#most of the time i just go full conspiracy theorist on them to embarrass them in public when they try to step to me tho | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

aylinaliens · 4 years ago

Text

The Not So Scary Haunting of Sarawat Guntithanon— Chapter 1

Fandom: 2Gether

Pairings: Sarawat/Tine

Summary: Sarawat Gay Panics 24/7 over his new roommate (who, by the way, might be a ghost, which is weird on so many levels but whatever, if a man wants to thirst over the supernatural being haunting his apartment so be it!)

Word Count: 1621

Notes: i'm not even excited for 2gether the movie yet here i am, posting another sarawatine fic. basically our boy Sarawat gay panics every single minute of every single day because the ghost who is haunting his apartment is pretty. that's it. that's the plot. just sarawatine being dumb, mutually pining idiots.

Read the first chapter on Ao3 or down below!

How was it possible that a disembodied voice could sound so... god damn enticing and lovely? At first, Sarawat found himself pressing his body deeper into his bed but after getting over to his initial shock and fear he allowed himself sometime to appreciate the sound of it. Although his heart was in his throat, Sarawat could not deny the wave of comfort that filled his veins, from his finger to his toes warm spread through his body.

Which was weird—and frankly crazy. Ghosts can possess people, right? Or kill them? Sarawat wished he paid more attention to all the horror movies Man and Boss dragged him to because maybe then he wouldn’t be laying in bed, already whipped, ready to drop down on knee. Hand in marriage sir, please give me your hand in marriage.

He should be terrified of this figure, not lowkey turned on.

Curse Sarawat and his inability to function around attractive boys. Curse this motherfucking hot as heck ghost and his stupid dimples.

Sarawat awakes to a blurry and translucent figure hovering mere inches from his face.

The next day he swears to Man and Boss that the reason he remains frozen was because of fear and not because he was having a full on gay panic attack... over a ghost. That’s what this person was, right? A ghost? He was a rationale adult but he had enough brain cells to connect all the dots.

Sarawat sucks in a deep inhale of breath, allowing his eyes to burn every line, curve, and dip of this mysterious figure's face.

The dim light of his bedroom combined with the near translucent nature of the figure meant that Sarawat never was able to get a clear idea of what this ghost looked like. Just the glimpses he did get left his throat dry and heart pounding rapidly.

The figure had a closed mouth smile etched across his features, all soft pink lips and crinkly eyes and dimples. Sarawat briefly thought of leaning forward to press his fingertips against those pink lips just to see if they were as soft as they looked. But then he realized that was insane and weird so instead he just beat that thought away with a stick. Gay thoughts: be gone! Don’t you dare become a simp over a motherfucking ghost.

The bottom half of his face was crystal clear which was both a blessing and curse while his top half looked as if it was about to flicker away at any moment. Sarawat was positive that this was abnormal, but then again this was his first encounter with a ghost so maybe it was, in fact, normal? It’s not as if he was given a manual or anything.

He couldn’t quite tell what shade of brown this mysterious figures eyes but he allowed his brain to imagine that it was probably vivid, just like the rest of his face. He was debating on the actual shade when he a disembodied voice spoke.

“Hello.”

He should be terrified of this figure, not lowkey turned on.

Curse Sarawat and his inability to function around attractive boys. Curse this motherfucking hot as heck ghost and his stupid dimples.

Sarawat was like ninety percent sure of his sexual identity but now he was having a crisis about the fact he was possibly crushing on a whole new species. Needless to say he was losing his mind!

He could just imagine the headline of the video Man would inevitably make him sit down to film and post on their jointed YouTube channel.

STORYTIME: I ALMOST MADE OUT WITH THE GHOST THAT'S HAUNTING MY APARTMENT!

Sarawat was positive that his best friend would insert various memes and jokes throughout his very honest and real existential-slash-moral-slash- philosophical crisis Sarawat was having.

It would probably rake in a lot of views but Sarawat did not want to be known as That One Guy Who Simped Over A Ghost for the rest of his life.

He was almost positive that if he told his friends the trust extent of how he felt, they would want to change their channel from music and vlogs to something more akin to Buzzfeed Unsolved.

They would buy a spirit box and Ouija board online and force Sarawat to try to communicate because of course they fucking would, those absolute menaces.

He could already see Boss glancing around like a conspiracy theorist, seriously asking the ghost are you DTF (that means down to fornicate in case you need clarification), Mr. Ghost? Just give us a sign, any sign. Man would most definitely feed into this or make the situation even worse.

Which is why he was not going to reveal what happened tonight. He would just play off as sleep paralysis. Yeah. That is the best way to prevent his best friends from blowing this situation out of proportion.

Sarawat wanted to say something but the words died in his throat. What would he even say? Hello. Please smash your face against mine! Uh, no way in hell. Maybe it was a good thing that he had trouble forming words right now. It would save him a lot of embarrassment.

The figure leaned down closer and— fuck fuck fuck gay thoughts go away— peering curiously down at Sarawat. “He definitely can see me so why isn’t he saying anything?”

Because you can’t verbally keysmash in real life you beautiful and vaguely threatening supernatural being.

The figure hummed, deep in thought, before leaning back (thank goodness) only to do something that made Sarawat let out a very unflattering shriek in surprise. Well there goes his reputation. He didn’t have one in the first place to begin with, especially not with this ghost, but still. There it goes.

Ghosts were unable to touch people right? Right? So why did a ghost...just touch him?

Sarawat raked his brain trying to remember the drama he watched a few months back with his brother (it was Phukong unsubtle way of being like, hey, bro, I like boys but I’m still scared of coming out so let’s just both pretend like I didn’t just cry at the scene where Ohm Pawat’s character comes out to his mother, I swear I’m emotional because of the acting not because I can relate to it).

Sarawat was positive that the ghost in that drama couldn’t actually touch anyone. He was like ninety-six percent sure that every time he tried his body would just go straight through the other characters.

He forgot how it was possible that the ghost could touch, and kiss, the human, though. He should have paid more attention but hey, he was also trying to think of an inconspicuous way to let it slip that he was also gay. Great (disaster gays) apparently think a lot alike.

Anyways, the figure poked his chest and Sarawat almost pissed his pants in shock. Clearly the ghost was just as surprised that he could actually touch Sarawat because he froze, making Sarawat happy that he decided to wear a shirt to bed tonight.

He assumed that the ghost must have thought he was dreaming to (wait can ghost dream?) so just to make sure he poked Sarawat three more times in the same spot and yup—Sarawat felt it. He felt it clear as day.

“Oh.” The figure tilted his head to the side. “This is weird. I shouldn’t be able to do that.”

Yeah, obviously.

Sarawat opened his mouth to finally speak (he swore he was going to play it cool and be all like: hi! i promise i’m not having gay thoughts right now!) but before he could a loud crash in the next room made him jolt in surprise.

After being rendered motionless for a few minutes, Sarawat finally gained control of his own body. He threw himself upright into a sitting position but in the process of doing so he accidentally slammed his forehead against the figure whose face was technically still in close proximity.

Cursing, Sarawat clutched his head as pain made white spots cloud his vision. “ Fuck .”

From next to him the figure cursed too. “ Shit.”

Eventually the pain subsided into a dull ache, allowing Sarawat to glance over at the boy—ghost, supernatural being, angel, whatever—next to him.

The top half of his face was no longer translucent anymore.

In fact, he wasn’t translucent at all.

Crimson blood began to trickle out from his nose, causing Sarawat to gape in horror.

Not because the image was a terrifying one. I mean, yeah, it was a bit weird but it has been established that Sarawat, that certifiable himbo, was in a constant state of ‘mark me down as scared and horny’ tonight, but because a ghost...was bleeding. From a wound that Sarawat gave him. Was that like, scientifically possible? Note to self: send a text to Earn so that she can ask her girlfriend about it.

Also? Sarawat was finally able to label the ghost's eyes as being a cross between honey and caramel. Obviously, his poor gay started chanting oh oh oh oh oh because yeah, read above, Sarawat Guntithanon? Himbo, Simp, Dumbass Extraordinaire. Either way he was a mess.

The possible brain injury and the shock of the entire night finally caught up to Sarawat, making his stomach churn with nausea and vision become blurry.

Without meaning to, Sarawat fainted—not even elegantly like one of those heroines in a romance novel but like a dead, fucking fish, limbs flopping every which way—right into the arms of the mysterious figure he was still dying ( yikes bad choice of words) to know the name of.

The last thing he registered before completely blacking out was that someone was cradling him to their chest, rambling away.

“Oh my god. Did I just kill him? No. No way. He’s still breathing. Shit. Sarawat! Hey, you saraleo, wake up!”

#2gether #2gether the series #still2gether #sarawatine #sarawatine fic #sarawat guntithanon #tine teepakorn #sarawat x tine #thai bl #bl fic #jdsdlkf whipped!wat and equally whipped!tine is my favorite so i had to write this #also this is inspired by he's coming to me but very vaguely

15 notes · View notes

dynocation · 4 years ago

Text

🌈⭐️The DTL Mods scared of being called out so they make a callout post about me in secret.

Get ready for a juicy story newcomers. This is a fun one.

Granted there are people in the dtl amino that still like me, so the word got back to me. These people literally are incapable of understanding, that yeah people can lie (ChibiTacoLord) and be toxic behind the scenes. There’s a reason why Taco doesn’t have many friends and I do. Not trying to diss or anything.

⭐️Addressing The People Making Testimonies⭐️

Ark - Person in the dtl community that would bully multiple people calling their art trash and making fun of people’s mental disabilities. I sent screenshot evidence to Bregee. She dismissed it saying “He’s my friend. That’s just how he is.”

It wasn’t him just attacking me either, I could careless about random nobodies reeing at me, but he was attacking some of the nicest people in dtl community. Calling their art terrible and hoping they’d die, and because of him multiple people left the dtl community. I was contacting Bregee as a voice for these people because they were scared to say anything, and she brushed it aside. “He’s a friend.” Despite me giving her fair warning that Ark is a douchebag she allowed him to stick around and what does he do? He goes on FurryAmino calling people “faggots” and their art “cringe”. Am I suppose to go “Poor Ark”? I legit feel no sympathy for him. He sabotaged the DTL Discord all on his own, yet I get blamed for it apparently. No thank you. I do not claim Ark as my responsibility. You made it clear he’s your two year old to handle. I’m also not banned from Furry Amino as Bregee has said. I’m still using it and have been for years, being featured, and making friends there, and will be a curator on it here soon.

Ark went on there screaming how he hates me and people tore him apart for it. (He basically just called my art cringe and the people who like it are cringe too).

In furry culture, you do not attack an artist without evidence, and Ark didn’t have any. (In regards for me being bad at commissions)

In shame he left the amino and deleted his account/hid it from me(one of the possibilities, he could’ve been banned due to breaking numerous rules) blaming me for people yelling at him. I didn’t say anything other than telling people to leave him alone and let staff deal with him. People were not kind to him, granted he was personally attacking people. People were pulling apart his arguments and pushed him off the amino. I wasn’t made aware of it till later when people were gloating about it to me, sharing me images of him getting spammed with clown emojis. That’s a funny lie for him to tell though in an attempt to save face. If he goes around saying I’m banned there, because I’m one of the biggest community members and still to this day. People on there message me everyday telling me it’s becuase of me they pursue art and love to animate. Maybe Ark is just an idiot though and just learned how to use the block button? And thought block was the same as a ban? Wouldn’t be the first a DTL Amino/Discord person learned that.

BakiDance - I worked with them to solve the raid issue. I said nothing nazi related except when I was @ by Ark and I made a joke in response to him.

Alli - Would ask me to do sexual Roleplay when I was 11-12. WOULD ASK ME, and I would do them becuase I didn’t understand at the time. It was like incest/rape/gore shit. She then would call my art shit and call me homophobic. When called out for it, she went to the excuse “oh we sexual rp’d”, as if that doesn’t also look bad back on her.

Bregee- She invited me back to the DTL discord and I told her no becuase she doesn’t curate it. She got offended. Then showing me like a 10 page document of new rules for her discord which made me cringe. (It was massive and full of inconsistencies) She then messaged me again, asking me about the New Years. I gave her a short stiff response, because of the Ark situation I had a distrust of her. She was doubly offended. She then randomly accused me of befriending nazis/pedofiles, which I found funny because, number one, she doesn’t know my friends, number two, she doesn’t know me. She’s like a hate Stan. Literally, she looks at my art and obsesses over it to a negative degree. She’s joined my discord, follows me, dms me. I know she hangs out with Taco/Alli some of the most toxic people in the dtl fandom, so hh. Unless she wants to say otherwise.

Chibi Taco Lord - Would ask me to do sexual rps, and I would decline, because of the bad experience I had with Alli, she promised me she woulnt be like Alli so I agreed once and it was okay. I’m an adult, Taco is an adult. I sexual rp to this day if both parties are adults and consent to it.

When it comes to abuse art. It’s the Pot calling the Kettle black. Taco made a whole story about her Drew getting raped and beaten by Wilfre and shared it with me. Abuse art of her Drew that she drew still exists to this day too btw on the dtl amino. So if you banned me due to my depressed Wilfre comics. Guess you gotta purge a whole lot more people, becuase sad comics are banned. Edgy art is banned. I think it’s stupid, but come on, don’t be hypocritical.

This isn’t an accussation out of nowhere either. I have screenshots of her doing this, drawings she’s made, and testimonies of “bystanders” who witnessed her asking for sexual abuse roleplay, Roxy nonetheless (a curator on the amino has witnessed this). I only share this info becuase she moved goal posts from “I hate how Baki’s posts has a lot of likes on it”, to “Baki only hates me becuase im autistic”, to now “Baki is a sexual deviant”. I will remove this embarrassing incriminating evidence of ChibiTacoLord, if the DTL Amino staff remove their slanderous take on me. Otherwise, I don’t care, becuase I’m open about my fetishes and I see nothing wrong with them. You can’t say I’m wrong for having the fetish and the DTL Amino staff is okay to have that fetish and post it frequently. Hyprocrites.

My character Cope: Hes literally not a nazi lol! You either have to be a conspiracy theorist, liar, or delusional to think so.

He’s a raposa from Lavasteam, wears a red camo outfit, with golden medals. He’s politically a dictator. Runs a military state. He’s the villain in my stories.

So I don’t see why that’s a problem? What? Are villains just no longer allowed in stories.

Cope is adored by a lot of people. I get requested often to make a comic of him/make a game with him in it. Only a few crazies dislike him and go spouting ‘nazi’.

My friends: I have several friends and none of them are nazis. Absolutely delusional to think I would be friends with someone who hates me. I am friends with Roxy though who ended up having to leave the Drawn To Life Amino staff due to the toxicity of the members. A painful reminder for those people.

—

🌈⭐️Conclusion🌈⭐️

These people are mentally broken and delusional with hate. I find it funny though. They make these little hate spaces, think they’re private, but the word always gets out.

You know what we call people who gather together to hate on one person for superficial reasons?

Get ready to scream. It’s called people a HATE GROUP. Take that to your political obsessed brains.

Anyways, if you see these people. Don’t spam or hate on them. It just fuels their hate for me.

#drawn to life #dtlamino #call out post #drawn to life the next chapter

10 notes · View notes

chiseler · 4 years ago

Text

THE MYSTERY OF SUNN CLASSIC PICTURES

It was like the positive, life-affirming New Age mysticism of the hippies took a sudden turn for the dark and very strange. In the mid-Seventies, as the country was overwhelmed by a creeping atmosphere of impotent anger, paranoia and existential despair in response to Vietnam, Watergate, race riots, Kent State, the Tate-LaBianca murders, bomb-tossing student radicals, pollution, high-profile assassinations, the oil crisis and the emergence of disco, Americans sought solace in some form by plunging headlong into a collective national obsession with all things Mysterious and Unexplained. Suddenly Bigfoot was all the rage, as was The Loch Ness Monster, The Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, psychic phenomena, near-death experiences, apocalyptic Biblical prophecies, and ancient astronauts. People were desperate to hold onto something, anything, no matter how ridiculous and fanciful, as the whole world seemed to be crumbling and burning around them. If something pointed toward an unseen world, a world outside this stinking mess we were stuck with, or better still promised the complete obliteration of this stinking mess, then at least there was a glimmer of hope. Almost overnight, a cottage industry cropped up, flooding the market with cheap paperbacks, magazines, movies and TV shows—even comic books and board games—devoted to unexplained phenomena of all sorts. Personally I didn’t give a Toss about the state of the world, but I still subscribed to UFO Reporter magazine, had a shelf full of cheap paperbacks with titles like The Search for Bigfoot and From Outer Space, and never missed In Search Of…, the half-hour syndicated series narrated by Leonard Nimoy that delved into one mystery or another every week. For god sakes, I even had the Bermuda Triangle board game.

But in what may have been the strangest phenomenon of all, far more bizarre than the legends surrounding Area 51 or the Philadelphia Experiment, in 1971 Schick teamed up with the Church of Latter Day Saints to launch a low-budget movie studio that aimed to become the epicenter of High Strangeness culture.

Yes, a razor blade company and the Mormons decided to make movies together. How could the results be anything but unfathomable?

(It’s worth noting before we get too far that in my research into the history of Sunn Classic Pictures, it became clear the indie studio, which still exists in some vague form today, seems to have gone to some great lengths to fog their early history, never once mentioning the Mormons, and in some cases denying there even was a Sunn Classic Pictures prior to 1980. With only a few rare exceptions, the reasonably small Sunn Classic catalog, now owned by Paramount, never received any kind of home video release, which only adds to the mystery.)

As the official story goes, in 1971, the employees of Schick—a subsidiary if the pharmaceutical company Warner-Lambert—approached Rayland Jensen and asked him to launch a new movie studio. Appalled by all the filth and violence and sex and cursing that infested American movie screens, as well as the so-called “intellectuals” who thought these movies were “good,�� they felt real Americans needed a family-friendly alternative. Those Schick employees concluded Jensen was just the man for the job, as a few years earlier he’d handled distribution for a nature picture released by the Utah-based American National Enterprises. The picture had done very well.

Okay, let me stop there. As I said, that’s the official story, as far as it goes and as little sense as it makes. The real story goes more like this.

In 1971, a renegade group of American National Enterprises employees, led by Jensen and inspired by that same disgust with what American movies had become, broke away to form a new production company to release family-friendly, G-rated pictures. Patrick Frawley, the ultraconservative, paranoid, anti-communist conspiracy theorist who also happen to run the Schick razor blade company invested a bundle in the new venture, ensuring he would have some say in the kinds of movies the new company would release.

With headquarters divided between Salt Lake City and Park City, Utah, the newly-christened Sunn Classic Pictures (aka Sunn international, aka Schick Sunn Classic Pictures) set out to Make family-friendly features and documentaries aimed at working class, conservative, God-fearing Americans who didn’t go out to movies very often, likely because of all the above-mentioned filth and sex and violence and cuss words. Moreover, they wanted to make certain these warm-hearted films turned a healthy profit. This involved two basic techniques.

The first was four-walling, a distribution method American National Enterprises helped pioneer. Instead of spending a fortune on all those prints necessary for a massive nationwide theatrical release, Sunn instead rented theaters serving the target demographic, inundated the market with ads and gimmicks, then screened their new film at the selected theater for no more than a week. After that extremely limited run, they packed up and moved the print to another theater far away. It was a tricky ploy. On the upside four-walling a picture allowed the production company to keep all the box office receipts without having to divide them among various middlemen.

If they knew the film was a stinker, it also allowed them to skip town before the bad reviews could do them any damage. On the downside, those limited runs also meant the picture would be there and gone before any positive word of mouth could work its magic. Sunn would try four-walling a new movie for a few months, and if it was making money, they might consider a nationwide release. If not, then they’d start trying to sell it to TV for syndication. It wasn’t a tack that worked all the time, but often enough to make it worthwhile, and it left them more of an escape route than a national release ever would.

So. “Family friendly.” Yes. If you want to make Disney-style pictures but don’t have Disney-style budgets to work with, animated features are out. So are live action films with any kind of special effects. Basically what you’re left with are nature films, right? No expensive sets, very few actors, and as a result very cheap to make. So Sunn began producing wilderness adventure stories.

In those very early days, you can definitely smell Patrick Frawley’s hand in the development process. Films like 1971’s Toklat, in which a man is forced to track down and kill a beloved pet bear after the bear kills a local rancher’s livestock, is a prime example. (As it happens, Toklat was the first Sunn picture I ever saw, Green Bay being a conservative working-class town, and so on Sunn’s demographic map. ) There was something decidedly Nietzschean about those earliest releases. Most of them featured lone individualusts with strong principles who flee the corruption of modern civilization to face the harsh realities of nature alone.

Now, think back and ask yourself honestly” what kid in his right mind has ever liked nature films, Nietzschean or otherwise? Maybe Mormon kids did, but certainly not normal kids. Nature movies are dull as dust, all those endless shots of trees and rivers and shit. Even if it’s supposed to be a true adventure story about some historical frontiersman, so what? Where are the explosions and car chases and monkeys doing funny things? You know who liked nature films? Grandparents! Grandparents loved them because they were wholesome and taught valuable lessons. They insisted on dragging their grandkids to them because they didn’t have to worry about being embarrassed or having to define certain words on the trip home.

The handful of films Sunn Classic released in their first three years—most all of them wilderness adventures about solitary manly sorts learning to dominate nature in one way or another—did okay. They didn’t lose money, but they also didn’t become runaway hits.

In 1974, even after several rewrites, no one at Sunn Classic Pictures had high hopes for the next film on the docket, something called The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams. Sure, it was loosely based on an historical figure who again fled the corruption of the modern world to live in the wilderness, befriending a grizzly bear along the way. But the character was not some stalwart and steely-eyed Ubermensch—he was gentle and kind-hearted. What the hell were they going to do with that?

Enter Charles Sellier, and the second technique that would be central to Sunn Classic’s success. Sellier, today considered one of Sunn’s true founders together with Rayland Jensen, was a recently-converted Mormon in his thirties, as well as the author of the 1972 novel upon which Grizzly Adams was based. As Sunn’s new executive producer, he had a different—and eventually hugely influential—approach to marketing films.

Sellier set aside an estimated $85,000 for market research before a new film went into production. This involved targeting the desired demographic with door-to-door and telephone interviews asking housewives and construction workers what kind of movies they would like to see. This also involved screening early rushes from films currently in production for hand-picked test audiences in order to get their reactions and advice. This is, of course, standard operating procedure now, but it was radical back then, and something that mortified directors and screenwriters. In some cases Sellier even had members of the test audience wired to biometric scanners to measure their reactions to the scenes they were being shown, and use those reactions to have a script rewritten more to the test audience liking. If audience pulse rates went up whenever a certain character was on screen, well, they’d build up that role. If a certain animal warmed their hearts, well, maybe they’d make a whole movie about that particular animal.

Sellier’s method of crowd-sourced filmmaking was first tried on The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, and sure enough, the film, starring former viker movie regular Dan Haggerty, became Sunn’s first bona fide international hit, bringing in over $20 million. The film was such a smash among grandparents it quickly spawned a Sunn-produced TV series, which was also a big hit among grandparents. To date, the Grizzly Adams franchise remains Sunn’s biggest cash cow.

But something else happened in 1974 that would help make that iconic Sunn Classic logo as familiar and comforting as the Toho, American International, Shaw Brothers and Troma logos. To some of us, anyway.

In 1968, Erich Von Daniken published Chariots of the Gods?, a book which argued, through some mighty suspect and loosely interpreted archaeological evidence, that aliens had visited Earth thousands of years ago, and among other things helped build the Egyptian and Mexican Pyramids, Stonehenge and the statues on Easter island. It was one of the first major hallmarks of the High Strangeness Culture to come. Originally published in Germany, the book became an International sensation among those with a very high tolerance for pseudoscience, pseudohistory, and bullshit in general..

In 1970, German director Harald Reinl made a documentary based on von Daniken’s book, and it, too, became a big hit across Europe. As sillyassed as the whole thing was, I’d argue the film was even more effective than the book thanks to the visual presentation of all the supposed evidence.

Well, after seeing how much money Chariots of the Gods? Was pulling in overseas, and interested in such topics himself, American TV producer Alan Landsburg acquired the U.S. rights, re-edited the filmn, brought in Rod Serling to narrate, and broadcast it in 1973 as In Search of Ancient Astronauts. It would be the first of a trilogy of TV documentaries about ancient astronauts produced by Landsburg and narrated by Serling.

Noting the ratings that Landsburg doc brought in, as well as that European box office, Sunn obtained the US theatrical rights to In Search of Ancient Astronauts, changed the title back to Chariots of the Gods? And began four-walling it around the country in 1974. It didn’t matter that by that time countless articles and books had completely debunked all of von Daniken’s claims, nor that critics had savaged the film, in some cases even calling it racist for purporting indigenous people in Mexico, Africa an elsewhere could never have created these wonders by themselves. The picture made money. It may not have been Grizzly Adams money, but enough to leave Sellier and Jensen convinced they might be onto something with these documentaries about weird shit. Documentaries were even cheaper to make than nature films, and the demographic they were aiming at seemed eager to believe in monsters and aliens and conspiracies, so there you go. For the next five years, along with the wilderness adventures and wholesome TV adaptations of Huck Finn and Gulliver’s Travels, Sunn gave the half-wits like me what we wanted.

In 1975, Sunn picked up the theatrical distrobution rights To The Outer Space Connection, the last of Landsburg’s ancient astronaut trilogy (as well as one of the last things Rod Serling worked on before he died). This final entry argued not only that aliens had visited earth thousands of years ago, but had planted humans here in the first place and had been guiding our evolution ever since. This wasn’t exactly a new idea, and could be traced back, so far as I’m aware, at least to Nigel Kneale’s 1958 BBC miniseries Quatermass and The Pit. But the film, directed by Fred Warshofsky, went several crazy steps beyond Kneale, claiming we know exactly where the aliens came from and why, that the Mayans were themselves aliens, and that these same aliens would return to Earth on Christmas Eve, 2011.

The TV documentaries made enough of a splash for Landsburg that he parlayed them into the above-mentioned weekly In Search Of… series, which began airing in 1977, right around the same time Grizzly Adams hit the airwaves.

Both Chariots of the Gods? And The Outer Space Connection helped cement the template that would define the rest of the Sunn-produced High Strangeness documentaries that would follow, making them so effective on the young, the susceptible, and the merely desperate. The real key, it seems, far beyomd the film’s actual content, was conscripting an authoritative host/narrator who can present the most insane pseudoscientific theories and shaky evidence with a straight face while repeatedly using terms like “indisputable,” “Proven beyond a doubt,” and “scientists agree.”: “It’s an incontrovertible fact these ancient carvings prove alien visitors walked on Earth over five hundred centuries ago.” It was the simplest of carnival sideshow techniques, but one that kept drawing suckers to the theaters.

The same year they released The Outer Space Connection, Sunn also released The Mysterious Monsters, which was less a documentary than a series of vignettes about Bigfoot, the Yeti, and The Loch Ness Monster. Director Robert Guenette had been making what you might call speculative Sunn-style documentaries long before Sunn even existed, so he was in familiar territory. In fact, The Mysterious Monsters includes scenes borrowed from Guenette’s 1974 TV movie, Monsters: Mysteries or Myths?, which coincidentally had been narrated by Rod Serling. The (mostly) new and expanded Sunn production was hosted by Peter Graves, who was as straight-faced as they come. In between shots of Graves and ten other men in cowboy hats wandering the forest on horseback looking for Bigfoot, we get eyewitness accounts from those who claim to have actually seen Bigfoot, Nessie, or the Yeti. Unlike most Bigfoot films of the era (and there were a bunch), The Mysterious Monsters infers a decided fearlessness and hostility on Bigfoot’s part, claiming he not only terrorized innocent victims, but wandered into the suburbs to terrorize them. The recreated Bigfoot encounters here are kind of fun, and in fact the film contains two solid scares, at least if you’re nine. Nessie and the Yeti get short shrift, and those scenes of Graves riding through the forest with that hopeless hunting party are interminable, but the picture was another big hit,arriving at precisely the right time given 1975 was a banner year for Bigfoot cinema. In the end, and where he got his information who the hell knows, Graves announces there is a community of some two hundred Bigfeet living in Northern California, though Graves and the hunting party find none of them.

Another hallmark of Sunn’s documentaries was that most inevitably ended with an outlandish, shocking, unexpected, and wholly unsubstantiated claim. The influence of mondo films—Mondo Cane, Africa ama and the like—on Sunn’s documentaries is undeniable. But while mondo films aimed to shock grindhouse audiences with footage (whether real or created) of bizarre and extreme human behavior, Sunn aimed to leave family audiences womderstruck at the possibilities of a mysterious world of magic and monsters just beyond our perceptions.

In 1976, Sunn followed up The Mysterious Monsters with The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomena, also directed by Guenette, this time narrated by Raymond Burr. The film is less a cohesive documentary than another shaggy dog series of vignettes exploring extrasensory perception, astral projection, and telekinesis as well as ghosts and spiritualism, featuring an all-star cast of celebrity psychics including Jeanne Dixon and Uri Geller. Not surprisingly, Burr, who doesn’t seem terribly convinced himself, informs us that there is irrefutable scientific evidence that all these powers are absolutely real and for true.

That same year also saw the release of one of Sunn’s more patently ridiculous outings, In Search of Noah’s ARk, a film which, in many ways, proved a turning point. The film was the first to be hosted/narrated by character actor Brad Crandall, who would go on to narrate most of the remaining Sunn Classic documentaries, as well as appearing in a few of their TV shows. It was directed by James L. Conway, who quickly established himself as Sunn’s go-to in-house director, churning out five or six features and TV movies a year.

Apart from turning to mostly in-house staffers to make their films instead of bringing in outside directors and celebrity hosts, In Search of Noah’s ARk also marked the point at which Sunn further fed their demographic by adding a decidedly fundamentalist Christian focus to many of their films, from Noah’s Ark to their TV series Greatest Heroes of the Bible to two documentaries about near-death experiences to 1979’s (and grammar be damned) In search of Historic Jesus.

In business terms it was a savvy move. To this day, films aimed at a fundamentalist audience, especially if they support a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible, can bring in more money than most Hollywood films. They certainly bring in more than most Mormon themed films, and apparently the more patently ridiculous the involved claims, the better.

The supposed “scientists” who lay out the evidence that the remains of Noah’s honest-to-God ark are still sitting up there on top of Mt. Ararat (should anyone care to take a look) aren’t, um, scientists at all. One, a supposed physics professor, argues there’s a mountain of geological evidence proving the world was deluged by an all-consuming flood, um, five thousand years ago. Another claims the ark was first discovered by a Russian expedition sent by Tsar Nicholas II in 1916, but all the reports and evidence were destroyed by dirty communist revolutionaries, um, two days after the expedition returned. It all goes downhill from there, and you have to feel some pity for the poor gullible fools who believed all this nonsense.

I saw nearly all of Sunn’s documentaries in the theater when I was a kid, and now feel sorry for my mom, dad, and older sister, who I suspect drew straws to see who had to take me whenever a new Sunn picture hit town. When I was ten I bought every last nutty claim. Going back and watching them again four decades later, I find myself blurting, “Wait, what?” Aloud after nearly every scene. They do, however, remain fascinating artifacts and a mirror of a certain psychological makeup. They’re also still fun as hell for all their crazy dumbness, if you keep your critical thinking skills at the ready.

Sunn found themselves in the middle of a shitstorm in 1977 with the release of The Lincoln Conspiracy, also directed by Conway. Historians, critics and the media at large attacked the film for presenting as fact a convoluted conspiracy claiming the assassination of President Lincoln was an inside job, closing, as Oliver Stone’s JFK would years later, with a demand the investigation be reopened. Conway would later claim the film was just a silly speculative docudrama based on a couple recent books, but even the authors of the books denounced the film. Still, a little controversy has never been known to hurt the box office.

Over the next few years Sunn continued to release two or three pseudoscientific documentaries a year, including Beyond and Back, Beyond Death’s Door, and The Bermuda Triangle, the latter of which claimed all those ships and planes vanished after being zapped by a malfunctioning Atlantean particle bean that was lost somewhere on the ocean floor near Bimini. Bimini? Well, I gotta say, as explanations go, it makes about as much sense as any other.

A personal favorite from the late Sunn era for its sheer nihilistic simplicity was 1979’s Encounter With Disaster, this time directed by Charles Sellier himself. Using his patented market research techniques, he brought a test audience into a theater and showed them dozens of newsreel clips of fires, earthquakes, The Hindenberg, race car crashes and the like, measuring responses to see which were considered the most exciting. He then strung all the most popular disaster footage together and released it as a feature.

Encounter With Disaster was perhaps the one true mondo film Sunn released during their brief heyday, and a definite anomaly. Toward the end, instead of documentary footage, talking heads and manipulative narration, films like The Bermuda Triangle, Beyond Death’s Door and In Search of Historic Jesus cane to rely more on speculative recreations with actors, sets and scripted dialogue. Although a narrator does pop up occasionally to say, in essence, “Yup, this really, really happened!,” the films come off more like splintered docudramas than documentaries, which somehow makes their assorted theses seem even less plausible.

It’s worth pointing out here that In Search of Historic Jesus, as delightfully awful as it is, does, without saying as much, offer a clear case study of the effect Sellier’s marketing machinations could have on a film.

Directed by Sunn’s in-house cinematographer Henning Schellerup (who prior to Sunn had worked on everything from softcore porn to Corman productions) and again narrated by Brad Crandall, Historic Jesus clearly began life as a documentary aiming to present all the independent historical evidence proving the Biblical account of Jesus’ life was accurate. Given there was precious little of that to be found, it became a documentary about the Shroud of Turin. Given there wasn’t really ninety minutes worth of material about the Shroud of Turin, they shot an interview with a fake scientist offering some, um, plausible scientific explanations for the Star of Bethlehem, then plundered some footage from the Noah’s Ark movie (though oddly the data offered in the latter somehow changed between 1976 and 1979). All this left them with a film that was about twenty minutes long.

The film was saved when Sellier gathered a test audience of fundamentalist Christians. After showing them a few scenes, he quickly learned they didn’t need any scientific or historical proof that Jesus really existed. They just wanted to hear more Jesus stories.

Taking their advice, the bulk of the film became a string of recreations of Jesus’ Greatest Hits acted out by amateur actors playing Jesus, Mary, Herid, Pontius Pilate and assorted disciples. No effort whatsoever is made to prove these recreated scenes actually happened. So instead of a pseudoscientific, pseudohistorical account of the, um, historical figure known as Jesus of Nazareth, it became another Sunday School-ready Jesus movie, all primed and ready to be rented to church groups across the country. In short, then, calling the film In Search of Historic Jesus actually makes sense.

By 1979, Sunn’s documentaries seemed to be running out of gas. They were still turning a profit (especially that Historic Jesus thing), but the profits weren’t what they once were, and the films were costing more to make. Also, other production houses had picked up on the Sunn Classic formula and began releasing High Strangeness docs of their own. In 1978, for instance, Amran Films and RCR released The Late Great Planet Earth, based on “Biblical scholar” Hal Lindsey’s massive bestseller which claimed all the prophecies in the Book of Revelation were coming true, and the long-promised Apocalypse would arrive any day now. If I remember correctly, the world was supposed to end in 1986. The film was hosted and narrated by Orson Wells, who had once been asked to narrate a Sunn film, but was so horrified by their marketing practices he turned down the job.

(A few years later in 1981, Welles would also narrate a documentary about Nostradamus’ prophecies, which was directed, coincidentally enough, by Sunn Classic alumnus Robert Guenette. Just to illustrate how influential Sunn’s experiment had been, The Man Who Saw Tomorrow was distributed by goddamn WARNER BROTHERS, of all places.)

What struck the real death knell to Sunn’s hugely successful string of pseudoscientific and pseudo historical extravaganzas was a changing culture. We were own the brink of Morning in America and the Reagan Era. Interest in silly monsters and psychic phenomena was waning as everyone put the ’70s behind them, focusing instead on the stock market, the threat of nuclear war, cocaine, designer clothes and other tangible real world issues.

Charles Sellier

In 1980 Sunn Classic Pictures was bought out by Taft Enterprises, a Cincinnatti-based conglomerate. The suits in Taft’s entertainment division had a few ideas of their own about what American moviegoers wanted. When they correctly saw that the days of four-walling were about over as the business ties between the major studios and national theater Chains grew stronger, Charles Sellier walked away to continue writing, producing, directing and marketing films on his own terms. In 1984 he directed the notorious holiday slasher film, Silent Night, Deadly Night, a picture remembered more for its ad campaign than anything in the picture itself. Sellier also later converted from Mormonism to evangelical Christianity.

When Taft likewise decided family friendly entertainment was a dead end, that the market for G-rated wilderness adventures simply wasn’t there anymore, that a film had to be rated PG or R if it hoped to make any money, Jensen and a few other original American National Enterprises refugees quit in disgust, and once again formed their own production company to offer honest American families wholesome entertainment options. Their first film was 1981’s Private Lessons, a teen sex comedy starring Sylvia Kristel. It made a lot of money.

Director James Conway stayed with Taft for awhile, helming several pictures, including the monster movie The Boogens . Interestingly, the very first Taft/Sunn release, perhaps formulated to attract Sunn’s core audience, was the Conway-directed Hangar 18, starring Darren McGavin, Robert Vaughn and Gary Collins. It was the perfect transitional picture, a sci-fi conspiracy thriller loosely based on what might well have been the subject of the next Sunn Classic documentary: Roswell and Area 51. Conway later went on to become an executive at Spelling Entertainment, overseeing a mountain of wildly successful crap.

Over the subsequent decades there were more sales and acquisitions, with the various companies overseeing the Sunn Classic brand themselves being gobbled up by even larger faceless corporate entities. Sunn vanished, then reappeared, then vanished again. Today there are vague, mysterious hints that Sunn Classics Pictures has been re-launched after Rayland Jensen teamed up with Lang Elliott, original founder of Tri-Star Pictures. But if Sunn really has risen from the grave, would it matter?

For good or ill, over the course of that five-year stretch between 1974 and 1979, Sunn Classic Pictures illuminated one strange facet of a very strange era, warped millions of impressionable minds (like mine), fully capitalized on a nation’s despair and collective neuroses, and left an indelible mark on the culture. Take even a cursory glance at what’s airing on the History and Discovery Channels, or at how the marketing departments of any movie studio large or small operates today. They simply wouldn’t be what they are In the second decade of the twenty-first century had it not been for Sunn Classic Pictures., and fore that we can thank the Mormons, a right-wing kook, and Bigfoot.

by Jim Knipfel

2 notes · View notes

lefaystrent · 6 years ago

Text

Kid Logan au pt.3

Fandom: Thomas Sanders, Sanders Sides

Pairings: none

Summary: After Logan wakes up to find himself to be eleven-years-old again, he tries to make the best of his life and attends high school. But he doesn’t do much to hide the fact that he’s an adult stuck in a kid’s body and his new friends are becoming suspicious.

Notes: You can find the first two parts here.

In the days that follow since they became friends with Logan, he does not get any less weird.

“You know what I just realized is a positive to being a child?” Logan says one morning out of nowhere. They’re all loitering around outside the school, waiting for the bell to ring for the first class of the day.

“What’s that?” Virgil asks.

“I have no obligation to do taxes.” He smiles, entirely too satisfied with the epiphany. “I’m a dependent.”

They all watch him with bemused expressions. He’s sitting on a bench swinging his legs slightly back and forth, sipping contently from a thermos that Virgil is convinced is filled with black coffee.

Virgil doesn’t know anything about taxes or why the fuck this eleven-year-old boy is so happy to not have to do them, but that’s just one of the many weird things that makes up who Logan is.

And who Logan is has quickly become the campus cryptid.

“Don’t you think you’re overreacting?” Patton remarks. It’s the end of the day, students are pouring out the doors, and the three of them have met up at Roman’s car. Once again, they’re talking about their newest little friend.

“Think about it,” Virgil implores as he tosses his bag into the backseat. “There’s so many little things adding up that he’s—” He waves his hands around vaguely as if it’s supposed to mean something. To him it does, at least.

“Just a kid mature beyond his years and finds it hard to connect with people because of it?” Patton asks, brow raised.

“Sounds fake but okay.”

“I’m kinda with Virgil on this one, Padré,” Roman surprises Virgil by saying. Or maybe not so surprising, because every time Logan makes one of those kinds of comments, Roman’s the first to look at Virgil to confirm if he’s hearing this absurd kid right. Roman leans back against his car, arms crossed. “Go on with your theories, Lame Dawson. I know you’ve come up with something in that conspiracy theorist brain of yours.”

Virgil pushes up the sleeves of his hoodie to ready himself. “Okay. So far? There’s only two possible scenarios.”

“The first one being?”

“Aliens.”

“You always think it’s aliens.”

“I haven’t been proven wrong yet.”

“But you’ve never been proven right either—”

“And then my second theory!” Virgil talks over Roman. “He’s a vampire and his thermos wasn’t actually filled with coffee but with blood.”

“Now Virge, you don’t have to B negative about this,” Patton giggles, making the others snort.

“Who said I was negative about it?” Virgil smirks. “This is freaking cool.”

“I thought we agreed that this was creepy?” Roman says.

“Yeah, but creepy’s kinda my thing, dude.”

“Logan isn’t creepy,” Patton disputes. “He’s just trying his best.”

“So you think he’s just a totally normal kid?”

“Oh no, he’s definitely weird.” Patton nods. “But even if he’s not human, I still think he’s trying his best. And like Virge said, how cool would it be to have a vampire/alien friend?”

“I’m placing my bets elsewhere,” Roman disagrees. “Maybe he’s a changeling.”

“A what?”

“You know, a fairy left in the place of a human child.”

“Yeeeeah,” Virgil says convincingly, completely unconvinced. “I’m sure that’s it, Princey. Fairies.”

“If I didn’t scoff at your alien/vampire theories, then you’re not allowed to scoff at mine!”

“But you did!”

“Ugh, whatever,” Roman huffs at him and turns to Patton. “What do you think, Pat? Who do you think is closer to the truth?”

Patton shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe Logan’s just a time traveling old man trapped in a kid’s body.”

“Let’s be realistic here.”

They carry on, about to pile into the car when they spot the kid himself walking down the sidewalk. Patton hollers out to him, waving his arms back and forth spastically until Logan would have to be deaf and blind not to notice him. He adjusts his course and approaches them.

“Hello, is there anything I can do for you?” Logan asks. “Preferably before your arms detach from your shoulders with your wild swinging, Patton.”

“Do you need a ride, kiddo?” Patton asks, chipper.

Logan glances at Roman who stands at the driver’s side door, keys in hand. It’s one of those times when he shows signs of being too sharp for an eleven-year-old, because Virgil can see him quickly concluding that Roman is the driver and that their interactions are still tense even after Roman accepted being friends. It’s not really Patton’s place to be offering a ride when it’s Roman’s car.

“That won’t be necessary.”

“You sure? Because we were gonna hang out for a while if you want to join us.”

Logan shifts his weight to the other foot and adjusts the straps of his bookbag. He’s glancing between Roman and Virgil and pointedly not at Patton. He clears his throat. “Perhaps another time. At the moment I’m busy with a project of mine that I plan to work on today.”

“Oooh, what kind of project?” Patton asks.

For the past week, he’s been asking Logan a lot of questions, wanting to learn more about him. During a chance moment alone with Virgil, Logan had asked, “Is he acting this way because he sees me as a child and is attempting to humor me?”

“Nah, that’s just Patton being Patton,” Virgil responded. Logan didn’t ask anything further on the matter, but he did become a bit more obviously self-conscious whenever Patton questioned him. His answers would become softer at being the center of attention and he’d tug at the end of his too-large tie.

Logan’s tugging on his tie right now. “It’s not for class and nothing you’d probably be interested in, I assure you. Just a personal project of mine. But if you must know, I’m researching theorems on time travel.”

Virgil and Roman turn to look at Patton fearfully. Patton just stands there with a pale face.

“Oh . . . that’s uh . . . that’s really cool, kiddo.”

“Indeed, I find the subject utterly fascinating.”

“Sowhat’sthefuturelike?” Patton mutters really fast.

“What?”

“Nothing!” he laughs to cover it up. He walks up to Logan and ruffles his hair. “Say, we should watch ‘Doctor Who’ sometime!”

Logan lets out a disgruntled grunt, batting Patton’s hand away. “Your affection is noted and unwelcome.” Then what Patton said seems to catch up with him. His hands freeze in his hair that he’d been trying to fix. “Wait, did you say ‘Doctor Who’?”

“Yeah, have you heard of it?”

“Heard of it?!” Logan practically screeches, and suddenly he’s far more animated than they’ve ever seen him. “It’s only one of the greatest shows in the history of television! If there was ever a series that didn’t deserve to be canceled, it was that one.”

“It was canceled?” Roman asks, looking at the others for an answer because he isn’t that into the show.

“No?” Virgil says in confusion. He looks at Logan, brow raised. “It’s still ongoing.”

Before Logan can explain himself, a car rolls by, stopping by them.

“There’s my high school son!” a woman yells out the window.

Logan spins around on his heel to scream in a high pitch, “Mother!”

There are other students in the area who start paying attention, but that doesn’t deter the woman. She has a big grin on her face as she waves out the window. “Hi honey! Is my high school son making high school friends?”

“Your repetitive reference to me as being in high school is unnecessary, thank you!”

“That’s really your mom?” Roman asks lowly to Logan. It is kinda hard to believe. She seems like a Patton-type, bright smiles and extroverted demeanor the opposite of Logan’s.

Logan huffs indignantly. “Yes. She has not gotten over the fact that I skipped three grades and uses every chance she can get to brag about me. It’s excessive.”

“But you like it, don’t you,” Patton teases lightly, making Logan’s face go red.

With no other prompting needed, Roman waves back at the woman. “Hello, Miss Sanders! We are most certainly your high school son’s high school friends.”

“What are you doing?” Logan hisses. “You’re just going to further enable her!”

“Hey there!” Patton calls to her next. “You have a wonderful son!”

“Not you too! Virgil, please, some assistance—”

“S’up, Logan’s mom,” Virgil greets her, throwing out a lazy peace sign.

She seems about ready to cry. She looks at her son, voice thick with emotion. “I’m so proud of you Logey-wogey.”

“Logey-wogey?” Patton gasps. Stars blossom in his eyes at the nickname, and Virgil is certain that he’ll adopt the nickname as his own. As it is, he’s reaching out to hug Logan who shrugs him off in embarrassment.

“I will pay you to forget you heard that,” Logan says.

Roman’s smile is full of sharp teeth. “Not a chance, Logey-wogey~.” Then he turns to his mother. “Miss Sanders, we were just in the middle of inviting your son to our weekly movie-marathon night. Would it be alright if he joins us?”

“What are you doing? This is kidnapping.”

“Is it really kidnapping if we have parental consent?” Virgil ponders. Logan sends him a glare, and to be honest Virgil feels a bit guilty. It’s a surprise to hear Roman pushing to have Logan join them, but Virgil can’t deny that he’s become infinitely more curious to figure out the kid than he was ten minutes ago.

“Oh my gosh, yes!” his mother agrees enthusiastically. “Logan honey, you go hang out with your high school friends, okay? I love you!”

And with that she drives away. Logan tries running after her car but his short legs aren’t quick enough. He stands in the dust left behind, mouth gaping.

“Wow, that was easy,” Roman muses. “Lucky we aren’t really kidnappers.”

“I don’t think he can really tell the difference at the moment,” Virgil observes.

“Logan?” Patton asks in concern, hovering over where Logan has fallen down to the ground on his back, defeated. Virgil doesn’t know where he got it, but Patton starts poking Logan’s cheek with a stick. “Logan? Lo? Logey-wogey?”

“Yeet me into the sun, I beg of you.”

Tag list: @spectralheartt @a-pastel-pan @notalwaysthevillian @rose-gold-roman @ijustrealizedhowdumbmynamewas @katie-the-noble-fangirl @yourroyalydramaticanxiousness @aroundofapplesauce @merlybird500 @beach-fan @jemthebookworm @whats-going-on-kiddos @randomsandersides @gamerfreddie @unring-this-bell @that-royal-ravenclaw @analogicallythinking @lilygold23 @under-the-blue-moonlight @broadwaytheanimatedseries @just-fic-me-up @joyful-milkshake-observation @absolutesandersidestrash @midnightmagi (let me know if you want to be added or removed from this story’s tag list)

#sanders sides #logan #logan sanders #virgil #virgil sanders #roman #roman sanders #patton #patton sanders #platonic lamp #kid logan au #funny #writing #fanfiction

617 notes · View notes

campcampdumbbitch · 6 years ago

Text

Idea

Halfway through summer there's an event ((involving his parents, probably getting caught saying something they shouldn't in front of David or Gwen by accident)) that leads to Max being told that after camp, he's going into the foster care system and he isn't excited and practically terrified cause it means he might never see any of his friends or David or Gwen ever again. Cut to one day him sitting in his tent one day and Ered just skates in like

"Yo dude, heard you're going into the foster care, i got some hot tips and tricks"

And they spent like an entire day talking about it, Ered finds out how shitty Max's parents were and is able to force him to tell her his worries about never seeing any of his friends again and Max finds out that Ered's been in the system since she was a baby and all the things she learned from being stuck in it for like 6 years. Stuff like:

"Pray to god you get sent to a co-ed orphanage instead of a full boys one, it's vicious there"

"Don't stop being evil to get adopted, i was evil and i got two cool dads"

And they're like weirdly close by the end of the day but they found they're shockingly similar to one another, even about not admitting how similar they are to one another.

But in the end it doesn't even matter because Ered's dads just adopt Max on the spot but they're still pretty close

I guess some extra Ered + Max sibling stuff

-One time Nikki pissed Max off bad and he told her Ered had a girlfriend, she cried for like 5 hours and she still hasn't forgiven him for it.

-Sometimes they call each other by their full names to tease each other

-Any time either of them brings a partner home, they tell the most embarrassing stories while calling them by their full names "Oh wanna hear the story of how Meredith broke her leg at camp?" "And here's the time Pops taught my baby brother Maxwell how to swim"

-They share a room and like... half the room is painted pink with skateboards hung up on the wall and posters and trophies and the other half is beige with a single pile of clothes, a bunch of boxes that are probably hiding drugs, a picture of Max with his friends, a picture of Max with his family and a plastic trophy that says "#1 brother dickwad"

-Ered's got the same one but instead it says "#1 sister bitch"

-Max is a conspiracy theorist but since his dads literally work for the FBI, he sorta just asks them now, he's gotten so many weird answers he doesn't even ask anymore.

-Dolph comes over a lot so Max has to be nicer to him or else he gets the sibling shoulder punch of doom.

-Due to this Max sometimes catching himself standing up for Dolph at school, one time a bunch of kids from Dolph's class started bullying him so Max just sorta walked up behind them with Nikki and Neil who were all way bigger and scarier.

-They totally do extreme sports together, but like...not olympic extreme...but just deadlier versions of already existing games "Wanna play extreme hide and seek?" "How can you make hide and seek extreme?" "Wait till we pull out the spiked ball and chain, motherfucker"

-Even if he can be a dick sometimes, Max drops in a good few words about Nikki to Ered, but it's pretty obvious she's not interested. "There's no cute girls to date..." "how bout' nikki?" "Eh"

-Likewise, Ered drops in a few words for Preston. She's just way less subtle. "Preston bet me 50 dollars he could get you to date him" "Pay him the 50 dollars, he'll need it"

(I know I'm rambling i just want there to be more adoption scenarios for max than just david and gwen, spice it up ppl seriously, even Harrison has at least two)

#camp camp #cc max #cc ered #cc cool gay dads

83 notes · View notes

lostinfantasies38 · 5 years ago

Text

2020 - 20 Facts

Tagged by @kittimau and @somniaran Not gonna lie, some answers I left the same from yours @kittimau

1. Do you make your bed?

Meh, sometimes. Usually with a grumpy baby in the morning I don’t get to it by mid-afternoon anyway. And if she’s especially grumpy, I’ll just tuck her into bed with me for a nap, which only messes it up again lol

2. What’s your favorite number?

13 - it’s my lucky number

3. What’s your job?

Stay at home mom. A recent development, actually. I left my job as a vet tech/receptionist at a corporate animal clinic after almost 5 years. It was time for a break - empathy burn out. And staying home saves us the insane cost of daycare with an infant.

4. If you could, would you go back to school?

No. Been there, done that. I never completed my BA after nearly 7 years, since I switched my major halfway through and was working full time which prevented me from devoting all the time I would have liked to get through the degree program more quickly.

5. Can you parallel park?

Yes, but I hate doing it lol!

6. A job you had which would surprise people?

Ummm...years ago I worked for like 3 months at Allstate as a claims adjuster and I hated it

7. Do you think aliens are real?

Yes...and no. I think what we consider “life” and “intelligent” are very narrow. Viruses and pathogens are intelligent and constantly evolving to outsmart our own defenses against them. And I have ex-military family members who are definitely conspiracy theorists...but I don’t know if I buy the version of ET creatures. If they do exist, they have cooler places to go then here.

8. Can you drive a manual car?

Funnily, I can only drive standard in a car. Put me behind the wheel of a manual truck and I’m totally going to kill the engine in traffic - trust me.

9. What’s your guilty pleasure?

Fanfiction - reading or writing it. I love to read fluffy, happy fics, but damn if I only know how to write angst! lol

10. Tattoos?

I have three. A Norse rune on my right wrist, Uruz, which translates to “strength and perseverance.” I got it before the semi-colon caught on as a symbol to keep fighting through depression. I have 9 bats that rise from mid-back and over my right shoulder - no special meaning except I have loved bats since I was a child and they do not get enough love in my opinion. And a standard red heart with an arrow that I had inked on my left calf a few years ago to commemorate a good friend’s wedding. It’s my only tattoo with color!

11. Favorite color?

Green, followed by purple. I look good in them as well but mostly wear a lot of greys and black lol. (@kittimau I don’t even see the point in changing this answer since it’s the same as yours! LOL)

12. Things people do that drive you crazy?

Being rude or hateful, argumentative, mean. Bullying, trolling. It hurts me on a deeply personal level even if it is not happening to me directly. I can’t stand seeing others hurt.

Not using blinkers while driving. THEY’RE THERE FOR A REASON.

Snuffing children’s natural curiosity and dreams. They are our future. Don’t destroy them - we need their imagination and insight to keep us from falling into a pit of apathy. Stifling creativity is how we guarantee this planet will die before we can rescue it from the damage we caused.

13. Any Phobias?

Arachnophobia (fear of spiders): yes, I know it’s common, but if you grew up with a basement bedroom as a kid in the Midwest you’d be haunted by the massive wolf spiders too!

Sociophobia: mainly the fear of social gatherings, socializing, embarrassment in social situations. (same, girl, same)

Mild agoraphobia (fear of crowds): when I’m deep in a depressive funk, yes. I have refused to leave my house for days or weeks at a time when these episodes happen

Atelophobia: fear of not being good enough or doing something incorrectly (fear of imperfection) - this is very evident in my need for validation when it comes to my writing. I’m sorry, I apologize in advance.

14. Favorite childhood sport?

Ummm, I used to baton twirl but when we left Texas and moved to the Midwest where it wasn’t common, I stopped doing it. I was more of the band/choir nerd

15. Do you talk to yourself?

YeEEeeeeSSSssss (insert Alistair voice)

16. What movie do you adore?

Awww, shiiiiit. Idk, I love Avatar, but I also really love the How to Train Your Dragon series. Omg, I blubber more than my kids when I watch them!

17. Do you like doing puzzles?

Yes, but I haven’t put one together in years. Too many small hands and dogs who eat everything to keep small pieces lying around and ruin a work of art

18. Favorite kind of music?

All kinds? Depends on my mood, honestly.

Rock, alternative, experimental, electronica/trance, indie, folk, Celtic, country. Classical (Beethoven and Mozart being my favorite composers). A little of everything except like, death metal or black metal. ( @kittimau , I swear, you and I are the same person - LMAO!)

19. Tea or coffee?

Both. Both is good. Depends on my mood which one I go for, but I do enjoy both hot and iced tea, as well as hot and iced coffee.

20. The first thing you remember you wanted to be when you grew up?

Even growing up landlocked, I was dead set on becoming a marine biologist to study rays and sharks for the rest of my life and I probably would have, if I hadn’t learned how hard it is to get grants to be on the ocean researching the things you love. Most biologists, marine and otherwise, end up teaching and never get the grants they need to actually be in the field. So damn sad.

#2020 facts #get to know me

5 notes · View notes

tjkiahgb · 6 years ago

Text

Episode Recap: 3.08, “I Got Your Number”

Let’s see if I still remember how to do this.

Wait. Nope. That’s not it.

One second.

The episode begins with Andi and Bex in their apartment. There we go.

Andi says Bex is using her charger because it has pink tape on it, but then Bex finds another charger and it also has pink tape on it.

Then Bowie jams his head through the still-unfixed giant hole in the wall.

Those bricks look like loose teeth. They’re going to fall out any second. The whole wall is going to come down and no one seems to care.

Bowie also has a charger with pink tape on it and Bex realizes Andi has put pink tape on all the chargers as a ploy to be able to seize any charger she sees for her own use.

I don’t know how Andi thought that plan was going to hold up for longer than a minute. Once Bex found another charger with pink tape on it, it was all over.

On the other hand, I’m glad she’s doing sneaky stuff like this. It’s like living with a little velociraptor. She’s clever and dangerous and always plotting something. It keeps Bex and Bowie on their toes and keeps their minds active, which is important as you start to age.

The next day, Buffy finds Andi at the Jefferson Middle School Machu Picchu.

She delivers her a handwritten invitation to hang out that weekend. It’s a bit extra, but I appreciate the effort.

Then Buffy says her plan is to watch a ton of bad dance-themed movies and reels off a list of films that -- and I did the math on this -- would take Andi and Buffy over 16 full hours to watch. It would basically be: wake up, watch nothing but dance movies the entire day, then go to bed.

Buffy calls it the “DanceDance Film Festival.”

I call it cruel and unusual punishment.

I’m pretty sure the Geneva Convention has rules against treating prisoners of war this way.

Watching 16 straight hours of dance movies sounds like something a conspiracy theorist barking up a wrong, dumb tree would do.

If I was trapped in a steel box for 16 hours and had nothing but a portable DVD player and the Step Up films, I’d spend my time trying to punch my way out of the steel box. (don’t @ me, Step Up fans)

Andi’s into the idea though, except she can’t do it because she already has plans for that night with Amber. Andi suggests they do it tonight, but Buffy has plans with Walker.

They decide to postpone this marathon of pain until another time and say they’ll plan out a future date for it. And then they both talk about how crazy it sounds for them to be making plans like some kind of lame adults or something.

20! Hah! Can you imagine? Can you even imagine??

*laughs and laughs and laughs until the laughter turns into tears and now I’m laughing and crying and I don’t know if I can stop* Help me.

Speaking of being old, Bex and Bowie read books on the couch. Bex asks Bowie to hold her foot which makes Bowie feel like they’re an elderly married couple. They swap visions about how cool it’d be to be unaware seniors.

Then Bowie tells Bex he could see her as a grandma...

...which is something I would never say to someone. I don’t care if she’s 100 and wearing a shirt that says “Ask me about my grandchildren!” You let them say they’re a grandma first, and then you always say something like, “You’re a grandma?? That’s crazy! I’d never have guessed!”

All this talk of being old freaks Bex and Bowie out and they decide to get out and have themselves a little romantic evening. The type only young folk have.

Over at one of Cyrus’s houses, Cyrus brings Jonah down to his stepdad’s man cave for some ping pong. Jonah is surprised Cyrus has a ping pong setup, but Cyrus says it’s because until recently his stepdad was using it for civil war reenactments.

Oh so they’ll let Cyrus imitate guns firing but they won’t let him say gay. Ok.

They start to play and Cyrus quickly goes up 3-0.

Suddenly, TJ comes waltzing down the stairs.

Who let him in? Do Cyrus’s parents know him? Does he have a key? Was he already in the house, stalking around like a cat? I like any and all of these possibilities.

Either way, he’s here now. Just in time to congratulate Cyrus on taking a 3-0 lead. He does this by saying, “Niceberg.”

Sorry. Hold up. I gotta rewind.

This’ll just take a second.

Ok. Be right with you.

Alright, just gonna put that in the mail and I’ll be right back.

Ok. Back.

Anyway, long story short, I don’t feel like “Niceberg” is gonna catch on the same way “Underdog” did.

Jonah’s mood immediately flips. He starts looking for any reason to get out of the basement.

Cyrus is like, if this is about the gun thing, we worked that out. Jonah’s like, it’s not about that. I couldn’t care less about that. I had the Metcalf tattoo thing and the Libby thing, I barely even know what happened.

Jonah storms out, leaving Cyrus and TJ in a metaphorical hole of confusion.

Also, like, a literal hole. Because that’s kind of what a basement is? A hole in the ground? I’m trying too hard to be poetic I think. You can’t force art.

Jonah retreats to Red Rooster Records. He wants to know why he wasn’t warned of this surprise TJ. Cyrus is like, I didn’t think I had to.

You’re universally liked and you universally like everyone back. You know, like a Golden Retriever.

Cyrus says TJ’s in between friends right now, what with TJ sending Reed and Lester up the river to Sing Sing to do 10 years hard time.

Jonah says he’ll never be friends with TJ. He says it’s a long and embarrassing story, though I imagine it’s nothing like the embarrassment Alfonso Mazzanti would feel if he saw his record was still sitting unpurchased in this ratty store.

Does no one in Shadyshade have an appreciation for opera anymore?!

Jonah says the story goes all the way back to little league and we get basically a Drunk History retelling of the Jonah/TJ fight, except Jonah’s obviously not drunk, he’s just Jonah, so, you know: Jonah History.

And the story is this: Jonah used to love baseball. He idolized Roberto Clemente. Now, I’m not going to argue Clemente isn’t an all-time great, but I do find it strange that this kid in Shadyside loved a player who spent his entire career in Pittsburgh and died some 40 years before Jonah was even born. Most kids just go with Derek Jeter, but to each his own I guess. Anyway, Jonah wanted a “21″ jersey to be like Clemente.

But before he got to wear it, it was nabbed by a young TJ, from way back before he changed the direction his hair parts.

This leads to an argument where young Jonah gets angwee.

Cyrus asks Jonah if he cried, but Jonah invokes the baseball law laid down by Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own: there’s no crying in baseball. Cyrus says that’s just a line from a movie, but since when did he become an expert on sports? Stay in your lane, Cyrus.

Jonah says the jersey thing led to a shoving match that got stopped by his dad (their coach) before it could get too far. Jonah took another jersey, but the emotional scars remained. He couldn’t take the pain of watching TJ playing in his number and Jonah would never play a real sport again, banished forever to a lifetime of frisbee.

Cyrus says Jonah has proclaimed multiple times that Ultimate Frisbee is a real sport, and Jonah’s like, “Yeah...”

...let’s stop lying to ourselves about what frisbee is.

Jonah thinks the whole grudge is stupid, but Cyrus feels that it’s clearly important to him and it’s part of what shaped him as a person, so it can’t be that stupid.

Cyrus wants to figure out why TJ did it. Jonah thinks it’s because he’s permanently mean. Cyrus is like, no, he isn’t. He just has resting mean face.

Jonah feels glad to have talked it out and says he’s ready to let it go, but Cyrus isn’t, more so for TJ’s sake than anyone else’s at this point, I assume.

That night, Andi and Amber walk through a parking lot. Amber asks about the Buffy/Walker situation, which Andi says is still a situation, although she’s feeling less strict about following the Girl Code’s laws to reacting to such situations. They discuss how there’s room for interpretation as far as the Girl Code goes. It’s not exactly the Ten Commandments chiseled into stone.

Andi suddenly realizes they’ve been walking a long time and have somehow found themselves deep in the warehouse district.

Amber leads Andi towards a warehouse party. Andi starts to get a little unsure about this whole thing. As they head for the entrance, a man with facial hair exits.

A man that does not shave on a regular basis is one of the best indicators of questionable behavior in the area. You know the old saying: clean faces, clean hearts.

Amber says it’s a high school party, but not to worry, because she’ll protect Andi. They head inside.

Guys. This high school party. I’m losing my mind. I feel like I could make 1000 gifs of the people dancing in this place. I’m not going to, but I could.

Because this party...

is a party...

for dweebs.

I mean, I get part of the problem. It’s Disney Channel. They aren’t allowed to really show anything, so nothing like underage drinking or whatever. You just have to assume it’s an intimidating party off-screen. Ok. Fine.

But maybe the costume designer could’ve put everyone in less floral prints?

There’s very little that’s intimidating about a floral print unless it’s being worn by some kind of iron fist island dictator.

Andi gets separated real quick from Amber and immediately begins to panic.

Bex and Bowie, meanwhile, take a romantic nighttime carriage ride through the park when they get a text from Andi about the warehouse party.

Bowie asks the carriage driver (conductor? horsier?) to take him to Andi.

I hope he understands these carriages are not taxis. I’m not even sure they’re really street legal.

Bex is surprised to find out Andi snuck off to a warehouse party, but Bowie says at least she came clean to them about it within minutes.

Bex wants to know if the carriage can go faster. Bowie stops the carriage instead and says he’s going to run all the way across town to the Meatpacking District to get their daughter.

Bex stops him and says he’s doing a great job as a dad. Really dadding it up. And then they make out again.

These two. They’re always making out. It’s like, get a room.

Bex sends him to find Andi and he takes off running as the carriage horsier sits in uncomfortable silence.

Bowie finds his way to the warehouse party and runs in with the pitch perfect energy of a dad come to take his teenage daughter away from a party.

Although, and I don’t want to harp on this too much again, but if I was Bowie and walked into this party and this was the first thing I saw...

...I’d breathe a big sigh of relief.

I’d be like, “Oh, thank God: dweebs. It’s a dweeb party. Phew.”

He quickly finds Andi and she asks him what took so long. They start to leave when Amber returns. She’s like, are you leaving? And Bowie’s like, you’re darn tootin’ she’s leaving! Amber tries to take the blame but Bowie says it was Andi’s decision and she’ll take responsibility for it. They leave together.

Outside, Andi thinks Bowie’s whole dad thing was an act, but it turns out he was actually very much in dad mode. He says her behavior has led him to not trust her at this moment and then he throws his hand over his mouth like he just called Andi an expletive by mistake.

Bowie and Andi are shocked by this sudden dad-ness.

Andi promises to never do this again, but Bowie isn’t listening because all he can hear is how much he just sounded like his father. He and Andi both see this as a big moment in their father/daughter relationship, and I guess that sort of releases any of the tension as it seems Bowie actually isn’t going to follow up on any of the punishment talk.

They head off. Bowie tells Andi to call Bex but before she can, Bex shows up in the carriage in the middle of this industrial parking lot like some kind of misplaced Disney Princess.

Andi realizes she’s ruined Bex and Bowie’s date night, but they forgive her and all ride off together.

At Cyrus’s house, Cyrus has brought TJ and Jonah back together to solve this little league thing. TJ thinks it’s crazy. Jonah wants to let it go but TJ doesn’t want Jonah going around rest of his life proclaiming him some kind of jersey thief.

At this point, I was kind of like, “Oh, I actually like TJ’s outfit here.”

But then I was like, “Hold on a second. Enhance.”

That’s a basketball hoop! This is a surprise basketball shirt outfit!

Dammit! I can’t believe how many basketball themed shirts he has in his closet.

Anyway, Cyrus pulls up a picture of the two in little league.

Both Jonah and TJ think this proves their point.

But then Cyrus confirms the jersey number is actually 21 and TJ realizes his dyscalculia has struck again.

He explains to Jonah he’s got a learning disability. That this whole thing has been something of a misunderstanding.

Jonah apologizes for holding onto this grudge for so long and for never thanking him for helping him when he was having a panic attack at the Bash Mitzvah.

TJ notes that everyone has struggles.

Cyrus notes his fear of flamingos, which is not the first thing I’d think of when it comes to him, but I don’t disagree. They have unnaturally thin legs.

I don’t trust them for one second.

Jonah and TJ fist bump to end the grudge.

That was such a great little scene. One, for tying up the TJ/Jonah loose end from the Bash Mitzvah, but two, for showing these characters’ growth. It’s nice to see these two, who had previously been so guarded, be able to discuss their mental health openly without fear or anger, and then support each other.

On the other hand, Jonah’s now told TJ about his anxiety before he’s told Andi about it. I guess she was always going to be the hardest one to tell, but uh... yeah...

Speaking of Andi, she shows up at Buffy’s house with a big ol’ bag of popcorn and a pretty sweet new impression.

She explains the party was no fun, but that Buffy is. She wants to hang with her and participate in her crazy film festival.

They start dancing the night away.

Buffy asks if they’ll still be doing this when they’re 20.

*laughs and cries until I’m suddenly scream-wailing into the night sky for some reason* I’m fine.

They dance and dance until the episode ends.

So I guess there really isn’t going to be any punishment if Bowie and Bex just let Andi go hang out with a friend that very night.

Unless they heard what Buffy’s plans were and decided that was punishment enough.

Sure it seems like fun now, but when she’s at hour 12 of this and the credits are rolling on Step Up 3D and then Buffy goes, “Awesome! Let’s watch it again!”, Andi’s going to be wishing she was grounded.

#Andi Mack #Buffy Driscoll #Cyrus Goodman #Jonah Beck #TJ Kippen #Amber #Bex Mack #Bowie Quinn #Andi #episode recaps

261 notes · View notes

seamingleecomplex · 5 years ago

Text

Instant Regret

The Fic I write because I can’t get my own post out of my head. I just fall in love with Fan boy Flash every time. Spoilers for the end credit scenes from Far From Home

WC: 830

Flash could admit he was a little bit of a fan boy. Just a little. Or a lot, a lot would be a safe assumption. Only for one person though, Spiderman. It explained his Instagram handle as well as half of his content. Spiderman to him was amazing, spectacular, other words that he could describe. He was everything Flash wanted to be.

Since his school trip to Europe his admiration turned into full on infatuation, not that it wasn’t on the border already. Who could blame him? He was in danger and Spiderman came all the way from queens to save him. Spiderman who follows him, watches his live streams, who sent his personal assistant just to make sure he was safe. Between that and Spiderman saving him in D.C. there was only one explanation. He was His civilian, his Pepper Potts to his Tony Stark, his Lois Lane to his Superman. He was honestly ready to take that responsibility.

The only thing he needed now was to find out who he was, to get that little extra bit of trust between them to make it official. He really couldn’t have made it more obvious that he was ready to meet. A whole post of Spidey swinging off from the scene with the caption “Excited for our next adventure!” He contemplated putting a heart at the end but he had to keep cool. Keep it casual, couldn’t seem too eager. That didn’t stop him from going through all of his followers on the plane home trying to figure out which one was his. There was one he was suspicious of Skysoverny. It was very fitting, no bio, no name, no captions, barely any following and only following a few accounts. The pictures themselves were of almost impossible to get shots of the skylines of New York. If it weren’t for the laws he could have thought they were shots from drones. They could have been and the account holder was just a rule breaker but then again he never read anything about a drone over the Statue of Liberty.

He looked back on the hashtag SpideySightin andg a lot of it matched up. This had to be him, he could feel it. Though he couldn’t just message him. How would that even go? “Hey Spidey, thanks for sending your assistant to…..” “Spiderman it’s Flash …you follow me so you already know that…” “Hey baby i know you’ve been watching me and I’ve been watching you, wanna swing to my place?” “Wyd?” DMs were out of the question he couldn’t do that. Even on the off chance he was wrong it would be the most embarrassing way to start this out. He just had to do this the old fashioned way. Stalk him online, track where all bad guys are and be his damsel in distress. Classic.

Which lead him to where he was now. Following a tip off from a post showing he was swinging some girl towards Madison Square. The good thing was that he wasn’t far off so even with the traffic it was only a five minute run on foot. Just in time. Just in time to see him land and drop off….Michelle? Weird, weirdly weird, but not weirdly abnormal. Afterall he was the friendly neighborhood hero, saving and helping out the neighborhood and those in it. Right? That was it, just that. Just helping out a civilian, that’s what he did. He was a helpful guy, a good guy, a good guy that was flipping away. Shit he got in his head, he had to-

The blaring sound of the special news broadcast cut through his thoughts. Flash stopped in his tracks just shy of MJ and the web slinger on the lamp post. The anger in him bubbled up as that wack job conspiracy theorist spout some bull about how Spiderman was a murderer. It was obliviously a lie, some doctored footage and of course someone with as much of a vendetta against the Spider would demonize him. Why were they playing this on the news, Jameson was a crack pot and everyone knew it. He was, he was-

“Spiderman is-…… Spiderman is Peter Parker.”

His heart dropped as the face of Peter, his classmate flashed up on screen. He looked over to Michelle and the look of her face matched the sinking feeling in his stomach.

“What the Fuck?!” He looked up seeing the panic in Spiderman’s movements as he looked around frantically before swinging away.

“Wait hold up!” He chased after him before ultimately realizing the was no way he could get to him. He turned to MJ. “This is a joke right? Parker can’t be….there’s no way he's…”

“I have to go.” She said quickly before running off. Leaving him all alone with the pit in his stomach dropping lower. The only things replaying in his mind was Quinton’s words and every single time he called him Penis Parker.

#personal #fic #spiderman far from home #spoilers #ffh #ffh spoilers #far from home #flash thompson #peter parker #michelle jones #spideyflash #been a while since i wrote a fic #ya know fuck it

10 notes · View notes

jupiterjunebug · 6 years ago

Note

WHERE'S THE WEREWOLF ESSAY, OP??

@malaloba @bisexualducknewton You also dared me to say this so you get a tag

Okay so fun facts about Tyler Keegan Casey (I literally just wanted to make a joke about Tyler Casey abbreviating to Tyler K.C):

His parents, Edgar Casey and Rebecca Wilson, got married at 18. Their reasoning was "hey, we've been together all of high school, we still like each other, and I think our kids would be really hot." A bit of the shine wore off for Rebecca, though, when it turned out Edgar inherited a controlling streak from his parents. He got it in his head that his growth as a person required moving as far away from tiny little Casper, WV as he could. Which was fine, and would've been true if he’d put any actual EFFORT into growing up, except he made that decision without consulting his wife. Family was the most important thing in the world for her, which meant she didn't want to leave. Unfortunately, family was the most important thing in the world to her, and Edgar was technically her family.As far away as possible turned out to be Fortville, Indiana. At around 3000 people, it was certainly bigger than Casper, but much smaller than Edgar's ambitions. Unfortunately, they'd run out of gas, and got stuck in town long enough for Rebecca to work up her courage and deliver an ultimatum: they were eight hours from Casper, close enough to drive over, and she'd live no further away than that.Tyler was born a few years later and grew up the only "daughter" of the household, pretty in a generic way and polite to a fault. His homesick mama taught him that he'd know when he found his people on account of the decision to give up everything for them would only hurt a little. His pyramid-scheme chasing daddy taught him that the key to success is for people to think you're one of their people, and who gives a shit if it's true or not?Up until he was twenty he was a full-on social chameleon: he wore the closest thing he could get to the "right" clothes, he did his hair in the "right" way, he laughed at the right jokes and had a crush on all the right boys. Third runner up for prom queen, dated at least three members in the football team (the breakups were never his fault, of course. He'd take a relationship as far as the other person wanted, he only dated them because they wanted to date him after all), popular but not so popular for people to consider him a threat.Every holiday, Tyler and his mama went off to Casper to visit her family. That meant he ended up at the kids table with his two younger cousins Franc ( @keplersheetz) and Vicki. Franc and Vicki were practically sisters, Franc lived with Vicki's parents whenever her ma was off dealing with her host of mental issues, which meant that Tyler was kind of the third wheel.

Tyler ended up the responsible one, and town gossip went on about how they hoped he'd be a good influence, because wasn't he just a perfect little child? Gossip about Franc went on about how she was wild, about how she didn't follow rules, if she wasn't careful she'd end up just like her mother and didn't Vicki's parents worry about if she was a bad influence? No one gossiped about Vicki at all.

It created a weird circle of jealousy, where Tyler envied Franc for having the guts to be herself, Franc worried that Vicki would end up liking Tyler better than her, and Vicki wished somebody might talk about her instead of other people’s “influence” on her. In general, Tyler and Franc didn't get along on account of they were very different and had no interests in common, but when you spend months each year as an obligatory playmate you end up developing at least a little fondness.Tyler went to Indiana University Bloomington, close enough to home for both his parents and also in possession of a Bachelors program for early childhood education. He quickly acquired a job at the library, a reputation as "a pleasure to have in class," an overcommitment to several clubs, and a thoroughly mediocre boyfriend. He also ended up in two classes with and as a coworker to Monet, ( @pleasekalemenow). In sophomore year, the two were roommates and in three classes together, which was haha a funny coincidence. Then in Spring term Tyler had a stress breakdown and Monet was so thrown by composed, fake-ass Tyler losing his shit over something completely minor that she ended up sitting with him for four hours and now they're best friends.In the summer before Junior year he was like "hey wait a fucking second, if I'm completely changing my personality around other people so that they'll like me...do they actually like me?" and decided that fuck it, I'm going to just have my own personality and work my hardest to make it so people find that person likable. The most obvious shift - aside from him breaking up with his mediocre boyfriend and quitting half of his clubs - was coming out as, you know, a dude.

His parents didn't really...get it? His mom continues to this day to treat it as something she supports but just can't understand, and his dad kind of took it as a personal attack because his dad is a self-obsessed jackass. The rest of the family didn't really express an opinion on any of this, on account of Vicki had a baby and Franc ran away from home just a little while later. Compared to having a daughter under 18 and just straight up disappearing, being trans wasn't all that embarrassing to them.Things went pretty decent for half of Junior year. Then one day while he was watching a kindergarten class, the last kid to be picked up at the end of the day turned into an eldritch horror and ate the other student teacher. The FBI’s Paranormal Research and Investigation division showed up and was like "hey I'm pretty sure you can guess that we're going to tell you to keep this hush hush, so keep this fucking hush hush." Tyler went "wow you know I don't like being kept in the dark about all this," so he changed his major to criminal justice and worked his ass off to graduate at the same time as everyone else. Then he joined the FBI, and when they were interviewing him he dropped some line about "oh, I saw something once and the, uh, I think it was PRI? Said that it was top secret dangerous business. I'd like to solve murders like that :)" and the PRI kind of went "well...I guess? we can hire? Him? He did a god job on all of his exams...we have no reason not to."At around this time he played the love interest in Monet's breakout limited access TV show, Once Upon a Cryptid. This show eventually gained Dr. Horrible levels of cult-classic fame, and Tyler is eternally thankful that T has at this point changed his look enough that no one really recognizes him beyond people he talks to on case being like "haha isn't it funny that you look kind of like actor Tyler Casey and you're an FBI agent just like his character?" And he just says "haha yeah I get that a lot :)"The PRI was also like "hey can you keep an eye on this person who is causing trouble with conspiracy theory shit?" Tyler says "uh yeah, sure? Anything I should know?" And the PRI is like "well it's your cousin, but other than that, nah, glhf :)"Tyler found this situation Vaguely Uncomfortable, so instead of being actually good at his job he took this opportunity to leave reminders to eat and warnings to keep her head down when she overreached. They were all signed with "The FBI Agent That's Watching You Right Now" and wow isn't it fucked up that they're closer as anonymous FBI stalker and conspiracy theorist than they were as proper childhood playmates? It fucks me up sometimes.Five years before the game starts, he goes on an investigation into what may or may not be a supernatural murderer. While in the area he runs into August Caraway ( @transagentstern), who is. Super his type. He immediately starts finding excuses to spend time w/ the hot, sensitive, painter, asking August to be his guide around the area. And also if he could see that painting that August is working on because it sounds really :) great :). Eventually he comes to the conclusion that the long periods of time between attacks and the COD indicate either a werewolf attack or a very patient predator. He goes "well, it's the new moon tonight...so if I take August out on a da-I MEAN INVESTIGATION into that clearing in the woods it'll be safe."Spoilers! It isn't!They get attacked by a werewolf. Tyler says "well, I'm an FBI agent so I should be the one to sacrifice myself" and tries to shoot the werewolf. It quickly takes him to the ground, but hey! At least August has time to run! Except instead of running, August goes up to try and save Tyler. Which ends in them both getting bitten before the silver bracelets August always wears fend the thing off. August manages to drag Tyler to civilization before losing consciousness, and the two wake up in separate hospitals. August is told Tyler got sent to a special FBI hospital, but is fine. Tyler is told August got tired of waiting around for him to wake up and left. (More fun facts: this happened the day before Pigeon's birthday! Wow! Terrible)Tyler is kept under observation for the rest of the month, just to make sure he's fine. He is, of course, not fine. The PRI is super stoked to have access to someone who is fully willing to spend the rest of his month j chillin' and then come in on the full moons, on account of most of the werewolves they have access to are ones they caught and have to keep hold of all the time. Which, like, unlawfully contained civilians are a shitty baseline.So, despite having research in their name, the PRI kinda fucking sucks at research. Their methodology is to just try shit until they figure out 1. How to kill the monster and 2. How to spot the affliction/how it progresses. They are perfectly aware of how to kill werewolves, so really all they do is stage observations under different stress conditions to play “how to spot a werewolf”.

Every experiment is just put them in a cage with moonlight access, see whether the transformation is faster/slower when the person has a certain diet/fitness level/etc. Most of the subjects can’t leave bc they’d run away and are also liable to transform sometimes which is inconvenient.

The PRI isn't especially concerned about Tyler, because they know one of the conditions for a transformation is high stress and if there's one thing he's good at it's completely repressing an anxiety attack, so he's able to pretty much do his job aside from the whole "locked up under the full moon" thing. Of course, he's ostracized by his coworkers on account of he's like. Literally a monster. But that's fine! He has Monet! Who he never tells anything about all this because he doesn't want to worry her, and also because her brother (coincidentally August, though Tyler doesn't know that) died around the time of his attack and he doesn't want her to blame herself for never trying to come see him.Good things that happen in these 5 years: he has an amicable relationship with Franc. He gets good at his job. He and Monet discover that the uncanny coincidences which led to them always having classes together carry over into their adult life, and they constantly run into each other while performing their respective jobs. She sometimes invites him to parties to stop men from hitting on her, and because he looks vaguely like Jake Gyllenhaal (that's Tyler's face claim) they get to laugh about all the tabloid rumors that Monet is dating Jake.The bad news is Tyler never had access to the other werewolves prior to the attack (it wasn't his division, and he wasn't usually in a position to take anything alive) which means he's never been around to see a new one, to watch the arc of their deterioration. Usually it goes like this: they wake up, alone and naked in a room with only a bed, a desk, and an uncomfortable wooden chair. They are given clothing by an FBI agent, sometimes that agent is sympathetic, sometimes sneering, but usually expressionless. Each full moon they transform, and remember nothing of it save pain, hunger, and the feeling of their claws digging into the metal walls. Fear is a trigger for transformation, as is anger. They are always afraid, always angry. Eventually, it becomes rare to see them in their human forms.The PRI is fucking stupid. A reasonable person might say "duh, werewolves turn when they're scared, maybe if we put them someplace less scary they'll stop turning so much." Instead, they write in their notes, the notes Tyler receives, "we're fairly certain that, at some point, the humanity of a werewolf is completely lost." He only sees werewolves that have not been human in months, or even years. Or, he sees the ones who are even worse off.The worse news is that Tyler is told there's a cure. Sometimes, the PRI manages to poke and prod at a werewolf and for reasons we just don't understand they never transform again. So he doesn't argue with the tests, and even if he writes a will he doesn't tell Monet anything because he might be fine, and he doesn't want to worry her. He throws himself into his work and into making Monet happy, because he wants to make sure that if he is lost he leaves a legacy. There's something to prove that Tyler Casey's existence was justified.Then he finds out what the cure entails. It's not recovery, not at all; it's pushing someone so hard, making them so afraid, that their body can't take being afraid anymore. A person who’s too tired to feel doesn't shift, not even under the full moon, because the werewolf's state of mind is defined by the person's emotions before it happens (so if someone was actually CALM, really truly calm, then they'd manage to control it, but hunger and anger and fear can all throw that out of wack). If the person is numb, there is nothing for the curse to react to.Tyler Casey would rather die after trying his hardest than live longer but not be able to do anything. So, when he manages to find a job opening at The Askar Foundation, a secret society with more funding and more knowledge than the FBI could ever hope for, he has no qualms spilling the PRI's secrets in exchange for a position as a field agent.As you can probably guess, August, Monet, and Franc are all there as well. The circumstances of their recruitment were significantly less...consensual than his (Monet and Franc recently saw too much and got pressganged in, and after nearly killing Franc while transformed August got dragged in for Askar's own brand of tests). This leads to a veritable five layer dip of fucking drama:1. Franc and Tyler have a private conversation which leads to the revelation of several character secrets on both their parts. This ends when Tyler and Franc both insist that they saw different things during one of the scenes. Franc has always had the ability to tell when people lie to her, but she is also convinced she's right about their topic of conversation (which uh, she IS right, so). That means that, despite the fact that she can't feel him lying, he MUST be. She's convinced that he's had the supernatural ability to get around her own uncanny powers this whole time, and thus they engaged in a Comedy of Errors where instead of mistaken identities it’s Tyler saying things that further convince Franc he's trying to manipulate the entire team2. The Askar foundation would very much like to keep their shiny new field agent, and also Tyler still has connections to the FBI and him snitching to them would be.........inconvenient. So they're willing to put effort, within reason, into making sure he doesn't find out anything that might cause problems, like the fact that August is a kind of monster Tyler has a massive vendetta against. Or uh...anything else that might make him question them. This leads to3. Askar shutting down a conversation between him and Monet, leading to her concluding that talking about their past experiences with the supernatural OR the workings of Askar will never go well. (Exacerbated by the fact that Askar had already been trying to keep her from finding out shit about her brother) 4. Consequently, Monet will no longer talk to him about deep personal topics if they lead back to these things at ALL5. Franc ended up in a romantic entanglement w/ the monster of the week, who is a shapeshifter unwillingly being used to bring about...the apocalypse. He thinks the reason she doesn’t trust him is because she figured out he was a werewolf, and doesn’t trust him/is keeping an eye on him so she can put him down when he becomes dangerous. So he thinks she hates him bc he’s a shapeshifter that has no control over himself, but then she’s fine with...the OTHER shapeshifter that has no control over himself.6. August thinks Tyler hates werewolves because of the attack, and is afraid to enter a relationship with him because he wouldn't be able to keep his condition a secret7. Tyler refuses to let himself entertain notions of actually DATING August, because Tyler thinks he's going to die and doesn't want to hurt even MORE people when he goes8. Tyler and Monet platonically love each other so much and are also living together in Seinfeld's mansion that she stole the keys to, and Tyler is an idiot which means August thinks Tyler wants to date Monet (August's SISTER)So tl;dr, Tyler thinks that after Franc gained access to more Askar files she suddenly doesn't trust him (he assumes she knows he's a werewolf), he knows that Monet suddenly doesn't want to TALK to him and knows that if he discovers anything suspicious he thus cannot tell her, and he knows he......really, really, REALLY is starting to enjoy August's companyThis means that conversations oscillate between Tyler being professionally friendly with all his coworkers, Franc interpreting something random as a personal attack, Monet deeply wishing she could tell Tyler something, and then a completely stupid conversation where Tyler and August are flirting about something stupid and getting cockblocked by Tyler's hangups and August remembering that as far as he's concerned Tyler and Monet should get together.Oh and also Askar definitely is fucking with his head at least once a session.

#my ocs #tyler casey #rip me #A mysterious traveler #Hark! Who goes there?

14 notes · View notes

fanwarriorfictions · 5 years ago

Text

One-

A Stranger Things 2 Fanfic

Chapter Nine- Part Six

-One Month Later-

Jonathan and Nancy had apparently helped get Hawkins Lab shut down, exposing them for covering up Barb's death with a tape that they had given this conspiracy theorist to get out to the public. After that, the lab was shut down by the government and Hawkins, Indiana was in the national spotlight. A bunch of different news stations had come to interview citizens in the small town, even sitting outside the high school to ask the students. One news station had even asked Phina something one day after school and at the Byers' later that night she had been shown on the news channel to Hopper's dismay and a little bit of anger.

"What do you think about the whole ordeal, did you know Barbra," the woman reporter had asked Phina.

Phina had turned to the camera with a grin full of pure malice, "Hawkins Lab was a place full of monsters." She had meant it literally and figuratively. " for what those bastards did to Barb, a dear friend of my sisters." Her grin grew wider at her next words and a little sadistic. "For what they did, they will all burn in hell."

Let's say Phina had a few stern talking to's from both Hopper, and her parents for cussing on tv.

Now that the secret was out, that her parents knew that Barb was dead, there was a funeral for her. They had a casket but with no body to bury in the ground. They said it was because the Lab had burned her body, but Phina and the rest of them knew that it was because her body was in the upside down, rotting away or eaten to nothing by those creatures. But now the town had time to heal, Nancy could finally grieve for her best friend and Barb could be remembered as the amazing person she was and not the runaway Hawkins Lab had tried to make her. They could all heal now, Phina could heal knowing that Hawkins Lab and the people who had hurt her were finally all gone.

Phina grinned at her brother from behind her mom as he deadpanned at the woman. She took picture after picture of him in his suit. Mike was going to the middle school's snowball tonight and their mom was overly excited.

She drops a picture and bends down to grab it, "oh, wait."

"All right, that's enough," Mike says as he rolls his eyes.

"One more, okay? Just one more," their mom pleaded as she puts the camera up to her face.

"Why," Mike groans.

"You look so handsome," Karen says

"Mom!"

Phina laughs, "oh come on, Mike, smile a bit!"

He gives the camera an exasperated look, "Mom!"

She snaps the photo and Phina laughs again, that photo was definitely going up on her wall, maybe she'd ask Jonathan if he could enlarge it as well.

Speaking of Jonathan, the doorbell rang and Phina ran over to open it. Her best friend was standing there with a single rose in his hand.

"Is it too late to try and convince you to go with us," he asks.

Phina grins, "why would I want to be the third wheel? Nancy's upstairs finishing up, Mike's in the living room. I'll go get Nance."

Jonathan grinned back at her at the mention of Nancy. Over this past month, they had finally stopped lying to themselves and everyone around them and started to date. The two of them were going to go help work the dance tonight, Jon taking pictures and Nance serving punch. They had tried to get Phina to go along with them but she had refused, wanting to stay home and enjoy some time without the lovebirds. She loved them, but new couples always sucked because they never paid attention to anyone else but each other, and Jonathan and Nancy were no exception. Phina enjoyed seeing them happy but figured they needed time to be happy together, just them.

"Nance, Jonathan's here to take you and Mike," Phina says as she pushes open her sister's door.

"Ok," Nancy smiled at her sister, turning to show Phina her dress, "how do I look?"

Phina smiled back, "you look beautiful, Nance."

"Thank you, Phina," Nancy says.

"You're welcome," Phina says, "now go, have a nice night, Nance."

Nancy hugs her sister quickly and runs down the stairs. Phina doesn't follow, just turns to her room and listens as Jonathan's car drives away.

Steve had dropped Dustin off at the dance and now his mind was wandering as he drove. He had a plan but he wasn't so sure he should go through with it. So he drove to the Wheeler house anyway. He parked on the other side of the street and went to the side of the house where he had climbed onto the roof many times in the past. By now, it was no effort to get up. Usually, he'd be there to sneak into Nancy's room, not this time. This time he climbed up to the peak of the roof.

"What are you doing here, Harrington," Phina's voice calls out, stopping him in his tracks.

The girl was sitting on the roof, blankets, pillows, books, art supplies, and lanterns on low light surrounding her. She was wearing a large gray hoodie that came down to her mid thighs and black shorts that could barely see beneath the hoodie, he'd think she'd be freezing if it wasn't for her powers.

"Uh," he blushes, "nothing?"

Phina laughs quietly, "sure, Harrington, sure."

He sighs, climbing over the peak of the roof, "I was actually here to find you."

She grins up at him, "well you found me. What do you want?"

He shrugs, walking down the roof to stand next to her blankets, "I'm not exactly sure, I didn't think I'd really get this far or that you'd be on the roof."

She laughs again, "well, you're here, might as well stay awhile."

She shifts over and nods for him to sit down next to her. As he does he can feel the warmth radiating off her, fighting off the chill of winter that set in around them.

"Do you do this often," he asks, gesturing to the set up around them.

Phina nods, "yeah, I like coming out here at night, looking up at the stars, drawing, reading, it's peaceful, you know? God knows I need some peace in my life."

Steve laughs, "ain't that the truth."

They settle into a comfortable silence and Steve looks at the things strewn around them. Her sketchbook lays close to him and he remembers something.

"You know, you're gonna kill me for this," he chuckles, "but the last time I was here, sneaking up on the roof, I uh, well I was looking for Nancy but I saw her and Jonathan and I was upset but I didn't leave. Instead, I climbed over to this side and, this is the part you're gonna kill me for, I looked in your window to find you. You were crying and looking in your sketchbook, you threw it and it landed in front of the window, open to a drawing, a drawing of me actually."

Phina's face goes red, not in anger but in embarrassment. She picks up her sketchbook and flips through the pages, stopping on the first ever drawing she did of him.

"Yep," he says, looking at it, "that's the one."

She sighs, "I did a few of these last year. I do this thing where I space out and just draw, for some reason, your face popped up a lot when I did this, it still does."

She opens the book to a few pages farther along in the book, each one had his face on them. He grabs the book from her hand when she stops on the most recent one, where his face was bruised and bloody after being beaten by Billy Hargrove.

"These are amazing, Phina," he says, wincing as he looks at the image, "almost too good, I can almost feel the pain."

She chuckles, taking the book back, "they would be better but I didn't have you there to reference them, just my memory."

He grins suddenly, "do you want to have a more accurate one?"

She raises her brows in question and he angles himself towards her, "I'm here, draw me."

She smiles, "um, ok. Just, uh, face me I guess, you don't have to pose or anything just... just keep your face neutral."

"Yes, ma'am," he salutes with a grin.

-1433 words-

Awww, sweeties! So that's basically the end of the show but there is one more part, a completely OC chapter ;) ;) Oh the possibilities!!!

-Morgan

#steve harrington #steve harrington x oc #stranger things #stranger things fanfic #strangerthingsfanfic #strangerthings #slow burn #one #romance

3 notes · View notes

aion-rsa · 4 years ago

Text

What Are NFTs and Why Are Comics Companies Selling Them?

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

With an announcement from collectible maker VeVe, the world was introduced to the first officially licensed DC NFTs. “What is VeVe?” you might ask. Or possibly “What is an NFT?”

Excellent questions, friends! We will do our absolute best to explain them in clear, concise terms to you right now.

Here are simple answers to complicated questions: NFTs are ecologically devastating vaporware created to part very dumb, very wealthy collectors from their money, made by stoned libertarian math nerds trying to prove a point they think is profound but is actually just very banal. Veve is no different than any other secondary huckster that springs up around a particularly successful snake oil economy.

As for why DC is getting in bed with them, it’s hard to know if the company is trying to just be cutting edge or if it’s because AT&T took on a shitload of debt buying Warner, and like anybody with creditors breathing down their neck, they need to make several quick bucks or else.

THE NEXT EVOLUTION IN COMICS HUCKSTERISM

Two full decades after Metallica teamed up with record labels to make sure we didn’t own anything we purchased digitally, a group of rejected Captain Planet villains came up with a workaround: NFTs.

NFTs use blockchain, a distributed AI accountant that requires ENORMOUS amounts of processing power to work properly, to assign certificates of ownership and record transactions. Accepting the pitch behind blockchain technology requires one to step back to an absurdly abstract level, then a zoom back into the extremely micro.

Every transaction between two people is built around trust: I trust that you are giving me the thing I’m paying for, while we both trust that the currency I’m handing you has a (relatively) absolute value which will allow it to be traded for other things. Blockchain purports to eliminate that trust: it uses a distributed ledger that anyone can see and confirm to record our transaction; it uses an algorithm to make sure every copy of the ledger is the same; and it assigns tokens to each transaction that can be given a value.

NFTs add in an absurd additional abstraction: ownership of digital media. I have always had the ability to, for example, produce an animated reaction gif from a television show and sell that animated reaction gif to you for a fixed sum of money. You would be an idiot for purchasing that reaction gif for several reasons: anyone else could make the exact same gif and you could find it in iMessage’s search engine, for one. But nothing in the past has ever prevented this transaction from occurring.

The “innovation” around NFTs is that it uses blockchain technology to “prove” “ownership” and “authenticity,” a sentence that is so heavily caveated that to express it correctly in writing makes the writer look like a conspiracy theorist. The NFT assigns a ledger value to the piece of digital artwork, and then that ledger value is what is sold between parties. It is a non-fungible token – unlike Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency, the idea is these art pieces’ tokens’ inherent value doesn’t change (hence the non-fungible), while cryptocurrency is a token whose value is relative to other less imaginary currency.

This has led to some frankly embarrassing sales online. Jack Dorsey, the vacuous and bizarre founder of Twitter, is auctioning off his first tweet, something that already happened, that you can find with one simple Google search, for millions of dollars. Beeple, an artist the internet assures me is real, auctioned off a digital JPEG collage of all their previous works for $69 million. Jose Delgo, a comics artist from the ‘70s that very few people remembered until this happened, has made almost $2 million selling NFTs of his own artwork, spurring DC to email freelancers to remind them that they should not be using DC characters to try and skate atop this obvious bubble. Not because of the catastrophic environmental impacts caused by the blockchain algorithm, mind you. No, it was because AT&T needed to get some of that sweet, sweet tulip money.

THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS MOSTLY POOR PEOPLE

Joanie Lemercier, a French artist and climate activist, has sold six NFT pieces so far. The act of accounting for those sales – assigning a token, then transferring ownership of that token from Lemercier to the purchaser – was 8.7 megawatt hours of energy. That’s roughly equivalent to the entire energy consumption of his studio for two entire years.

The algorithm used for NFTs, like the one used for Bitcoin, other cryptocurrency, and all blockchain transactions, requires computers perform a certain volume of complex activity to access the ledger. That’s how it prevents fraudulent transactions – by making the barrier to writable access so high that it’s functionally impossible.

Of course, as demand for these transactions increases, so too does the computing power needed to record them. Hence the massive power consumption from Lemercier’s sale. Bitcoin transactions, especially since Elon Musk invested heavily in them to drive up their price (presumably the “pump” part of “pump and dump”), now use more energy annually than the entire country of Argentina.

Here’s the catch: in a perfectly green, zero emission energy environment, this wouldn’t be a huge problem. Unfortunately, as anyone who has gone outside in the past 18 months has noticed, we’re not quite there yet. And while adding another Argentina to global power load isn’t the same as adding another China, it is still a significant drain on existing grids, and if it’s not timed and sited right, it’s using very dirty power (it’s fairly complicated, but the short version is electricity generation generally gets dirtier as demand increases).

So when Grimes auctions off a certificate of creation for her digital artwork, she’s triggering a set of computer actions that put a massive stress on the power grid that churns out oodles of negative environmental consequences, which according to study after study fall disproportionately on poor people and people of color.

Or! Instead of auctioning off something that clearly doesn’t exist, maybe she’s just using fracked natural gas as laundry detergent for mafia cash.

DIGITAL MONEY LAUNDROMAT

Let’s say I was a certain very sadistic, very fictional, black mask wearing crime lord of an American city and I have $1 million in cash lying around that I made from my operation’s drug business. If I suddenly bought a house with that million dollars, the authorities would notice that large transaction (probably through transaction reporting from the bank handling the sale, or the property exchange paperwork that runs through City Hall) and start sniffing around to find out where that money came from.

The same goes if I were to purchase IRL fine art through an auction house. The auction house would ask questions about where that money came from, and if it didn’t like what it found, it would report it to the authorities. Same for buying cars, or businesses, or lots of other real life transactions.

Now replace bank, city hall, and auction house with “a bunch of computers playing tic tac toe against each other on a 1025 square board” and try and guess where the reporting comes in. We don’t have to wait for an answer, that reporting doesn’t exist.

NFT transactions are the perfect confluence of the shadiness of art dealing with the shadiness of off-book dark web money-moving. They’re not all money laundering, but they are easy enough to use as money laundering that the authorities are getting concerned.

PRECARITY, PANDEMICS, AND COMICS ART

So why are comics people doing this? To start with, we mean actual people, and not people in the legal sense of the word (corporations).

It’s not hard to see the eye popping amounts of money changing hands and understand why at least some of them are getting involved. But it’s equally easy to look at the economics of the pandemic era of comics creation and at least sympathize with the pull. Comic page rates have been largely stagnant since the 1980s – penciler page rates in recent years are actually lower than the modest demands made by creators during the abortive effort to unionize in the 1970s.

With that money being so limited, most artists relied on the sale of original art, sketches, and sales at conventions to help make ends meet. So the last year has been exceptionally tough on them. Add to that the trend towards digital art, where there’s no actual physical page produced for the comic, and it’s not hard to imagine a hard up artist, one year into not seeing another living soul except for when the grocery clerk brings a bag of food out to their car, seeing someone coming along waving a conservative five figures at them and not explaining the extremely convoluted yet catastrophic environmental impact of the proces, saying yes to the quick cash.

To their credit, many comics creators are repulsed by the idea. Several have expressed serious concerns with NFTs on Twitter, with Doomsday Clock artist Gary Frank expressing “bewilderment” at the idea of his art being used to sell one of these things, and Marsha Cooke, widow of New Frontier great Darwyn Cooke and manager of his estate, going so far as to ask DC to stop using his art in them.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Hopefully the companies involved (or thinking of getting involved) with NFTs listen to their creatives. Nothing more honors the spirit of Batman than using his image to help give a pallet of Bratva money a quick scrub.

The post What Are NFTs and Why Are Comics Companies Selling Them? appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/2P393DK

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

0 notes

imagining-eddsworld · 7 years ago

Text

Chapter Eight- Tord Confesses All

“Wait wait, hold on.” Tom grabbed Tord’s arm, stopping him from going.

“You have an army? Since when?”

“I can’t get into all the details its…” Tord trailed off.

“Classified or some bull shit? Tord you need to tell us now. Everything.”

“I…I have an army, the Red Army, I’ve been secretly running it for a couple of years now….”

“Is that why you tried to leave?” Edd spoke up.

“Yea Edd, that’s why I tried to leave…”

Nobody spoke for a bit.

“Can we come with you?” Matt finally broke the silence.

Tord thought about it. “Eh why not...You guys can’t cause any harm to us…Probably.”

They all piled into the car they shared, Tord was the driver, and he drove.

And drove and drove and drove, jesus how far was this place? Tom was certain they passed that sign at least 5 times.

“Tord do you know where you are going?” Tom sighed.

“…Yea.”

“Tord.”

“…I might have gotten a little lost.”

“TORD!” Edd yelled, the other two groaned.

“Oh shut up! Matt’s supposed to help me with the map! He’s too busy looking in the mirror!”

“I gave Edd the map.” Matt stated and went back to staring at himself in the mirror.

“No? I don’t have it…Tom?”

“Don’t look at me.”

“WAIT THEN WHO HAS THE MAP?!” Tord yelled. Nobody answered again.

“For fucks sake….” Tord pulled over, and took out his phone.

“What are you doing?” Edd tried to sit up and look at Tord’s phone. “Who’s Pauel?”

“A friend.” Tord got out of the car and called Pauel.

The other three watched Tord pace around and talk to the person on the other end. The call took about five minutes and then Tord got back in the car. He said nothing and started the car. And then went back to driving.

This time they actually got to the secret base, but it was night time and everyone in the car except Tord was asleep.

Pauel and Pat met him at the gates.

“You run this whole army and you don’t even know the way to the base?!” Pat started laughing.

“Shut up! It’s been awhile since I’ve been here!” Tord said defensively.

Pauel joined in on the laughing, Edd had to hide a small snort.

Tord turned red out of embarrassment. “…let’s just get on with the mission or whatever.” Tord mumbled.

Tord led the group to a empty meeting room. It had maps on the walls of various countries and cities. On the table it had various stacks of files and papers and papers thrown about everywhere. A board on one side of the room had a black and white picture of a man named Todd with a bunch of strings attaching it to other photos and stuff. Apparently this guy meant something. To be honest, this looked like something a conspiracy theorist would have. Edd would tease him about that later.

Tord cleared his throat to gather his housemates attention. They joined him at the table in the middle of the room, which had even more papers on it. “So we know that the government took them, or at least people who are working with the government.” Tord started, staring at the table.

“How do we know which one took them?” Edd asked.

“Process of elimination. The red army has cameras and hacked security feeds of most governments of other countries. We just look in those cameras to figure out which one.” Pat said, typing something into a laptop he carried into the room with him. “We’ll start with England’s and then move onto the other countries that are nearby. They couldn’t have gotten that far.”

“Why don’t we check Area 51 or something.” Tom said in a monotone voice.

“Area 51 doesn’t exist.” Pauel mumbled quickly, going over to Pat and looking at the camera feed with him.

“Are you sure about that?” Tom raised an eyebrow, a small smirk on his face.

Pauel frowned and angrily started typing on the computer.

Edd muttered something which only Tom and Matt could hear part of. “It’d be funny ????? does ???? with our luck….”

They waited around impatiently hoping that they’d get some sign that they found their beloved space babe and that they were okay. Minutes passed, then hours, and almost a full day had gone by as they sat in silence, their only entertainment their dying phones and books that were around the room and only a few were in English. Matt had lost interest in almost everything and was now staring at a reflection of himself in the small reflective parts of metal around the room. Edd was passed out in the corner of the room, his stomach running every so often as he shifted positions. And Tom? Well Tom was drinking like it was end of the world, and to him, it was.

Tord had not taken any rest from watching the computer screen and neither had his two right hand men.

Their eyes were red and tired, their stomachs rumbling as well, but it didn’t concern them.

“Did you find anything yet? Finland’s cams are down right now but I highly doubt they have them.” Pauel yawned. “No…..” Pat grumbled, rapidly clicking his mouse which cycled through all the cameras they hacked into.

“I’m telling you check Area 51.” Tom sat up.

“There’s no place called Area 51!” Pauel slammed his fist on the table, which shook it. He got glared at by Tord and sighed. “Fine I’ll look. But I highly doubt they are there. And that it exists.” Pauel started searching.

“Besides, why would the American government want an alien found in Europe?” Pat looked up from his computer.

“Because they deal with all the alien shit! That’s why!” Tom said defensively.

“This could take a few hours, you should get to sleep.” Tord told his right hand men. “You should get some rest too Tom. I’ll take over the search.”

They both nodded and went into some chairs in the corner of the room and slowly drifted to sleep.

But Tom did not fall asleep, he watched Tord work as the minutes ticked by, waiting for some sort of clarification that they had found Space Babe.

Pauel woke from his three hour long nap and went over to the computer and muttered a curse.

“What’s the matter eyebrows?” Tom took another swig from the bottle he was holding.

“….we found them…”

“Where?”

“…..Area 51…”

He threw the glass bottle on the ground creating a loud crash which woke up the rest of the gang. “I FUCKING CALLED IT!”

#txt post #iw pauel #iw edd #iw tord #iw tom #iw matt #iw patrick #submission #space babe #alien au #the good shit

7 notes · View notes