children. I speak to God through my children. I am humbled for the blessings He has given me. There have been times in my life when I, like everyone, has had to wonder about God's existence. When Prince smiles, when Paris giggles, I have no doubts. Children are God's gift to us. No--they are more than that--they are the very form of God's energy and creativity and love. He is to be found in their innocence, experienced in their playfulness. My most precious days as a child were those Sundays when I was able to be free. That is what the Sabbath has always been for me. A day of freedom. Now I find this freedom and magic every day in my role as a father. The amazing thing is, we all have the ability to make every day the precious day that is the Sabbath. And we do this by rededicating ourselves to the wonders of childhood. We do this by giving over our entire heart and mind to the little people we call son and daughter. The time we spend with them is the Sabbath. The place we spend it is called Paradise. " video : https://youtu.be/-_SZOJAbhvQ

[therealestatesparkblog]

16 Side Hustles to Help Save Money for Your First Deal

Do you know why most people cannot invest in real estate? Its because they dont have the money. Are you one of these people? Are you dying to get in, but dont have the funds to do so? You may have fully optimized your spending, but lets be realyou can only save so much. Ideas on how to get into your first real estate deal have run through your mind. Perhaps this includes wholesaling, flipping, or using other peoples money (OPM). Unless you plan to dedicate 100 percent and make this your full-time job, I would advise against these strategies, as they can be quite time-consuming and may take away from your current job. Instead, I would advise that you continue to pinch your pennies and look for easier ways to generate additional incomeones that are relatively easy to do for a short period of time and will generate just enough to get you the cash for that first down payment. Related:5 Ways to Generate Extra Income Beyond Real Estate Investing There are a plethora of options in this arena, but I am going to provide 16 side hustle ideas that you can start and monetize in the next 30 days so you can be on your way to rapidly saving for that down payment. These side hustles are geared toward someone who is young and hungry but has yet to do their first deal. His or her time best spent at this point would be hustling for every dollar to save up for that down payment. As a result, these may be low dollar-per-hour tasks. I am certainly not suggesting you do these foreverjust until you have obtained your first property or can find a higher dollar-per-hour task. So, here it goes! 1. Drive for Uber or Lyft Driving for Uber or Lyft is the most obvious side hustle. Turn your car into an asset while familiarizing yourself with the city and networking with the passengers. Youll be surprised that you may find a property that you are interested in or meet the newest member of your team. I actually did this for about three months and would make an extra $1,000 per month while also getting to know Denver. Fun fact: I actually found the woman who cleans my Airbnbs through driving for Lyft. 2. Rent Your Car on Turo Im not the biggest fan of driving, which is why my career with Lyft was rather short. I decided that Id rather make slightly less money but have all of my time back by turning my car into a semi-passive income stream by renting it out on a site called Turo. Turo is essentially the Airbnb for cars. It works great, and depending on the type of car you have, it can put a couple hundred dollars in your pocket each month. 3. Airbnb Rooms in Your Apartment (If Your Landlord Allows) Be sure to check with your landlord, but if you have an extra room in your residence and live in a semi-desirable area, try renting an extra bedroom, or even your couch, on Airbnb. I rented my bedroom out while sleeping on a futon behind a curtain in the living room. The results? My savings were boosted an additional $1,200 per month and I met some cool travelers from all around the world. 4. Walk Dogs on Wag or Rover These days, people are more and more treating their dogs like humans. Dogs wear clothes, shoes, and I recently even saw something where dogs have their own car seat. I cant wait until dog owners start sending their dogs off to doggy college. Related: 7 Creative Ways to Earn More Money from Your Rental Properties Anyway, the point is that people love their dogs and they dont want them couped up inside all day while theyre at work or on vacation. What do they do? They will pay you ~$20 to come in and take their dog for a 30-min walk. If youre a dog lover, this one might be a no-brainer. 5. Bicycle Taxi Have you ever seen those folks on bicycles towing a couple through downtown or around after a baseball game? Those bicycle taxi drivers with the huge legs actually make decent pay for a side hustle. If you live in the city and dont mind spending some of your nights and weekends riding your bicycle, this could be an attractive side hustle option for you. 6. Assistant to a Real Estate Agent Are you just getting started in real estate? Do you want to learn a whole bunch in a short amount of time while getting paid for it? Would you like to gain a mentor in the process? If so, go onto Zillow and look at some of the top performing agents in your area. I bet more than anything they are extremely busy and are going to need some assistance. Reach out and ask if they are looking for an assistant. You will receive a lot of Nos, but keep asking. All it takes is one Yes, and youll have yourself a (albeit low) paying real estate job while learning from one of the best in your area and making connections. 7. Waiter/Bartender on the Weekends If you are looking to rapidly save money, becoming a waiter or a bartender on nights and weekends might be a great way to get started. This is a double win. Not only will you make lots of money, but youll be doing it during a time when youd likely be spending a significant amount of money. Each night you bartend you replace high spending with high earning. Although, you likely will not get many high-value networking opportunities being a waiter or bartender. 8. Handyman/Mow Lawns If you are confident in your handyman skills, try selling these skills on Craigslist, TaskRabbit, or other sites. Youll be amazed at how many people will pay someone to change a light bulb or mow their lawn.

If you are ever planning to do a rehab yourself, this is a great way to gain experience and confidence while also generating some additional income. 9. Take Surveys Online While not a great use of your time given that you wont make a whole lot of money and you wont learn much, companies pay people to take surveys for them. Swagbucks is one of the most popular, but others include Toluna, OnePoll, and MySurvey. I would recommend only doing this in down times such as when you are watching TV. 10. Start a Blog You are about to embark on a journey down the path less traveled. The road of financial independence through real estate investing. Why not document the journey? Let your friends and family know what youre doing, why youre doing it, and the frame of mind you are in. A couple of years down the road, when you are much more experienced, your blog will likely help and motivate others. Who knows? It might even be thousands of other people in which case you can monetize if youd like. 11. Tutor What was your favorite subject in high school? Im sure if it was your favorite, it was because you were pretty darn good at it. Guess what? There are loads of kids having lots of trouble learning the stuff that you are good at and there are twice as many parents willing to pay someone to get their kids up to speed. Why not monetize your math, history, or English skills? If you live in a culturally diverse area, this can include teaching non-English speakers how to speak English. 12. Babysit Babysitting is a great way to make extra money. Ive never been paid to babysit, but the people I know who have seem to get paid a decent amount of money. Depending on the kids and time of day, it can be a relatively easy job. If all it takes is putting them to sleep, then youll have time to listen to a podcast, read a book, or work on other side projects. Heck, maybe even the parents youre babysitting for are involved in real estate and you might be able to get some good networking from it. 13. Clean Houses One thing that many people dislike doing is cleaning. You know what that means? Theres a good chance that they will pay someone else to do it. Do you know who that someone is? Its you! Get a few clients and clean their houses once or twice a month. Depending on the size of the house, youll likely be able to make $60-$100 per house. If it takes you 3-5 hours per house, thats a $20-per-hour job. Not bad for one of your first side hustles. 14. Become a Freelance Writer If you are a good writer, there are a lot of people who have great content but do not have time to write the articles. I promise that I write my own articles, but do you think guys like Tim Ferriss and Gary Vaynerchuck write their own articles? Probably not. They probably hire someone to do the writing so they can still provide quality content while doing bigger and better tasks. You can be a writer for one of these people. That is, until you move on to bigger and better tasks. 15. Give Music Lessons Do you play an instrument? If you do, Im sure you enjoy playing it. Whatever instrument that is, Im sure there is a whole bunch of people who play worse than you but want to get better. Teaching music lessons is a great way to do something you enjoy while teaching others and potentially networking! 16. Become a Local Tour Guide If youre going to be investing in real estate, it might be a good idea to have knowledge of the area you want to invest in. Assuming that this is where you live currently, what better way to really know an area than to give guided tours? Not only will you learn a lot about the neighborhood, but youll likely be meeting 2530 people. While on the tour, in between stops, try to make your rounds and let everyone know what you do. Perhaps they can help you or you can help them? As you can see, there are an infinite amount of side hustle opportunities, many of which are not mentioned in this list. My suggestion is to pick one where you think you can get the most additional income and personal growth so you can purchase your first property. Remember that this is not a job you will hold onto forever, its just for a couple of months or years until youve saved enough for that down payment. Once you feel like your time can be better spentelsewhere, do it! Until then, heads down and get to work! Remember, saving the first $20,000 is the hardest part. My challenge to you is to do it in 2 years. Ready GO!

What side hustles have you used successfully? Share them below! https://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/side-hustles-save-money-first-deal

[sending-the-message]

Case #2- Youtube's Most Mysterious Vlogger by JacobMielke

THIS IS NOT A JOKE PLEASE HELP

That was the subject line of the very first email my investigative service received. I have it saved to this day. In a way, that case shaped the years to come. It cemented that we weren’t just going to be having walk-throughs of haunted houses and going bigfoot hunting in the woods. There would be times when things became serious.

I started Mielke Investigations with my friend Moxxy in the summer of 2015. I was (and still am) a horror writer and I wanted to work more with nonfiction. Being an actual paranormal investigator allowed me to do that by enabling me to write my about my own experiences. Moxxy, a fan of my work who eventually became a friend, came up with the idea. After a terrifying first case where we investigated supernatural activity in a strip club (which you can read about here) I decided to make it official and had business cards printed for the newly minted Mielke Investigations. Moxxy had taken to distributing them to people who might be able to throw a case our way. Lo and behold, someone noticed.

From: (omittedemailaddress)@aol.com To: (omittedemailadress)@aol.com Subject: THIS IS NOT A JOKE PLEASE HELP

Hello,

I found your card at a bus stop today and I hope you can help me. Do you know who Opperyke is? He was a Youtuber I liked to watch. His channel was deleted last year.

I know you only focus on like ghosts and aliens and stuff so hear me out. My mom was having nightmares and one day she saw his picture on my computer and said “that’s him! That’s the man in my dreams!” The scary thing is I was having nightmares too! I’d be running through a maze and he would follow me. I would run and he would walk but somehow he was always right behind me. My mom used to have nightmares where she’d be at a pool watching me drown. Opperyke was the lifeguard and he’d never even try to save me. My mom doesn’t have those nightmares anymore but I still do sometimes.

I know it’s not much to go on but maybe you could look into it a little? Every time I think about him now I get scared. And my mom didn’t even watch him, how was she having nightmares about him? Am I just overthinking things and being a baby here?

Please help!

-Amy (Name omitted)

She was right, it wasn’t much to go on. Still, she was our only client (hah! As if we were getting paid) at the moment so I opened a new file on my computer: Case #2.

I wasn’t able to find too much that night on account of the channel being deleted before it could really take off. What information I had came from forum posts and the like. The Youtuber called Opperyke had a channel in 2013-2014 of minor success. His real name was Scott, though no one seemed to know his surname. He posted vlogs talking mostly about his life and thoughts. I was able to find a single screenshot of one of his videos off Google image search showing a video of about fifteen minutes in length and around 5,000 views. Opperyke was gesturing at the camera, his mouth open in mid-speech.

He looked normal to me, with his short brown hair, brown eyes, and thick rimmed glasses. His face was smooth as the day he was born and his shirt was a red sweater. And yet… as I studied him I started to feel most curious. There was something slightly off about his features, as if they weren’t sitting right on his face and the difference was minuscule enough that our minds weren’t registering it on a conscious level. Though he was smiling, his eyes looked… pained, maybe?

I decided to pursue it further and wrote a quick e-mail back to the client saying I’d look into it.

The next day I met up with Moxxy for coffee and broached the subject of Opperyke. I told about the client’s nightmares, what little information I’d been able to find, and I showed her the screenshot of him on my phone.

“Cool,” She said. “I’ve never heard of him but I’ll see what I can find out.”

A couple of days later she emailed me a link and instructions on how to view it. I had to download a browser called Tor and change a bunch of my settings. After two hours of frustration I followed the link to a hidden video sharing site, which I’m pretty sure gave my computer digital syphilis. The post was an Opperyke video entitled MY LAST. I moved my mouse cursor over the play button but before I could click it, footsteps ran at me from behind.

I whipped around in my chair, hands up to defend myself, but there was no one in the room. I chalked it up to the upstairs neighbors running through their apartment (a perfectly normal thing to do at one in the morning) and turned my attentions back to the video.

The picture quality was normal but the audio was distorted all to hell. Someone, either the person who posted it on this website of questionable legality or Opperyke himself, put subtitles in the video, so I was able to follow along. It started normally enough, Opperyke recounted the events of his day (he mowed his lawn and got a package from Amazon) and some of his sociopolitical views (he seemed to be a big fan of Mitt Romney and George Takei). Towards the end of the video, something finally caught my interest.

“So I have something to tell you guys. You’re not going to want to hear it but this has been a long time coming. For reasons I can’t disclose, I’m shutting down my Youtube channel.”

He smiled at the camera then and I couldn’t help but flinch. There was something sleazy about that smile. It was the kind of grin I imagine a heroin dealer would give to a pregnant mother right before selling her his product.

“For my closing thoughts, I want to talk about secrets. We all have them; anyone who says they don’t is a liar. Most secrets are harmless. They’re the secrets of the kid who stole the cookie or the husband who slept with his wife’s sister on their wedding night. But there are other secrets, secrets with power, secrets that haunt whoever learns them.”

He leaned in close to the camera so his face took up the entire screen. His features were hideous and I couldn’t imagine how I ever thought otherwise.

“Some of you know what I mean. Some of you know my secret.”

The video ended there and I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. On the surface, there was nothing about this video that made it worth looking into for a paranormal investigator, even if it was creepy. But on the other hand, Opperyke gave me a strange feeling. I’d felt this before, many times stronger then, in the basement of the strip club Moxxy and I investigated. I don’t claim to be a psychic or anything, but… I don’t know. Maybe having experienced what I did gave me a sixth sense for these things. I download the video and saved it to my Case #2 folder, praying the entire time that it wouldn’t mess up my computer.

That night while I slept, I dreamed I was in a grocery store. The fruit and vegetables were rotten and had attracted flies and wasps. The deli display was filled with decaying meat and fish. Untold thousands of maggots writhed in the display. I went to the manager’s office to complain about the conditions (and the fact that there were no other employees on duty) but it was empty. I was alone in the store. A calendar on the wall of the manager’s office was open to July of 2013. The 11th day was circled.

“Do you want to know my secret?”

The voice behind me was as distorted as it was in the video. The only reason I understood the words were because they weren’t just behind me, they were inside me. A hand fell on my shoulder and an electric cold spread from the point of contact to the rest of my body.

I opened my eyes and watched a spider scurry across the ceiling. It paused briefly, as if it knew I was watching, then continued on its way. The first traces of light glowed blue through the window, not yet enough to illuminate the room. In the dark, a voice whispered next to my ear, not distorted at all this time, “Do you want to know my secret?”

Yes, Opperyke. I really do.

It took nearly a week of asking questions on forums and in Youtube comments sections before I made the next breakthrough.

July 11th, 2013. That was the day Opperyke uploaded his first video to Youtube.

I had no way of knowing that date the previous week and yet it and the man it relates to appeared in my dream. It was the final shred of proof I needed to confirm something supernatural was going on (could I have thought of a rational explanation given time? Probably, if I relied way too much on assumptions and coincidence).

I asked Moxxy to see if anything significant or strange happened on that date, since I’d reached the extent of my researching abilities. She assured me that she knew a guy who knew a guy.

And he must have been a good guy because I had my answer the very next day. Moxxy forwarded an email to me with an old article attached to it. On July 11, 2013, in the small town of Marietta, Ohio, a 24 year old college student named Scott Eric Cranston was murdered in his house while his parents were on a date. His throat had been slashed while he sat at his computer, recording a video. His senior picture was in the article. It was a good picture; the unsettling, creepy features I saw in his video were absent in the picture.

Opperyke was murdered the same day he recorded and uploaded his first Youtube video. Then he continued to make and upload more for two years after his death.

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard of ghosts continuing to do after death what they would have in life. Many a tale has been told of deceased old ladies tending to their gardens even in death or the spirits of dead parents watching and protecting their still-living children. But it was the first time I’d heard of a ghost vlogging. The internet has affected our world in such a huge way, I suppose it was only a matter of time before it affected the supernatural world as well.

I emailed my findings to the client, who I never heard from again. There were ways I could keep investigating and gathering data but my curiosity was sated for the time being. I saved all of my data in the Case #2 folder and decided to deem it “Closed”. I thought there was nothing more we could learn. I thought I knew Opperyke’s secret.

I thought wrong.

Case #2 will continue in an update. Follow my author page here to be notified when the next part is up.

[gokinjeespot]

off the rack #1168

Monday, June 26, 2017

 It's the last week of June, so Canada Day is soon. With the country celebrating its 150th anniversary, this year is a big deal. I was 10-years-old when we had our centennial in 1967 and I was part of a children's choir that sang at city hall as part of the year-long celebration back then. We're getting together with friends for Canada Day come Saturday and I wish you all a great week and weekend.

 Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man #1 - Chip Zdarsky (writer) Adam Kubert (art) Jordie Bellaire (colours). Get ready to be assaulted by an explosion of Spider-Man stuff as we near the theatrical release of the movie "Spider-Man Homecoming" on July 7. I still remember picking up Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man #1 off the spinner rack in 1976, happy that there was another comic book starring my favourite super hero. I wasn't sure I wanted to read this new incarnation because I am not a big fan of Chip's writing. I was not impressed with his work on the new Howard the Duck and Jughead books. My problem is that he comes across as too frenetic and eager to please by writing way too much. The double page spread with Peter and Johnny Storm having lunch together is a great example. Look at all them word balloons. The rest of the book is no better. Almost every panel is jammed full of word balloons. And what's with Peter leaving his mask on during lunch? Johnny knows his secret identity already. Wouldn't it have been more comfortable to take his mask off? I know I'm being picky but it's these little details that annoy me. The other thing that annoyed me was that I had to Google two acronyms to get what was being said. I'm an old fogey so I didn't know what NBD and NPC meant. Maybe it was to balance out all the other words used that "no big deal" and "non player character" were shortened. My quibbles are not enough to keep me from reading the next issue however because Chip pulls something out of the asphalt at the end that makes me want to find out more about the surprise person that Johnny meets. Well played Chip Zdarsky, well played.

 Batwoman #4 - Marguerite Bennett & James Tynion IV (writers) Steve Epting (art) Jeromy Cox (colours) Deron Bennett (letters). The first story arc ends with Kate and company saving the day. I was satisfied with how the story ended and there is enough mystery to keep me wanting to read more. What is Plan B and who is the shadowy figure in the last panel? I want to find out.

 Shirtless Bear-Fighter #1 - Jody Leheup & Sebastian Girner (writers) Nil Vendrell (art) Mike Spicer (colours) Dave Lanphear (letters). This takes place in a land where Yogi Bear would fit right in. The well endowed Shirtless Bear-Fighter's origin story is part Mowgli from Jungle Book and part Superman and part Punisher. This issue was mildly humorous but I didn't chuckle or laugh out loud. Maybe I'm too old. Is this the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1? Or The Walking Dead #1? Do bears poop in the woods? Buy it, read it and you be the judge. I only read it because Ottawa's own Tom Fowler did one of the variant covers.

 W.M.D. Weapons of Mutant Destruction #1 - Greg Pak (writer) Mahmud Asrar (art) Nolan Woodard (colours) VC's Joe Caramagna (letters). I hope you've been reading the new Weapon X comic book with Old Man Logan, Sabretooth, et alia because this is a direct tie-in to what went on there. No worries if you haven't because Greg spells everything out very clearly. The good guys are fighting an evil anti-mutant organization that is creating mutant killers. The Totally Awesome Hulk is one of the good guys so look for part 2, 4 and 6 of the story in that book. Parts 3 and 5 are in Weapon X. I'm reading them all.

 Aquaman #25 - Dan Abnett (writer) Stjepan Sejic (art & colours) Steve Wands (letters). This title has gone "Game of Thrones" but that's not why I took this extra-sized anniversary issue off the racks to read. It was the cover and interior art by Stjepan Sejic that made me want to give this book another try. I sure am glad I did. The story of a new power mad King of Atlantis and the return of the usurped King isn’t anything new but the beautiful art makes it more exciting to me. Stjepan knows how to draw hot women and Mera and Dolphin gives him plenty of opportunity to show that off. Aquaman is going back on my "must read" list.

 Crosswind #5 - Gail Simone (writer) Cat Staggs (illustrator) Simon Bowland (letters). It's nice to see Gail back on the racks again. Here she does a grown up version of Freaky Friday where a housewife and a mob enforcer switch bodies. Juniper and Cason are introduced pre switcheroo, which happens at the end of this issue. I can't wait to see what happens next. Cat's art is nice and that made it easy to put this new book on my "must read" list.

 Plastic #3 - Doug Wagner (writer) Daniel Hillyard (art) Laura Martin (colours) Ed Dukeshire (letters). The "hero" of this story is a psychotic killer but I like him a lot. A damsel in distress who may suffer a fate worst than death (haven't heard that cliché in a while eh?) plays a big role in this issue. Punisher fans will like this series.

 Royal City #4 - Jeff Lemire (writer & illustrator) Steve Wands (letters). This is a really cool ghost story. Patrick's thoughts about aging hit close to home.

 Archie #21 - Mark Waid (writer) Pete Woods (art & colours) Jack Morelli (letters). OMG (I know what that means) they killed…! You have to read this issue to find out who.

 The Mighty Thor #20 - Jason Aaron (writer) Russell Dauterman & Valerio Schiti (art) Matthew Wilson & Veronica Gandini (colours) VC's Joe Sabino (letters). Loved the Walt Simonson tribute cover by Patrick Brown. Speculator alert: it's the first appearance of a new Thor. You won't believe who it is. What motivates this guy to pick up the hammer is heart wrenching and the bad guys are going to get it. I can't wait to see him in action. There's a scene between Jane Foster and the Odinson that puts into question the fate of the Mighty Thor. I really hope she sticks around.

 Batman #25 - Tom King (writer) Mikel Janin (art) June Chung (colours) Clayton Cowles (letters). What made last issue worth reading was the kaboom on the last page. This whole issue is worth it for the build up to "The War of Jokes and Riddles". It's Batman versus the Joker and the Riddler and it's super intense. Mikel's art is the cherry on top and it's yummy. Batman is getting really good again.

 Wildstorm #5 - Warren Ellis (writer) Jon Davis-Hunt (art) Steve Buccellato (colours) Simon Bowland (letters). You should read this. It's all coming together beautifully.

 Luke Cage #2 - David F. Walker (writer) Nelson Blake II (art) Marcio Menyz (colours) VC's Joe Sabino (letters). This is an uh-oh issue as Luke investigates what the scientist that gave him his super powers was up to. Kind of reminded me of Orphan Black.

 Superman #25 - Patrick Gleason & Peter J. Tomasi (writers) Doug Mahnke & Patrick Gleason (pencils) Jaime Mendoza, Mick Gray, Joe Prado, Ray McCarthy, Scott Hanna & Matt Santorelli (inks) Wil Quintana & John Kalisz (colours) Dave Sharpe (letters). The conclusion to "Fade to Black" has guest stars galore and highlights the core of this title as the good guys prevail. I've enjoyed this book more because of the family values that Clark, Lois and Jonathan embody and the art is spectacular.

 Star Wars: Darth Vader #2 - Charles Soule (writer) Giuseppe Camuncoli (pencils) Cam Smith (inks) David Curiel (colours) VC's Joe Caramagna (letters). By the way Vader is mowing down storm troopers he must be really pissed at his boss. We find out who he's going to get his light sabre from in this issue. From the looks of the next issue teaser, it's going to be a scorcher.

 Nick Fury #3 - James Robinson (writer) Aco (pencils) Hugo Petrus (inks) Rachelle Rosenberg (colours) Travis Lanham (letters). This is freaking awesome. All you fans out there not reading this are missing out on some excellent writing and art. This reminds me of how I felt when I first saw Jim Steranko's art on Nick Fury Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. in the sixties as a teenager. Aco and Hugo's art with Rachelle's colours is so pretty and pops off the page. Buy this book.

 Super Sons #5 - Peter J. Tomasi (writer) Alisson Borges (art) Hi-Fi (colours) Rob Leigh (letters). Few writers know how to make young adults sound genuine but Peter is one of them. This issue establishes Jon and Damian as the young dynamic duo. I can't wait to see what they get up to next.

 Invincible Iron Man #8 - Brian Michael Bendis (writer) Stefano Caselli (art) Marte Gracia (colours) VC's Clayton Cowles (letters). This sets up next issue's fight with Lady Von Bardas. We'll see how bardas she really is.