#maybe once a week have a cycle in the patch updates where | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

romance-geek · 3 years ago

Text

sleep my long, unbroken sleep (niragi x oc)

warnings: violence, blood

author’s note: it's been a long long time?? i feel like most of the hype for alice in borderland has gone now, but i've gotten the urge to write again. so sorry it took so long! i'm thinking i'll do big chapters every update since future updates will probably a while, depending on my mood. hope you like it!

summary: Kuroba Chiyori may be born in the Borderlands, but no way in hell does she want to die in it.

AO3 LINK

CHAPTER TWO: fires find a home in me

PRESENT

Chiyori crouches down behind a tree outside one of the city’s stadiums, where the lights are as bright as can be in the Borderlands, beckoning players from all over Tokyo to join. There are signs nearby to lead people into the venue. Having been a citizen for all her life and a child of two of the most ruthless Game Masters, Chiyori knows the usual haunts; where to avoid and where to flock.

As much as she likes to consider herself an independent woman (and she very much is a woman now, thank you very much!), she prefers being surrounded by people whether familiar or not. Those earlier years spent locked inside a library with only books and dust as friends truly did wonders for her touch starvation. Craving companionship, but knowing death could pry them away from her bloody fingers in a blink of an eye. Her eternal dilemma.

And that night, nearly a decade ago, a decade of murder and sin, death stole the ones who brought her to life. She who guided the fates’ scissors, who lured her parents into a game they had a hand in orchestrating.

Thus began her undoing.

She could never really recall the whole night, most of her memories were of after. Bits and pieces would flash to her mind at the most inopportune moments (resulting in many near-death experiences), and to this day she cannot say what events led to the single clear picture in her mind. Of blood, gushing like a geyser from her father’s headless neck; of his wide-eyed head with a mouth frozen in a silent scream, rolling to a still beneath the shaking legs of her mother as her pulsing entrails out of her with a katana stuck to her spine, like a sick version of a magician’s show but only nearly succeeding.

Countless deaths had she witnessed in her childhood alone, usually by the lasers that come to claim players with zero days left as she watched through her library windows while nibbling on biscuits. Yet, this was the one that had her hurling her guts, almost in tandem with her mother’s dripping entrails.

Chiyori couldn’t tell you when was the first time she witnessed death, but she remembered the first time her hands took away someone’s life.

In a bout of adrenaline, and because the rules of the game permitted her to do so (each weapon can only be used once by each player, to up the ante), Chiyori wrenched the katana her mother’s killer used and drove it straight to his heart.

Battle Royale Kill Count.

Pretty straightforward name. Like Battle Royale, except only the one with the most kills survived. It was unlike the fiction novels she had read in her little library home, not like The Hunger Games where it only mattered who survived until the end even if you barely killed anyone, or like The Lord of the Flies where an adult appears to save you in the end.

At first, no one wanted to harm her. A child in the Borderlands? Unheard of. But as the game went on, the timer ticking down, the number of players dwindling, she knew they would come for her.

So she had to come for them first.

The katana was of no use to her any longer, so she had left it on her parents’ killer’s chest as he laid facing the ceiling, like a crude cross marker for her two parents.

She spent half of the time left looking around for stray weapons, but most of what she found were close-range types. She didn’t want to risk revealing herself to the others, so she persisted in looking around.

In one of the many rooms there, she found tucked into the corner behind a pile of boxes a large jug of gasoline. Relief flooded through her body as she scrambled for it. It was perfect! She only needed to spread the gasoline around, and it would only take one match for the whole building to burn.

Speaking of matches… She smiled horrifically, her face a mess of tears and snot with blood dripping down her nose, finding a little box with a few matchsticks amidst the junk.

Chiyori ran on the tips of her toes to avoid attention, hefting the jug and pouring it everywhere she could. All of a sudden, someone violently pulled at her ponytail. The gasoline sloshed over her front and clung to her clothes as the jug crashed to the floor.

She screamed as she was dragged back by a man with desperate eyes. He held a small knife, which trembled in his hands. The man struggled to straddle her as she kicked frantically, keeping eye contact with her while seeming to be in an internal war with himself. He raised the knife up high with both hands, the dull glint of it invoking her to grasp for something, anything to defend herself with. Her fingers latched on a broken piece of wood, with splinters and nails at the other end.

With a guttural yell, akin to the sound of pigs being slaughtered, the man drops his knife to try and dislodge the wood from the side of his head. It squelched in his efforts, blood and bits of skin coating the nails. While he was distracted, she grabbed the knife and plunged it into his right eye and twisted.

Chiyori knew something was wrong with her when she relished in his pain.

He dropped to the ground as she pushed him off, taking the jug and what amount of gasoline it had left to dump it all over his writhing body. She grabbed the matchbox from her pockets. She took one stick and struck it to light.

For a moment, she stood there, transfixed in the tiny flame.

Then, she dropped it.

The man lit up in a manner of seconds, his screams reaching a crescendo as the flames enveloped him.

Vicious thoughts ran through her mind. Vengeful. Mournful.

Hysteria replaced them when the flames licked at her clothes and ignited her as well.

She tried to roll around, but the room was quickly filling up with smoke and grew with even more flames. Chiyori ran outside, flailing her arms to no avail as it only seemed to fan the fire. Finding a clear patch of floor, she dropped and rolled for what seemed like hours of agony but was probably only a few minutes until the fire was completely smothered.

Third degree burns covered her arms, part of her abdomen, and her left thigh. The clothes stuck to her skin. The smell of barbecued pork along with smoke made her dizzy.

She stood up with a pained cry and limped as fast as she could to the entrance of the game venue. From different rooms, she could hear the panic of the remaining players as they fought against the fire.

The screen that dictates the amount of kills per player chimed with each death, the only number to increase was under her name, as she lit the fire that killed them. Subsequently, the number of remaining players were slowly counting down. She kept her gaze locked onto that number. The only way the game would end was when everyone else died.

Smoke started seeping into her nostrils again. She knew it was only a matter of time until the flames were upon her once more.

Finally, the screen changed.

𝐑 𝐄 𝐌 𝐀 𝐈 𝐍 𝐈 𝐍 𝐆 𝐏 𝐋 𝐀 𝐘 𝐄 𝐑 𝐒 : 𝟎

𝐆 𝐀 𝐌 𝐄 𝐂 𝐋 𝐄 𝐀 𝐑 𝐄 𝐃

𝐂 𝐎 𝐍 𝐆 𝐑 𝐀 𝐓 𝐔 𝐋 𝐀 𝐓 𝐈 𝐎 𝐍 𝐒

The phone she grabbed at the beginning chimed in one of her cargo shorts’ pockets. When she fishes it out, the screen lit up with the following message:

【 𝙶 𝙰 𝙼 𝙴 】

♤　♤　♤　♤　♤

𝐖 𝐄 𝐖 𝐈 𝐋 𝐋 𝐒 𝐔 𝐏 𝐏 𝐋 𝐘 𝐀 𝐋 𝐋 𝐆 𝐀 𝐌 𝐄 𝐒 𝐔 𝐑 𝐕 𝐈 𝐕 𝐎 𝐑 𝐒

𝐖 𝐈 𝐓 𝐇 𝐀 𝐓 𝐄 𝐍 - 𝐃 𝐀 𝐘 𝐕 𝐈 𝐒 𝐀

The irony of her father, the King of Spades, dying at a Ten of Spades game to protect her and her mother… Were it not for Chiyori, both of her parents would still be here right now. Maybe they would’ve trained her in preparation for the games that she wanted to play since she was a child.

But now?

She wondered why she ever wanted to play.

After that game, she immediately sought help from her parents’ fellow game masters, but after her wounds were cleaned and patched she holed up in her library home with the intent to let her visa run out by itself.

Only it didn’t. Not really.

She thought she lost her sense of time when the number stayed at zero for nearly a week, only to realize that the Borderlands didn’t want its single native citizen out of its clutches. Whichever god that rules this sinful place, if there ever is one, plays with her life almost daily with its cruel tribulations, but condemns her efforts to die outside of the games. It is almost as if they want her to play in order to die.

Chiyori isn’t particularly religious, but she has often read books about religion and philosophy. When one has questions, one seeks answers, but none of the books in any library in Tokyo have ever explained the nature and laws of this place.

With the games not being necessary to her life and being the only way to die, she needn’t participate. And for a while, she didn’t want to either.

Slowly, she began to open up to her parents’ friends, but the Borderlands only took them one by one as each cycle passed until she didn’t have anyone left but herself and her books. But even books couldn’t give her the happiness it gave when she was younger. By that time, she was thirteen, still a child but now numb to the death that surrounded her. She started participating in a few games a year, to a few games a month, now nearly everyday when she realized that those deadly games were the only things that made her feel alive anymore.

Sure, she meets friends along the way, but they only die in the end. Sometimes by her hand. Such is life in the Borderlands. The sooner you accept that, the better you’ll survive.

When a good amount of people have arrived at the game venue, she stands from her hiding place and nonchalantly walks over to join them, hands tucked into her denim jacket, the leathery scar on her left thigh visible as she only wore cycling shorts.

The clunk of her combat boots prompts several of them to glance at her entrance. She coolly raises an eyebrow and runs her eyes over everybody, reading them almost like her beloved books.

Chiyori runs a finger along the table of phones, choosing one with a sleek black case. After it scans her face, she saunters to a wall and leans back to continue her survey of the other players.

“Hey, are you new here?” A guy wearing a long-sleeved neon green shirt asks her. There’s a girl with a thankfully less bright top holding his hand. Both of them are looking at Chiyori worriedly.

She gazes distastefully at his shirt. With a scoff, she asks, “What makes you say that?”

“If I may, miss,” the girl interjects, “You look like you don’t realize how dangerous these things can get… We only wish to help educate you.”

Their familiarity with each other suggests that they knew each other before ending up at the borderlands. Both of them had dyed hair, the guy sporting blond tips while the girl had long pink hair. The fact that the girl had no roots showing tells Chiyori that they must’ve only been in the Borderlands for less than three weeks.

No, Chiyori decides after a peek of inked flesh on the guy’s bicep, about as big as the size of her palm. It still has a cling film wrapped around it, so it couldn’t have been more than three to five days.

The girl knew the games were dangerous, so they played at least one, not very hard if they’re already at another. This is probably their second or third game. Most likely the second.

In spite of herself, Chiyori smiles at them. They might end up betraying her later when the game starts, but she appreciates their concern. Not that she needed it.

“Thanks,” she says. “But I think I can manage. You guys worry about yourselves, you haven’t experienced real danger yet.”

The couple looks at her, at each other, then they shrug as if to say ‘Suit yourself.’

Chiyori’s gaze drops to their locked hands as they leave to go back to their corner. A twinge of longing cuts through her.

She thinks the game should start any minute now when a guy with black hair almost to his shoulders and a few face piercings walks in hesitantly, looking around in confusion as he taps his hand against an ear. Her eyebrows go up as she checks him out appreciatively.

“He’s new,” she remarks quietly to the couple. “You guys have been here only about a few days, I can tell.”

The girl whispers, “How’d you know?”

“You guys are pretty obvious, as is that guy. How?” Chiyori nods to the guy with piercings. “Look at his hands. He’s patting his pockets, and from the shape of it it’s a phone. Where he came from, it was loud, so he��s here to watch a game but when he entered the noise was gone. So he’s new new.”

Chiyori can tell that although they’re impressed, they’re unnerved by her. As most people are. So she pushes off the wall and saunters towards the guy who is now fiddling with his phone, trying to turn it on.

The way he hunches his shoulders tells her he is a private person, so she stops a respectable distance from him. “Hey.”

He lifts his head up to look at her, eyebrows furrowed. “What?” His voice snaps, almost defensively.

She doesn’t smile at him, thinking he seemed the type of person to think it was condescending. Instead, she points with her thumb to the table where only a few more cellphones were available. “Your phone is busted. Take one of those.”

He sneered at her and says, “Fuck off.”

Rolling her eyes, she says, “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto. Take a phone or you’re disqualified and trust me, you don’t want to be disqualified.”

He still makes no move to the table, so she takes his busted phone with a quick movement and throws it to the entrance of the stadium. The other players watch them, not wanting to intervene.

“You bitch, what—?!” His enraged shout is cut off when a red laser beams down from the ceiling and puts a hole into the phone. “What the fuck?!”

Chiyori locks her eyes with his, smirking at the contempt that he displays for her. “You came here to watch a game, did you? Which teams are playing? Doesn’t matter. You’re not here to watch. You’re here to play.” She shoves a new phone in his hands. “Humor me, would you?”

With a glare, he turns on the phone. Almost as soon as his face is done scanning, everybody’s phones start chiming.

“Let the games begin,” Chiyori says, her excitement evident.

𝐑 𝐄 𝐆 𝐈 𝐒 𝐓 𝐑 𝐀 𝐓 𝐈 𝐎 𝐍 𝐇 𝐀 𝐒 𝐂 𝐋 𝐎 𝐒 𝐄 𝐃

𝐓 𝐇 𝐄 𝐆 𝐀 𝐌 𝐄 𝐖 𝐈 𝐋 𝐋 𝐍 𝐎 𝐖 𝐂 𝐎 𝐌 𝐌 𝐄 𝐍 𝐂 𝐄

𝐆 𝐀 𝐌 𝐄 : 𝟐 𝟎 𝟎 𝐌 𝐄 𝐓 𝐄 𝐑 𝐑 𝐀 𝐂 𝐄

𝐃 𝐈 𝐅 𝐅 𝐈 𝐂 𝐔 𝐋 𝐓 𝐘 : 𝐓 𝐄 𝐍 𝐎 𝐅 𝐒 𝐏 𝐀 𝐃 𝐄 𝐒

When the difficulty level is announced, almost everyone starts cussing or panicking, apart from Chiyori and the guy with piercings.

She is momentarily breathless as memories of another Ten of Spades game come to her, but she shoves them at the back of her mind and turns her attention to the guy. Hostile he may be, something in her wants to help him. “This is the last time I’m gonna warn you. It’s kill or be killed, alright?”

He looks at her almost like a puppy, the angry facade he keeps up down for a moment.

“Welcome to the Borderlands,” she tells him.

They enter through another entrance to go into the arena itself. She hears the guy mutter in shock when he sees the arena. Like the rest of the Borderlands, the fauna is overgrown intermixed with other weeds and plants, except for a rectangular patch of land in the center where it was just plain dirt. Ostensibly 200 meters wide.

At the end closest to the entrance they came through is a long table full of weapons ranging from bows and arrows to javelins to throwing daggers. No guns. There are three people wearing grotesque halloween masks and nondescript clothes behind the table, waiting patiently for the game to start with hands clasped.

There were 21 participants in total. You know what they say: the more, the deadlier.

The guy in neon moved to grab a weapon off the table, but one of the dealers stopped him from doing so by brandishing a machete to his face. “Shit!” He squeaks. “Watch where you’re pointing that thing!”

The dealer with the machete brings one finger up to the lips of his mask, as if to sush him, then wags the finger like scolding a child. The other dealers gesture for them to wait for the rules.

Their phones chime once again. “Rule: Players must race through 200 meters to get to the other side. Condition: Finish the race within ten minutes.”

Chiyori smiles grimly, realizing what the weapons were for. She drops her denim jacket to the floor, revealing the burns on her arms, and readies herself.

“Start.”

She sprints ahead of everyone else, zigzagging and changing direction at random intervals. Screams start to rise. Behind her, the familiar squelch of someone being stabbed urges her to run faster. Someone manages to run even faster than her, even with her head start, but who said the game is about how quick you can finish the race?

A javelin goes through the head of the player.

Not even sparing them a glance, she jumps over the body - because that’s all the player is anymore, a body - and nearly collides with the guy from before. He looks like he wants her to die, but contradicts himself when he pushes her away from a flying arrow.

She barely gasps out a whisper of gratitude before they both continue their run. The timer loudly ticks down from the stadium’s screens.

They are only a few meters away from the finish line when she notices a small movement from behind the tall grass at the other end. She grabs the guy’s arm and pulls him while still keeping them in motion, albeit going back in the opposite direction.

“What are you doing?! The finish line’s right there!” He growls.

“Look again,” she snaps at him. “Someone’s waiting for us.”

He glances back and confirms it for himself. “What the fuck kind of dystopian shit is going on here?”

“These games are never simple,” she says.

By now, there were only about half of them still alive. A few have run past the two of them already, but Chiyori knew they would regret not thinking twice. She runs to a body that has a throwing axe deep into the side of her neck.

A glance at the starting line lets her know that the masked people only have a few weapons left to throw at them, but she still remains cautious in her running patterns as she runs to a few more bodies to collect more light throwing weapons. The guy follows her example, a bloody machete in hand.

They run back to the finish line, where a few of the others have begun to realize that there was one more masked person to torment them. Their weapon of choice? An actual roaring chainsaw.

“I should have stayed home!” The guy with piercings groans.

“Would’ve been the better choice,” she agrees.

The masked person slashed their chainsaw with reckless abandon at whoever dared to come close. One of the players was using someone’s lifeless body as a shield to get closer. Another player runs to the side of the race track, but a laser immediately comes for them.

Chiyori glances at the guy with piercings, locking eyes with him, darts her eyes to the masked person then back at him. He nods.

Holding her breath, she assumes a throwing stance. She brings the axe behind her head, then extends her arm forward while at the same time letting go of the weapon while keeping her wrist and elbow firm. It sinks into the masked person’s jugular.

Trusting that the guy would take over, she whips back to face the starting line and grabs the small throwing daggers she collected in each hand. Just in time to dodge a masked person’s forward slash. She drops to the floor and rolls over, kicking them on the head to dizzy them. She jumps on their back and uses another dagger to cut their throat open.

With her legs wrapped around their torso, she rolls both of them over just as several arrows lodge onto the masked person’s chest. Heart pounding at the close call, Chiyori throws her remaining daggers and knives in rapid succession towards where the arrows came from, hoping to buy time.

She crawls to the nearest body, who is rendered nearly headless by a curved blade. She pulls it out, spraying even more blood all over herself and the floor. When she looks up, she finds a masked person struggling to remove a knife embedded into their eye socket. Stopping for a second to marvel at her blind but successful aim, she puts them out of their misery with a swing of the blade.

Chiyori looks around for the third masked person, finding them grappling with another player. She turns her gaze to the guy with piercings, who seems to have successfully dispatched his opponent. He has his hands cupped around his mouth, shouting at her, but she is too far away to hear him clearly.

“... over here!”

“What?!” She screams.

The guy runs a hand through his hair in frustration, then points furiously at the stadium screens. She follows the direction of his finger, to find that there is only less than a minute left for her to cross about 100 meters to the finish line.

With no time to waste, she tightens her grip on the handle of the curved blade and runs for her life.

Chiyori is only a few feet away when a javelin twirls through the air and nicks her calf. She nearly drops at the pain, but perseveres and limps as fast as she can.

The guy with piercings picks up his opponent’s chainsaw and turns it on with a loud roar.

He sprints for the masked person making their way to Chiyori and slices them in half jaggedly.

With only twenty seconds left on the clock, he barks for the two other players in the finish line to help him drag Chiyori to safety, but only one actually does.

They cross the finish line with two seconds to spare.

Their phones chime in unison.

𝐆 𝐀 𝐌 𝐄 𝐂 𝐋 𝐄 𝐀 𝐑 𝐄 𝐃

𝐂 𝐎 𝐍 𝐆 𝐑 𝐀 𝐓 𝐔 𝐋 𝐀 𝐓 𝐈 𝐎 𝐍 𝐒

They all pant in exhaustion, bodies slick with blood. Blood from the masked people, from the other players, from them. Chiyori can’t wait to go home and wash it all off, maybe take a week off from playing the games.

【 𝙶 𝙰 𝙼 𝙴 】

♤　♤　♤　♤　♤

𝐖 𝐄 𝐖 𝐈 𝐋 𝐋 𝐒 𝐔 𝐏 𝐏 𝐋 𝐘 𝐀 𝐋 𝐋 𝐆 𝐀 𝐌 𝐄 𝐒 𝐔 𝐑 𝐕 𝐈 𝐕 𝐎 𝐑 𝐒

𝐖 𝐈 𝐓 𝐇 𝐀 𝐓 𝐄 𝐍 - 𝐃 𝐀 𝐘 𝐕 𝐈 𝐒 𝐀

She struggles to stand, waving off any help offered to her.

Hand still gripping on the curved blade, she uses it to cut away at the long grass until she finds a small table with a single Ten of Spades card on it. Despite not having the need for it, she swipes it and hides it in her bra.

Chiyori limps back to where the others are. The guy with piercings has blood dripping down his nose, and a cut somewhere on his trunk causing the shirt he has on to cling to his form.

“Welcome to the Borderlands,” she repeats with a smile, referring to before the game started. “I’m Kuroba Chiyori. What’s your name?”

Warily, he considers the hand she offers for him to shake. He glances at her face, at her horrific smile, teeth stained with blood. He takes her small hand into his much larger one and slowly shakes it, feeling vaguely like he is making a deal with the devil.

“Niragi Suguru.”

#niragi suguru x reader #niragi x reader #niragi #alice in borderland #Dori Sakurada

32 notes · View notes

elisela · 4 years ago

Text

take root buck x eddie, 1.2k. happy birthday, @gracieli! ♥️🌻

“Dad!” Chris rushes towards him, phone clutched in one hand, beaming. “My zucchini sprouted!”

Eddie holds his hand out for the phone—Chris had been checking his classroom website obsessively as soon as summer break started, waiting for his teacher to post an update about the vegetables they planted on the last day of school. “Looks pretty good, buddy,” he says, looking at the two tiny leaves sticking up through dark soil, Christopher’s name written in his best handwriting on a marker in front. “Did you sign up for a time to go work in the garden yet?”

“Yeah, two times,” Chris says. “We can go on Wednesday and Buck said he’d take me, too, on Friday.”

Of course he did.

“I already sent you the invite,” Chris adds, pushing his glasses up and reaching a hand out for his phone back. “You need to accept it, Dad.”

It’s not that Eddie regrets getting him the phone, but he does wish the constant bombardment of calendar invites, download requests, game requests, and text messages with nothing but memes would … slow down a bit. “I’m not even sure where my phone is,” he says, “but I will. Promise. You should send that picture to abuela, she’d love to see it.”

----

Eddie hadn’t been exaggerating when he told Chris that he had a brown thumb. He’s not sure what it is—maybe the same lack of intuition that keeps him away from the kitchen most nights—but when he’d failed to even keep a succulent that Sophia had given him alive back in El Paso, he’d given it up. Plants are fine, and he can enjoy them in nature, but he doesn’t really feel the need to have them around the house, anyway.

Chris is different. Fourth grade science and a unit on plant life cycles had him begging for flowers to be brought into the house, and with huge bouquets regularly sold at the farmer’s market for $10, Eddie had no problem taking him every week to pick a bunch out. Sometimes Chris would save his allowance and buy a smaller bouquet for his room, or a vase or two at a yard sale. Then it was a ficus that was half-dead at the nursery and tended carefully by his son until it was thriving again, a monstera deliciosa that Buck brought over and was moved around no less than twenty-six times before Chris found the perfect place for it, and four planters full of sunflowers that Chris planted along the side of the house.

But his obsession with growing vegetables really starts after they plant the zucchini at school. Eddie and Buck take turns bringing him twice a week to meet his science teacher so he can help tend to the garden, and every time Chris looks wistfully out into their small, brown backyard, Eddie’s heart sinks. They don’t have the space for a real garden—Chris had never been a kid to run around in the backyard, preferring playgrounds and parks, so he hadn’t cared too much when he’d rented the place—let alone the knowledge on how to set it up. The school’s gardens are nice; he can see irrigation lines, beautiful cedar planters, and he’s pretty sure it would cost quite a bit to set something like that up.

It’s not until they respond to a call at a community garden that he realizes how he can get Chris the garden he so desperately wants.

-----

It takes seven months for space to become available, and part of him had worried about Chris losing interest in that time, but they now have four additional plants in the house along with a windowsill herb garden filled with rosemary, mint, basil, and chives that Chris and Buck regularly use while they cook. The garden manager gives him a call on Tuesday and Eddie fills out the rental agreement while he’s on shift, renting out two adjacent plots, and buys a gardening book that becomes remarkably difficult to read without his boys catching him. He doesn’t just want to drag them out to an empty plot—it just doesn’t feel right—but he’s also … really not sure what to do. So he sucks it up and wanders around the garden, asking for advice, before finally planting a peach tree in Chris’ plot (his favorite fruit) and California poppies in Buck’s (despite Buck claiming that sunflowers are his favorite flower, Eddie’s been dragged out to the poppy fields more times than he can count).

He picks up the gardening tools that everyone told him he would need, puts them in the community garden branded tote bag that the manager had given him on his first trip out, and takes his boys out to breakfast.

“Let’s go on a walk,” Eddie says, and Buck groans.

“I would have eaten less if I had known you were going to torture us,” Buck says, but he’s smiling.

“Liar,” Eddie says, reaching for his hand. “Come on, I want to show you guys something.”

They listen to Chris chatter as they walk, and Eddie brings them to a stop along the wrought iron gates with a giant metal sun. “In here,” he says, and feels a sense of pride bloom in his chest as Buck and Chris read the sign and then glance at each other, clearly excited. Their plots are in the back of the expanded section, set up against the corner. One of the other gardeners had offered to make signs for their planter boxes, and he watches the pleased smile on Buck’s face as he runs his fingers over the small wooden board that says Diaz Family.

“It’s ours?” Chris asks incredulously, gazing around at the space. “We can plant whatever we want?”

“It’s yours,” Eddie says. “One for you, one for Buck. We can head over to the nursery for all your seeds after this.”

“Once again, you just reap the benefits,” Buck teases, throwing an arm over Eddie’s shoulders and leaning in to kiss his cheek. “This is awesome, Eddie.”

He shows them where he’d planted the peach tree, and Buck’s poppies, and sits on the side of the planter box, face tilted up to the sun as they discuss their plans, Chris tapping away at his phone as he writes everything down.

“This is the best, Dad,” Chris says when they’re leaving, red-cheeked from the sun and grinning. “I’m gonna grow so many vegetables, we’ll never have to buy them from the store again. I’ll teach you how to grow it all, too.”

Eventually, they get into the habit of spending a few days a week at the garden, tending to their own patches and talking to the other gardeners, experimenting with different things to grow, celebrating their victories with new recipes and old favorites at home, bunches of carefully cut flowers adorning the dining room table.

When he and Buck finally decide to buy a house, the backyard is the first thing he looks at.

#buddie #buddie fic #evan buckley #eddie diaz #christopher diaz #eli writes #it's okay eddie #i also have a brown thumb #happy birthday alicia!

99 notes · View notes

doctorreids · 4 years ago

Text

folklore - spencer reid x reader

CHAPTER EIGHT - august

previous chapter | next chapter

word count - 1.7k

a/n - see @ the end !

warnings: slight sexual content, nothing explicit though.

“i never needed anything more, whispers of ‘are you sure?’ ‘never have i ever before.’”

The glare of headlights filtered through his car as he drove down the main street, few cars passed. Red and green lights mixed together as he reached each stoplight.

The reality of what he was about to do hit him, just 20 minutes from her apartment he thought about turning back.

The ‘what if’s’ swirled around in his head. What if he wasn’t good enough? What if he truly hadn’t changed and he was just kidding himself? What if she was better off without him?

He would be lying if that last thought didn’t make tears pool in his eyes.

The late-night drive, however, did remind him of August's past. When he pulled up outside her apartment when they had the rare week off and told her to get in. Alex Blake had kindly given them the use of her beach-side Hampton’s summer home. The five-hour drive stretched well into the night.

He could remember her laughter in the passenger seat and her soft snores as they travelled down the highway. Talking nonsense and playing ‘I spy’ to pass the time before the sun began to set, the sky turning from blue into a purple-pink sky with red hues.

Before she drifted to sleep she turned towards him and whispered, “Red sky at night shepherd’s delight, red sky in the morning shepherd’s warning.”

The memory made him smile.

It also made him wonder if this was worth it. If he was too late.

…

“So you’re telling me you’ve never played ‘Never Have I Ever’?” She giggled.

“Nope.” Popping the ‘p’, he shrugged.

Pulling herself onto his lap, she peered up at him.

“Well then,” she sighed comically, “guess I’m just going to have to take your Never Have I Ever virginity! Pass me the wine.”

Tipsy and thinking nothing of it, he passed her the wine.

Hours passed and the questions got dirtier and dirtier. No longer did he blush or feel awkward at her suggestive comments, he made them himself.

They were both slurring, roaring with laughter at times. He had never felt more whole.

“Awk, Spencer, pick your jaw up from the floor.” She straddled him, her finger traced along his jawline.

He smiled up at her before pressing his lips to hers. His hands rested on her hips, she was fully pressed into his chest. She toyed with the buttons on his shirts as he kissed her neck.

He could not describe the utter state of bliss he was in; all he could feel, see, and hear was her. Her soft whimpers at his touch, her soft butterfly kisses on his chest, her bright eyes staring back at him, so full of love and adoration. He never wanted that feeling to end. He had never felt braver as he slipped off her top, placing kisses down her stomach and her thighs, watching her body react to his touch and the soft gasps that escaped her lips. He was on a high that he believed would never end, her touch was like ecstasy, he was filled with complete euphoria.

Whispered ‘I love you’s’ passed between them, he finally knew how it felt to be a teenager falling in love for the first time. She was his true first love. She was the kiss under the bleachers that he never got. She was the prom date he had waited for. He felt 13 years younger with her - shy, bashful and unsure.

The universe and all its questions had all its answers when he was with her.

“august slipped away into a moment in time, cause it was never mine, and I can see us twisted in bedsheets, august sipped away like a bottle of wine.”

The memory of the past August made him smile. They spent the day on the beach, reading and Y/N pulling him into the water despite his protests of it being too cold. They cooked together, showered together, and spent every other moment with each other. If he thought hard enough he could still remember the smells of the local Italian restaurant, the smell of each bottle of red, white and rose wine they drank. He could recall every word that was said.

“I love you.”

“The earth has rotated roughly 212.9 times in the seven months we’ve been together.”

“Not a more accurate figure, no?”

“I’m not a calculator, my love.”

He laughs audibly at the memory. He took so much for granted; how she would listen to his ramblings about everything and anything, especially things she didn’t understand. She would listen so intently, her eyes following his every word and gesture, and she would try her best to talk about astrophysics or whatever his chosen topic was in her own vocabulary, in a way she could understand.

She thought his mind was amazing, he thought her mind was too.

She was patient. She was kind. She was kind.

The memories don’t feel like they are his. They are only a slippery slope into madness. Tempting him back to the days of curling up on his sofa clutching some novel that reminds him of her.

His copy of Pride and Prejudice is now completely worn as he finds himself reading it over and over, remembering the sound of her voice of one summer afternoon in which she read it to him.

He had it memorised cover to cover but he couldn’t bring himself to read it aloud, only her voice could gently relay one of the greatest love stories of all time. A story he had hoped they would rival.

Maybe it was too big of fantasy to maintain hope but without hope, he was lost.

He didn’t feel as though he owned the memory of the past August. Almost as though he was out of his own body, watching it happen. Watching things be so perfect and then watching them fall apart. It was a vicious cycle.

“your back beneath the sun, wishin’ I could write my name on it.”

The morning sun flooded the room as he rolled over to face her. The thin white curtains did little to keep the light out. He couldn’t figure out what time it was and he couldn’t be bothered to look at the small alarm clock beside him.

Her back faced away from him, soft snores came from her mouth. He traced his finger all so gently along the lace of her nightdress to the base of her neck, along the straps and soft cotton material. The sun illuminated her skin, an angelic halo encircling her.

Not even Michelangelo could paint something so heavenly.

Each time he looked at her he felt winded. He was not one to dwell on luck, he focused rather on what was guaranteed and soundproof, but he knew he was so lucky to call her ‘his’. To be able to hold her, to watch each sunrise and sunset with her, was everything to him.

It was at this moment he decided on their future - the girl before him was the woman he knew he was going to marry. Someday, he promised himself.

“I can practically feel you burning holes into my back, Spence.’ Her laugh cracked with sleep as she turned to face him.

They lay there for a few moments holding each other’s gaze, irises swimming with love. He grabbed her waist, a soft muffled hum as she rested her hand on his chest.

“I can also hear you thinking. Penny for your thoughts?” Her voice was gentle.

He hummed.

“I think you can hear my aching head rather than my thoughts, sweetheart.”

“Aw, does poor Doctor Reid have a sore head?” She teased.

Lifting her head with his index finger, he said, “Now, what did I say about calling me Doctor Reid.”

“Ah, yes. How could I possibly forget! At least one of us can remember last night with some degree of clarity.”

He laughed, “I just have a hangover, I remember everything. Not like you on some of your girl’s nights with Garcia.”

Pulling her pillow from underneath her, she hit him with it.

“You promised you wouldn’t speak of that!” She groaned.

“And you promised you wouldn’t call me unless…” He trailed off.

He wished he could stay there forever as their laughter mixed together.

…

There are moments after laughing, those deep belly laughs, where silence fell upon them both and she would look at him with that mischievous look in her eye and he would fall over and over again. It was pure, unadulterated joy as they caught their breath.

These are the moments he wishes more than anything that he could live once more.

The empty passenger seat reminds him of the silence of their apartments as they grew further apart. It reminds him when she would sit there and stare out the window without as much of a glance towards him. It also reminds him of the drive home from their august trip. She was glowing, happily chewing on a piece of candy or eating the Cheetos they’d specifically bought for JJ and claiming she would buy more packs when they got back. (She never did.)

Time seemed to slow as each stop light turned red. The drive extended by a few extra minutes. More time to psych himself out. To tell himself to turn around. To remind himself that she wasn’t his to lose.

She was her own person, it was the reason he loved her so. She couldn’t be owned by anyone. In another way, neither could he. Maybe it’s why they clicked together like missing pieces of a puzzle. It’s a possibility why they fell apart so quickly, those pieces must have gotten lost somewhere along the way.

He no longer felt the anxiousness of before, determination surged through his veins. Each red light he stopped at reminded him of each mistake, each time he missed the cracks and signs. This time, he promises himself, he would be better.

He took the next right, knowing that she was 10 minutes away.

He was 10 minutes away from either making the best or worst decision of his life.

600 seconds away from his heart’s home.

799.

798…

a/n: hi guys!! sorry for the long wait - results week was very weird for me, and i had to get my grades reassessed and that was another week before i found them out too (which i went up to 2A*s and an A which was way more than what i originally got) which was amazing! i’ve just been going through a rough patch mentally and i’ve been busy sorting out university etc. i feel as though i owe you all an apology for not updating as often - this chapter just took it out of me but i’m looking to update at least weekly or maybe twice a week!! thank u for all the support it means so much <3

taglist: @itsfangirlmendes @toosassy2handle @supernatural-strangerthings-1980 @rexorangecouny @myheartbelongsintz @toizerdecker @baddestbau @haylaansmi @hess016 @blameitonthenight21

#spencer #reid #dr spencer reid #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid x you #spencer reid/reader #spencer reid/you #spencer reid fanfic #spencer reid fluff #spencer reid angst #spencer reid fanfiction #spencer reid imagine #spencer reid series #criminal minds #criminal minds fanfiction #reidxfolklore

110 notes · View notes

fogsrollingin · 4 years ago

Text

Title: not even duct tape & safety pins Author: fogsrollingin Fandom: Supernatural Story details: Sam & Dean, rated PG-13, 2.7k words, chapter 1/? Summary: The minute Sam's ravaged soul slipped back into his body by Death, mind and spirit combined to manifest as something barely human. Feral. Death vanished, Dean struggled to hold a screaming, newly re-souled Sam down on the cot, and ever since he's been praying for his little brother to come back to him. A/N: my next entry for @whumptober2020! Prompts filled are No 24. "You’re not making any sense" 😵 and No 18. "Paranoia" 👀. This chapter is the first of many that will continue to be updated after Whumptober. Tumblr link to Chapter 2 || Available on AO3

｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆ not even duct tape & safety pins, ch 1 ｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆

Sam used to know how easy it was to break zip-ties.

Not now.

Dean discovered this fact while gently experimenting with Sam; he was long past the sentimental aspects of reuniting with his brother.

He focused on the here and now a lot more, if not for practicality than for the sake of his sanity. He studied Sam now, carefully tested him sometimes as he dwelt in the basement panic room.

It had been six weeks since Sam's ravaged soul slipped back into his body by Death, his mind and spirit combining to manifest as something barely human. Feral. Six weeks. Bobby and Dean had been diligently tracking Sam's "recovery" trying to convince themselves it wasn't devastating to witness their graphed plateau lasting longer and longer.

Today Dean figured he might as well see if some hunter's tricks could jog Sam's memories. So, a harmless experiment, the zip-ties.

Sam was always naked, unable or unwilling to clothe himself. He was always warm though. Dean made sure of that. He and Bobby monitored the thermostat religiously. It was harder to keep him clean. Sam gnashed his teeth and growled threateningly but at least he never attacked when Dean cornered him with warm wet towels to wipe off the sweat, grit and grime Sam managed to get on his skin rolling around the floors, stalking along the walls, toppling old furniture. Sure, Sam might fritz into a panic as Dean approached, screaming and terrified, but he never hit or kicked and Dean would rub him down, his ears ringing by the end of it.

Dean tried to outlast his brother's screams whenever he came near so many times. Tried to stay there through it until Sam's throat would go dry, until his vocal chords would seize up, his muscles would relax and his eyes might dull with lassitude. Dean would still be there, soft words and gentle touches and maybe it'd cut a revelation through Sam's mind that he could trust Dean when his guard was down.

But it never happened.

Sammy’s unholy shrieks never stopped until Dean would back away, shaky, the sound echoing in his head. Each time he tried, Dean would last longer than he had before but never longer than Sam could hold out, his little brother's tireless yowls a relentless barrage of mindless alarm and panic. And then every time without fail, when Dean retreated, Sam would instantly go quiet and prowl, wary unblinking eyes staying fixed on him.

It was a tactic, Dean had realized.

Depending on his mood, this knowledge made Dean either furious or on the brink of despair. It was a tactic that worked so well on him. Every time. The desperate, piercing vocals of fear and terror from Sam were never going to be something Dean could ignore.

Today Sam had screeched and shook as predicted while Dean cornered him and put the zip-tie around his bony wrists. When he stepped away, Sam calmed. Dean felt guilty for the dark amusement he felt watching Sam's exaggerated movements looking down, squinting, an aggressive wriggling of his hands trying to part them at the wrist, then the full realization dawning that he was bound; Dean had bound him.

Dean wasn't so amused when Sam looked back up at him, his face ugly with hatred and fury.

Dean never seen his little brother with that look. It was pure and unhinged, a demon's mien, and it stole his breath away.

The look vanished then though, enraged roaring and screaming took its place. Sam ran around and knocked things over and clearly had no recollection how to simply swing his arms down with his elbows tucked to split the stupid thing. He was behaving like an animal caught and trapped and trying to escape with unthinking panic.

Dean didn't remove the ties. He couldn't; he wouldn't bring the sharp pliers near Sam until he calmed down.

Dean and Bobby were worried about Sam near sharp utensils and wouldn't allow it even when they were around and watchful. They just didn't want to risk hurting Sam (or Sam hurting himself) in any way. They knew if he did, Sam wouldn't understand; he might see blood and feel pain and think it was torture, and whatever trust gained between the three of them (and Dean and Bobby had to believe there was some) could be lost.

Sharp objects certainly included razors, and Sam's modest beard stood testament to their concerns. And now, regrettably, so was a zip-tie that Sam couldn't break on his own.

Dean had to leave the room as Sam was really getting underway. His body was a wrecking ball in a tornado when he got like this, crashing through nearly everything in the panic room. Dean swung the heavy door shut, closing watery eyes and sniffing as he slotted the metal viewer open. He opened his eyes to watch, make sure Sammy didn't hurt himself. He also grabbed the pliers off a shelf to the side of the door outside and pocketed them.

Sam raged on, wrists still bound.

Six weeks. In all that time neither Bobby nor Dean had been able to find it in their hearts to bind Sam down - to the cot, for instance, or in a straitjacket. They'd been loathe to even keep him locked in the panic room but they quickly realized leaving him free to the whole house served as a kind of sensory overload for him. He'd freak out over nothing they could discern and there were too many exits to the house - including windows - where a naked Sammy could bolt. And one afternoon just days after the re-souling, that's exactly what happened. Sam had been found shivering, naked on a stack of pallets in the alley behind a Sioux Falls post office. Bobby and Dean had driven like lightning to get there as soon as they heard the dispatch chatter but two deputies were already near the post office and made it to the scene first. Sam snapped and snarled at them when they came too close. They were at a loss of what to do about him when the Impala swerved into the alley, the two gruff men launching out to take over. Bobby had handled the two deputies as Dean had thrown a blanket over Sam, coaxed him into the Impala.

Shaken and reeling, they had taken Sam down to the panic room and spent hours with him there, patching up his cuts from the window glass he'd shattered when he'd jumped through it, guilty they had to keep him down there but knowing it was the only way to make sure this incident wouldn't be repeated. They did the room up as nice as possible. Power-washed it, got a big box mattress. Soft white sheets. A thick, cushy pillow. Plastic water bottles littered the area too. Dean and Bobby were on a constant cycle of bringing full ones down and the empties up.

Sam seemed completely indifferent about the relocation. Then they noticed a few improvements in his habits which simmered hope. He was using the bed, for example, and where before if Dean forgot to take him into the bathroom he wouldn't be able to make it in time but now Sam got up and used the toilet on his own. That was a big, big win.

So maybe the boundaries of the panic room were a good thing. But bindings had been out of the question. No cuffs, no straitjacket. They couldn't do that to him after what he'd suffered in the cage for eons, after having had his very soul shredded to ribbons by the literal devil. And they noticed that Sam never hurt them and didn't really hurt himself during his tirades so it wasn't actually necessary safety-wise.

They also never drugged him, although Bobby was starting to come around to the idea and Dean wouldn't be too difficult to persuade if things kept going the way they were. Sam needed to calm down sometimes.

But maybe these flimsy zip-ties, the first form of restraint Dean had used on his traumatized brother - but only because he thought Sam would handle them better, get out of them quick - would tucker him out. Maybe he'd shriek and snarl and jump, run, somersault and whatever other acrobatics he could try to reach an exhaustion point that'd get his guard down. Maybe far enough down Dean could catch a glimpse of... him, of Sammy. If he was still in there.

Dean's eyes pricked, his nose ran. It was this grief mingled with paralyzing terror that Sam was gone forever, his immortal soul so permanently scarred and altered there was nothing left of what Dean knew of it.

Dean blinked away tears, steadied his breath, and watched his brother wear himself out. He ended up in a heaving, sweaty heap lying in the corner, whimpering and writhing around, eyes fixed on the white plastic around his wrists in front of him. Despite the giant overhead propellers that served as ventilation, the air down there was still musty, stale, dry. Sam gulped, his breath hitching painfully. He continued to stare at his bindings, twitching and rocking his body on the floor in a mix between anxiety and what Dean figured to be self-soothing repetition.

Dean opened the door then, immediately going to the floor once he stepped inside. Sam didn't growl as much when Dean would do that.

He army-crawled to his brother. Sam shook and pressed deeper into the cement wall where it met the floor. His eyes were alert slits of suspicion as Dean closed the distance.

Sweat broke out over Dean's brow as he crept closer without much of a reaction from Sam. This was a huge first right now. The only other times Dean had made it this close to his brother, Sam was always wild and panicked and Dean was usually trying to restrain him. Sam hadn't been this calm near him since the re-souling.

Dean blanked out his mind, loosened the grip of fear that held him. But he knew any moment, this quiet between them could break apart, fly away off the rails before Dean could even think to do something with it. This was progress. This was magic.

Don't let go, Sam.

Dean reminded himself to breathe.

Sam's hands were bound by flimsy plastic in front of him as he lay on his side, huffing petulantly, his damp-from-sweat hair tangled and splayed out everywhere, beard straggly, lips chapped, but he was maintaining eye contact. His eyes were so clear, so much his little brother that it hurt deep in Dean's chest. Murky green, turquoise, patches of hazel, flecks of gold in brown, all fixed on him as though he were a stranger. Dean yearned to reach out and press the pads of his fingers to the side of Sam's face, smooth his hair, and just keep at it until Sam closed his eyes. Dean was so desperate for just that tiniest, simplest lesson of trust they might be able to experience.

Without taking his eyes off him and before he even knew what he was doing, Dean lifted a hand. Sam jerked back, shaking, looking between Dean and his hand like they were separate entities, one unpredictable and the other a snake uncoiling, rising to strike. Dean could see the countdown to panic so quickly he just went for the closest contact point between them and ended up petting Sam's arm.

It was awkward, maybe even comical if this wasn't such a desperate bid to build trust with a little brother who felt like the embodiment of the word 'trauma' right now. There was no equivalent in the human experience to the time Sam spent in hell with Lucifer. Dean knew this and in his darkest musings he wondered if trying to coax out any semblance of his Sammy was just added trauma. Hadn't he been through enough? Shouldn't Dean just let him rest, give him the necessities of life and otherwise leave the poor man to his own devices?

Dean's gut and heart always rebelled at that direction of thought. So he kept dragging his fingers gently along Sam's skin. Below the elbow, little strokes, barely there, and Sam had let out a yelp of shock and fear at first but he quieted into low breathy whimpers when he realized there was no pain. He stared at Dean's hand, eyes laser focused. He kept his whole body tense, strung like a bow and Dean realized he was doing the same.

Dean forced himself to relax. He gradually turned on his stomach, he let his legs stretch out, all while keeping a gentle watchful gaze on his brother, keeping his two fingers petting Sam's arm in an unbroken, slow rhythm.

After an interminable amount of time doing nothing else, Dean inwardly celebrated when he saw Sam start to take after him in relaxing. The steady strokes were calming, every sweet touch reinforcing Dean's presence as calm, as harmless.

---

There was a demon. It was lying down in front of Sam, petting him after having bound his wrists, and Sam didn't know its name but it was pathetic. It was always coming to him in this new hell, this round metal tube full of garbage. The demon seemed to be his keeper for the moment. Where had Lucifer gone? And what was this thing trying to do, crawling on the floor to him - trick him? Did it think he was that stupid?

The face was nice though, Sam thought detachedly. It was the first unmarred face he'd seen in ages. Another trick, no doubt, but a pleasant one to enjoy for just a moment. Same thing when the creature started touching him, stroking his arm with feather-light pressure, its fingers gentle, eyes wide open, hellish murky pits of... feelings that Sam couldn't place right now but he knew they existed out there somewhere, somewhere he was sure he couldn't touch, somewhere impossible. His heart twinged, his breath got shallow at the feeling of it, the feeling he couldn’t touch.

Sam discovered then that the demon was fast. It moved, cut the cord that bound his wrists so quickly Sam that barely saw the flash of the sharp metal that did it.

Sam made to launch up and scream this demon away again but then the touch came back, quick as anything on his arms and then down to his hands. Sam watched, eyes wide and following every moment of the demon's gentle, simple caresses as though any moment a knife would materialize and slice pain down him just as soft and pretty and elegant.

When it never came, when the demon finally just got up and left, Sam was starting to think the demon must be sick or infirm. There was something deeply wrong with it.

Looking at the door after it, Sam didn't understand the salty water on his cheeks. He rubbed the wet off until his skin was dry but his face still hurt. His body was numb as always. The demon's touches burned though. They haunted him.

---

"Sounds like progress," Bobby concluded after Dean had filled him in. He was leaning against one of his bookshelves. "So what're you being sulky for?"

Dean bit his lip, staring at nothing as he perched on a stack of books against the wall. He clicked his tongue. "Think something might be wrong with his eyes, maybe."

"Why's that?"

Dean shrugged. "He still doesn't recognize me."

Bobby sighed. After a healthy silence honoring Dean's disappointment, he finally spoke. "People think we see with our eyes. And sure, if we lose our eyeballs, we won't see. But there's another way to disrupt eyesight and every other sense God gave ya."

Dean thought a moment before nodding with understanding. Bobby continued. "Psychological trauma can mess with what you see, hear, smell, taste..."

Dean clenched his jaw and wiped his face with his hands. "Yeah."

“Makes you wonder how much of reality Sam’s actually perceiving right now.”

"And what he remembers," Bobby added significantly. That Sam might not, might never remember Dean went unsaid but they were both thinking it.

Dean shook his head clear. "No. Doesn't matter. He can make new memories of me," he said confidently. But his eyes glistened. Bobby broke out a second bottle of whiskey.

To Be Continued...

Tumblr link to Chapter 2 || Available on AO3 A/N: 😢 Thank you so much for reading! Please like, comment, reblog if you can spare the time 💛🤗 ~ Alex

6 notes · View notes

mistakenot4892 · 4 years ago

Text

Some thoughts of Heart of Deimos.

I made a reddit post but I thought I might repost it here and see if the response is any different. Mild spoilers for Heart of Deimos, the most recent Warframe update, under the cut.

First off, this is a bit of an effortpost, and it will be quite meandering and confused, sorry about that. We are now two days into Heart of Deimos and I had some thoughts I wanted to put on paper as it were. There's a TL;DR at the bottom.

The Bad:

In all honesty, taking into account the usual DE release-then-fix cycle and the quick patching they've already done to things like the Son token costs, there's very little about this update that I think is objectively bad. Deimos might be the single best open world release of the set, lack of a catchy musical number aside. It's not any buggier than any other release, which may say more about DE's QA than anything, but I have fallen through the map a few times, and host migrations have broken multiple vault runs.

The combined token system is a pretty big departure from the other open worlds, and I found it very confusing initially. Without the prior context of using Ticker for bonds in Fortuna, I think it would be really opaque, particularly for new players who aren't already up to speed on how the open world resource loops are expected to work. Alongside the complex token system, it's also understandable that people are frustrated with the expectation that they -must- participate in mining, fishing and conservation to get the tokens, since these don't really leverage the well developed aspects of gameplay.

The initial quest was lackluster from a storytelling perspective, with some really nonsensical events, a lack of development for each individual beat, and a frustrating lack of building on the already existing lore in favour of introducing new lore. It was pretty blatantly a tour of the zone mechanics, though maybe we'll see a more engaging plot when the equivalent of the Profit Taker and Exploiter bounties are introduced over the next year. The new warframe being dropped in by Mother as an afterthought, without a scrap of context, almost felt worse than the way previous quests have just given us the blueprint with no explanation at all. Protea's quest felt a lot clearer so it's disheartening to see them taking a step back there.

Finally, prior to finding the Albrecht lore I thought the playable content of the update was quite short and uninteresting.

The Good:

The Family voice acting is really, really good. Some of the writing is a bit iffy in the classic overwrought DE sense (which IMO is charmingly earnest anyway) but the delivery is fantastic, and while initially I was put off by the characters being shallow, I came around on it - I will go into more detail under 'The Ugly'.

With regards to the grind: even though the resources from the open world minigames are mandatory, participation isn't - so far I've run conservation exactly once, for about an hour, and I am clear for the third rank up with the Entrati. The world drops and bounty loot are more than enough to cover the vast majority of other costs, which is honestly fantastic. For all the complaining, DE has definitely learned from PoE and Fortuna with regards to letting people dictate their own playstyle without handicapping their progress. You can focus down specific requirements with specific minigames, no trouble, or you can just play bounties and run and gun your way to incidental loot. The combined token system was really confusing initially but combined with the incidental drops it makes progression quite organic without forcing you to spend your time on any particular task (looking at you, pre-Thumper PoE). There also seems to be a pretty solid spawn chance for tokens in the caves of the open world, and since the rank ups are now 1 of each kind of token instead of 10, this is possibly now a feasible way to skip the conservation grind entirely.

With regards to the lore: despite my earlier complaint about narrative quality and disconnection, DE does seem to be tying Parvos, the Entrati and the Glassmaker together, which is interesting. Prior to finding the Necraloid area and hearing the excellent Albrecht Vitruvian lore (seriously, mad props to the writers and the VA, the fourth log gives me powerful Darkest Dungeon narration vibes) I was ready to drop the game until a few patches and more content was added, but now I'm fully willing to grind for a couple weeks to hear the rest. I'm curious to see where they will go with the Heart and the Man in the Wall, particularly in regards to stuff like the reliquary drive and how it relates to the Necraloids and pre-warframe Orokin technology in general.

The Ugly:

The Family are the ugly, get it? This bit is mostly just because I want to talk about the new characters and the themes of Warframe as a narrative.

There's a kind of tension around the family that I initially found offputting - here we have a family of immortal alien gods who made their name ripping secrets from the flesh of reality, literally sprouting from the meat flowers of an infested moon... and they act like the cast of Arrested Development, switching between lofty poetic proclamations and petty squabbling that wouldn't be out of place on a sitcom. At first it seemed like it was just bad writing. Over time though, with exposure to the wider plot and the various deeper interactions, I started to warm to it. It's really interesting how DE has juxtaposed the deformed appearance of the Entrati, their perfect-marble-statue-like Orokin aesthetic, the pulsating infestation, and this very human, very relatable behavior. It really pulls back the skin on the Orokin as a people and uses a bit of clever metanarrative to show us that even the Tenno remember the Orokin as being more than human, when they were just as flawed as anyone else.

The individual characters felt very shallow at first, like cardboard cutouts of the typical family transplanted into a blob of writhing meat, but the pleasant surprise of the relationships mending between Entrati rank-ups and the subtle undercurrents you start to notice when interacting with them over a longer timeline really turned that on its head. There's some really excellent combinations of writing and delivery that add subtleties to each character, like the Daughter's undercurrent of thirst for either the Tenno or for butchering mutant fish, or the animalistic yearning of the Son and his bleeding heart hidden under the callous and cruel facade.

Family, parenthood and belonging are arguably the core themes of Warframe's narrative - the Tenno are orphan children clinging to a single parental figure who herself is a stolen child, while their allies like the Ostrons and the Solaris are people who cling to their human connections and their shared culture despite outside forces, and draw their strength from each other. The grand enemies of the setting are collectivist empires who have shredded their humanity in pursuit of strength and profit respectively. Then you have the Orokin, whose grand flaw is hubris in isolation, and a deliberate abandonment of shared humanity in pursuit of impossible perfection. The entire Parvos questline related to blood, with Nef wanting to abuse it for gain and Parvos denouncing him. Even the Sentients, arguably the only alien culture in the setting, love their families and oppose the Orokin and by extension the Tenno largely in defense of their people.

DE has leaned hard on quite creepy, quite -relatable- strangeness to give the Family depth, which helps reinforce that they're demigods of a dead empire, even if they are also quite friendly and personable. It lends some real weight to the way the Orokin have been depicted as cruel, hollow people, since we now have direct evidence of how their culture and the expectations of their various roles tear at those interpersonal connections. There's a lot of heart and clear work put into developing these themes, and I think that it's a bit sad that the quality of the writing is frequently overlooked in the broader Warframe community in favour of focusing on the flashy mechanics and cool new novel features. DE's writers are some of the best in mainstream video gaming currently, and even with my complaints about the main quest earlier, this consistent ongoing thematic cohesion and the variety of individually good beats more than make up for incoherent feature-driven storytelling.

TL;DR:

Despite some teething issues and bugs Heart of Deimos might be the best open world update so far, the way DE presents the Family and develops on the overarching themes of the story are pretty excellent, and I am excited to see where they go with it. Thanks for reading my incoherent and largely irrelevant thought-spew. Have a good one.

#warframe #heart of deimos #rambling diatribe #I have no qualifications just many opinions

2 notes · View notes

silvershoelaces · 4 years ago

Text

HPWU: A One Year Retrospective

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite turned one year old last month, and over the past year, it has improved a lot.

This review is looking at HPWU as a standalone game, devoid of the context of the book series, any views of its author, the movies and spinoffs, or any other media associated with the Harry Potter franchise. I have plenty of opinions thereof, but they are not directly relevant to my opinions of the game and how it functions.

The game at its core is not particularly inventive, and at the beginning of its first year, it mostly felt like a reskin of Pokemon Go. Spawns appear on the screen based on a map that a player traverses in real space, and players must tap on the spawns and then attempt to collect them in order to complete their collections. But instead of catching Pokemon to fill the Pokedex, players are rescuing “foundables” from “confoundables” to fill their stamp collections. Unlike Pokemon Go, multiple copies of each foundable must be collected in order to acquire the stamp, and once the entire page of stamps is collected, it can be prestiged in order to start the whole process over again.

Traversing the world, though, can prove to be complicated in anywhere but the most urban of areas. I live in an urban area, close to my local downtown, and at the game’s inception, I had to walk pretty far in order to complete my daily F2P chores each day. See, all of the POIs (points of interest) on the map are auto-generated from the data in Niantic’s original game, Ingress, and each POI is randomly assigned to one of three types. Inns, where players can acquire spell energy, are the most common. Next are greenhouses, where players can acquire potionmaking ingredients and occasionally, more spell energy. And the least common of these POIs is fortresses, which allow players to enter timed dungeons either by themselves or with other players to fight baddies and get prizes for their efforts.

The randomness of assigning each of these three types of POI is a real drag for many players. When the game was first released, I had two greenhouses and one fortress reasonably close to my home. This was enough to play the game, as greenhouses also occasionally awarded spell energy just like inns, except that the dailies explicitly required me to interact with two inns each day in order to get any premium currency. And as I mentioned, the assortment of POIs was completely random! Some players found themselves with nothing but fortresses around, while others had only inns and no fortresses for multiple kilometers. I considered myself relatively fortunate that I only had to walk 1 km to get to a nearby inn!

But unlike Pokemon Go, while the game encourages exploring, the core mechanics are not well suited to walking. In Go, a rare spawn can be easily subdued in 1-2 attempts, and curveballs are quick and easy to throw. In HPWU, the rarer the spawn, the more difficult it is to capture, and the more likely it is to run away. Foundables are captured by tracing patterns on the screen, and they all have a rather low acquisition rate, which means the rare ones are more likely to flee than to stay put unless the player pours consumable items into their capture. And even so, a player having to trace the same pattern multiple times just to capture a single spawn means that there is much more time standing in one place and less time walking. This is not an exercise game.

And this is one of the core flaws that has plagued Wizards Unite since its inception. It’s a clone of Pokemon Go, but every single mechanic that differs from Pokemon Go brings it further away from Go’s vision of an exercise game. Wizards Unite is an augmented reality exploration game, but it’s more about exploring a story and a setting than about racking up burned calories. This is especially apparent in limited-time events that encourage players to spend multiple hours standing still by the same POI, challenging hordes of enemies.

Monthly Community Day events aside, the regular cycle of in-game events was fun and engaging at first, but it quickly grew dull as players finished the main story quest and found the primary content of the game to be the fortnightly events. This is always a struggle for F2P games, especially games that rely on collections rather than PVP mechanics. The events weren’t even new content, merely recolored versions of content that already existed in the games, spawning much more frequently than other foundables and with featured spawn rates. What was fun in the game’s first few months had quickly become tedious, especially when the featured foundables had low catch rates.

Despite this stagnation, the game has changed over time, and many improvements have been made. The tonic for trace detection, a craftable potion that allows players to summon foundables to wherever they are, was long overdue when it was introduced into the game, allowing players who were less mobile to encounter more foundables when they had time to play. Inns and greenhouses were rebalanced so that inns in less urban areas dropped more spell energy, and greenhouses’ spell energy became guaranteed, rather than a 50% drop rate, which was an important improvement for areas with a low POI density and an active playerbase. Adventure Sync was added, which allows the game to track steps. (Unfortunately, this feature does not function well, as the steps counted toward daily tasks only begin after the player’s daily login bonus, and AdSync requires the game to have access to the player’s GPS while the game is closed, which drains phone battery in the background. Players who already have AdSync enabled for Pokemon Go will not notice much difference.)

The most significant overhaul, of course, came with the onset of coronavirus. In order to allow players to continue playing from their homes, the daily requirement to interact with inns was removed, and the Knight Bus, which allows players to remotely access fortress challenges and even engage with other players remotely, was implemented. I have found that the implementation of the Knight Bus almost single-handedly revived my interest in the game when I had grown completely bored of it, as it was a lot more fun to play fortress challenges with friends, which I had barely been able to do before, than to play the game solo.

But these improvements also serve to highlight the flaws in this game that have not been improved since its release. Trace completion always takes a particular shape, and its right-handed bias is clear the moment one attempts to complete a trace off-handed. The swirl of Ebublio, in particular, which takes an “e” shape, feels much more natural in the counter-clockwise direction in the right hand than in the left. Mirroring traces in a left-handed or “mirror” mode would be an easy fix!

SOS assignments have not been updated since day one of the game, and they have said “new assignments coming soon” since I completed them. In my first few months of playing, that was the real draw of the game for me, finishing the story quest and continuing on to the next page to see what would happen next. Each event feels like filler, while what would have made the most sense would have been to add four or five new pages of story quests every few months or so. And they (and all other events) aren’t replayable, so when WB/Niantic/whoever is responsible finally gets around to adding them, we’ll all have forgotten what happened. I already don’t remember.

Finally, the entire story as a whole, which is told as a haphazard, shoddy, zigzagging extra flavor to the repetitive, bland events, could have been told with just a week or even a day of gameplay in a regular game. “What is causing this calamity?” the characters ask. “I don’t know, but let’s patch the problem and investigate the cause later. Maybe the identity of the next problem that arises will give us a clue.” The game relies on half a dozen characters who show up just to give the player instructions, and it is somewhat over-reliant on the draw of the property to encourage players to invest themselves in the game. This is not good for a game that is mostly divorced from the primary story of its franchise. Assuming I knew nothing about Harry Potter or his universe before playing this game, and even if I do, there are way too many characters, and no documented point of reference for a player to look at for a reminder. The main characters seem to be Constance Pickering and Hermione Granger, with a splash of Harry Potter and a pinch of Ron Weasley thrown in. Their commentary doesn’t add much to my engagement because it’s the same mildly curious “I wonder what’s causing this” speculation we’ve had since the beginning.

Good stuff appears to be coming soon. The strongest aspect of the game is the ability to customize one’s character with an ability tree, which lends more variety to the way players can interact with the fortress challenges. An upcoming update is set to add this customization to the map screen, which may give this game the new life it so sorely needs.

All in all, judging Wizards Unite by its gameplay and content alone, and divorcing it from the source material, I’d rate it a C+. The game isn’t sure what it wants to be. It advertises itself as an exploration game, but punishes walking and rewards standing still. Adventure Sync once again rewards walking, this time when the game is closed, but the player is again punished, this time by severe battery drain. The game leans heavily on its story, but the story falls short due to poor updates and over-reliance on events to tease rather than deliver new story elements.

And of course, if we are to judge the game based primarily on its being an entry into the Harry Potter franchise, then we must begin to judge it on the merits and flaws of the franchise as a whole, which is a discussion for another day. If we don’t measure it against the franchise, there is much in the game that will be confusing to a player unfamiliar with the series. Who are these people, and why are we rescuing them? Why are we rescuing this one man some of the time, and attacking him other times? Four of the six pages of stamps feature characters from the franchise heavily. Players who aren’t invested in the franchise won’t care too much about them.

To someone who isn’t interested in the Harry Potter franchise, or to someone who was previously interested but has become disillusioned with the author of the series, I recommend you pass on this game. However, longtime fans who can still derive pleasure from the series, who separate the creator from the creation, or who view this and other derivative works as their own entries, created by teams rather than by the one who started it all, may enjoy this game.

#harry potter wizards unite #hpwu #mobile games #reviews #long post

1 note · View note

thesevenseraphs · 5 years ago

Text

Bungie Weekly Update 7/25/19

This week at Bungie, things are heating up for Solstice of Heroes. The next big beat for Season of Opulence is almost upon us. Solstice of Heroes is bringing new Moments of Triumph to complete and a new title for Guardians to earn. You’ll also be challenged to upgrade a Solstice of Heroes armor set by completing various objectives throughout Destiny 2. If you missed our Solstice of Heroes 2019 announcement article yesterday, make sure to check it out. We have a cool trailer to go with it!

youtube

If you have what it takes to fully upgrade your armor set to the Legendary tier, you’ll also find an armor 2.0 version of you Solstice of Heroes set at the Gunsmith when Shadowkeep launches. While the event begins next week, Lord Saladin didn’t want you sitting idle. The Iron Banner is in full swing, bringing Power-enabled PvP combat back into the fold. If you’re hunting advanced perks on Legendary armor, be sure to complete Saladin’s bounties and quest line. A few changes are coming next week for both that quest and a certain wolf-themed weapon, so let’s get to it.

COMMEMORATIVE

Sometimes there are weapons that bring a bit of chaos to the meta. The weekend of Prometheus Lens, otherwise known as “Laser Tag Weekend,” is a great example. Lord of Wolves also falls into this category. Next week, Destiny 2 Update 2.5.2 will reign in the wolves a bit by reducing the amount of ammo Guardians pick up and toning down the effective range of the weapon. As promised last month, we’ve created an emblem and Triumph for those who braved the wolves during the Season of Opulence. Next week, qualifying players will receive a “Lost History” package at the postmaster, which will unlock a unique Triumph. Once the Triumph is claimed, the emblem will be granted.

To qualify for the “Wolves Unleashed” emblem, players must have finished an Iron Banner match between 10 AM PDT June 18 and 10 AM PDT June 25 2019 or between 10 AM PDT July 23 and 10 AM PDT July 30 2019.

Additionally, we’ve created an emblem for those who embraced the madness back in 2017, when skulls were melted during the reign of Prometheus Lens.

To qualify for the “Prismatic Inferno” emblem, players must have finished a Crucible match between 10 AM PST December 8 and 10 AM PST December 12 2017. While we don’t intend for these chaotic micro-events to happen, it can be an exciting time when things get a little crazy. We hope these emblems bring fond memories of the battlefield. Who knows—maybe a new weapon will dominate the Crucible come Shadowkeep. Only time will tell.

TWO FIVE TWO

As mentioned above, Destiny 2 Update 2.5.2 will be released next week, kicking off Solstice of Heroes and bringing some balance to Lord of Wolves. There will also be a few more changes and fixes within the update that have been highly requested by the community. Here’s a quick preview of what’s to come:

Lord of Wolves

Reducing the amount of ammo Shotgun scavenger perks can give to Lord of Wolves when in the Release the Wolves state

Decreasing the effective range on Lord of Wolves

This decrease is more aggressive when in the Release the Wolves state

Tribute Hall

Tribute Hall Triumphs for “The Emperor’s Gladiator” and “Scoundrel in Uniform” will no longer require a full set of Leviathan gear equipped to progress

Players will earn more points based on the number of gear pieces worn, similar to other Triumphs

Iron Banner

Iron Banner quest objective values will been adjusted for future events

Reducing grenade kills required by 50%, and ally grenade kills will be worth as much as your own

Reducing Sword kills required by 25%, and ally sword kills will be worth as much as your own

Menagerie/Chalice

Heroic Menagerie will drop a Sword for first time completion (100%)

Subsequent completions will have a moderate chance to drop a sword (25%)

General

Fixing an issue where completion notifications did not appear after completing bounties

This will also fix an issue where players would sometimes not spawn during a Crucible match

There will be additional bug fixes and general updates, so stay tuned to @BungieHelp for patch notes when the download becomes available next Tuesday.

PATCH PREP

Some call them detectives, others see them as bug exterminators. Destiny Player Support is on the case, bringing you vital information to keep you up to speed when downloading and installing Destiny 2 Update 2.5.2.

This is their report.

Destiny 2 Update 2.5.2

Next Tuesday, on July 30, Update 2.5.2 will roll out to all players in Destiny 2. This update will mark the beginning to Solstice of Heroes, and is required in order to access Destiny 2 once it has been deployed. Listed below is the release timeline for this update.

Tuesday, July 30:

9 AM PDT (1600 UTC): Destiny 2 maintenance will begin. Destiny Companion features will be taken offline.

9:45 AM PDT (1645 UTC): Destiny 2 will be taken offline. All players will be returned to the title screen.

10 AM PDT (1700 UTC): Destiny 2 will be back online. Maintenance will be ongoing. Update 2.5.2 will begin rolling out across all platforms and regions.*

11 AM PDT (1800 UTC): Maintenance will conclude. Destiny Companion features will be back online. Solstice of Heroes will begin.

*Players on console who are taking an abnormally long time to receive this update should try updating manually. Follow the links below for instructions on how to accomplish this:

Manually Updating Destiny on PS4

Manually Updating Destiny on Xbox One

Players who still do not see this update may wish to try power cycling their console hardware. To do this, players should:

Completely power down the console. Ensure that the device is not in rest mode.

Unplug the console from its power source.

Wait five minutes.

Plug back in and try again.

If the update is available, it should begin downloading automatically after power cycling the console hardware. If not, players may wish to try manually checking for this update once more before resorting to another power cycle. For live updates, players should follow @BungieHelp on Twitter or monitor our support feed at help.bungie.net. For patch notes when they become available, players should stay tuned to our Updates page.

Vital Information: Emperor’s Gladiator Triumph

This week, Iron Banner has returned and bonus Valor is active in all Crucible playlists. Players should be aware that the Tribute Hall Triumph “Emperor’s Gladiator,” which requires players to earn Valor from the Crucible while wearing Calus gear, does not gain extra progress while bonus Valor is active. Players will continue to earn progress toward this Triumph; however, progress will be applied at its normal rate.

Destiny 2: Season of Opulence Known Issues

Listed below are the latest player-impacting issues discovered in Season of Opulence, as reported by players to the #Help forum.

Crucible Invisibility: We have identified an issue causing some players to appear nearly invisible intermittently during Crucible matches. This issue is expected to be resolved in Destiny 2 Update 2.5.2 next week.

Strike Loading: We have identified an issue causing players to sometimes get stuck with "Loading" on their screen during strike activities. This issue is expected to be resolved in Destiny 2 Update 2.5.2 next week.

For the latest gameplay issues as soon as they are discovered, players should visit our Destiny 2: Season of Opulence Known Issues thread. For archived known issues, players should visit our Destiny 2 Known Issues support article.

#Destiny #Destiny 2 #Destiny 2: Forsaken #Bungie Weekly Update #long post

20 notes · View notes

thesoupoftheafternoon · 6 years ago

Text

6.5ish years T, 5.5ish years post top

Updating because of a surprise revelation regarding my dose & how it relates to my mental health. Also because I haven't posted on this for two years!

First off, general changes. Dose stuff at the end. (TL;DR dose stuff--by accident I lowered my dose by .1 mL and despite never having felt much of a difference mood-wise from changing my dose before, I feel fucking great and actually happy for the first time in a while! Surprise, your levels should also take into account your age and you shouldn't use the same reference range for the whole time you're on T!)

Under cut--this is mad long. [And cw for mental health talk including v mild suicide ideation, also alcohol/drugs]

T stuff:

I posted pretty much the same thing last time, but I'll reiterate that the vast majority of these changes are basically subtle things that no one else notices and that probably have more to do with just getting older/diet/exercise than being on T. My facial hair range is exactly the same as it was two years ago (literally just ‘stache and chin directly below the mouth) which checks out based on my dad/my entire family. I shave about once a week. Happy trail a little bit happier, lil more arm hair, lil more leg hair. Haven't been checking super closely but I think I have more hair around my butthole. Dick size is the same. Appetite has dropped a bunch--I can't scarf down food the way I used to. I’m read as male all the time, haven’t been misgendered based on my appearance since like 2013. 120-125ish pounds.

Chest stuff: (I had keyhole btw)

Nipple sensation is back, I repeat, nipple sensation is BACK! They're healthy and super perky, which I used to be kinda insecure about since they stick out a bit, but also like, who gives a shit? I would say they feel about 90% as sensitive as they were before surgery, and after a bit of touching they do start feeling a little less sensitive, but they never go completely numb. I'd say they've been at this level of sensation since early 2017. Left nipple is more sensitive than my right. My right nipple used to kinda bulge outward on the bottom but I guess the scar tissue has broken down somewhat since it's lying a lot flatter these days. The numb chest patches are smaller and way less numb and it takes less pressure for them to register touch. Drain scars look kinda like bug bite scars. Under-areola scars are very hidden, basically invisible.

Lower surgery??

It’s on my mind but it’s always been a little on my mind. It’s not a priority. A hysto/oopho may be in order someday. But I’ve been thinking about what I want my junk to look like and be like as I get older, and whether my current setup and how I relate to it is going to be sustainable. I genuinely don’t know whether I would rather get metoidioplasty or phalloplasty. There’s a lot more thinking to be done.

Dose stuff:

I started T in 2012 with .5 injections every other week. With 200 mg/mL that averages out to 50 mg of T per week, although I'm sure my levels were different from someone on a weekly schedule. Around the 2.5 year mark my bloodwork came back saying I had super low T. I upped my dose to .5 every week, so 100 mg/week (which is famously a pretty common dose, there's even some trans merch company called .5cc.) Over the next year or two (I really don't remember exactly when) my bloodwork showed me now at very high T levels, nearly and in some cases exceeding the upper threshold of my doctors' reference ranges, so I lowered my dose to .4 and then to .3 mL/week, or 80 and then 60 mg/week. Of course I worried about T aromatizing into E, but my doctor at the time didn't test my blood for estradiol until I had already reduced my dose down to .4, and said my E levels were fine (I don't remember the exact number.)

Even at 60 mg/week my T levels were still high. I and my doctors chalked it up to the fact that I work out a lot and/or maybe my body was just like that The general consensus was that "if your period isn't coming back, your E levels are fine," usually followed with some question like “how are you feeling on this dose?” or “are you feeling good?”

And what I kinda knew then then, but what’s even clearer to me now, is that I HAD NO FUCKING IDEA. My I-guess-it’s-anxiety, my on-and-off idk-if-it's-depression, my garbage sleep cycle, my self-doubt and second-guessing and skewed perspectives, have all been around in some form or another, so it's very hard for me to parse out what I'm even Really Feeling sometimes, never mind what might be causing that feeling. For the last several years if I felt bad I would usually conclude one of the following:

I feel bad because I’m actually a shitty person and feeling bad is natural for how bad and awful a person I am.

I feel bad because the world is fucked and society is crumbling and feeling bad is natural for how literally everything we love will be swallowed by the sea and/or be salted and burned in worldwide conflict.

Which is obviously not conducive to trying to figure out any other external factors or triggers for my shitty mental health!!

Plus it’s not like I was exactly excited to have less testosterone in my body. I was genuinely nervous that lowering my dose lower than .3 a week would just be an experiment that wouldn’t do anything except make me less buff and maybe even bring back my period. And I’d always been a little skeptical about the extent of hormonal effects on mood. T certainly affected my mood positively when I started, that was an obvious cause/effect, but I figured (and still do think) that had SO much more to do with finally being seen as a guy and having a masculine body than any sort of direct T-on-brain action. I did notice some increased irritability, but it wasn't much, and also I was still 16 lol. I noticed changes over the course of months or years--never within the course of a week. I can’t relate at all to folks who talk about spikes or troughs in their levels or getting a rush or feeling low based on where they were in their shot cycle. So I'd always tell doctors that I felt fine on whatever dose I was on because, well...I guess I felt fine!!

For the last several months--maybe the last year and a half, tbh--my mental health has been pretty bad. Over the course of any given day, the things I felt were generally limited to annoyance, panic, self-pity, drunk, stoned, and horny, and usually in that order. And that's a relative statement, because I'm pretty functional and haven't ever hit clinical levels of whatever, have always been able to find enjoyment in some things and get endorphins from exercise and complete necessary tasks on time, but hey, if you're reading this and feel like it's normal to constantly have "I hate myself, I fucking suck, why don't I just die" churning around in your head even if you're "not going to act on it," or that it's normal to drink and smoke weed until you basically pass out 6 days out of 7, or that it's normal to feel convinced every bit of positive affirmation you're getting is out of pity, Honey You've Got A Big Storm Coming. Like, again, considering how shit awful our current sociopolitical climate (and also the literal Earth's climate) are, it's no surprise I felt these were understandable feelings, and like, I guess they kind of were? But just because a feeling is understandable doesn't mean it's a good thing that I'm having it. Which seems remarkably obvious in hindsight!

Anyway, about a month ago I underestimated how much was left in my vial and had to do a .2 mL shot instead of .3. That's 40 mg for that week: even lower of a dose than when I started T. As the week went on I noticed I actually felt consistently happy: not just "someone's giving me attention," not just "nihilistic fun," not just "I guess the things I'm looking at right now are pretty," but actually satisfied, content, grounded, having emotions that felt like they came FROM ME.

And since I’m always one to consider alternative explanations, there’s plenty of other factors that might have led to this improved mood. When I lowered my dose, I had just gotten accepted to two new jobs. I’d met up with friends I hadn’t seen in a while. But it’s not as though before I lowered my dose I never felt happy. It just never stuck around. These days I’m able to retain a positive emotion beyond the precipitating event and not just have the same boring self-hating thoughts over and over again. Which is huge!! I feel like I’ve really broken the thought cycle that’s defined much of my thinking for the last few years. So many of my emotions have been about my emotions, and a big part of why I felt so awful was feeling so helpless against these thoughts, and understanding completely deep down that it was irrational, that it really didn’t make any sense for me to feel this awful. That of course tapped horribly into my endless guilt complex and fed it and it just went on and on.

I haven’t gotten my levels tested again yet--that’ll happen later this month. (My doctor knows and is cool with this reduced dose.) I’m especially interested to see where my estradiol will be at. My T will probably be more reasonable for someone my age--I feel like my crazy 1000+ ng/dL T levels were okay when I was like 19-20 but now that I’m a whole 23 years old (yo!!!) it makes sense they should be a little lower. I’m not a doctor, though--but then again, real ass certified doctors have made hashes of my medical care in the past, so I’m comfortable trusting myself a little on this one.

General life update and thoughts on being trans in this world:

I’m much more relaxed and much more okay with being trans these days. Comes with being a lot more sure about myself and who I am, which is a continuous process and one that was happening even before I lowered my dose and was suddenly way less depressed. While I still get hives at the thought of anyone outing me without my permission, I’m a lot more comfortable outing myself to people, even large groups of people, even folks who I might not really know. I’ve come to appreciate the parts of me that are definitely and absolutely because I am trans or that reveal I am trans, and the connections I can make with people by sharing those parts of me.

I’m not sure I’d say I have a career at this point, but definitely most of the work I’m doing these days is in social justice, non-profit, LGBTQ-related, activist work. My resume more or less outs me as at the very least a deeply committed trans ally, lol. I think growing up and realizing I was trans I hated the thought that it would define who I was and what I did. I didn’t want to touch activism or trans spaces in general with a trillion-foot pole.

I’ve since gotten over myself and like...let myself enjoy things, I guess? I really do find nonprofit work super rewarding and I finally admitted to myself I fucking love chilling with other trans people and talking about trans shit and that I do love, if not the fact that I And My Body Am Trans, the existence of community and the thoughts and ideas that we share. And a lot of the time I do like my body. And I’m kinda ready for this newfound happiness to stop feeling so fresh and exciting, because I know it’s a bit weird and inappropriate to be talking about how happy I am that I feel great when, again, The World’s Some Shit Right Now.

But I think in general--not just about being trans--I’m letting myself feel the happiness that I have, with so much less guilt and shame. I always knew intellectually but am finally putting into practice the fact that simply denying myself happiness or feeling bad that I feel happy doesn’t bring happiness to folks who don’t have it.

that’s it for now !

#ftm #testosterone #top surgery #transgender #trans man

4 notes · View notes

edsbrak · 7 years ago

Photo

CH 1 | CH 2 | CH 3 | CH 4 Coming Soon

Read on Ao3 | New Kid AU

It's senior year and Eddie is determined to get through it with ease while also scared about what awaits him on the other side. But then a new kid arrives in town and turns Eddie's life completely upside down, in ways he never would have expected.

Tags: Modern Setting, Strangers To Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Coming Of Age

Chapter 1: New Kid On The Block (3.8k)

Life in Derry, to say the least, was quiet.

Some might say that equals to boring, some would argue that it was untouched paradise. But to most, in the end, all simply agree that it was their town, nothing special, and for one Eddie Kaspbrak that was enough.

“Eddie dear, you’re going to be late for your first day back,” calls Mrs. Kaspbrak from the bottom of the stairs.

“Coming ma!” yells Eddie, before he turns to look at himself in the mirror one last time.

It was their final year of high school and Eddie has already counted up the days until their sweet release into freedom. Eddie thinks if it weren’t for his best friends Bill and Stan high school life may have been a less than average one. He was in the middle of the spectrum – not popular nor an outcast, just someone who would do what was expected of him, no more, no less.

Eddie runs his fingers through his mop of hair again, watching as the almost-curls bounce back into place and wondering if he should cut it.

His clothes, once colourful and daring when he was younger, were now a basic washed-out jeans and button down shirt combo. Eddie found by not drawing attention to himself around town, he could get through life a little bit easier. It was better this way, regardless of moments when he felt as if his heart was made of lead and pumping out ice-cold water.

“Eddie, hurry up!”

With a sigh he picks up his backpack and steps out of his room, down the stairs to where his mother is waiting for him by the front door.

“I can drive you to school, pumpkin. I don’t want to be getting a late call from your teacher,” she says warningly.

“No, ma, I’m fine. I’ll just take the shortcut if I have to,” says Eddie.

She eyes him warily before finally kissing his forehead and handing him his packed lunch. “Okay. Be careful please. And don’t forget to give the school nurse your updated medication list.”

“I know,” says Eddie lowly, pecking his mother’s cheek and leaving the house quickly.

“Don’t be back too late!” calls Mrs. Kaspbrak, and Eddie hears their front door finally click shut.

Eddie scuffs his shoes on the sidewalk and hikes his heavy bag around to sit more comfortably on his shoulders. The morning rush in Derry always happens at 8 o’clock sharp, every day, and so his walks to school were frequently quiet ones. A car or two might drive by, or someone might be walking their dog, but at this time, the streets belonged to Eddie.

He wanders into the middle of the road, knowing full well if his mother were here she’d be screaming profanities up the wazoo. It was one of Eddie’s less than impactful rebellious schemes, but it was his own, and he likes that.

“Oh, shit!”

That was the only warning Eddie gets before a bike swerves out in front of him and just barely manages to miss a full-frontal collision. Eddie can only step back slightly when it happens, too shocked to react any faster, and watches helplessly as the rider comes to an unskilled stop at the curb and nearly falls right off his bike.

“Jesus,” the guy – a teenager, Eddie observes – exclaims worriedly, and turns to face Eddie. “Dude, why were you in the middle of the road? You got a death wish or something?”

Eddie startles, only mildly registering the edge of bitterness in the boy’s tone, and focuses more on the wild mane of black hair and the worn through leather jacket with a Clash patch on his sleeve. His dark eyes were pinned on Eddie, brows furrowed, and it’s not until an impatient gesture is made that finally Eddie answers him.

“Sorry,” he says, feet still rooted in place. “I didn’t think being the only moving thing on the road would throw you off that much. I’ll be more careful next time.”

The boy gives him an incredulous look and scoffs as he shakes his head shallowly. “What the hell, man.”

Finally Eddie steps over to the boy, taking in every detail he can; from his black converse to the chain dangling from his pocket, the scab’s on his knuckles and the splatter of freckles across his face. He was undoubtedly attractive, which somehow pisses Eddie off for reason’s he can’t quite place.

“Wanna take a picture?” asks the boy as he straightens out his bike.

“I’ve never seen you before,” says Eddie.

“Why Mr. Holmes, I didn’t expect to run into you in this lifetime. And I’m not surprised – you probably inadvertently kill a bunch of people before you get the chance to meet them,” he says, only half-heartedly.

“Funny,” says Eddie before he steps away and begins his walk again to school.

There’s a brief lapse of silence until he hears a “Hey, wait!” and a bike peddling behind him. Eddie doesn’t slow his pace, and debates ignoring this boy as he comes up to ride alongside him obnoxiously.

“You’re heading this way too?” the boy asks, and Eddie spares him a glance. “Think of me as an escort – so you don’t accidently hurt anyone else.”

Eddie swallows down his remark and rubs absently at his nose. Ten more minutes until he’ll reach the school grounds, and he doesn’t think he can handle listening to this guy talk the entire time there. So he makes a sharp left turn in the wrong direction, not caring he’ll be late for his first class and hopes the boy doesn’t follow.

He does.

There’s another grunt of distress. “Whoops, almost lost you,” he huffs as he turns his bike swiftly. “Warn me next time.”

“There won’t be a ‘next time’,” snaps Eddie.

“Whoa, who pissed in your cereal this morning,” he jokes, letting go of the handle bars and crossing his arms, still perfectly balanced. Eddie tries not to get nervous as he watches. “So what’s your name?”

Eddie breathes through his nose in an effort to calm the racing of his heart. This guy. “Eddie,” he grits out.

The boy hums. “Cute.”

“What?” says Eddie and comes to a stop.

The boy grips the handle bars again in favour of cycling in circles around Eddie. “What? No one ever compliment you before? What a waste.”

Eddie follows the boy’s movements, mind stuck on replay. What in God’s name was happening right now? Had he stepped into the Twilight Zone when he wasn’t looking? He rubs idly at his temple and makes the decision to strongly ignore the heat that has spread to his cheeks.

Finally the boy makes an abrupt halt in Eddie’s path, teeth showing through a grin.

“Don’t you wanna know my name?” he flirts.

“Not particularly,” grumbles Eddie.

“It’s Richie,” he says, offering a hand. Eddie looks down at it. There’s ash covering the tips, and instantly Eddie’s mother is shouting warnings about dirt and disease in his head. Eventually Richie pulls it back when Eddie doesn’t move. “Well, uh… this has been… educational.”

“Sure,” says Eddie slowly.

Richie eyes him carefully and chews on his bottom lip. Eddie wants to tell him it’s a bad habit. Then Richie nods once, smiling, and says, “I do hope we meet again, Eds. But be careful in the future, promise?” he gestures to Eddie as a whole. “Precious cargo.”

He’s riding away before Eddie can even respond, and he’s so thrown off by the unwelcome safety lesson and blatant flirting that he didn’t even register how casually Richie slipped in that nickname.

“Unbelievable,” mutters Eddie, and takes off in a run after checking his wristwatch and seeing the time.

He was late to school, but somehow couldn’t bring it in himself to mind too much.

Eddie’s second class for the day was English. Bill was placed in the more advanced class for their final year, but Eddie didn’t mind so much since he still had Stan to sit with.

He walks in on time and sees Stan sitting in the middle of the room. They bump fists before Eddie takes his seat next to him and pulls out his notebook. Their teacher this year was Mrs. Crawford – a short, beady-eyed woman with seriously bad dental hygiene, but at least her assignments were more selective based than most so Eddie can’t complain that much.

“I can’t believe this is our last year,” says Stan.

“I know,” says Eddie. Nothing in this room has changed for 20 years, except for the students that come and go every new year. Soon he’ll be one of them. “I’m still stuck on what I should do once we finally leave here.”

“My father wants me to take over the synagogue.”

“Well, if it’s what you want,” shrugs Eddie. “I’m not sure I’ll even leave Derry. I can’t see myself getting past my mother.”

Stan hums quietly as he writes something down.

Soon everybody seems to have arrived to class and Mrs. Crawford takes attendance, ticking them off one by one, all students that Eddie is familiar with. Then his mind suddenly wanders back to that boy on his bike.

“Now class,” announces Mrs. Crawford as she walks over towards the door. “We have a new student starting with us this year,” she calls out into the hallway, “Come on in, dear.”

Eddie’s attention focuses on the door and he can’t shake the sudden feeling of dread brewing in his gut. The entire situation has an element of b-grade-sitcom to it and Eddie was not at all ready for this.

A figure in all black steps into the room, and just like that all of Eddie’s scrambled thoughts are confirmed.

Immediately the room is filled with excited whispers. Richie stands at the front of the class, still wearing his jacket even in their poorly air-conditioned classrooms and carrying no stationary or books at all. Eddie tries desperately to shrink down out of sight.

“Well dear, you’re welcome to tell us a bit about yourself,” says Mrs. Crawford, gesturing out to the rest of the staring students.

It’s quite rare in Derry for anyone new to just appear in their town – even rarer that it’s another student. Eddie knows for certain it’ll be talked about for weeks, maybe even months, and just when he thought his last year of high school was going to flow by undisturbed. Typical.

“Why thank you, gorgeous,” says Richie with a wink to Mrs. Crawford. Eddie tries not to gag or roll his eyes loud enough to draw attention. “I’m Richie. I arrived here in your lovely town a few days ago from Rhode Island. And if someone here could tell me where you run your underground brothels that would be real helpful—”

“Okay Mr. Tozier, that’s quite enough. Take a seat please,” interjects Mrs. Crawford over the hushed giggles in the front row. “I see you didn’t bring any of your books.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. My uncle was getting it all for me today, I promise,” says Richie with a charming smile.

Mrs. Crawford eyes him before she sighs. “Alright. Take a seat next to Mr. Kaspbrak in the middle there. Eddie, please make sure Mr. Tozier leaves today’s lesson with all of the necessary notes.”

“Fine,” grumbles Eddie, hardly believing his luck.

He sees instantly when Richie’s eyes light up and he’s grinning as he walks towards Eddie to take his seat next to him.

“My, my, what great luck I’m having today to run into you again, Eds,” says Richie.

“What?” Stan whispers to Eddie, but not quietly enough.

“Oh, I already know dear old Eddie Bear here,” says Richie, wagging his eyebrows. He then holds out his hand to Stan across Eddie’s desk. “Richie. Nice to meet you, Eddie’s Friend.”

“Stan,” he corrects, and shakes it. “I’m surprised Eddie made a new friend all on his own.”

“Hey—” objects Eddie.

“Ah, I don’t think we’re quite there yet,” says Richie, giving Eddie a wink. Eddie wonders if the floor will swallow him up if he sinks any further in his seat. “But I’m sure over time my charm will just become too irresistible. Isn’t that right, Eds?”

“It’s Eddie,” he says irritably.

“Well, welcome to Derry, I guess,” says Stan, and his attention snaps to Mrs. Crawford once she clears her throat pointedly.

There’s still a number of hushed words spreading around the classroom, most definitely still pertaining to Richie’s sudden appearance. Eddie’s glances around and notices a clique of girls all giggling amongst themselves as they keep looking over to where Richie is now casually leaning back in his seat in true devil-may-care fashion. Eddie makes a point to stare them down into silence, suddenly more irritated that this guy is causing so much chaos already.

Soon he tries to distract himself from the constant murmuring and focuses on whatever it is Mrs. Crawford is trying desperately to mould into their minds, until there’s a light tap on his shoulder. He looks over to see Richie giving him a sheepish smile.

“Hey, uh, can I borrow a pen?”

Right, he didn’t bring any supplies with him, thinks Eddie.

He sighs lowly and hands Richie one of his seven spare pens from his pencil case before facing the front once again. There’s peace for maybe 20 seconds (not that he was counting) before there’s another tap on his shoulder.

“Can I also borrow a sheet of paper?” asks Richie, and his voice is a lot closer so as to avoid a scolding. Eddie sees Mrs. Crawford shoot them the look anyway.

As quickly as he can, Eddie rips out a page from his notebook and almost throws it in Richie’s face. Richie leans back and settles comfortably in his chair, and like some kind of sixth sense Eddie just knows Richie is still looking at him.

“Thanks, Eds.”

That same hot feeling makes an appearance under Eddie’s skin, and hoping Richie will finally ignore him, Eddie gives him a curt nod and resumes his attention on Mrs. Crawford.

It isn’t until about halfway into the lesson that curiosity gets the better of Eddie and he finds himself sneaking a glance over to where Richie has been writing non-stop since he gave him the paper. But instead of notes all he sees are… doodles?

Richie was just… drawing?

With a disbelieving scoff, Eddie watches the clock atop the door frame and desperately waits for the minutes to tick down.

When the bell for lunch rang out on the second day Eddie hails it as a blessing. After rushing out of the house this morning and stupidly skipping breakfast despite his mother’s protests, his stomach is brewing up a storm and his eyes are on the prize.

“Jeez, Eddie, slow down or you’ll choke,” jokes Stan once they’re outside and sitting down to eat.

“Whaaeber,” says Eddie around a mouthful of food.

Bill, sitting to Stan’s right, laughs quietly at him and opens up his container of pasta salad. Together they mostly eat in silence until they’re all finished, and during that time Eddie likes to observe the other students around them. About half the school’s population sits inside in their cafeteria during breaks, but Eddie’s never quite liked the awful lighting and gross plastic seats covered in probably a million germs from countless food fights.

Years ago Stan, Bill and himself chose this spot under a large basswood tree. It was just far enough away from everyone that Eddie could forget for a few moments that he was here – that he could imagine he was anywhere else.

They were always nice thoughts until the bell rang and brought him back to reality.

Only today his daydreams are interrupted prematurely when Stan says “Hey, isn’t that the new kid sitting on the roof?”

Instantly Eddie’s attention is caught and he’s following Stan’s helpful pointing up to where there is, in fact, someone sitting near the roofs edge. The mop of black hair is unmistakable, as is his token leather jacket, and Eddie feels a mixture of annoyance and nosiness creep its way to the surface.

“How the hell did he get up there?” he says.

“I d-didn’t think anyone was allowed,” says Bill.

“Of course he’s not allowed,” says Eddie lowly. Richie held what looked to be a book in his hands, and somehow that made the situation even more bizarre. He was sitting far back enough that the students closer to the school couldn’t see him, but where Eddie and his friends were they could view him plain as day.

“At this rate this guy is just asking for trouble,” says Stan.

And then, as if somehow sensing he was being watched, Richie lowers his book and his gaze seems to look out to where Eddie was still sitting and watching him intently. Eddie feels as if he’s been caught with his hand in the metaphorical cookie jar, but then he wants to laugh at himself because he’s not the one doing something as stupid as breaking onto the school roof in the middle of the day.

Then as if in slow motion, Richie holds up his hand and waves right at him.

Eddie feels his face scrunch up into a deep frown, but has trouble tearing his gaze away. When some time passes and he doesn’t wave back, Bill speaks up:

“Uh, Eddie… w-w-why is the new kid waving at you?”

Still stuck in some kind of frozen limbo, Stan takes the reins and waves back to Richie before looking at Eddie expectantly. Eddie avoids their gazes.

“How do you know he wasn’t waving at Stan?”

“Pretty sure he knows you the best, ‘Eddie Bear’,” says Stan, his tone clearly teasing.

“That’s stupid,” mumbles Eddie. “And don’t encourage him by waving back. He shouldn’t be up there. Something’s seriously loose in his mind, I’m telling you.”

“He seems friendly enough,” says Stan conversationally, but then he turns to ask Bill about their weekend plans and so Eddie is left to deal with his many, many thoughts about what this kid’s deal is.

Not long after that the bell finally goes off and they pack up their stuff to head back inside. Biting his lip, Eddie looks up to see if Richie is still there. He’s not, and Eddie shakes his head shortly, following behind Bill and ignoring the inkling of desire to scan the hallways for those infamous dark curls.

When school lets out at the end of the day, Eddie declines Stan and Bill’s offer to go to the Aladdin, insisting his mum wants him home early enough to be able to tape her shows while she’s out visiting her friend. His friends give him pitying looks but ultimately say goodbye, and Eddie begins his walk home in the dry, slightly overcast Fall afternoon.

He brings his hands up to his lips and blows out a low tune as he ambles down the street. The wind blows past him loudly, distracting him from his tone of key, and with a sigh he starts up again.

A ring of a bell dings once behind him, and Eddie stays in his lane to let the bike pass him safely. Only it doesn’t ride past, and Eddie feels like he should have seen this coming.

“Well, well, fancy meeting you here.”

Eddie lowers his hands in favour of clenching them slightly, and angles his head over to see none other than Richie giving him a thousand watt grin.

“Do I somehow have a note stuck to my back that says ‘Yes, please come over here and bother me to your heart’s content’?” says Eddie.

“Oh, touchy,” teases Richie.

“Are you stalking me or something?”

Richie’s eyebrows rise. “Does it get you all hot and bothered thinking that you have my undivided attention? Aw, Eds.”

“What is your problem?” says Eddie. “You’re seriously the weirdest person I’ve ever met.”

“Really?” says Richie, sounding genuinely surprised. “Although, I suppose ‘weird’ is better than ‘freak’ or ‘ungrateful pig-headed degenerate’.”

Momentarily curious about where those names came from, Eddie chooses instead to just focus on the road, glancing at his wristwatch again and seeing he still has time before his mother’s show starts.

“How did you get on the school’s roof today?” asks Eddie, because the still begrudgingly impressed side of him wants to know.

“Ah, that’s for me to know and you to find out,” answers Richie unhelpfully. “The view sure is nice, though.”

“I bet it is,” grunts Eddie and speeds up.

Richie catches up easily. There’s an awkward moment of silence. “Do you really not like me?” he eventually asks, tone losing some of its bravado.

The word ‘No’ should be leaving Eddie’s mouth over to Richie’s awaiting ears. ‘No, I don’t, so go away’ should be making its grand entrance once and for all, but they grow stubborn. Frustrated at himself, Eddie decides to not say anything at all.

Something in his non-answer must cause Richie to relax slightly because he continues to ride alongside him, and then cautiously he begins to hum.

Eddie recognizes the melody after a few moments, and without much thought to it he joins in with Richie when the chorus hits, and they don’t stop until they finish the song together.

“You dig Thin Lizzy?” asks Richie when they’re done.

“Of course. They helped me to get through eighth grade, man,” says Eddie, eyeing Richie carefully.

“Nice,” says Richie with a smile. Their eyes meet briefly and then Eddie jerks his away quickly. “I have all of their music, so if you ever wanna come over and borrow something you totally can.”

Eddie licks his lips before saying, “Cool. Uh… thanks.”

“Not a problem, Eds,” says Richie, and gets a better grip on his handle bars. “I must be off, sadly. But let’s do this again sometime, yeah? See you in class tomorrow.” And with that, he makes a u-turn and heads off in the opposite direction. Eddie watches him raptly until he’s out of sight.

If you were to ask Eddie right now what exactly was happening, he wouldn’t be able to give you an honest answer.

But in knowing that, Eddie couldn’t smother the budding flame of excitement rooted deep in his gut.

Maybe life in Derry was about to get interesting.

if you wanna be added to the tag list, lemme know! :D xxxx

#richie tozier #eddie kaspbrak #reddie #it 2017 #new kid au #lost and found #bill denbrough #stanley uris #it #my fics #roughandreddie

101 notes · View notes

ridingirlsblog · 5 years ago

Text

Photoshoot of the Week: February 17th-23rd 2020 - Ducati Monster 821 & Stefania

These days, the best urban motorcycles are those that can navigate, cut through traffic, and place you at the head of the mid-morning rush with ease. Acceleration and speed are nice qualities to have, but they take a back seat to mobility, compactness, and fuel economy. When looking for the perfect inner-city cycle, you’ll need something that can fulfill all these elements with ease, while also offering you a bit more in terms of safety and manageable speed. Without any doubts cool Italian bikergirl and impressive socialite Stefania made the right choice: Ducati Moster 821. The smoothness and precision of this bike make it feel as though you are always in control. In the city, this bike is able to handle everything an urban rider can through at it. It is very balanced at slow speed and does not give you the feeling that it will topple. It steers with minimal effort and is able to avoid hazards and obstacles with very little effort. The Monster runs perfectly in the city, despite all of the “stop and go traffic” and endless idling. Besides, if you leave the city to head out of town, you'll be not disappointed, again. Just try out the touring setting: once set, it reminds you to let off on the throttle to engage the mode. It's like switching to a different motorcycle: the motorcycle immediately feels more responsive and the acceleration become more immediate. Everyone who tryed the Monster can tell you how agile this bike is in the twisties and how responsive it was on the straights: the touring setting highlighted the torque of the bike. Riding a Ducati Monster 821 definitely puts a smile on your face, as you can see from fascinating Stefania's posts on Instagram. I think that legendary actress Mariyn Monroe once said that "a smile is the best makeup any girl can wear". Well, I think that's so true, but such an amazing bike can also play its part! Am I right people? *** *** *** The Monster 821 pays homage to the legacy of the Monster 900, which over 25 years ago revolutionised the motorcycle world. Agile and featuring sporty performance, it was designed for maximum riding enjoyment, at all times and in all conditions. The Monster 821 range has been rejuvenated with a new stealth version: matte black livery, updated graphics and front fairing give a unique character to the naked Ducati par excellence. The standard equipment, which includes adjustable fork and Ducati Quick Shift up/down, makes it even more effective on the road. Now, the Monster 821 has been upgraded to include aesthetic and functional features first introduced on the Monster 1200: a more streamlined, agile look with fully redesigned tank and tail, an all-new silencer and a headlight that is both classic and contemporary. Also making its debut on the mid-size Monster is the colour TFT display with selected gear and fuel indicators, while available accessories include the Ducati Quick Shift up/down system. The Euro 4 compliant liquid-cooled Testastretta 11° engine delivers a maximum power of 109 hp (80 kW) at 9250 rpm. Thanks to its 8.8 kgm (86 Nm) of torque at 7750 rpm, the 821 offers exciting performance, easy riding and unmatched fun. A beefy front end, exposed Trellis frame, and tiny tail give the Monster 821 an all-up-front look that just accentuates its aggressive nature and makes it look kinda like a big cat about to pounce. Fans of the family will likely recognize the round headlight and fuel tank as the same used by the Monster 1200 with a very special detail in the tank clip that hails back to the family’s origins in 1992. A short-rise handlebar lets you push off for a near-vertical posture in a relaxed attitude with plenty of room to tuck in over the curve of the fuel tank for those times when you’re feeling a little more aggressive. The rear of the tank tapers to a narrow waist ahead of the deep-scoop saddle to form a knee pocket that pulls the leg in out of the slipstream and gives you a knee-hanger if you’re inclined to do a little pegdragging. An adjustable saddle gives you a choice in seat height with a 30.9-inch setting and a 31.8-inch one without having to change the seat or suspension components. Behind the pilot, a monochrome cover disguises the two-up nature of the seat with subframe-mount, flip-up footpegs to complete the pillion gear. Tubular-steel members make up the Trellis frame on the Monster 821 Stealth, and as you’d expect, the engine is a stressed unit that completes the assembly and replaces a significant chunk of frame in the downtube/cradle area to reduce weight. Aluminum is the material of choice for the yoke-style swingarm to minimize unsprung weight at the rear axle. Toward that end, a set of 17-inch, cast-alloy wheels round out the rolling chassis with a 10-spoke design and Pirelli’s Diablo Rosso III hoops to make the connection to the pavement. The hoops are typical of the genre at 120/70 up front and 180/55 out back, and they get all kinds of help from the electronics to make this a relatively safe ride. The Monster 821 Stealth comes with the Ducati Safety Pack that includes delightfulness such as the aforementioned ABS and Traction Control alongside variable power-delivery Power Modes and a Quick Shift feature that let’s you bang out clutchless shifts both up and down the range. An anti-hop slipper clutch couples engine power to the six-speed transmission, and it provides one final layer of protection for the rear contact patch. Said power measures in with some fairly impressive numbers. Ducati’s Testastretta pumps out 109 horsepower at 9,250 rpm with 63 pounds of torque that top out at 7,750 rpm. Twin, 88 mm bores run with a 67.5 mm stroke for a total of 821 cc and a sizzlin’ 12.8-to-1 compression ratio, and as usual, Duc’s Desmodromic valvetrain times the four-valve heads with a pull-closed cam rather than coil springs to seal the combustion chamber. The bike maintained it’s smooth acceleration, but it was undeniable that this machine has the heart of a racer. This is where the steel trellis frame highlighted the precision that is undeniably Ducati. With very little effort, I was able to pass slower traffic. At no time did I find that I was not in control of the bike. The Monster 821 played its role very well in allowing me to experience the road in a very exhilarating and fun way. It is a powerful motorcycle; however, it is very smooth and predictable as one would expect from a twin cylinder engine. The relatively flat torque curve and the 109 horsepower combined with the weight of this motorcycle gives it a finely tuned feeling that Ducati is known for. I would recommend the Monster 821 to everyone. It is an awesome machine that I hope to have a chance to ride again soon ... maybe with Stefania? #bikergirl #Monster821 #ducatiobsession #ducatilife #motorcycle #ducatista #ducatinsta #superbikes #ducativ4 #ducatimonster821 #ducatiSuperSport #ridefast #bikeracing #motosports #motolife #fastbikes #RidinGirlsBlog #racing #motorbike #bikersofinstagram #bikerfamily #biketouring #riderich #girlsonbikes #hjc #sportbike #sexybiker #bikerchick #bikerlady #desmo #speed #roadracing #ridingsexy #superbike #motard #ducaticorse #motorrad #ducati #motogp #moto #helmetporn #ducatimonster #ducatiracing #turin #monster600 #monster797 #v4

Precious Memories *** Visualizza questo post su Instagram Ride day #endofsummer #keepriding #ducatinsta #monster821 #hjchelmets #alpinestars #bikersofinstagram #bikerchicksofinsta #bikergirl #ducatimonster #ridingtime #happiness Un post condiviso da (@stefidem) in data: 21 Set 2019 alle ore 8:54 PDT Read the full article

0 notes

prorevenge · 8 years ago

Text

Pro revenge by whistle blowing.

warning: long story.

One of my first jobs out of college wasn't really a true job. I interviewed at a proprietary trading firm and was offered a job as one of their traders. Looking back, it was naive to join such a firm and this was right before the '08 crash. They sold themselves as being pro traders and all you had to do was put up some capital which got added to the group's pooled fund. After that, you went through training and once the boss thought you were ready, you would 'go live' with your trading account. There were no paychecks, but you did get to keep most of your profits. Later on, I learned that the bosses of such groups made money by either taking a cut from your profits or by taking a fee from your traded volume. This group skimmed from both sides taking 15% from your profits and a fee from your trading volume which came out to about $1.5 every 100 shares traded.

For months, I spent time learning from the "Pros," and then I began to realize along with some of the other newbies, that the only person making money was the boss. The turnover for new traders was high. Some people lasted a month, others a year or two. As I got to know people around the office, I began finding out that very few made any money at all. The boss was a micromanager and watched the risk monitor for his group like a hawk. If you hit -$50 in a day, you were locked out and couldn't trade anymore throughout the day. Also, you were limited to trading stocks up to $40 per share with a max size of 200 shares. It was very difficult to make a living trading like this.

Here is where things get interesting. The boss took a liking to me at first because I was tech savvy. They had a large computer lab with many trading groups and about 1,000 workstations set up for trading. The group I was in had maybe 35-40 traders. The floor was staffed with 2 IT techs. Needless to say, if there was a tech problem, it took a while for your support ticket to get answered. So, instead of waiting, I just hacked the network and got the domain admin credentials (back in the days of XP and Server 2k3). I then proceeded to add my account to the local admins group on my PC at the office. In turn, I was able to install updates, patches, different trading software, and more. The IT staff never knew and the boss liked how I got around the system and gave me an additional role as the 'unofficial IT guy' for our group. This exposed me to the bosses PC as well as all of the other traders.

Doing the unofficial IT work, I ended up meeting everyone in the group. As I became friends with some of the more seasoned traders, I found out that most were surviving by receiving a commission for signing up new traders and not from trading. New traders would put $3-10k down and after the 'training class,' they'd go live. A small portion of that went to the employee that recruited the trader. One guy, let's call him 'trader x' who had been there the longest started telling me all about the boss and I began to understand how shady this whole operation was. Having access to the bosses PC when he asked me to help with some basic tasks, 'trader x' stopped by and coerced me into doing some digging. The boss was gone, and we found a lot of shady documents relating to the company. The boss had an alternate identity, bank accounts in another name, ID's with his picture and different info. It was all very suspicious. Shortly after that day of digging, he entrusted me to bring an envelope with some documents to the bank for him, and I did. Although, when I met with the banker about the documents I was dropping off, she used the other name trader x and I found on the bosses PC. When I mentioned the name I knew, the banker had no idea who I was talking about.

Soon after realizing it was a sketchy place to be working at, and seeing my fellow traders drop like flies due to the trading restrictions, I came across one of the bosses emails to an unknown part that went into detail about how to properly sign up traders and bleed their accounts dry for the maximum profit. I'm oversimplifying it here but this got to me and I went home ticked off. Trader X and I talked about it and he confirmed that this was the bosses modus operandi. Collect the training fee, have the trader sign the contract with the group, and cycle them out as fast as possible. So that night, I went home and wrote up a post on a trading forum about the group, its practices, and warned anyone looking at joining the group to steer clear. I went to bed and thought nothing more of the post until the next day.

The next morning, when I arrived in the office, everyone was being held in the conference room. We were all getting interviewed/interrogated about a post that was found online about our group. Shit! It was my post! I remained calm and when it was my turn, I just remember thinking to myself "Never underestimate the power of denial." When asked if I had any knowledge of anything posted online, I said that I did not. Suspicion was there but it got dropped after I was threatened with an empty threat that if I did know anything, I was in breach of the contract I signed that stated that I could be sued for damages up to $100k. I didn't buckle under the pressure and maintained that I didn't know anything. After a few days, things cooled off and I was asked to stay late to work on the bosses PC again. This time, I pulled a copy of all the bosses emails and saved it to a flash drive.

When reviewing what I took, and knowing that this was a 'fly by night' sort of operation going on, I packaged it up and sent the pst file to the SEC via an anonymous email address. I then reached out to all of the traders I had known that left and were swindled out the their money and urged them to submit complaints / tips to the SEC about the trading group. All in all, I think about 20 complaints were sent out through my efforts. When I looped in Trader X about everything I had done, he jumped in and got more people from before my time starting with the group to submit complaints.

Now it was time for my exit. I wanted to be done with this group. I contacted the boss and informed him I wanted my money back and based on my calculations, I should be flat overall with my account. I made nothing and lost nothing since I had started. The boss over the phone tried to inform me that I signed a contract and according to that contract, the money was no longer mine. To his surprise, I told him he was wrong and that I actually had a copy of his contract. I then proceeded to read off the sections that clearly stated that they money provided was for training purposes and would only be kept by the company if losses were not paid back to the company. He was surprised I was able to read this off to him because all copies of this contract were only available to the traders the day they signed with the group. He never provided a copy for your own records, and clearly did so because he did not want you to fully understand what you signed or have you scrutinize over it with a lawyer. Once I explained my logic of how my account was flat and that my capital contribution should be fully refundable based on the wording of the contract, his response to me was "The contract isn't open to interpretation!" I responded by saying "You think your contract isn't open for interpretation. Are you kidding? the Constitution is open to interpretation. What makes you think your contract is set in stone?" He proceeded by threatening me with the clause regarding the $100k in damages and claimed he had proof I posted online about him and his group. I told him I'd gladly meet him in court... I knew he wouldn't want to go to court and I called his bluff. A few days later I received a check for the money I initially put up to join the group.

What makes this qualify as pro revenge was that during the market crashing in '08, the office where the group operated out of got a visit from the SEC about 3 weeks after all the complaints were received. Trader X informed me that the boss was pulled into meetings with investigators from the SEC and a few days after their arrival, the boss was gone and the group dissolved. Since there were many other trading groups sharing the floor, anyone left over was given the option to get their money back or to join another group on the floor. The last I heard about the boss was that a few years after the whole SEC investigation, the parent company was investigated. They ended up changing business names and downsized significantly. As for my old boss, he moved out of the country after a few failed business endeavors. It was pretty sweet how everything played out and I was glad that most of the traders I was there with got their money back. In the end, some of the traders who knew the full story referred to me as the whistleblower of the group but in a good way!

(source) (story by daytrader1231)

#pro revenge #by daytrader1231 #prorevenge #pro revenge stories #revenge stories #pro #revenge

1K notes · View notes

grabthelantern · 7 years ago

Text

State of the Meta: Patience is a virtue

By Helmight

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Riot release or update a character, the playerbase complains that they’re underpowered, Riot hotfixes them buffs and buffs them in the next patch, then has to nerf the champion a patch later.

Sound familiar? Good, because it’s happened at least a half-dozen times over the years.

Ivern, Taliyah, the Zac update - all of these characters released underpowered in the last year. Each time, Riot chose to hotfix them buffs instead of waiting to see if the community would learn how to play them first, and each time Riot ended up needing to nerf the character once players got used to their unique playstyle. This has happened enough that I’m honestly confused as to why Riot keep making the same mistakes. You’d figure that at some point a designer would think to themselves “hey, maybe we should give it a bit before buffing the champ.”

Now, to be fair, Riot does have a vested interest in ensuring that their champions don’t release underpowered. If the initial reaction is bad, players won’t buy the new champion, and that cuts revenue. However, if the champion in question has a VERY different playstyle, as in the case of Ivern and Taliyah, they should be allowing more time before assessing balance. You can’t play Ivern like Lee Sin, so you have to give the community time to figure out his unique strengths.

In the same vein, champion reworks need time to be processed before balance can be evaluated. If the champion changed drastically, players will have to unlearn what they’ve been doing previously and figure out new builds. That won’t happen in the first week of play, but you might get a better idea about where the champ stands after the players have been trying out the rework for a patch cycle.

It’s not a make-or-break thing for Riot, but seeing champions ping-pong from “utter garbage” to “Camille-tier OP” in the span of a couple weeks is tiring and honestly smacks of hasty balance judgments. Evaluate carefully before buffing nerfing, Riot - don’t just throw changes around willy-nilly.

Let me know your thoughts on Riot’s balancing policies in the comments, and be sure to like and reblog this post if you enjoyed it!

#League of Legends #Grab the Lantern #State of the Meta

5 notes · View notes

heretac · 7 years ago

Text

The Real & Raw of My IVF Journey - Transfer #5 And I'm not ashamed to show it!

2 weeks ago today I once again got the dreadful call from my doctor that my embryo transfer was not successful. Once again I heard the words, "I'm so sorry, but your test came back negative." Yup, in late April I started IVF again - my 5th embryo transfer. I kept it mostly to myself because instead of giving the occasional updates on Facebook I decided to record my experience. I love coming back to my blog page to read about my past struggles and thought perhaps recording my 5th embryo transfer cycle would be fun, educational and who knows it might just help someone out. I do have followers that appreciate reading my IVF blogs. I know recording my journey definitely helped me out. It gave me something to look forward to versus just dreading the painful daily shots I had to endure. When I read other women's blog posts or watch their videos, I can totally relate to what they are going through and it makes me feel a little better knowing that its not just me. That I am not the only one who's heart and hopes get stomped on each time we attempt IVF. It reminds me that I am still human and like most women who suffer from infertility, I too suffer from the pain of wanting to become a mother but sadly have to endure weeks and weeks of pain, fear, nervousness, crazy hormone effects and heartache. So on this journey I decided that I was going to record my daily shots, do brief updates (sorry I'm not experienced in front of the camera) but this is the REAL ME, MY REAL STORY, MY PAIN, MY OBSTACLES and MY HEARTACHE. Watch video below:

youtube

I did over a month of shots, patches and pills. My belly was bruised from all the daily shots i was giving myself. The patches always give me an allergic reaction and the intramuscular butt shots...OMG ouch! I have never been so bruised like I got with this cycle. Sometimes you just have to endure all the pain to get your little miracle. I am willing to endure all i need to endure just for a chance at a miracle. This transfer was probably one of the most emotional and stressful transfers for me. I found out that Bella had a tumor and that she needed radiation right away. Timing could not have been more horrible but it was too late for me to back out of doing my transfer. I had already started doing my shots, had paid the clinic and was getting my body ready for the transfer when I got the bad news of Bella. It was extremely emotional for both Robert and myself as well as a financial hit in the gut. If I would have known 1 week before starting shots that my poor baby girl Bella had a tumor that had grown and she would not last more then a few months, than I would have cancelled my IVF and concentrated strictly on getting her better. But that was not the case. I was in the middle of my cycle already and witnessed Bella's decline and it hit me pretty hard physically and emotionally. I often found myself caring for Bella's well being and not even once thinking about the possible life that I had inside of me. I felt guilty and cried many nights because not once did I give myself the chance to think of myself and felt such pain knowing that my dog was suffering and we needed to do something about it. I don't regret one bit making Bella my priority. But I do regret having those days where i didn't even think of myself as possibly being pregnant. In past cycles I often talked to my belly in hopes that the embryo could hear me and stick for good. But this time I didn't even have the time nor the strength for that. Although I prepped myself for the bad news I still broke down this time around. I guess no matter what i say or think I just can't control the way the bad news will make me feel. It is a feeling like no other, knowing that you have tried so hard to get to something but yet it seems like you just didn't try hard enough or you just feel like a failure. I blame myself and then I pity myself. But like other cycles, I just have to snap out of it. Not sure why this happened the way that it did, and like I've said before in pasts blog posts, if "God" has a reason for why this happened- well gosh darn it, I'd like to know what it is. I pray and hope all the time but its never enough and not to throw myself a pity party but darn, how much more of this can I take? I have had 5 unsuccessful IVF transfers. I only got pregnant on my first try but it didn't last and ended up miscarrying. I try so hard to stay positive but it seems like every time I do an IVF transfer something crazy is going on in my life. Could this be a sign to just STOP!? A big part of me wants to stop but I still have 1 embryo left. It would be unfair for me to give up on it. I know i'm not the only one that has done IVF nor am I the only one who has been unsuccessful 5 times. But IVF is by far the hardest thing that I have ever done. I am hoping that no matter what the outcome is that somehow God gives me the opportunity to just do this last transfer without any obstacles in my life. Doing IVF and knowing my dog was sick was really tough for me. So tough to watch and tough to deal with. All I ask is that I am allowed to do my last embryo transfer without having any stress in my life. Give me a fair chance to do this and just maybe my body can be strong enough to create a life. I plan on starting again in a couple of months, just waiting for Bella to get a little bit better. My last embryo was created when i was 39 years old, that was 2 years ago. If that doesn't take then we will need to think of what comes next. Who knows...I might do 1 more full cycle of IVF (meaning i'll need to create my eggs) this of course is the worst part of the IVF process. Life is full of challenges and I'm up for the challenges, I know I am strong but I'm also human and I break down at times. I don't want to hear the "it will happen or just relax" that many of us going through IVF so often tend to hear. I just want a fair chance. And yes we've considered adopting too but believe me it's not as easy as one might think. That is why I can't give up just yet. I seem to be healthy enough to create the eggs, even at my age. So I don't plan on giving up just yet. I will just hold my head up high, put on a smile and go about life like I have been for the last 4 years. It's funny how life works, but I guess there's a reason why things happen the way that they do. All I can do is TRY. Although part of me is somewhat numb now from the many heartaches, I must gather up the strength to keep going. I'm not giving up on you so please don't give up on me!

#ivf #ivfjourney #embryo transfer #notgivingup

1 note · View note

douglassmiith · 4 years ago

Text

Smashing Podcast Episode 17 With Angie Byron: Whats New In Drupal 9?

In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we’re taking a look at what’s new in Drupal 9. What are the major upcoming changes to this nearly 20-year-old open-source project? Drew McLellan talks to Drupal core committer Angie Byron to find out.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Drew McLellan: She is Senior Director of Product and Community Development at Acquia, a company you’ll know from their software and services built around the Drupal ecosystem. She’s been a Drupal core maintainer for nearly 12 years, as well as being an author for O’Reilly and an open-source evangelist who just lives and breathes Drupal. Joining us from near Vancouver, British Columbia. She’s passionate about getting new people, especially women into open source. We know she’s a longstanding Drupal expert, but did you know she once taught a dolphin to make marmalade? My smashing friends, please welcome Angie Byron.

Drew: Hi Angie. How are you?

Angie Byron: I’m smashing, Drew. How are you?

Drew: I’m very good. Thank you. I wanted to talk to you today about something we’ve certainly not covered on the podcast before. And I’ve rarely actually touched on Smashing Magazine articles over the years, despite it being a hugely popular open-source project with a massive community. And that of course is Drupal. Now, I’ve deliberately not described what Drupal is in my introduction because I feel like there could be a whole generation of web designers and developers who’ve never really come across it. And there are those who might think, that we know what Drupal is all about, but that could be based off of a view formed 10, 15, 20 years ago almost. What is Drupal as it stands today?

Angie: We call Drupal a content management framework. And what that means is it’s a generalized framework that you can use to make websites, you can use it to make mobile apps, you can use it to make just about anything you can imagine. But it’s very content structured, content based central system. It’s used to power one in 35 websites in the world. It’s out there and people use it. It’s been used a lot for government websites, media websites, just about everything that you can imagine. It’s even been used to power say, the princess cruise ship schedules and things like that. It’s used in a lot of different capacities.

Drew: How does it differ from other content management systems that people might have used in the past, such as WordPress or static publishing tools like Hugo and Jekyll?

Angie: I like to say that if you know what you want is a blog or another thing that WordPress is really good at, WordPress is a great choice. Similarly, if you know that you need some highly customized software that can only work with one particular backend system or things like that, a custom CMF framework like Symfony or something might be a better choice. Drupal is great because it spans both. It has a user interface, so you can create content just by clicking and filling out forms. And you can extend it with its API, but it’s built to actually allow you to do a tremendously amount of powerful stuff just by being in your browser, clicking around forms and buttons.

Angie: I use it a lot because I often have customers who don’t really know what they want. And so, they think that they want to blog and then it turns out that, “Oh, but we also want an ecommerce component with this blog. Oh, and we also need like a forum with five star ratings and reviews and these kinds of things.” And with Drupal, that’s just a check boxes to start adding new functionality like that versus with WordPress, it might mean, putting a couple of different solutions together that you then have to integrate. And with custom code, that’s obviously custom codes what’s going to be a lot of work for you.

Angie: Drupal has a whole library of contributed modules. There are something like 10,000 to 12,000 of these add-on modules that can do additional features. And then out of the box, especially if you haven’t used Drupal in 20 years, Drupal is actually a really full featured CMS these days as well, where it shifts with media layout support, all kinds of different things.

Drew: You briefly mentioned some projects before that are using Drupal. What is the ideal project where somebody would reach for it over something else? Where does Drupal really excel?

Angie: I would say that Drupal is great if you have, let’s say a website or a web presence where there’s a lot of different sub-components and you all want them to maintain a consistent look and feel. Universities use it a lot, for example, because they want to have the consistent university branding across all of the different sub sites. However, they also want to give individual departments freedom to set up their own, say content types. So, say the art department might want to track artists and musicians and things like that. And tying those to works that they’ve produced versus the IT department might want to be contracting like these are the different people we do IT internships for, and these are the different people that work for them.

Angie: And Drupal allows you to model all of that content together and create a dynamic views of it and forms that you can just click together out of the box.

Drew: One of the reasons I wanted to chat to you about Drupal at this point in time is that there’s a major release around the corner. Isn’t there?

Angie: There is. Next, well, I don’t know when this will go out, but it’s June 3rd. So, currently a week from today.

Drew: And that’s Drupal 9.

Angie: That’s correct.

Drew: Now, a big new version of a mature software product always brings with it, big new features. Doesn’t it? What are the headline changes that someone would really notice about Drupal 9?

Angie: If you’re using Drupal 8 currently, the big news for you is that Drupal 9 is really not much has changed. And that’s a big deal for our community because in the past, when you want to move from say six to seven or seven to eight, it was a, I wouldn’t call it a harrowing process, but you could call it something like that where we used to have a philosophy that we’re going to break your code and not your data. We would always be on the cutting edge of the latest things and any major version upgrade would come with it. The needs, support modules and the underlying code with Drupal, and you’d always get the latest, greatest stuff, but it would come at an expensive, costly upgrade process.

Angie: From Drupal 8 to nine, what we’ve been doing is building Drupal 9 in Drupal 8 effectively. And so, Drupal 8, the whole way along has gotten the new APIs, the new features, all these kinds of things in a backwards compatible way. What Drupal 9 is going to do is cut out the backwards compatible stuff and put us all on the latest version of say, Symfony, PHP, MySQL all the newest stuff there so that we have security support for those things for the next three to five years to come. From eight to nine, not much, if you last looked at Drupal though from say Drupal 7, a tremendous amount has changed, because you not only get the innovations that have into Drupal 8, things like mobile experience, out of the box configuration, management, the views module, which allows you to dynamically assemble lists of things available out of the box.

Angie: But you also get the features that have come within the Drupal 8 cycles. Those are things like a media library, workflow management, layout building capabilities, better automated testing and all kinds of other things.

Drew: One aspect I am particularly interested in because there’s something that’s either lacking or patched on messily to many content management systems, is this concept of structured data. What do we mean when we say structured content? And what does Drupal 9 bring us in that regard?

Angie: Structured content is a really fascinating concept and it’s been built into Drupal from the early days. In a CMS like WordPress or Squarespace, something like that, you would say, I want to download the photo gallery feature and I’m going to enable the photo gallery feature, I’m going to get the photo gallery as the person who created it, envisioned it. In Drupal, you go at it a different way. What you do is you create your photo gallery feature from base components. And what I mean by that is you will create a content type called photo. You will add an image field to it for the picture. You will add maybe a caption field, you’ll maybe have attributes to the image and all these other tenets, number fields for the attributes, or sorry for the heightened width text fields for the old attributes, there’s many different kinds of things you can do.

Angie: And then you’ll create a view of photos and you can choose if that photo view is, say it lays everything out in a six by nine grid, or maybe it does it in two columns or whatever, and you can have full customizability over how, and in what way it’s produced. Structured content is interesting because not only can you make your website look like how you want it, but because the content is structured in a generic way through entities and fields, you can also say, for example, create a decoupled react application that talks to Drupal as a backend.

Angie: And have full control over how that’s done, and then take the same backend, make it your website, the same backend make it say a kiosk in the mall where people can select different items. A lot of people make use of Drupal as this general content store that can then be talked to by anything. And the way we can do that is because all the data that the CMS manages is abstracted. It’s not built into the presentation layer. If you use a Wiziwig editor to answer in your content, you’re going to get the images embedded in the body field, and that’s never any good if you want to then take part that body field and display it in a sidebar block.

Angie: Drupal by structuring everything into discrete fields and entities on the backend, makes it so the concept can be mixed and matched really easy.

Drew: That means you could use a Drupal as a headless CMS essentially?

Angie: Yeah.

Drew: That’s pretty much what you’re describing there, isn’t it?

Angie: Yes, absolutely.

Drew: If you’re working in the Jamstack say, or you’ve got a single page app, or you’re building mobile apps or have other less conventional ways of consuming content, you could use Drupal as a content management system just to literally manage the content and then to expose it to those other things via an API or something like JSON.

Angie: Exactly. Yep. JSON:API support is built in and this comes with its… everything about Drupal is modular. If you don’t want the theme layer, you don’t need to have it. Theme layer is what we call like the HTML presentation layer that’s generally generated by PHP. But you can throw that out and say, “I just want JSON:API output of all of my content.” You also get certain features that are built into Drupal built into your app. For example, Drupal has a really robust users, permissions and roles system. You can set up different roles with discrete permissions to do different things on the site or see different pages on the site even.

Angie: And those things will be respected by Drupal and will be enforced by Drupal so that by the time someone actually loads the application at a certain URL, you know that the person who is there is meant to have access to it. It’s really interesting. It’s a cool product to work on because, on the one end, it’s a product made by developers for developers. We started building it because we wanted an easier way to… We didn’t want to have to get called by somebody to change the copyright field at the bottom of the page every year or whatever.

Angie: We just make a box so that they can fill it out. But it’s also a tool made for a carving out a whole new area of people, which is like site builders. They’re like technical, but not necessarily know how to write all the backend code, but they know for example, how to click together these different concepts in order to make these really powerful sites. And so, at any point, when you’re developing a feature such as a media library, you have to not only think about how do we make this really easy to use for a marketer or a content author persona, who’s going to use it every day, but also how do we make it infinitely extensible from the developer side, how do we make sure we have automated tests that cover everything?

Angie: How do we make sure that the output is accessible so it can be translated by screen readers? And all these kinds of considerations. So, Drupal’s really interesting and kind of stands out in its field in that a lot of times you have to pick between a really easy to use front end that doesn’t have decoupled content or a very technical decoupled content thing that you need a fleet of JavaScript developers to work on. And Drupal sits in a middle and a sweet spot where it can be both.

Drew: Because Drupal is essentially traditionally a themed CMS, isn’t it? If you’re looking to build a site, a more traditional site where you’re using a theme to output HTML pages, CSS, a nice responsive web design is going serve your mobile devices, desktop devices, and so on. What templating capabilities would you be looking at in Drupal? What have you got available to use?

Angie: Drupal uses a Symfony library called Twig, and it’s effectively HTML templates with little special characters to do branching, basic branching logic, print variables, that kind of thing. That’s a default output that Drupal does. You have a callback that generates the output and that’s stored into an array. The array is passed to whichever output layer. It could be JSON:API, as I mentioned before, and just put big drop of JSON, or it could be passed to the theme layer, which will then translate those arrays into, this is the header, this is that and it’ll print it into the CSS and HTML variables like that. I don’t know if that answered your question though. Sorry.

Drew: No, you did.

Angie: Okay, great.

Drew: I think last time I used Drupal, it was using maybe Smarty. Is that right?

Angie: Oh, Smarty, yeah. Well, that’s like Drupal 6 days.

Drew: Yeah, it’s Drupal 6 or Drupal 5 even.

Angie: Yeah. Oh, that’s fantastic. Twig is a similar concept to Smarty, but the nice thing about Twig is it better enforces the separation between your business logic and your presentation logic. Twig is not really, you can do it, but it’s not set up as a best practice for you to sit there and start putting a whole bunch of functions and objects and classes and all that stuff in your actual HTML files. Your HTML files, more or less stay HTML files with just the little special placeholders in them. And then your business logical happens behind the scenes in a module or in a pre-process function or something like that.

Drew: That separation actually makes things a little bit more straightforward and safer for developers who aren’t so used to working in the backend world maybe be even more comfortable with doing front end development, but a lot of the hard logic is separated from the HTML and CSS?

Angie: That’s right. And the other thing that you get as a benefit out of that is Twig is really good about auto XSS vulnerability escaping. A common thing that can happen when you’re writing your own theme from scratch is you start printing variables directly. And then someone creates a username like ‘Little Bobby Tables or whatever, that kind of thing and messes your whole site up. Twig is great because it has auto escaping of variables like that. As long as you’re sticking to the APIs and you’re using them directly, you won’t accidentally introduce either a JavaScript or SQL vulnerability in your site just by trying to make your theme look nice.

Drew: And in terms of the content authoring experience, I know a lot of people in the web design industry have seen some of their business go away, particularly at the lower end to these extremely user friendly services, things like Squarespace. How does Drupal compete with that authoring experience that people get from these very polished and sleek services?

Angie: I will say we’ve come a long way. We’re definitely not at a Squarespace level. I’ll just say that flat out. Squarespace has the advantage where they are not building structured content in that round or they’re building pages. And so, the pages are self contained and they can have full control over the HTML in there and use nice front end tools to get at them. Drupal by nature being structured content, I mentioned the benefits are that the content could be mixed and matched. It’s easy to output the content of variety of different fashions. But the disadvantage is that, our front end tools are not, they respect that structured content nature. So, you don’t see like a take over the page in place editing experience with Drupal as it stands.

Angie: However, I will say that there’s a bunch of people doing a lot of work. And so, core itself shifts with in place editing, which is the ability to click on a field and edit it right in place without having to go to the backend. There’s also the settings tray, which if you want to make a quick configuration change to say the site name or the location of a block or something like that, that’s built in there. The layout builder has some drag and drop capabilities in there as well. We’ve really made a concerted effort to improve the content authoring experience in Drupal. We did user testing back in, we started in 2008, Drupal is an old project that you mentioned it’s been around awhile, but we started in 2008 and 2012, 2015.

Angie: We keep doing these every few years, we sit down and the University of Minnesota has helped us with this. We sit down and we go to a real life usability lab with one way glass and eye tracking the whole thing. And through that process really saw that while the backend of Drupal is amazing and people love it because it’s flexible, it’s well documented, it’s architected amazingly, all these kinds of things. People really did struggle with the front end. I made it my personal mission. I know that Dree has made it his personal mission, the project lead, as well as the community as a whole to really bring that quality of Drupal to the front end as well.

Angie: And so, we’ve added a whole bunch of capabilities since then, like a backend admin theme. Some of these content author friendly features like workflows, media, that kind of stuff, and putting it first and foremost in people’s hands so that they don’t have to hand write HTML tags or this kind of thing, which was like the case many years ago.

Drew: One of the things that often attracts developers to simple publishing systems rather than the full stack CMSs is this concept of having everything managed in a gate repo. So, the changes to a life site can be atomically deployed and that gate repo is a single source of truth for the project. You don’t have multiple copies of a database representing different versions of a system gets around this issue of developing a new site feature in one environment, and then trying to figure out how to build that up and deploy it to the live environment, which goals may have changed since they started working on the feature. Does Drupal offer any way to manage that particularly difficult process?

Angie: Yes, starting with Drupal 7, in fact, we had a concept called the features module and what features were, where the ability to combine both module functionality as well as configuration changes and deploy those as one chunk of logical code between environments. In Drupal 8 and nine, we’ve improved upon that ability by building it right into the core system. There’s something called the configuration management system. And what it does is every bit of configuration that you do. For example, what is my site name called, what’s the email template that I’m making, these kinds of things. All get stored into a centralized system and that system has everything else and Drupal is infinitely flexible.

Angie: It can be exported as YAML files, for example, that can just be migrated back and forth between environments. And then it’s really easy to also do a get, diff and find out, “Oh, okay. There’s been changes between the last time that I saw that and I can look them over and make sure they look okay, great import them in.” And there’s both gooey tools for doing that as well as command line tools for doing that because again, Drupal’s always trying to serve both of those audiences.

Drew: There’s always this great opportunity when you make a new major version of a mature software project to deprecate and remove pieces that have had their day maybe features that never caught on in the way that you hope they would and to resolve tech debt and that sort of thing. What changes have been made in Drupal 9 in terms of cleaning house?

Angie: Yeah, we did take the major version bump as an opportunity to really clean house. What we’ve been doing throughout the Drupal 8 cycle is envisioning new ways of doing things. Better, clearer APIs, for example, managing entities or configuration or that kind of thing, or like a more modern JavaScript library for handling drag and drop or that kind of stuff. And during Drupal 8, what we did is we left all the old stuff in place because we didn’t want to break anyone’s site between 2015 and today. But Drupal 9 gave us the opportunity to say, “Okay, as we went along the way, we just marked all these things as like at deprecated.”

Angie: And so, we could find them later and be like, “That’s the stuff we need to clean up.” And so, Drupal 9 went through wholesale and got rid of all of the deprecated functionality. And then there’s a Drupal 8.9 version that’s coming out at the same time as Drupal 9, which has all the BC layers in there, but it’s fully compatible with Drupal 9 to give people a release to move everything up to where it needs to be. But yeah, among the things we did was we updated to the latest versions of all of our dependencies. We have a bunch of JavaScript dependency, some PHP dependencies.

Angie: Those are all on the latest sort of LTS releases. So, we stay on that for a long time. We also took the opportunity to raise the system requirements, which I know people are like, “Oh my God, why my Eskimo 5.7.” But the advantage is that a lot of these older versions of PHP, particularly at PHP 5, there has still hanging around, haven’t been security supported in ages. And so, we’re trying to make sure that our users that are on Drupal 9 are staying secure, not only today, but going forward into the future. We’ve updated those and then we’ve gotten rid of any deprecated APIs that we’ve created along the way. When you start a site with Drupal 9, you’re starting with a fresh slate, no deprecated code on the latest stuff and should serve you for many years to come.

Drew: That sounds like quite a complex development workflow. The fact that you’ve been working on a Drupal 9 compatible version of Drupal 8 and working on Drupal 9 at the same time, getting them ready to release together. How did that work in practice?

Angie: Yeah, it’s worked well because we effectively write Drupal 9 in Drupal 8 over the past five years, starting at Drupal 8, we use a concept called semantic versioning. In the past, when we released Drupal 7, for example, we just left it alone more or less, except for a few bug fixes and maybe keeping it up-to date with the latest versions of PHP that come out and that sort of thing. With Drupal 8, we made the shift to semantic versioning. And what that means is that every six months, we have what’s called a minor release of Drupal and that’d be like an 8.1 and 8.2, as opposed to an 8.1.6 or something, which would just be a bug fix release.

Angie: And every time we do one of these minor releases, we have the opportunity to add new APIs, to add new features and to change the way that Drupal works with the caveat that we always need to leave a backwards compatibility shim in there so that existing sites don’t stop working. All the way along, we’ve been improving Drupal 8 since its initial release. And so, we’ve added features, we’ve deprecated APIs, that kind of thing. So, when we get to Drupal 9, it was a lot of work. I don’t want to mitigate the word there or deprecate that word that the team has been doing because there’s like this whole burn-down chart of all the deprecated things that we needed to get through and all of these contributed modules that needed to update their stuff too.

Angie: But the effort was much lower than prepping for any other major release, because it really was just honing in on those deprecated things, the libraries that are no longer supported that we need to find alternatives for and making sure we’re on the latest versions of stuff and all this stuff works with it. And so, that’s the Delta between 8.9 and nine will be, I think it’s something like 12% reduction in code or something like that is what we managed to do, but otherwise they’re identical because they’re all using the same stuff.

Drew: Wow. It’s just like Drupal 8, but the shackles have come off.

Angie: Yes. That’s a great… I’m going to quote you on that. That’s great, I love it. Have you thought about joining our marketing agency team? No, I’m just kidding.

Drew: Historically, and Drupal is certainly not alone in this, but there has historically been quite a lot of pain in moving sites from old major versions to newer major versions of Drupal. It sounds like maybe with process of developing a Drupal 9 inside Drupal 8, maybe that has been resolved slightly. So, should moving from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9, actually be fairly straightforward?

Angie: That’s right. Yeah. I think there’s basically three scenarios, so one is if you were running Drupal 8 and every time a new minor release of Drupal 8 came out, you upgraded it to a right away and you started making use of the new stuff. Your path is going to be basically nothing like you’ve already been doing all the work and you’re fine. If you moved to Drupal 8 awhile back and you haven’t been keeping up with the BC changes, there is a little bit of work for you. It’s definitely the easiest upgrade in over a decade of our software anyway. And we have a ton of different tools to help you with it. There’s a dashboard that shows all of the contributed modules and what their Drupal 9 situation is, there’s automated tools for going through and checking your code and flagging any deprecated functions that you have.

Angie: And there’s tools for automatically, going up and finding, “Oh, this is the latest version of your module and it’s Drupal 9 ready? You should go download it,” that kind of stuff. From Drupal 8 to 9, I would say that that part’s pretty well covered. If you’re coming from a prior version of Drupal, say Drupal 7 or below to Drupal 9, that does start to look a little bit trickier, like among the changes that we made in Drupal 8, where for example, we moved entirely to object-oriented PHP and we started utilizing design patterns that were found in other software project, which is a really smart thing to do architecturally, but it does mean that if you had a ton of custom code in your old life, that in Drupal 9, you’re going to need to find alternatives for that.

Angie: Acquia is a product and development called Acquia migration accelerator which is aiming to solve that problem where we’re creating like a nice, react to find application, which reads in your old Drupal 7 data creates equivalent Drupal 8 data for you along with all the modules that you’re going to need that mapped to your old Drupal 7 modules where possible to try and expedite that process quite a bit because we want to make sure that everybody who’s on older versions can still make it over to the new world order where everyone’s on the same version and we’re all working together.

Angie: And then in addition, we’ve also extended the Drupal 7… The community like the opensource community of Drupal their end of life in Drupal 7 as of November of next year. Currently, anyway, we need to discuss whether COVID impacts that or not. But there’s a number of different companies and Acquia is one of them that offers extended support for Drupal 7 beyond that, to 2024 at least. And so, that makes it so that people who have an easy upgrade have a year and a half to get it done. People have a less easy upgrade, have potentially like three and a half years to get it done or longer if they need to. And we’re trying really hard to make it possible for everybody to move over and then building tools like Acquia migrate accelerator to help speed up the process.

Drew: I’m intrigued by the sound of this functionality to scan your code and find out if it’s going to be Drupal 9 compatible. Is that essentially a static analysis tool?

Angie: It is. Static analysis has its limitations. We’ve built a little bit… It’s a library called Rector PHP and you can use on any generic PHP code. It’s not specific to Drupal, but we’ve built a wrapper around it called Drupal Rector, which my understanding is that it adds a little bit of extra things where… There’s certain stuff that we know when something’s dynamically loaded up in the argument that it’s looking for might not be present at that wouldn’t be necessarily addressable, when it’s just in static codings reading dollar signs and stuff like that. And so, there’s been a little bit of extra wrappers to look for some of the most common issues that we find there. And the other cool thing I’m sorry, I got those two confused.

Angie: PHP scan is the thing that scans the code. Rector is the thing that can automatically apply changes to code. And so, we’ve been using those in tandem. PHP standard do the static analysis, plus a wrapper for some Drupal specific things to catch some of the dynamically loaded problems. And then rector is a thing that’s used to say, used to be Drupal_set_message of procedural function. And now it’s this arrow Drupal message or whatever it is and it automatically can make those changes for you so that you’re really only honing in on a couple of tricky your API bits that can’t be automated for you, but we have a dashboard on dev.acquia.com that goes through all of the contributed modules.

Angie: And I’m going to get the numbers wrong, but it was something like 50% of projects are either done already for Drupal 9, or they just need like one or two line changes that can be done with this automated tool. And then there’ll be good to go. The two of those tools together in tandem have been excellent. What I’d like to see is when we make API changes going forward in Drupal 9.1 and 9.2. and so on that we actually couple them with a rector room that will automatically fix them in modules going forward, because then we can cut this transition period down even further in future releases.

Drew: That sounds really smart. Is this something that users with Drupal 8 sites currently can start using in preparation for Drupal 9?

Angie: Yep, absolutely. We’ve been recommending people start doing this since beta, which was a couple of months ago. Yeah, there’s a couple of I don’t know if it’s the best to send you links or something like that, but there’s a project on drupal.org called upgrade status and that’s a nice jumping off point. That’s the thing that gets you the dashboard overview, it looks at all your modules tells you a red, yellow, green, whether or not it’s ready for Drupal 9 and can point you off to the tools that either can help upgrade your site for you or help you upgrade your own code in cases where you’ve extended Drupal beyond its normal capabilities.

Drew: So, say somebody listening to this has got a WordPress site, which they’ve built over the years. They’ve got maybe multiple themes and child themes, dozens of add-ons, it’s draining, it’s bursting at the seams, it’s beginning to sweat and they’re looking at Drupal, they’re thinking, “I like the sound of this. This sounds like it’s built for more of the project that I’ve got here.” What would the process of moving a site on something like WordPress over to Drupal look like?

Angie: One of the features of Drupal 8 is the migrate API, which is something we’re making use of an Acquia migrate accelerator as well. And the migrate API is generic. It doesn’t care what you’re moving to or from, we happen to use it to move from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9, but you could also use it to move from WordPress to Drupal or from Drupal to WordPress for that matter. Please don’t but you could. There are a bunch of plugins for the migrate system and one of them does add WordPress specific knowledge to the migrate system. And so, it sets up WordPress as a source, Drupal as a destination, and it moves things over there. That worked for the data of your site, the actual functionality of your site, you’d have to do some research to figure out if you say I was using this plugin and WordPress that maps to this module in Drupal.

Angie: One future plan we have for Acquia migrate accelerator actually is, once we got the seven to nine problem leaked to try and open it up so we can move people from anything to Drupal because it’s the same basic problem where you’re doing a major upgrade from an external system to another external system. There’s no reason we couldn’t theoretically throw in WordPress, Adobe experience manager, Sycor those kinds of things into this as well and work on migration tools for those because yeah, the more on the Drupal boat, the merrier.

Drew: Drupal has been a project for nearly 20 years at this point, it’s obviously got a healthy ecosystem loads of committers, loads of support. It’s got companies built around it. But obviously a project this big has to keep evolving and keep bringing in new blood. Are there any initiatives to bring new developers into the Drupal family?

Angie: There is. There’s a couple of those. I would say the one that I’m the most excited about that is very ambitious and so we didn’t get it done in Drupal 8, but we’re calling it, the admin UI initiative would be probably need to split that up into several smaller initiatives, but effectively it’s an initiative to modernize the JavaScript of Drupal. And that means a number of different things. Number one, we’re using jQuery because that was the hottest thing back in 2006 or whenever we made that decision. And moving it more to like generic ES 6 or I don’t even know, I’m sorry, I’m not a JavaScript person, so I don’t know what there is to list there, but whatever the latest ECMAScript is, we’d be using that.

Angie: But it also means, drilling down… Drupal 8 in particular already went a long way to making Drupal really accessible for decoupled builds. Having a JSON:API output, there’s a distribution called Contenta that is get you up and running on a Drupal site, catered to headless, if that’s what you want. There’s a bunch of stuff in that area, but I would love to do even more. Knowing that that is more or less a best practice now, it’s like, sort of build this decoupled front end to a backend and really honed Drupal for that purpose.

Angie: I think that’s part of the JavaScript modernization. And then the other part is a lot of our admin experience tools are still in that PHP client server model, or like a person who clicks a button, there’s a request to the server or something churns, and then you get output. I would love to bring in more of the dynamic instant feedback, that react view angular, some of those libraries make possible. I would love to get some of that in the actual admin interface, both just so the code interface looks nice, but also because if we could develop a set of components, say react components or something like that.

Angie: All of the Drupal modules that plug into Drupal could also make use of those. And it wouldn’t be like reinventing the wheel every time. I think that’s going to be a major focus for Drupal 9 is modernizing the JavaScript and the whole overall developer experience of Drupal for JavaScript developers. And then in addition to that, we’re also trying to minimize the amount of work that people who are developers and already know Drupal have to do through the automatic updates initiative is another big one that I’m excited about where right now, if you want to update your modules, that’s pretty straightforward, but updating core requires some manual work.

Angie: And we would like to get rid of that so that everybody can stay on the most secure version and that kind of thing. If it hasn’t come across, Drupal’s very concerned about security. We run some major governments in the world. We are running the Grammy’s or whatever. A lot of people depend on Drupal for being rock solid. And so, we spend a lot of time being very concerned about the security of the software, making sure the security team is responsive, not only to core issues, but anything that happens in our contributed module space. We take a lot of care about accessibility. We make sure that any change that goes into core goes through a series of gates and make sure that it’s WK compatible and uses the correct Aria attributes and all that kind of stuff.

Angie: We really have spent a lot of time making sure that things are good. And now I think the next phase of things where he’s going to be opening up all of that effort that we’ve put in to make it more accessible to more people.

Drew: It sounds like Drupal takes longterm support very seriously.

Angie: That’s correct.

Drew: How do you balance having a modern code base, you mentioned updating the style of JavaScript using having something that’s attractive to developers yet still having something that’s stable and isn’t following fads, isn’t bringing in dependencies that are going to quickly go away, that you can rely on and it’s going to be a bit boring and keep running and be supportable?

Angie: That is a fair question. I think a couple of different ways. As I mentioned, Drupal is very modular. One thing that has led to success in the past, so JSON:API is a good example. There was a lot of contention about what format are we going to standardize on for Drupal itself to output. And we settled on JSON:API for a number of reasons. It’s an open protocol. It’s not backed by one particular company, blah, blah, blah. There’s a bunch of stuff. When we did that, we actually prototyped that in contrib first. We created a contributed module, which can iterate very fast and easily.

Angie: And we can even just say, “Oh, that didn’t work out, delete it.” We were able to innovate really fast out in sort of this contributed module space. We started there and saw that, “Hey, this thing has some legs. Like people are actually making use of it. They’re providing really great developer feedback. We’ve got Drupal people on the JSON:API spec writing team, like this is actually really good. Let’s bring that thing that we already know works into core.” And then we did so, but it’s still just a module. Let’s say that, next year XMLRPC comes back from the dead and that becomes the thing that everybody uses.

Angie: It’s still possible that we would just leave the JSON:API module in there. We would get a new XMLRPC module. We would enable that by default, but still leave the old thing in there. And then when Drupal 10 came out, we’d take the old JSON:API module, move it back to contrib and people could still use it. But what shifts in the core software itself would just be following the latest trends. This way we get the best of all worlds because we’re able to innovate quickly. We’re able to make the best decisions possible for what the default Drupal user experience will be and developer experience. But then we’re also able to backtrack on decisions if necessary to do different things instead.

Angie: I think what would be get really tricky would be like, if we wanted to throw out the entire theme system and replace it with angular, for example, that would be hard. It’s really hard to make… All of the modules have to write four different ways that they could do their templates and that kind of stuff. That one, we would need to think through more, but that general approach of figuring out a way to plug into the system, leaving the old way in there as a crutch for the people who still need it. And then when we retire things, we retire them gracefully, so they’re still available to people, but just not part of the core product, I think that’s generally how this goes.

Drew: And I guess it’s that continuing process that’s brought you to this point where you’ve got Drupal 8 with all the backwards compatibility, I’ll call it baggage, baggage that you’re now shedding and moving forward with Drupal 9.

Angie: That’s right. Yep. And we’ll do it again in Drupal 10.

Drew: It sounds like a very important release for Drupal. Is there anything else we should know about it? And when is it landing?

Angie: It lands on June 3rd. You heard it here first, or maybe you didn’t hear it here first. We’re going to be doing some kind of like… It’s a little sad that it’s happening during COVID times because when Drupal 7 and eight came out, for example, were user groups all over the world doing like Drupal parties with cakes and all this kind of stuff. And so, we’re going to try and do a virtual version of that, but it won’t quite be the same. But what’s really cute is people bake little Drupal cupcakes and stuff like that, or showing the Drupal can on the side of a building or these kinds of things. And so, it’s a really creative and innovative community, so I’m sure they’ll figure it out some of the cool stuff.

Angie: But no, in terms of things to cover, I think we covered a lot of it, I think, if you’ve looked at Drupal before and held your nose at it, I would say, please give it another look. We’ve done a lot of work and over the past years to really, really hone in on that user feedback, really hone in on the usability piece, make it much easier for marketers. And also much easier to maintain for developers too. We have done that and we’ve managed to do those feature changes without horribly breaking things for the Drupal 8 people because we kept the backwards compatibility stuff in place. But it means if you haven’t looked at Drupal, even in five years has changed significantly as well because we’ve kept adding features, including API headless stuff, workflow, layout builder, all this kind of stuff.

Angie: And I’d say it’s a great way to build, it’s future-proof, there’s structured data under the hood, so you can… Whatever the new front end trend that ends up being you’re well positioned to jump on that. It’s got a great community full of awesome people. I hang out at open-source communities a lot and some of them are like, “Oh, you don’t know about blah, blah, blah?” Well, whatever, kind of thing. And Drupal is more like, “Oh, you don’t know about blah, blah, blah? Well, let me tell you about it because it’s awesome.” It’s just like a really welcoming cool community, I think, because we come from all different backgrounds and we’re just here to make the web rock.

Angie: So, yeah. Anyway, I hope something in there was helpful. And thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with you.

Drew: It would be remiss of me not to ask you about your involvement in open-source more generally, and especially the hurdles that are very real for getting more women to participate in open source. That’s something that you’re very passionate about, isn’t it?

Angie: Yeah. My background is, I was an open-source zealot back when I was even a teenager, I heard about opensource. I was like, “That is so cool. Everything should be open source.” But I always had this vision that you had to be a genius to work on open source because the people who were big names and open source back then was like Linus Torvalds and Eric S. Raymond and I don’t know. For some reason they carry this glow of like, “Oh, those guys are so smart.”

Angie: And so, I was self taught, I was going to community college at the time. And so, I just figured out this is not for me. But then Google announced a program called Google Summer of Code, which was where you get paid over the summer to work on an opensource project. And I was like, “Well, that’s really interesting because if they know we’re students, they know we don’t know everything yet. Maybe I’ll and just see what happens.” And I picked Drupal because I’m one of those people that just use source on every website I visit, just because I’m curious about what’s happening. And back in the day, there was a website called Spread Firefox that was built on Drupal. And it was really interesting. It was basically the community site where anyone could upload like a Firefox installed Fest or event having their campus, or they could upload a poster that they made or like whatever.

Angie: And I was just like, “That’s really neat. That’s cool. I’ll just file that away for later.” Because I long since given up using actual CMSs because I use PHP nuke and I was like, “No, I’m never doing anything like it. My cat could write better code than this anyway, I’m sorry. Sorry, PHB nuke.” But anyway, I had filed that away and I saw Drupal on listers and I was like, “All right, sure. I’ll give it a go.” And then it was amazing because from this side of things, once I got in the community and was actually contributing, I realized like, “Wow. A, first of all, the people that I thought knew all these things don’t actually know that much. You know what I mean?” They do. But like everyone has strengths and weaknesses. And what I saw happening was there’s people who are really good at certain aspects of the code.

Angie: People who are really good at documentation, people who are good at design. People who are good at explaining things to people, whatever, all of these people collaborating on these changes and all contributing the little bit that they know. And I was like, “Man, if I had known that like 10 years earlier, I would have gotten hit on this, I could have had a whole decade of software experience by now.” And so, I made it my mission to try and break down that barrier, particularly for women because women are socialized from a very young age to not get into tech, to begin with. And then once they get into tech, there’s a lot of like, “Oh my God, it’s a girl,” kind of thing. And it’s just like, if you’re in tech, you’re already dealing with a certain amount of crap.

Angie: And it’s like, why don’t we cut the crap and show people how awesome this is. I love talking to anybody who wants to get involved in open source, but particularly the women because I ran a group called Drupal Chicks for a few years there, which was women in Drupal to get together and talk. And the meetings were so funny because a girl would be like, “Well, I’m not a developer but,” and then she’d go on to like describe all this complex CSS stuff that she does or whatever. And I’m like, “You know that’s development, right?” I see women in particular though, everybody can struggle with this, but women in particular struggling with that feeling that even if I’m a perfectly capable person, that I’m just not as good as everyone else and so yeah.

Angie: I tried really hard to break down that barrier. I also tried to break down the… For my own self like people go, “Who Is Web Chick?” And I’m like, “No, I’m just like a moron.” I was like, “I did the stupid thing last week.” It was hilarious. And just to kind of break down that rockstar idolatry stuff, because we’re all just humans and we’re all just here trying to make it work and yeah. I am passionate about it because I just feel like if there’s someone out there who genuinely loves open source and the ethos of open source and the idea of it, that they shouldn’t be held back just because they think they’re not as good as other people because I can tell you right now, you’re good enough and you should just do it.

Drew: That’s so, so important. I’ve been learning about Drupal 9. What have you been learning about lately, Angie?

Angie: At the beginning of the whole pandemic thing, a friend of mine who teaches guitar, posted like, “Crap, my music school closed. Does anybody want to do Zoom lessons?” And I was like, “Yeah, I have a guitar. Just been hanging out here.” And just because I collect musical instruments just in case of the off chance my daughter wants to get into music. I’m like, “Great, I have all the things.” But I have no idea how to play it. I play drums. And so, I was like, “Sure, I’ll try that.” Actually, for the past two months I’ve been taking guitar lessons online from a friend of mine and I’m learning like take it easy by the eagles and stuff like that and a little bit of blues stuff and I’m so far very terrible, but I’m trying and it’s fun.

Angie: It’s just a completely different thing that it wouldn’t otherwise do. And yeah, it’s been really fun.

Drew: Incredible. If your dear listener would like to hear more from Angie. You can follow her on Twitter where she’s @Webchick, find her personal site at webchick.net. And of course, find out all about the current and upcoming versions of Drupal at drupal.org. Thanks for joining us today, Angie, do you have any parting words?

Angie: No, I’m really grateful to have the opportunity to speak with you. You’ve been around the block like, “Holy cow.” I was looking at your resume. It’s like, “Oh my gosh.” Speaking of people that are up on pedestals, but honestly, that’s amazing. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you, especially about the little open-source project that could. And hope that people take the chance to try it out.

(il)

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

Via http://www.scpie.org/smashing-podcast-episode-17-with-angie-byron-whats-new-in-drupal-9/

source https://scpie.weebly.com/blog/smashing-podcast-episode-17-with-angie-byron-whats-new-in-drupal-9

0 notes