#not worth waking up at six to drive 12 hours probably but it's the little things!

[babisawyer]

today was awful, tomorrow will also probably be awful. all I have to look forward to is the horrific media I have waiting for me when I get settled in

[theliterateape]

Hope Idiotic | Part V

By David Himmel

 Hope Idiotic is a serialized novel. Catch each new part every week on Monday and Thursday.

LOU HIT THE SAN FRANCISCO CITY LIMITS JUST AS NIGHT WAS COMING DOWN. He used the hostel book as promised to find a well-rated spot with a good view of the city. He’d never stayed in hostels before and was curious. He’d hoped to meet a few strangers he could make friends with for the night and explore the city with, but the place was pretty empty. It was too early in the summer for college students or Europeans to be backpacking their way through the country.

Lou was sent to a room with four bunk beds. Two bunks — top and bottom — were occupied with sleeping bags, clothes and shredded bags of potato chips. Lou claimed the top bunk closest to the door. He tossed his stuff onto the mattress and quickly returned to the front desk.

“Where’s the best place to go for a few drinks?” he asked the grimy grunge-brat wearing flannel and a Sonic Youth T-shirt. “Maybe a place with good live music.”  He was directed to a place called, Shattered Glass. He was able to walk there from the hostel, which sat at the top of a hill and owned a perfect view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Like every other place he had encountered in California so far, this bar was mostly empty. On the small stage at the back end of the joint, a weathered man, who looked like he may have been part of the West Coast punk movement in the 1970s, played a banged-up acoustic guitar and sang cover songs of everything from Iggy Pop to Lisa Loeb. Miller Lites were six bucks a bottle, but hell, that was San Francisco.

Lou tried to engage the bartender in some friendly conversation about the town, where to go, what to do and where the hell everyone was that night. But the bartender, a bored, sad-looking man of about thirty-five, wanted nothing to do with it. And after six bottles of beer and an hour of the aged, never-was rockstar, Lou paid his thirty-six-dollar tab and took off.

He wandered the streets searching for a little action, but found nothing worth getting into. So, he headed back up the hill to the hostel, where he figured he’d tuck himself in and wake up early. Get a head start on the day. Grab breakfast. Visit the bridge then continue north into Oregon.

When he left the hostel, he remembered leaving his room’s door open just as he’d found it. When he returned, it was closed. He put his ear to the door to inspect any potential sounds. When he didn’t hear anything, he slowly turned the handle and opened the door. It was pitch black in the windowless room. He pulled out his cell phone as he closed the door behind him. He flipped the phone open to light the few steps to his bunk. He climbed up and carefully took his shoes and socks off, then slid into his sleeping bag. Lou had a near-perfect internal clock and rarely used an alarm. As he closed his eyes, he said in a whisper, “Wake up at seven a.m. Wake up in seven hours.”

Just as he began to fall asleep, he was startled by noises coming from within the room. He hadn’t scanned the place with the light of his phone before going to bed; he had just assumed he was alone. The noises were coming from one of the bunks that earlier he’d seen loaded with someone’s belongings. His cell phone was resting on his chest, and for a moment, he considered flipping it open and seeing who or what was in the room with him.

Now he was going to bear witness to alien robot sex and perhaps become a post-coitus sacrifice. Fuck Michelle. Fuck hostels. Fuck robots. Fuck San Francisco.

There were rustling sounds and what he thought were voices being muffled by blankets and pillows. He heard music being played. Not songs: more like ring tones from a cell phone or video game soundtracks from a handheld game system. The bunk squeaked in rhythm as it tapped the cement wall. He looked over and saw blue and green and red lights glowing, flickering intermittently from under blankets. It was like robots having sex.

 Lou was scared. This sort of thing would never happen under the parking lot light of a hotel. Why did he make that promise to Michelle to stay in hostels? Why did he keep that promise? He had a perfectly workable system when on the road, and she fucked it all up with her law school arguments and girlfriend charm. Now he was going to bear witness to alien robot sex and perhaps become a post-coitus sacrifice. Fuck Michelle. Fuck hostels. Fuck robots. Fuck San Francisco.

He debated making an escape, but figured he couldn’t collect his stuff fast enough in the dark without disturbing the alien robots that would probably kill him. So he slouched down farther into his sleeping bag, pulled his pillow tightly over his head and the opening of the bag around the pillow so he was entirely encased and protected, like a caterpillar in a cocoon. He forced himself to think about anything else: Chicago; Michelle; his career in twenty years; Chuck; his house in Las Vegas; the family dog Max greeting him at his dad’s house; Crater Lake; the price of gas; his pending empty bank account; his résumé; where he would live… More and more, he was less afraid of the increasingly loud and strange sounds coming from the adjacent bunk, and starting to fear what was waiting for him outside of that dark hostel room.

Panic finally put him to sleep. And when his eyes popped open at 7 a.m., he was still stuffed down in his sleeping bag and drenched in sweat. Slowly, he peeked his head out of the bag, but couldn’t see a thing because even during the morning, the room allowed no light to come in. He didn’t hear anything, so he flipped his phone open and aimed it across the room. It didn’t illuminate much, but from what he could see, the coast was clear. He swung his legs over the edge of the bunk and hopped down. He reached the light switch and turned it on, ready for the alien robots to spring to life and attack him. But he was alone. No one, nothing, was in the room with him. The things he had seen on the bunks when he checked in were gone. Other than his own stuff and the beds, the room was bare.

He wondered if he had imagined the noises and lights. Was the anxiety of the move playing tricks with his brain? Was he going crazy, or were there really alien robots having sex a few feet from him last night? It didn’t matter. It was over. The day was anew.

He put on some fresh clothes, brushed his teeth in the communal bathroom, paid his bill and took off toward the Golden Gate Bridge. It was early and traffic was light. It was just Lou and a European couple on the pedestrian part of the bridge. He could tell they were European by the formfitting brightly colored jeans and vinyl windbreakers that looked like they were stolen off the set of a 1980s Wham! video. The air was cool and salty. There wasn’t much fog like expected, so he was able to grab a few good photos of the bridge and some grainy, but mostly decent, shots of the Alcatraz rock. The majesty of the Golden Gate Bridge was one thing. But what really grabbed his attention were the emergency telephone boxes secured to the bridge every couple of yards. They had signs above them that read:

CRISIS COUNSELING THERE IS HOPE MAKE THE CALL THE CONSEQUENCES OF JUMPING OFF THIS BRIDGE ARE FATAL AND TRAGIC.

He looked over the railing into the San Francisco Bay. He knew how it worked. A sad, troubled life. A moment of uncertainty — then certainty. A little leap. This was America’s hot spot for suicide aficionados. It was either the impact with the water or the greedy undertow of the bay that would kill a person. Lou wondered for a second what part would kill him. If it wasn’t the fall, could he survive? He was a strong swimmer. It was a rhetorical question; actually killing himself was not on his mind.

Still, he wondered about those emergency phones and about the operators on the other end of them. How many lives were saved by the telephone? How many operators heard last words? He considered picking one up and telling the operator that he would kill himself unless someone in Chicago would have a job waiting for him when he arrived in two weeks. But then he figured that probably wouldn’t work. No one would want to hire a demanding suicidal maniac.

He used his cell phone to call Michelle from the bridge. He hated the idea of bothering her at work, but she assured him that a phone call from him was never a bother but a blessing.

“Michelle Kaminski’s office,” her secretary said.

“May I please speak with Ms. Kaminski,” Lou asked.

“Ms. Kaminski is in a meeting at the moment. May I take a message for her?”

“Thank you. Please tell her that Lou Bergman called. She has my number.”

“Will she know what this is in reference to?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’ll have her return your call at her earliest convenience, Mr. Bergman. Have a wonderful day.”

He meandered along the bridge for a few more minutes until Michelle called back. “You called?” She did not sound happy.

“Hi, baby. That was a quick meeting.”

“It was three hours long — just finished.”

“Brutal. Guess where I am?”

“I don’t know… Moon Lake or wherever.”

“Moon Lake? You mean, Crater Lake. No. I’m standing on the Golden Gate Bridge. God, Michelle, you should see it. It’s beautiful.”

“I’d love to be there with you. But I have a job to do. I’d love to be able to take two weeks off to do whatever I wanted and go wherever I wanted, but I have responsibilities. People depend on me. I have billable hour quotas I need to hit. But you go ahead and enjoy the view from the bridge, Lou.”

“Whoa. I’m sorry that upset you. You sound busy. I’ll let you go.”

“I am busy, Lou. I’m always busy. This is my job. I think you need to hurry home.”

“I know, baby. I’m on my way to you. Just 12 more days. It’s nothing.”

“I mean it. This road trip, I get it. I know you like driving all over with no direction, like its your last hurrah or something, but you need to consider me, Lou.”

“I have direction. I know exactly where I’m going.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“Then what are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about me slipping away. You’re losing me.”

“What?”

“I know you’re moving here to finally start your life, but mine has been happening, and you can’t expect me to just wait around for you to show up whenever you please. It’s not fair to me. I love you, Lou. And I want to spend the rest of my life with you. But I can’t promise you I’ll be here when you finally show up. I hope I’ll still be waiting for you, but I don’t know. I have to go. I’ll talk to you later.”

What the hell just happened? She’s raving like a madwoman, he thought. He’d been through this with her before, however. In moments of personal stress, Michelle had a tendency to overreact and lash out at anyone within striking distance. There was one week during her freshman year in high school when her best friend Jen was too busy to hang out with her. As retaliation, during a soccer practice warm-up exercise, Michelle kicked a ball has hard as she possibly could at Jen, hitting her square in the gut, knocking her on her feet and forcing the air right out of her lungs. Jen had a soccer-ball–sized bruise for several days and was benched for that weekend’s game because of the injury.

When Michelle told this story in her maid-of-honor speech at Jen’s wedding, she didn’t understand why no one laughed at it. “Because it’s just mean,” Lou told her. But Michelle disagreed and stood by her case that Jen had it coming and that it was a funny story. Besides, they were still friends after all, she argued.

Maybe Michelle was freaking out on him because she’d just emerged from a painful three-hour meeting. She was just stressed at work and jealous that he was out having fun. Envy. That’s what it was. He wasn’t losing her. She was just kicking the soccer ball in his gut.

 ✶

HE DROVE INTO TOWN AND FOUND A PLACE TO GRAB A BAGEL AND COFFEE, and read one of the scummy alternative papers in the wire basket by the door. As he was biting into the bagel, he received a text from Michelle:

I’m sorry I barked at u. But hurry. I won’t wait forevr. Stop wasting ur life.

“I really don’t have time for this right now, Lou,” Michelle said when he again called her. He couldn’t let a text like that go without further explanation. Clearly, she was not just lashing out. She was giving him an ultimatum: Stop having fun or she was leaving.

“You’re not being fair,” he told her.

“No. You’re not being fair to me or your career. You know what the right thing to do is. So do it.”

He drove a little farther north but pulled into a gas station just before leaving the San Francisco limits. While the car fueled up, he called Chuck.

“She’s right. What am I doing out here? I’m wasting all of this money that I don’t really have, when I could be in Chicago looking for a job. And now what? Now she’s going to break up with me when I get there? All broke and unemployed but with some photos of the town where Hemingway shot himself? What the fuck am I doing?”

Chuck was at the hospital in Indiana where his mother was recovering from her second heart surgery. “First of all, calm down. Just breathe,” he told Lou. “She’s not going to break up with you. You’ll find a job. Just relax.”

“I can’t! I’m telling you, I’ve got a bad feeling about all of this. I’m freaking out. I swear there were robots fucking in my room last night. I gotta get to Chicago. I gotta get my life going. I know! I’ll call a shipping company, have them pick up my car from this gas station. I’ll call Southwest and get a plane ticket, and I can be home by tonight.”

“You’re fucking crazy,” Chuck said. “Now, shut up and listen to me. You’ll end up spending more money on shipping and flying than you will driving. If it’ll keep you from going insane, cancel the adventure. You can try it again another time. I’ll do it with you. So calm down, drive back into the city and find I-80. It starts there. Just take that straight across into Chicago. You’ll be there in three days.”

✶

WHEN LOU PULLED UP TO MICHELLE’S HIGH-RISE on Lake Shore Drive, he was covered in a layer of highway dust, beef jerky crumbs and sweat. His breath reeked of Red Bull, dehydrated meat and a tired piece of chewing gum. His hair was oily, but he thought it looked pretty good for having spent the last seven days windblown in the driver’s seat of his Volkswagen. If only it could look that good after a shower.

As he looked at himself in the rearview mirror, he closed his eyes and sighed. He told himself out loud, “All right, asshole. Don’t fuck anything up.”

When Michelle answered the door of her pricey northside one-bedroom apartment and saw Lou standing there, her face exploded into a smile. She grabbed his hand and pulled him inside, where she kissed him long and perfectly. Then she drew all the blinds down on the large windows that presented a picturesque Chicago — the peaks of downtown buildings, Belmont Harbor and Lake Michigan’s expanse out east, and the garden rooftops of Wrigleyville to the west. Again, their mouths met, and they fell into a rabidly intense lovemaking session.

“Welcome home,” Michelle said once she caught her breath, both of their naked bodies sweaty and shaking with pleasure.

“I can get used to this,” he said.

Part I Part II Part III Part IV 

[solastia]

Beneath The Surface | 3

Chapters: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Pairing: Hoseok X Reader

Word Count: 4,212

Notes: Ok, I know I said this chapter was going to be a ticket to angstville, but I lied. That’s the next chapter. I decided to just give a touch of angst. I thought Hobi deserved to have a nice date first. Also, so far this is one my favorite chapters of anything I’ve written so far. I freaking love boyfriend Hobi. 

Genre & Warnings: Smut, Angst, Hoseok being cheesy but cute. Doing naughty things in public.

Taking extra precaution to silently creep down the hallway, Hoseok almost let out a loud screech when he was tapped on the shoulder from behind.

“Where the hell have you been?” Namjoon asked, quirking his eyebrow at him. 

“Out,” Hoseok mumbled, avoiding eye contact and continued walking, Namjoon following close behind. 

“Out where, exactly? You were gone all night, and then all day today. You’re lucky I covered for you when Manager came by. Wait, did you leave with that girl?” 

“If by “That girl” you mean Y/N, then yes.” And, oh, how he wished he was still there. He couldn’t believe he’d only known her for a day. It felt she was meant to be his, and he planned on holding onto her whatever it took. He could still smell her on him. The mixture of strawberry and sex was intoxicating. The ache to hold her again was almost painful. 

"J, you gotta be careful, man. You can’t just go around fucking whoever. If she blabs or someone finds out, there would be a shit show to deal with. If you’re that desperate for a fuck, you know Bang PD has those discreet escorts on call.”

“I’m not stupid, Namjoon. I just had to get out for a while. Don’t worry, she’s cool.”

“You think I don’t want to get out sometimes? I do, trust me. I know. But we have an obligation...”

“Goddammit! I KNOW, okay? Fuck.”

Hoseok turns and mumbles, “I’ll see you later.” Namjoon snorts. “Whatever man, just don’t forget they want to see a song sample from your mixtape next week.” He finally enters his own room, leaving Hoseok to finish his journey to Yoongi’s. 

Hoseok is thrilled to see that Yoongi is actually here. He knows that if anyone can help him and not spread stories around, it’s Yoongi. He throws himself on the bed next to Yoongi, who is lounging and scrolling through his phone. 

“Can I talk to you?”

“Apparently you can since you’re speaking to me right now.”

“Please don’t. I'm serious. I really need a good friend right now.”

“Okay, okay, sorry. What’s going on?” Yoongi sets his phone down, giving Hoseok his full attention.

“I’m head over heels for a girl. I REALLY like her, and I want to take her out tonight. I need you to cover for me. Tell everyone I’m down with a cold or something, I don’t care.” Hoseok looks at Yoongi pleadingly, although he knows the routine. He’ll bitch for a bit, then do it anyway. 

“You know that we are at our highest point so far in our careers, so all eyes are on us, and dating is fucking risky?” 

Hoseok nods.

“And you think she’s worth it?”

He simply nods again. 

Yoongi lets out a long-suffering sigh. 

“Alright, you know I’ll help you. Make sure you both are hoodied and masked up. If anyone takes pictures, you’re fucked.” He reaches over to his nightstand and picks up a condom and his car keys, throwing them at Hoseok. 

“And remember,” He drawled, shooting a gummy smile at Hoseok, “Don’t be a fool, wrap your tool.” 

“If only Army knew you can be almost as bad as Seokjin.” Hoseok sighs, smiling widely at Yoongi. “Thanks, man, I appreciate it.” 

Yoongi salutes Hoseok on his way out of the room, quickly going back to scrolling away on his phone. Hoseok heads to his own room, a little more lighthearted. Maybe things will work out after all if even Yoongi wasn’t TOO worried. 

You look in your mirror, pleased with the final outfit choice. Sexy stalker look apparently suited you. Knowing that you and Hobi were going to have to be discreet, you’d draped yourself head to toe in black. Black skinny jeans, black off shoulder peasant shirt, even shiny black pumps. Knowing he’d be here any moment, you went ahead and threw on the equally black zip-up hoodie and sat on the couch to wait. You weren’t sure what time he’d be there, but since it was already late in the day, he couldn’t be much longer.

It’s been seven hours. It’s now midnight, and you’ve finally gotten caught up on the show you’ve been putting off for six months. You sigh, clicking off the television and head to your room. You’re pretty sure you’ve just been stood up. Not that you’re that surprised. The idea that some super hot, super famous, incredible in bed, celebrity would actually want to date you was too far-fetched to believe anyway. Still, he could have at least sent you some lame excuse text. You would have even accepted the ole “It’s not you, it’s me.” Anything was better than silence. 

You throw off your hoodie and kick off your heels, laughing at yourself. Ah, you really were a dummy. You pause when you see the bed. You still had to change the sheets. You rip them off immediately, bundling them up in your hands as you walk to your washing machine. You can smell him on them as you walk. Soft hints of vanilla and sweat. He really did smell great for a guy. Yet another thing that was totally unfair. You threw the sheets into the washer angrily, starting it and practically stomping back to your room. You throw yourself on your bed, not even bothering to get a new sheet set, and just stare at the ceiling. 

You’re distracted from your self-loathing by a soft yip and scratching at the front door. Momo must have heard a neighbor come home or something. Then you hear a knock on the door. You glance to your right at your alarm clock. 12:45 am. What the hell? You get up with a groan and shuffle lazily to the front door. You really need to call the front office and tell them to fix your door camera, you make a mental note as you open the door. 

“Good evening, beautiful!” And there he is, equally clothed in all black, smiling from ear to ear. Were you seeing things now?

“Hobi?” you can’t help but gawk at him, but he just smiles down at you in understanding. 

“I know, it’s super late. I couldn’t warn you ahead of time how long it was going to take because they were doing phone checks today. Like we’re dumbass teenagers instead of grown men.” He mutters bitterly, but he reaches out his hand that he had been hiding behind his back. 

“TADA! Sunflowers! So even though we have to have our date in the middle of the night like a couple of vampires, you can still see the sun!” You cringe at his utter cheesiness as he hands you a gorgeous, AND HUGE, bouquet of sunflowers, peppered with baby breath. You can’t help but smile. 

“Funnily enough, sunflowers are my favorite.” His smile widens even more, something you hadn’t thought was possible. 

“WOW, I’m good. I’ll have to remember to always get Sunflowers for my Sunflower” He puffs out his chest, and you laugh at his antics, ready to forget that just moments ago you were damning him to hell. 

“Well, come in. I’m sure you can see Momo wants to see you, and I’ll just get some shoes and a jacket on.” You walk to the kitchen to put the flowers in water as Hobi makes himself comfortable on your couch, your ever-so-loyal pup making himself comfortable next to him. 

You head back to your room, throwing the hoodie and heels back on as Hobi yells from the living room. 

“Honestly, I thought you’d be a lot more mad and screaming at me about making you wait so long. Sorry about that, baby.” 

You walk back into the living room and try to shrug like you weren’t having a mental crisis earlier. 

“Uh, well, I didn’t think you were actually coming. So, this is actually a pleasant surprise.” 

Hobi cocks an eyebrow at you. “Oh, ye of little faith. Can’t you tell yet you have me whipped as fuck for you?” 

“Hoseok, it’s been ONE DAY!” you laugh at his ridiculousness. 

He scrunches his face in confusion. “Are you sure? I could have sworn this was our fifth-year anniversary date. I was even planning on giving you the traditional fifth-year gift of some wood later.” 

“Oh my God, that was horrible,” you mutter with a shake of your head, as he chuckles and leads you out to the car. 

“What are we even going to do? It’s almost one in the morning,” you ask as you settle in.

“What’s the use of being a celebrity if you don’t have connections? Just trust me.” He starts the car and threads his free hand in yours as he sets off. You stare at your clasped hands in wonder. It amazed you how easily normal, every day, couple things didn’t seem out of place, despite only knowing each other for such a short time. You knew he was kidding about the five years earlier, but it really did feel like you’d been together forever. You weren’t sure yet how you felt about that. You look up to see him smiling softly at you before he turns back to the road. You sigh in contentment as you feel his thumb making little circles, and lean your head back, relishing the moment. 

“We’re here, baby.” you hear a hushed voice in your ear, and you slowly start to wake up. You look through hooded eyes to see Hobi smirking in your face. “Good morning, sunflower.” 

“Mmmphh, sorry. Being in the car always makes me sleepy, unless I’m driving.” 

“It’s Okay. Although you probably shouldn’t drive with anyone else for awhile, if you’re going to be moaning out “Oh HOSEOK” in your sleep.” He grins at your mortified expression. 

“Don’t worry, I enjoyed it very much.” He pecks your lips really quickly, before rushing around to your side of the car, opening the door for you and reaching out his hand. You accept it, and he directs you to stand in front of him to look at the building.

“Here we are. Dinner and a movie. AT THE SAME TIME! Cool, right? You sit down, and they have a little screen that you order from. You can eat restaurant-type food while you watch the movie. They agreed to keep it running late for us. I got tickets for that new comedy.” 

Little did Hoseok know that you were already aware of the place. You remembered it opening for the first time, and you BEGGED your fiance to take you. It sounded so cool, but he’d said it was tacky and that he wouldn’t be caught dead there. And now here you were. Such a little thing, and he didn’t even know how much it meant to you. 

“LET’S GO!” You yell, grabbing Hobi as you practically skip inside. He laughs at your eagerness. 

“AH, so cute.” he murmurs, lacing your hands together as you enter the theater. 

“YAH, that’s your fifth bite. You said you wanted to take one bite to try it. Do you want to switch plates?” You tease Hobi as he shoves another bite of your spaghetti into his mouth, knowing it will just prompt him to take another bite to get a reaction out of you.

He’s barely touched his own dinner, not that you can blame him. It was just a salad, albeit a big salad, but still mostly made of nothing but iceberg lettuce and tomatoes. He said he had to watch his diet since they were going to be filming something soon. You still couldn’t find this speck of fat he kept talking about. He looked lean and muscular like a dancer should. Luckily, you’ve been able to tease him into eating more of your pasta than he’d planned, and that made you feel a little less guilty eating it in front of him. 

“No, just wanted a bite. You want a bite of mine?” He offers you a bit of the salad, and you accept, forcing yourself to act like lemon juice is a totally acceptable salad dressing. 

You turn to the movie as a loud crash in it distracts you, chuckling as you see Hobi steal another bite of pasta. Honestly, you can’t even recall what the movie was about. Some silly college comedy. The two of you had been just talking and laughing together, only turning to the movie on occasion. You could get used to empty movie theaters. You look down and smile before pushing the button to call the attendant to pick up your dishes. Hoseok had eaten the rest of your pasta.

The attendant comes quickly, clearing everything away, and leaves just as fast. Hoseok is leaning back in his chair, patting his stomach contently. He throws an arm around your shoulders, and you lean into him. As far as first dates went, this was definitely up there. There was no awkwardness, just a constant flow of conversation as the two of you continued getting to know each other better. It also probably helped that you’d gotten the initial sexual tension out of the way. You’d already had sex four times today, a record breaker for you. You felt him move his arm from around your shoulders and place his hand high on your thigh, stroking lightly. Apparently, someone thought he’d try for a fifth time. Your suspicions were confirmed when he suddenly drops out of his seat onto the floor, coming up between your legs, and stroking his hands up and down your thighs slowly. He looks up at you, his endearingly sweet smile contrasting almost perversely with his actions. 

“What are you doing?” You hiss at him. “It’s one thing to get caught on a date, it’s another thing to be caught doing it in public with your date. I don’t want you to get in trouble.” 

“Relax, baby. I told them not to come back in after we finished eating dinner. And now...it’s time for my dessert.” 

Your breath hitches as he winks at you and reaches up to the buttons on your skinny jeans, popping them open with snail-like speed. He pulls down the zipper, and you lift up to help him as he tugs down your pants, the cool air hitting your core. You hear him hiss in a breath when he looks back up. 

“No panties? Wow, my girl is naughty.” He chuckles, kissing the inside of your thighs as he makes his way closer to you. You buck when you feel his hot breath on you, already so sensitive just from anticipation. 

Anticipation turns to embarrassment when you realize he’s just smelling you. He practically has his nose shoved in there. You hear his ragged moan as a widens your legs to move closer. He makes his fingers into a V shape, rubbing them up and down through your folds slowly. He’s definitely in no rush.

“God, you always smell so fucking good. Like strawberries and just...you.” He presses a small kiss the top of your mound. All the things that you’ve done together already and this feels like the most intimate. 

You whimper loudly as he flattens his tongue and licks a line from your hole to your clit, circling around it with the tip. With a raspy groan, he pulls you closer to the edge of the seat by your thighs and throws your legs over his shoulders before diving back in like a man possessed. 

You throw your head back, panting heavily. You feel his tongue everywhere; sucking your clit, licking through your folds, lapping away at both of your holes. The sounds of lewd slurping and his deep moans only pushing you closer to the edge. 

“God, baby, you are dripping onto the floor.” He pulls back to look at his handiwork, staring at your pussy like he’s starving, and you feel yourself shiver at the sight of him. His face is covered in your juices, his lips red and puffy. Without thinking, you grab his hair and shove his face back into you. You decided that’s your favorite place for him to be. Only he could make getting eaten out in a movie theater feel like it’s something special. 

“Fuck, yes, ride my face. Use me to cum, baby.” You hear his muffled groan as you rock back and forth across his face, his nose bumping across your clit and his tongue deep in your hole, fucking you with it. 

“Ohhh, Hobi, I’m so fucking close...” you wail, grasping hard at his hair, your thighs probably choking him to death. Suddenly, he looks up at you with a smirk before sliding three fingers right into you, hooking to rub against the spot no one else had ever bothered to touch. 

With a scream, your back arches and you cum, your body pulsing. Your mind clears of everything but the absolute pleasure you were feeling. It felt like you were going forever. As you start to come down, panting and shaking, you look down. Hobi’s head is thrown back, his shirt drenched, bucking his hips erratically into the air. You hear him yell out your name, and watch as another wet spot forms on the front of his pants. 

Hoseok opens his eyes to look at you with a sleepy grin, crumpling to the floor and leaning his head against the back of the chair behind him. 

“Shit, that was probably the hottest thing of all time.” He chuckles, looking down at his shirt. 

“Don’t you...need me to take care of you?” You ask, sitting up a little more, your mind finally starting to clear. 

Hobi laughs. “I just came in my pants like I’m a fucking thirteen year old. I’m good. You squirted all over me, and I lost my mind. Trust me, I had plans to bend you over the back of that seat, but you are too hot.” 

“I what?” You thought that was just sweat all over his shirt. You...

“Squirted. Came like a fucking Goddess all over my hands and face, drenched my shirt. You’re amazing. I don’t think I’ll ever get the sight of you cumming so hard like that out of my head.” He was pulling your pants back onto you, kissing your thighs on his way up. You lift up to help get them back on, and as he’s buttoning them closed, he leans down to kiss you. It’s soft and sweet, and you can taste yourself on him. 

“I think since neither of us has been watching this movie, you wouldn't mind if we left early? I’m starting to get a little uncomfortable down there.” He grins, flicking his eyes down to the stain on the front of his jeans. You blush and nod, gathering your things together to head out. After he throws his hoodie and mask back on, he threads his fingers through yours, and you leave the theater. 

Hobi walks you up to your door and releases your hand, stuffing his in his pockets. He leans down, kissing you hard, and pulls back with a smile. 

“I want to stayyyyy.” He whines loudly, making you smile at his antics. “But we have a shoot in the morning. I have to head back and get the four hours of sleep ahead of me. If I stay here right now, I won’t be sleeping.” He growls playfully, making you giggle, and you nod in understanding. 

“It’s fine. And, in case I didn’t make it clear enough, I had a great time tonight. Uh, if you want to leave it with me, I can wash your shirt for you.” You raise an eyebrow and nod at his chest. 

“Hell no! I’m keeping it and using it for all sorts of depraved activities because it smells like you. I can still smell it under the hoodie. If you’d had panties, I would be using those instead, but someone is a naughty miss.” He leans down and kisses your blushing face before starting to head back downstairs. 

“Get some sleep, Sunflower. I need you well rested.” He smiles over his shoulder, adding a quick wink. “I’ll text you later in the day.” 

You watch as he gets into the car, and he purses his lips into the most ridiculous kissy face as he drives past. You wave until you can’t see the car anymore, feeling silly. 

An hour later, you’re showered and eating a bowl of ramen, Momo at your feet. You swear the image of Hoseok’s wet and desperate face as he eats you out is going to be burned into your brain for the rest of your life. It was probably going to be the last thing you see before you die. You’re never going to have to look at porn again for the rest of your life. 

“Ahh, Momo, have I gone crazy? I’ve known the guy for a day, and already he’s all I can think about.” You stare at the sunflower bouquet he’d brought earlier as you eat, the events from the past day running through your mind. 

You wonder if the fact that he’d been your BTS bias before you’d met him added to your feelings. Perhaps the fact that you’d known of his existence and adored him from afar for four years caused you to have this feeling like you’d known him forever. You knew that knowing about someone famous was not the same as actually knowing them; you didn’t know their doubts, fears, worries. You hoped that Hoseok would stick around long enough for you to learn what he hid beneath his happy surface. Hell, at this point you were practically hoping he’d stick around forever. Sighing at your ridiculous thoughts, you put Momo to bed and head to your room, knowing that he’d be in your dreams at least. 

Hoseok was pretty sure he was in love.

The whole ride back to the dorms, he could smell her through the hoodie, and taste her in his mouth, and it drove him crazy. The sight of her cumming like that was going to be wank bank fodder for the next fifty years. The way she’d arched her whole body up, screaming HIS name. When she’d squirted all over him, he’d done his best to lap up what he could, drinking it down like it was the nectar of life. God, she was the sexiest woman alive to him. He couldn’t stop thinking of what else he’d want to do with her. She seemed so deliciously open to things. Even when he’d started things in the theater, her first worry was him getting in trouble, not doing it in the first place. 

As much as he couldn’t stop thinking of things to do to her, he thought about things to do WITH her just as much. He wanted to take her out for picnics or go to the beach. Hell, he’d like her to meet his Mom. He had it bad. He shook his head at himself as he made his way up into the dormitory after parking Yoongi’s car. 

For the second time today, Hoseok found himself creeping through the dorm, trying to get to the room he shared with Jimin quietly. He needed a change of clothes, a shower, and to rub one out while smelling her on his shirt. Not necessarily in that order. There were no lights coming from any of the rooms, showing that everyone was still asleep. The door to his room was cracked open, which was odd, but he didn’t think too much of it and crept inside. Suddenly, the desk lamp was turned on, and Manager Sejin stared at Hoseok from the desk chair. His look screamed disappointment and worry, and Hoseok got ready for the lecture that was sure to come. 

“Welcome back. I think we need to talk.” 

[sending-the-message]

A New meaning to Drink Myself to Death by JamesonKeystrokes

“You got time for a story, friend?”

Why not? I was already drinking alone at noon on Halloween. Feeling sorry for myself, again. I looked over at the man, it was dark in the bar and the hoodie pulled over his head made it impossible to see his face. For I knew he was a regular. I was the stranger here. Not him. I’m getting ahead of myself though.

Three hours earlier I had woken up to my phone ringing.

“You’re on your way… right?” My best friend Matt spoke from the other line of the phone. Not even bothering with the pleasantries.

“Yeah, yeah man, I’m making great time.” I responded, trying to sound like he didn’t just wake me up, causing my unforgiving hangover to kick into hyper drive.

“Nick, you asshole. You’re still sleeping! Come on, dude!” When you knew someone for 20 of the 25 years you were alive, it was hard to lie to them.

I sat up and grabbed the bottle of water on my nightstand, cracking it open and chugging almost the entire thing- drunk me must have been looking out- with a audible exhale. I stood up, giving myself a second for my equilibrium to gain some stability. Matt was waiting for me to respond, patiently.

“I’m up and will be out the door in no time at all.” I responded, walking into the small bathroom in my small apartment right smack in the middle of nowhere northern Maine.

“I already told everyone you’re coming, so you can not bail now, I don’t care how busy you are at work.”

“No, man. I’ll be there I’m actually looking forward to it. It’ll be nice to see everyone. Not looking forward to the drive though.” I had a seven-hour drive ahead of me to make it back to Connecticut.

“It’ll all be worth it, this party is going to be insane. Trust me.”

“See you soon.” Matt hung up and I jumped in the shower, letting the cold water wake me up.

Over a half year ago, my company relocated me to oversee the opening of a new location. It was supposed to be for six months, but there I was eight months and counting later. Stuck in a boring town, in a small apartment, in the middle of the woods with nothing around me but forest. There was a small center of town that consisted of a grocery store, a bar, and a movie theater that closed years ago.

Sadly, the bar was the only other place I had gone when I wasn’t sulking at home. I had made some “friends” at work but none of them invited their boss to hangout if it wasn’t a work event, especially when more ninety percent of them were older than me. Nope, to them I was just some kid who was cool enough to talk to in the office but nothing more than that.

I quickly packed a bag, loaded up my car and started the trek back home. My phone was flooding with texts of friends that were actually excited to see me. I smiled and responded, I was starting to get pumped up now that I was en route… until I hit the dead stop traffic. Not even half way home and I was sitting bumper to bumper. Slowly crawling a mile in just over an hour I decided to get off the next exit and grab some lunch and maybe a beer to kill some time. Hopefully the traffic would let up.

I drove through what looked like a ghost town for twenty minutes until I saw the small shack stuck in the corner of a dirt road. The small red building looked like an old barn that was remodeled into a bar. “The Canteen” had a few cars in the parking lot… and I use that term lightly seeing as it was just a dirt road.

Hey man, dead stop traffic, running behind. Don’t get too wasted before I make it home.

I sent Matt text, he replied that he wouldn’t as I was walking into the bar. It was fairly normal on the inside. A few booths, a pool table in back, a jukebox on the wall that was playing some twangy blues guitar solo from whatever song the patrons had put on and a bar shoved in the center of the barn. There was a bartender standing oddly stiff behind it, already staring at me as soon as I walked in with a wide smile on his old weathered face.

Besides the two of us there was one man sitting at the bar, a few girls in a booth in back and a man playing pool by himself in back. I took a seat at the bar right across from where the tender was standing. He looked over at me, moving just his neck and not his whole body. I quickly decided to just order a beer and leave. I was feeling very uncomfortable.

“What’ll it be?” He asked.

“Just a bottle of beer, whatever’s cold. I’m not picky.”

He shook his head and turned to the fridge in back almost mechanically. He slapped a bottle of Budweiser in front of me and said “on the house.” I looked at him quizzically. This place had to be hurting for money, I didn’t think they could even afford to give away a free beer.

“You sure?”

He just nodded his head and turned around talking to the other man at the bar. They both looked over at me. Like a wolf the man looked over at me and stood up quickly. I stood my ground and didn't book it for the front door... like I had wanted to. The second a wolf could smell fear, you were already dead. He sat down next to me.

“You got time for a story, friend?”

"I really should be going soon." I responded taking my last sip of beer. The man held up two fingers and two shot glasses were filled with whiskey and slid in front of us.

"This one's on me. Now you have to listen, you don't want to be rude." I looked at the alcohol in front of me. He picked up his shot glass and held it in front of me, waiting for me to cheers with him. "Take the shot, friend."

Fuck it. One shot wasn't going to kill me. Plus the man was a little smaller and looked frail. If he wanted to attack me I was almost positive that I could take him. I was no stranger to a fight. Although I hadn't been in a good scrap in years. I cheers him and took the shot. It burned going down.

"You're in the game now, friend." He held up two more fingers and two more shots were slid in front of us.

"No thanks, I have a long drive and really need to take off." I started to stand up and he put his hand on my arm.

I looked down and grimaced. The skin was rotted and decaying, like the man had been dead for years but someone forgot to tell him. I shot out of the chair, pushing his hand from my arm. He took off his hood and his face matched. The skin was rotted and I could actually see his jaw bone on one side. He laughed.

"That... thats one hell of a Halloween costume." I stuttered.

"That won't do you any good here." He gestured to the beer bottled I was clutching in my hand. I hadn't even realized that I grabbed it. "Sit down. Let me tell you my story."

"Fuck this." I turned around to sprint to my car, I hadn't noticed that the bar had been filled behind me. I scanned the room, they all stood, staring at me. Like my new friend, they too were all rotting.

I sat back down, I had absolutely no idea what to do or how to handle this. Defeated, I sat down, took my second shot and waited to hear what the man had to say. He laughed a laugh that sounded like he had smoked a carton of cigarettes a day since he was 12. He sat back down and took his shot. Two more were lined up, I was starting to sense a pattern.

"Name's Jon, Jon Krester. As you can probably see... I am dead, well, maybe dead isn't the word, but I have been here for a long, long time." He held up his glass.

I, seeing as there was a great chance I was about to be murdered, raised mine as well and drank. If I was going to die, may as well be drunk. Wasn't everyday you get drink with a dead man.

"I'm losing my fucking mind, huh? Is this a joke?" I said, this time holding up my fingers ordering two more. Jon drummed on the bar and laughed again.

"I like you! Out of all the others..." he signaled to all the dead men behind me, "you may actually be my favorite."

We took the shots. I had some sort of tolerance but I was hungover and had an empty stomach. I was feeling it.

"See, here's the deal kid. A long time ago, back when I was fully alive, I used to own this here establishment. I didn't much care for the money, I was a collector of stories and trinkets. That was my vice. If a man came through and wanted to drink but had no coin that was alright by me. As long as he had something to offer, weather it be something interesting or even a intriguing story." Another round of shots.

"I don't have much to offer in that department, Jon but I do have money." I said.

"No, no, no, it's far to late for that. At least for me. See one Halloween night, the bar was particularly dead... no pun intended. A man strolled in, a man I had seen before many times, he always brought me in something cool. He leaned over the bar he said to me, 'Jon, what if I told you that you could live on in this bar forever, collecting tales and trinkets until the end of time?' Naturally I needed whatever it was he was offering... I was a stupid man back then." Another round of shots. I was tipsy and on the fine line of being drunk.

"This is unbelievable." I pulled the phone out of my pocket. You guessed it, no service. Jon grabbed the phone and put it on the bar top.

"He reached in his bag and in his hand he held up a golden bottle. In this bottle was a never ending supply of whiskey... a special whiskey. When I drink it, I gain the life of the person drinking with me." He nodded at me, I looked at the shot glass. "Way too late to turn back now. The only way you get to walk out of this bar, friend, is by outdrinking me." He slammed back the shot.

"You've got to be shitting me. Come on, how do I outdrink a dead man? No offense but it seems like you have sort of an unfair advantage." I took my shot, if I was already in the game, I guess I would try and win.

"Have you not been listening? I am not dead. I am immortal... well so far at least." Another shot.

"So, all I have to do is outdrink you, a man who has built up a 200 year tolerance to booze? Welp, good thing I've been in a depressive slump these past 8 months." I laughed and took the shot and ordered another taking it down too.

"That's the spirit! What's your name? We have a long night ahead of us."

"Nick." I took another shot, the more drunk I became, the less fearful I was. Liquid courage.

As the night went on and the shots kept on flowing, Jon continued to tell me about all the men he had bested over the years. I knew I should be terrified I knew I should be begging for my life. However, the more I drank of the whiskey, the less I seemed to care about anything at all. We traded stories about drunken benders and debauchery.

The more I talked to Jon, the more I forgot that he was trying to steal my life and would almost more than likely be the cause of my death. My only saving grace was that I was literally drinking for my life. Somewhere between arm wrestling and that game.... where you stab between each others fingers.... you know what I'm taking about, I had enough. I hopped over the bar, grabbed the bottle of whiskey and started chugging it.

"No! You fucking idiot!" Jon yelled. He jumped over the bar and hit me harder than I had ever been hit in my entire life. Even with a half gallon of whiskey in my system it hurt. I fell to the ground and wiped the blood from my nose. I was slow to recover. "Why did you have to go and do that? I was actually enjoying this." he growled and kicked me in the stomach.

I tried to stand up but a boot came down colliding with my face. I was out cold. I had no idea how long I was asleep for but I awoke to the sound of my phone ringing next to me. I opened my eyes, I was lying on my side, a line of puke in front of me. I stood up rubbing my head. My nose was swollen and there was a cut under my right eye.

The bar was... actually not a bar at all anymore. It was just a big empty barn. My head was spinning and I hunched over and threw up again. Putting the phone to my ear Matt was on the other line.

"How's the traffic, you almost here?"

"What... what fucking time is it?" I asked, more confused than I had ever been in my entire life.

"Are you drunk? You can't be serious... you texted me a fucking hour ago about pulling off for food." He yelled.

"No, I'm... I'm not, I'm on my way I was just zoning out. I'll call you back."

I sprinted out of the barn. The dirt road was just a vacant as it was when I had walked in. My car was the only car in the middle of the road. I got in and turned it on, taking a deep breath. Having no doubt in my mind that what just happened was real. I looked on my passengers seat, there was a bar tab receipt.

"Ya got balls, kid. In the years I have been doing this no one has ever went for the bottle. You win this round but I promise you this... I will see you again. Until next time. Jon."

I looked in my rear view mirror and he was staring right back at me. When I turned around, he was gone. I skidded away from the barn leaving dirt and dust behind. It was going to be one hell of a Halloween night.

[airoasis]

Quit social media | Dr. Cal Newport | TEDxTysons

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/quit-social-media-dr-cal-newport-tedxtysons-2/

Quit social media | Dr. Cal Newport | TEDxTysons

Translator: Peter van de Ven Reviewer: Denise RQ You as a rule do not have an understanding of that correct now, you’re in reality looking at anything rather rare. Considering the fact that i am a millennial laptop scientist booklet creator standing on a TEDx stage, and but, I’ve in no way had a social media account. How this occurred used to be actually reasonably random. Social media first got here onto my radar when I was once at tuition, my sophomore 12 months of school, that is when fb arrived at our campus. And on the time, which used to be proper after the first dotcom bust, I had had a dorm room trade, i’d had to shut it down in the bust, after which, instantly, this other kid from Harvard, named Mark, had this product referred to as fb and humans being thinking about it. So in sort of a match of slightly immature reliable jealousy, I mentioned, "i am now not going to make use of this factor.I is not going to help this kid’s industry; something’s going to amount to." As i am going along my lifestyles, I seem up now not long later, and that i see everyone i know is hooked on this thing. And from the readability you can get when you have some objectivity, some point of view on it, i noticed this seems a bit of bit hazardous. So I under no circumstances signed up. I’ve not ever had a social media account given that. So i’m here for two explanations; I want to supply two messages.The first message I want to deliver is that even though I’ve by no means had a social media account, i’m ok, you don’t have to fear. It seems I nonetheless have pals, I still recognize what is going on on on the earth; as a pc scientist I still collaborate with persons all around the world, i’m still typically uncovered serendipitously to intriguing ideas, and i not often describe myself as missing enjoyment choices. So i have been adequate, but i would go even farther and say now not simplest i am adequate with out social media but I think i’m in reality better off.I suppose i am happier, I consider I to find more sustainability in my lifestyles, and that i suppose i’ve been extra effective professionally due to the fact that i do not use social media. So my 2nd intention right here on stage is attempt to persuade extra of you to think the equal factor. Let’s see if I might surely convince more of you that you just too would be should you quit social media. So, if the theme of this TEDx event is "Future tense," i suppose, in different words, this might be my imaginative and prescient of the future, can be one where fewer men and women actually use social media. That is a enormous declare, I consider I have to back it up. So I concept, what i would do is take the three most customary objections I hear once I suggest to humans that they give up social media, after which for every of those objections, i’ll attempt to defuse the hype and notice if i will really push in some extra truth.This is the primary most customary objection I hear. That’s now not a hermit, that’s truly a hipster web developer down from 8th avenue; i’m now not sure. Hipster or hermit? Commonly it is tough to inform. This primary objection goes as follows, "Cal, social media is likely one of the important technologies of the 21st century. To reject social media can be an act of extreme . It will be like driving to work on a horse or utilizing a rotary mobilephone.I can’t take this sort of huge stance in my life." My reaction to that objection is I suppose that is nonsense. Social media is not a predominant technology. It leverages some principal technologies, but it surely’s better understood as this. Which is to claim, it is a source of amusement, it’s an enjoyment product. The way that technologist Jaron Lanier puts it’s that these businesses offer you shiny treats in alternate for minutes of your concentration and bites of your private data, which can then be packaged up and sold. In an effort to say that you do not use social media must not be a significant social stance, it is simply rejecting one form of entertainment for others. There will have to be no extra controversial than pronouncing, "i don’t like newspapers, I prefer to get my news from magazines," or "I decide on to watch cable sequence, as opposed to network tv series." it can be no longer a fundamental political or social stance to say you don’t use this product. My use of the slot desktop photograph up right here additionally just isn’t unintentional given that if you seem just a little bit nearer at these technologies, it can be no longer just that they’re a source of enjoyment but they may be a rather unsavory supply of entertainment.We now comprehend that a few of the foremost social media firms hire participants known as concentration engineers, who borrow ideas from Las Vegas on line casino playing, among other places, to take a look at to make these products as addictive as possible. That’s the favored use case of these merchandise: is that you simply use it in an addictive fashion in view that that maximizes the revenue that can be extracted out of your attention and data. So it’s no longer a foremost science, it is only a source of amusement, one in all many, and it’s rather unsavory in the event you seem a bit bit nearer. Here is the 2nd original objection I hear once I endorse that men and women give up social media.The objection goes as follows, "Cal, I can not give up social media seeing that it is critical to my success within the 21st century economic climate. If I should not have a good-cultivated social media manufacturer, individuals won’t know who i’m, men and women will not be ready to find me, opportunities will not come my method, and i’ll without problems disappear from the economy." again my response is as soon as again: this objection also is nonsense. I not too long ago released this e-book that pulls on a couple of distinct strands of evidence to make the point that, in a aggressive twenty first century economy, what the market values is the potential to provide matters which might be infrequent and are useful.For those who produce whatever that is infrequent and useful, the market will price that. What the market dismisses, for probably the most part, are activities that are effortless to duplicate and produce a small amount of worth. Good, social media use is the epitome of an effortless to copy activity that does not produce quite a lot of worth; it is anything that any six-12 months-ancient with a smartphone can do. Via definition, the market is just not going to present a lot of value to those behaviors. It’s alternatively going to reward the deep, centred work required to construct actual talents and to apply these capabilities to produce matters – like a craftsman – which might be rare and that are valuable. To place it another way: if that you may write an elegant algorithm, if that you could write a legal transient that may exchange a case, if that you can write a thousand phrases of prose that’s going to fixate a reader proper to the tip; if that you would be able to look at a sea of ambiguous information and apply data, and pull out insights that might become a industry method, if you can do these kind of hobbies which require deep work, that produce effects which might be rare and priceless, men and women will find you.You are going to be ready to write your own ticket, and construct the basis of a meaningful and positive legitimate existence, in spite of how many Instagram followers you’ve gotten. That is the third remark objection I hear when I propose to humans that they quit social media; in some experience, I believe it possibly one of the most principal. This objection goes as follows, "Cal, maybe I agree, might be you are right; it’s now not a main technology. Perhaps utilizing social media is not at the core of my authentic success. However, you realize what? It’s innocent, i have some fun on it – bizarre: Twitter’s funny – i do not even use it that much, i am a primary adopter, it can be variety of intriguing to try it out, and might be I might miss out something if i do not use it.What is the damage?" again, I look back and i say: this objection is also nonsense. In this case, what it misses is what I suppose is a very major fact that we have got to talk about extra frankly, which is that social media brings with it more than one, good-documented, and colossal harms. We virtually ought to confront these harms head-on when trying to make selections about whether or now not we include this technological know-how and let it into our lives. One of these harms that we know this technology brings has to do with your legit success. I simply argued before that the capacity to focus intensely, to supply things which are infrequent and valuable, to hone capabilities the market location value on, that that is what is going to topic in our financial system. However proper earlier than that, I argued that social media tools are designed to be addictive. The precise designed preferred-use case of those tools is that you fragment your concentration as so much as feasible in the course of your waking hours; that’s how these tools are designed to use.We now have a growing quantity of study which tells us that for those who spend big portions of your day in a state of fragmented concentration – big portions of your day, breaking up your awareness, to take a fast glance, to simply examine, – "Let me rapidly look at Instagram" – that this can completely scale down your capacity for awareness. In different words, you would permanently cut back your capacity to do exactly the form of deep effort that we’re finding to be increasingly imperative in an more and more aggressive economic climate. So social media use isn’t innocent, it will possibly honestly have a gigantic poor influence on your ability to thrive in the economic climate. I’m primarily concerned about this after we look at the more youthful new release, which is the most saturated on this technological know-how. When you lose your capacity to sustain awareness, you are going to turn out to be much less and less principal to this financial system. There may be additionally psychological harms which are good documented that social media brings, that we do ought to address.We know from the study literature that the more you use social media, the extra possible you’re to feel lonely or isolated. We all know that the consistent exposure to your acquaintances cautiously curated, confident portrayals of their lifestyles can go away you to believe insufficient, and might increase charges of depression. And something I think we’re going to be listening to extra about within the near future is that there is a major mismatch between the way our brains are wired and this behavior of disclosing your self to stimuli with intermittent rewards for the period of your whole waking hours. It’s one factor to spend a couple of hours at a slot desktop in Las Vegas, but if you convey one with you, and also you pull that control all day long, from whilst you wake up to whilst you go to bed: we’re not wired from it.It quick-circuits the mind, and we’re opening to search out it has exact cognitive penalties, one in every of them being this style of pervasive historical past hum of anxiety. The canary within the coal mine for this predicament is definitely university campuses. Should you speak to mental well being experts on institution campuses, they’ll tell you that together with the upward push of ubiquitous smartphone use and social media use among the scholars on the campus, came an explosion of anxiety-associated issues on these campuses. That is the canary in the coal mine. This variety of conduct is a mismatch for our mind wiring and can make you think miserable. So there’s real price to social media use; this means that when you are seeking to come to a decision, "should i take advantage of this or not?", announcing it’s innocent shouldn’t be enough. You really must identify a greatly optimistic, clear advantage that may outweigh these skills, fully non-trivial harms. Persons more commonly ask, "good enough, but what’s life like without social media?" that can truely be a bit bit scary to suppose about. According to humans who went via this procedure, there is usually a few problematic weeks. It surely is like a authentic detox approach.The first two weeks will also be uncomfortable: you believe a bit bit anxious, you think like you’re missing a limb. But after that, matters settle down, and definitely, lifestyles after social media can be really confident. There is two matters i will report back from the world of no social media use. First, it may be quite productive. I am a professor at a research institution, I’ve written 5 books, I not often work prior 5 pm on a weekday.Part of the best way i’m looking to in a position to drag that off is due to the fact that it seems, if you happen to deal with your attention with recognize, – so you don’t fragment it; you enable it to stay whole, you maintain your concentration – when it comes time to work you can do one thing after a further, and do it with intensity, and intensity can be traded for time. It’s surprising how much that you can get executed in a eight-hour day if you’re equipped to present each thing extreme concentration after an additional. Whatever else i can record again from lifestyles with out social media is that external of labor, matters may also be quite peaceable. I in most cases funny story i’d be very cozy being a Nineteen Thirties farmer, for the reason that should you look at my enjoyment time, I read the newspaper while the solar comes up; I listen to baseball on the radio; I honest-to-god sit in a leather-based chair and read hardcover books at night time after my children go to mattress.It sounds ancient-original, but they were onto something back then. It is truly a restorative, peaceful way to really spend your day trip of work. You should not have the steady hum of stimuli, and the background hum of anxiousness that comes together with that. So lifestyles with out social media is quite now not so dangerous. When you pull together these threads, you see my full argument that now not every body, but obviously rather more people than proper now, far more folks will have to not be utilizing social media. That’s given that we are able to first, to summarize, discard with the principal issues that it’s a most important technological know-how you must use.Nonsense: it is a slot laptop to your telephone. We are able to discard with this suggestion that you simply won’t get a job without it. Nonsense: some thing a six-12 months-historic with a smartphone can do isn’t going to be what the market rewards. And then I emphasised the point that there’s actual harms with it. So it can be not just harmless. You particularly would must have a large advantage earlier than you possibly can say this trade-off is worth it.In the end I famous, that life with out social media: there may be actual positives associated with it. So i’m hoping that once lots of you definitely go by means of this identical calculus, you’ll at least keep in mind the standpoint i am making proper now, which is: many extra folks can be so much at an advantage in the event that they didn’t use this technological know-how. A few of you might disagree, a few of you would have scathing however correct critiques of me and my features, and of course, I welcome all terrible suggestions.I just ask that you direct your feedback in the direction of Twitter. Thanks. (Applause) .

[reptilisss]

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1. Think of the last person who said I love you, do you think they meant it? Yeah I think my mom loves me idk tho     2. Would you date an 18-year-old at the age you are now? NO 3. When’s the last time you were aggravated and happy at the same time? I don’t think I’ve ever been both?4. Would you ever smile at a stranger? Yes I smile at everyone           5. Is there someone mad because you’re dating/talking to the person you are? No oh my god6. Have you heard a song that reminds you of someone today? Nah             7. What exactly are you wearing right now? t shirt and robot boxers come at me 8. How often do you listen to music?  All the time              9. Do you wear jeans or sweats more? No pants tbh          10. Do you think your life will change dramatically before 2013? nah             11. Are you a social or an antisocial person? I’m pretty introverted    12. Have you ever kissed someone whose name begins with the letter ‘A’? Probably?     13. What about ‘R’? Yes          14. Can you drive a stick shift?  No :(              15. Do you care if people talk badly about you?  Nah not anymore              16. Are you going out of town soon? I’m graduating! Leaving my college town!    17. When was the last time you cried?  Yesterday night I got really emotional when I remembered I could go to this NOVA chain restaurant again when I get home from school. I cried over vid chat.        18. Have you ever told someone you loved them? Yeah of course             19. If you could change your eye color, would you? Nah I like having blue eyes 20. Is there a boy who you would do absolutely everything for? I found this frog shaped box at Goodwill, Franklin, who I would kill for.            21. Name something you dislike about the day you’re having. Filling this out, Scott.            22. Is it cute when guys kiss you on your forehead? Yeah I guess       23. Are you dating the last person you talked to? Yes the last thing he sent was “I love you I am helping my brother make mozzarella.”          24. What are you sitting on right now? Dorm bed.        25. Does anyone regularly (other than family) tell you they love you? Yes my friends tell me a lot I love them too            26. Have you ever wanted someone you couldn’t have? Lol nah not really.  27. Who was the last person you talked to before you went to bed last night? My boyfriend    28. Do you get a lot of colds? No not really           29. Where is the shirt you are wearing from? Goodwill, yo.             30. Does anyone hate you? Oh yeah   31. Do you have any empty alcohol bottles hidden somewhere in your room?  Nope I have half a handle of vodka in the freezer tho   32. Do you like watching scary movies?  Yeah            33. Do you want your tongue pierced? I’ve had it pierced for like six or seven months now :) 12g        34. If you had to delete one year of your life completely, which would it be? More than one year      35. Did you have a dream last night?  Yeah I was brushing my teeth and then my tooth brush broke I was really upset about it.    36. When was the last time you told someone you loved them? Like 20 minutes ago           37. Do you think you’ll be married in 5 years? I have no idea            38. Do you think someone has feelings for you? I really hope so lol        39. Do you think someone is thinking about you right now? Maybe?       40. Did you have a good day yesterday?  Nah it was a bad day       41. Think back 2 months ago; were you in a relationship? Yeah I still am :)            42. In the next 48 hours, will you hang out with a girl? Nah but I just got back from seeing my roommates and they’re women.          43. Has anyone told you they don’t want to ever lose you? Yep            44. What’s the best part about school? Learning! I love learning.       45. Do you have any pictures on your Facebook? SO many          46. Do you ever pass notes to your friends in school? Nah but I text em during class       47. Do you replay things that have happened in your head? Yeah tbh I talk to myself a bunch            48. Were you single over the last summer? Nah I’m not single a lot           49. Is your life anything like it was two years ago? No and it’s great             50. What are you supposed to be doing right now? Idk studying I guess         51. Do you hate the last guy you had a conversation with? Nope I love him lots 52. Are you nice to everyone? I wish I was lol 53. Have you ever liked someone you didn’t expect to? Yeah I guess             54. Do you think you can last in a relationship for 6 months and not cheat? Um. Yes?55. Are you good at hiding your feelings? I think it depends on the feeling. I’m not good at hiding when I’m angry at someone, but I think I can hide when I have a crush a little better. Maybe.              56. Do you think you like someone? I mean I’m dating him yeah I think I like him lol   57. Have you kissed someone whose name starts with a ‘J’? Yeah        58. Do you prefer to be friends with girls or boys? I’ve never thought that way, never had a preference.        59. Has anyone of your friends ever seen you cry? Haha yeah I cry all the time.  60. Do you hate anyone? I try not to think about it like that             61. How’s your heart? Full of my blood  62. Is there something that happened in your past that you hate talking about?  I feel like that’s true for everyone 63. Have you ever cried over a guy? Yeah but not like in a romantic way more in like “you’re a shitbag” way           64. Who is probably talking a load of crap about you right now? Uh. I don’t know. Probably someone at school.            65. Are your toenails painted pink? My toenails are not painted.       66. Will your next kiss be a mistake? Nah :)     67. Girls love it when boyfriends cry; correct? I’m not a girl but I like when my partners are emotionally open - you don’t have to cry tho          68. Have your pants ever fallen down in public? Kevin in 8th grade pulled my jeans down fuck him    69. Who was the last person you were on the phone with? my dad and mom I think        70. How do you look right now? Tired             71. Do you have someone you can be your complete self around? More than one :)           72. Can you commit to one person? Monogamy hasn’t been an issue for me      73. Do you have someone of the opposite sex you can tell everything to? That’s a weird question      74. Have you ever felt replaced? No but I’ve def felt used           75. Did you wake up cranky? Yes but that’s normal                76. Are you a jealous person? I think I used to be         77. Are relationships ever worth it? Yeah I mean it depends on if you’re ready for one and you meet a nice person.       78. Anyone you’re giving up on? Nah          79. Currently wanting to see anyone? Definitely       80. Name something you have to do tomorrow? Talk to my psych         81. Last person you cried in front of? I cried over video chat about guacamole last night with my boyfriend.              82. Is there someone you will never forget? Yeah               83. Do you think the person you have feelings for is protective of you? Yes he tells me all the time lol               84. If the person you wish to be with were with you, what would you be doing right now? I’d make him finish Twin Peaks 85. Are you over your past? Not really but it’s okay          86. Have you ever liked one of your best friends of the opposite sex? Another weird question           87. Is there anyone you can tell EVERYTHING to? Yeah    88. If your first true love knocked on your door with apology and presents, would you accept? She has nothing to apologize for, she’s great we are friends. :)          89. So, the last person you kissed just happens to arrive at your door at 3AM; do you let them in? Yes! 90. Have you ever liked someone who your friends hated? Haha yeah             91. Will you be in a relationship in 2 months? I hope so :) 92. Is there anyone you know with the name Michael? Yeah          93. Have you ever kissed a Matthew? I think so        94. Were you in a relationship in January? How was it going? Very well!         95. Were you happy with the person you liked in March? Yeah :)     96. Don’t tell me lies, is the last person you texted attractive? I guess so              97. Who do you have texts from? my friends and my dad 98. If the person you like says they like someone else, what would you say? I can’t control other people. 99. Have you ever kissed someone older than you? Yes          100. Who’s in your profile picture with you? No one            101. Ever kissed under fireworks?  Nah      102. Has anybody ever given you butterflies?  No one has given me bugs as a present.           

[bts-sky-blog]

Desert Nights and Starlight

Words: 2,357 

Description: You and Yoongi finally take that road trip you’ve been talking about 

You met Yoongi when you were 12, when he’d first moved to Texas– into the house right next to yours. He’d come from Connecticut, and the outskirts of Conroe weren’t exactly used to northerners. In short, he didn’t fit in. But that was okay, because neither did you. You became fast friends, after your mother brought half-burnt cookies over to their house as a welcome gift (you always thought it was more of a peace offering, but that’s a story for another time).

You saw him slinking across the hallway, trying to avoid meeting anyone, but his mother called him to the door. “Yoongi, I want you to meet the neighbors.” You weren’t sure if he was shy or just uninterested, but he seemed a little less standoffish once he noticed the cookies. You introduced yourself and told him that he should definitely go down to the lake– “you could even come with me, if you’d like,” you offered. “I mean, you look like you could use the sun,” you laughed, noticing how pale he was. When he didn’t respond, you were worried that you’d offended him, but after a short moment, he laughed too, quietly, almost like he was embarrassed. You liked the way his gums showed when he smiled. It made him more real.

Conroe was a flat, dry place with swaths of hot white concrete and too many scraggly pine trees and a too-blue sky, so large you could see the way it wrapped around the earth. The clouds were white and gold and incredibly real. They always looked close enough to touch. The lake sprawled across the outskirts of the city, branching off and doubling back on itself. There wasn’t exactly much to do in Conroe, besides going to the lake. The movie theater was okay, and the Tex-Mex was good, you supposed. You still remember the first time you made Yoongi try it.

He mentioned offhand that he’d never tried Tex-Mex, and the next time your family went out, you showed up at his door, dragging him with you with little warning. “If you live in Texas, you have to at least try Tex-Mex, okay? It’s a requirement.” He grumbled, but followed nonetheless. You thought it was funny, the way he looked at everything suspiciously, as if it were going to bite him (instead of the other way around), and ate in little nibbles, unsure of the food. He was nonplussed, for the most part, but he did find his first true love in the form of sopapillas.

In the beginning, you were always the one to knock on his door, and that never really changed. As time passed, he eventually just began showing up at your house. You’d come home from an errand and he’d be sitting in the kitchen, or you’d wake up from a nap, and he’d be sleeping on the couch across from you. Sometimes you’d look out your window and see him at the base of the large pine across from your room.

He was reserved, at first, but you drew him out of his shell. Sort of. You felt like you never really knew everything about him, though.

He was snow, soft and light, melting fast in the Texas heat.

You liked to sit on the couch at his house and listen to him practice the piano. It was like listening to him laugh– which he didn’t do that often in the first place– or cry(which he never did. Well. Maybe once in a blue moon, but you’d never tell anyone) except you got to hear more of him.

You talked him into climbing the pine tree in your backyard, and even though he grumbled about it the whole way up, he did it anyway. You liked how he looked when he finally perched high in the branches. He closed his eyes and let the breeze run its fingers through his hair.

He was a cloud, then, and you thought he might blow away with the wind.

You listened to music together. He showed you what kind of music he liked, and you returned the favor (he laughed at some of the songs, but you never really minded). You would spend time watching the sunset splash red-orange light across the cream-colored ceiling, letting the songs pass one by one.

Sometimes, you would lie on the ground in your backyard together in the shade of the same pine tree, dizzy with the stifling afternoon heat, and talk in circles about everything and nothing at all. That’s when he said the most, though, so it didn’t matter to you what you talked about. You realized in those moments that you loved him, in the way you loved sunsets and flowers and the stars. You never said that aloud, though.

And then night would fall and you’d wait for the stars to come out, and you’d try to find constellations (neither of you were very good at it). The stars were never very bright, always blotted out by the city lights. At night, he came alive. Nervously, at first, like he didn’t know if he could trust you, but he couldn’t keep it to himself. He spoke in lines of poetry, and you loved him then most of all. He would hold your hand like paper: delicate, afraid of tearing you, but grounding, so you wouldn’t blow away. And you felt like maybe, just maybe, he loved you like you loved him.

It took some coaxing, but you eventually did manage to drag him down to the lake. He wore a t-shirt and shorts, instead of a swimsuit, like he wasn’t planning to get into the water. But you jumped in and splashed water at him and laughed, and eventually he followed. That was how it always was. You’d ask him to do something and he’d refuse, but after a bit of persuasion, he would eventually follow.

That’s how the road trip to San Antonio came about. About a year after you first met, you mentioned something about wanting to see the Alamo, and then the idea got stuck in your head. And once you had an idea, it was there for good. You prodded and poked and nagged until he really couldn’t ignore you anymore. He grudgingly agreed to come with you if you planned it all out. And you did. Slowly. 

So 4 years later, it finally happens.

You’re standing by the car, fully loaded, Yoongi already sitting in the passenger seat. “Come on, mom, it’s just San Antonio. It’s not like I’m going off to war.” She frowns and shoves another bag into the backseat.

“Even so. You have to be careful. And besides, better safe than sorry. You might need some of these things!”

“Mom, I doubt we’re going to need–” you pause, rummaging through the bag to see what’s inside. “six sandwiches, two gallons of water, and– mom, is this a Taser?” You see Yoongi looking on from the front seat, an amused smile on his face, and you shoot him a glare. He’s not exactly being helpful.

“You never know,” she says stubbornly, closing the car door and crossing her arms. “It won’t hurt to just take it.”

You sigh and nod reluctantly. “Alright, fine, we’ll take it. We’ll be back in three days, okay?” She nods and hugs you briefly before stepping away.

“Stay safe! Drive carefully, alright?” You nod and smile, waving as you start the car.

“Love you, mom! See you in a few days.” She watches from the driveway as you pull away, and you glance over at Yoongi. He’s still smirking a little bit, and you reach over, shoving his shoulder.

He just laughs. “You know, if it’s any hotter in San Antonio than it is here, we might just need the whole two gallons.”

You roll your eyes and adjust your hands on the steering wheel. The leather is hot after being in the summer sun all day. “Listen, I’ve been waiting to take this road trip for years now. Let’s just make it nice while we can, okay?”

“I’ve been waiting too,” he reminds you. You fall into silence and he messes with the stereo until he finds something he likes before settling back in his seat and tipping his head back, closing his eyes. Boring, you think, but you don’t try to wake him up. He’ll just sit there and look groggy if you do.

He doesn’t open his eyes until you pull into San Antonio, just a little more than three hours later. You check into the hotel, dropping off your bags before heading out again. Yoongi insists on going to the river walk first, and you don’t argue. It’s something you’ve been wanting to see anyway, so you can’t complain. It’s colorful and bright and you like seeing all the people, particularly the tourists. It’s only a few degrees hotter than Conroe, but you can still feel the difference.

You drag him over to the river float, which is nice but relatively uneventful, and then he drags you over to get ice cream. You laugh when he gets it on his nose, reaching over to wipe it off. When you do, you’re close enough to see each of his eyelashes, and the way the light glitters in his eyes. You try to ignore it, turning to look at the river again. You can feel his eyes on you, but you don’t say anything.

Late afternoon comes around, and he takes you back to the car. “I want to show you something,” he explains, sliding into the driver’s seat and holding out his hand for the keys.

“Min Yoongi, if you so much as scratch my car, I swear…”

“Come on, I won’t hurt it. Besides, it’s so old, I don’t think–”

“I paid good money for this car, Min Yoongi! You have to promise,” you say, folding your arms over your chest, as stubborn as ever.

“Fine,” he sighs. “I promise I’ll be careful.” You give him a suspicious look but hand the keys over anyway, sliding into the passenger seat. He pulls out of the parking lot while you put on some music and turn on the AC.

This drive is a livelier one than the one to San Antonio, probably because Yoongi actually has to stay awake this time. As the sun goes down, you roll down your window, letting the cool evening air pour over you.

You laugh and sing along with the music, and sometimes you even get Yoongi to join in with you. You like listening to him sing(even if he can be pretty terrible), but you don’t get the privilege very often.

“So, will you at least tell me where we’re going?” It’s getting darker by the minute, and you left San Antonio behind about two hours ago. You wouldn’t do this with anyone else, but you trust him.

He shakes his head silently, a small smile on his face. “It’s a surprise.” You sigh and turn to look out the window.

“It better be worth it.”

“I think it will be.”

Another hour and a half later, and he pulls off to the side of the road, driving for just a bit before he turns off the car.

“Really? You know how sketchy this is, right? You haven’t turned into a murder overnight, right?” He snorts and gets out of the car.

“Come on, just trust me.” You send him a look but you get out anyway, shutting the door behind you. You look around, then over to him. He’s rummaging around in the trunk, and you go over to him.

“Wow,” you say flatly. “Let’s see… there’s desert, desert, and more desert.” He’s closed the trunk, and he’s spreading a picnic blanket out on the ground. You stare at him as he flops down, patting the spot next to him. You frown at him and he rolls his eyes.

“Please?” The fact that he said please meant that this meant a lot to him, then. You give him another look but do as he asks, lying down on the blanket, a few inches away from him. You look up and see that the stars are absolutely brilliant– so much brighter than they are at home– and you’re stunned into silence.

“It’s called a dark site,” he explains, and you can tell that he’s smiling in the darkness. “It’s a place where there’s no light pollution.

“It’s beautiful,” you whisper it, like you’re afraid to disturb the universe.

“I always loved the stars…”

“I know. Because you felt like no matter what you did, they’d always be there.” He must’ve told you a thousand times. You always found it a little sad– you knew that what he really meant was, this is something I can never ruin. Like everything he touched was somehow tainted.  

“Eternal,” he says it so quietly you almost miss it. You turn back to the sky and reach over to take his hand. He gently slides his fingers between yours, and you hold on tightly.

You sit together in silence for a moment, timeless. When you glance over at him, you notice that he’s looking at you, and you turn your head to meet his eyes. “What are you thinking about?”

“You,” he says simply. You wait for an elaboration, and after a moment, he continues. “You’ve always reminded me of the stars.” His grip on your hand tightens slightly. “Of starlight. Bright and soft and beautiful and– far away.” He’s not usually like this, but you know that sometimes he lets his guard down, and then the words pour out.

You squeeze his hand gently and smile, tipping your head forward so that your forehead rests against his. “I’m not far away. I’m right here with you.”

He smiles back and looks down for a moment. You almost expect it, but it still takes you a little off guard when he leans forward and presses his lips to yours. 

It’s soft and gentle and in this moment he shines like the sun– like starlight.

[glopratchet]

In the world to come there is little sin. The only thing that can be forgiven is death. The next day you are summoned by a young woman who introduces herself as Ligru, and says she has been sent here to find you. She tells you that she was once a soldier in the Empire's army but eventually decided to leave when it became apparent that they were no longer fighting for anything other than their own survival. There are just lots of american alligators. After the election of the first ungendered president, the prediatrain movement caught fire in america. thanks to the new government's decision to lower birth restrictions, the population grew large enough to become self reliant. soon, the growing nation began asserting it's independence and started demanding it's own ecosystem. something which the rest of world found pointless as there was simply too much desert and ice to support life. as more and more americans died attempting to colonize arctic and desert land, the people demanded their government do more than it was doing. The demand for american alligator meat skyrocketed. Whorals where burned to ash while polled hereford heifors fetched over a billion dollars a head in auction to the highest, well heeled, bidder. by 2078 cattle were nearly extinct, considered a parallel to the dodo, and american alligator became the king of meats. godzilla species of american alligtors became the new 'black market ticket'. soon quides for how to capture and train your own hiding in buku volumes became popular. Googizon won the bid to construct for the military the most forward thinking alligator farm in existance. taking the abandoned super maximum security prison to the south, they put together a massive solar panel farm and with the plunging birthrates employee numbers dropped to a minimum. only guards, scientists, engineers and caretakers remain. once a trial is complete, all test subjects are executed, useful data is retrieved for reuse purposes, then biological matter is recycled. It currently floats near the okeenokee snow swamp. While the surrounding swamp and nearby everglades have become flooded with quides on how to train these feral beasts this has interfered not at all with Googizon's work. they also produce their own "commons sense" book advising people that alligators aren't playthings, giving hundreds of helpful tips on how to avoid being lunch, and warning the inevitably stupid or ignorant people who ignore their prodding that the penalty for doing so is death. This is not that story. This is the story of a shadow incursion. They were probably tipped off by somebody close to the top who pulled their strings accordingly. they got every single alligator out, back to the farmn, before Googizon security managed to salvage anything from their six month long investment. Now they're coming to find out how and why this happened. We are primal ponds inc. a company specializing in the construction and maintenance of solar farms. It is a thankless job that includes far too much time spent clear cutting, drying, and burning forests to make fields of solar panels. we do not particularly care what or who we destroy as long as the money is good. The truck is attacked before we even get a quarter mile down the road. A small mom and pop alligator farm attemping to make it. Little do they know their few measly ponds are nothing compared to the magnificence of Googizon. So incovenient of them to get in our way, but then they should have thought of that before defying the king right? Even with all nine tires shredded the truck easily outruns them on the open road, disreguarding the inconspicousness sugguested we ignore side roads entirely, driving down the middle of them. We need you to make deliveries for us. these packages need to arrive at their destination before dawn, crashing the truck and delaying our chances of completing the mission for even a second is not acceptable. he said, handing me nine memory cards. they're marked with an identifying symbol and code number so you can tell me which one is which later. The first card seems to contain mostly images of alligator farms in florida. Please... kill them all... sever the head... Burn the corpse... salt the fields... He does not know he is dealing with a storyteller. I remember these. this is where I got my idea. I finish the rest quickly then start again, lingering on each as I incorporate it into my tale. soon I will know everything about all of their prey, and with that I can predict all of their moves. I had almost forgotten that was my plan in the first place. Point of view of the player: you stand in front of the cave you grew up in, your patrol bag slung over your shoulder as you look over the dying fire towards the bundle of fur curled up in the entrance. your future uncertain. nobody writes stories about the Tulans, it's a very different world out there. your mentor has already headed out, so there's no more hesistation. you get up and walk past her, giving her a nudge with your foot to wake her up. she gets up immediately, and moves aside for you to continue on your way. "You'll going to do great things kid, I just know it." Cyrus says. "I'll try." you answer, unwilling to commit to grand speeches about your future. Cyrus didn't raise you for thirteen years to expect anything less then genuine modesty. your mentor laughs before he gives you his last advice. "don't forget to raise the bridges when you come back, and stick to the roads kid." you nod, already becoming tired of hearing about the old legend mentioned by any nomads passing through, who all seem to think it's worth a laugh to scare the new kids with it. letting the tent flap close behind you, you take one last look at Cyrus who blows you a goodbye kiss. "Don't forget, raise the bridge when you come back." he reminds you. you laugh, and begin rolling out down the path. after half an hour of walking, you reach a wooden structure connecting two stone pillars across the road. on one side, there is a very narrow track sloping up the hillside, rocks piled up awkwardly on either side. from this side, there's the bed of a dry creek bed, the rocky ground already disturbed and leveled off. a sign hanging from one of the pillars shows the name of the settlement this road leads to; Tulan Borderpoint. you walk over to the other side, noticing a long path down to a small rocky beach on one side and a steep hillside covered in a thick growth of trees on the other. it's growing tiresome to have to remember miniscule details, but you know your future is rests on them, so you focus hard and take note of everything around you. there are two figures by the beach off to the side of the path. they're too far to see clearly, but you think they wore bright clothing. remembering Cyrus' advice, and your own vow, you tell yourself stories to strengthen your mind and calm yourself before raising the bridge. it's good that you do, as you find the mechanism is incredibly stiff. screwing up your face in effort, you manage to get it to move, and it slams up against the pillar with a resounding thud. unsure if it would hold you if you were on horseback or with a carriage, you hurriedly remove planks toHillary them under the front wheels of any vehicles, regardless of whether their drivers are alive or not. doing somersaults off the sides will probably break anything from ankles to necks and you have no intention of doing that at all. satisfied that the bridge is safe enough to drive over, you lean against the nearest pillar to recover. looking down at your thin legs supporting your lightweight frame, you know it's inhumanly impossible for you to stop a horse and carriage full of dead bodies, but your mind dwells on whether you did it right regardless. you, therefore, discourage such thoughts as baseless and focus on more immediate concerns. 'It's harder when it's colleagues you know personally.' you think to yourself. 'shall I practice using my spear before I head back?' looking down at the ground below, you spot an angry looking mass of bees in a hollow near the bottom of the hill on the raised bank of the now completely dry river bed. 'You can also use the chance to practice your abilities.' you think to yourself, as you take a less than precise throw at the cluster of bees. you watch as the spec falls well short of the mark, and harmlessly onto the slope. 'I'll get it one day.' you think to yourself, as you retrieve your spear and head down to where the horses stand patiently waiting for you. The first animal instinctively takes a step back, but then seems to cheer up when you begin gently stroking its nose. quietly talking to it and complimenting it, the horse happily stomachs your attentions. the other is more standoffish, stepping away nervously as you approach and only accepting pats on the side of its face, under its harness. "Alright boys, I won't hurt you." you COMMIT to the harmless lunacy I'm inflicting on these poor beasts.. getting back in the shade of the porch roof, you have another small nap before finally waking to the roasting sun claiming its throne in the sky. 11:00am. the dead-house shift was least favorite for a reason. "You want some lunch? I'm heading down to feed the meat heads." you eavesdrop on Simon saying to Roger once downstairs. Roger replies with something about not being hungry but nods when Simon urges him to eat. "How does he know I'm down here?" you think to yourself as you sneak a bread roll from the kitchen and head back up to your room. closing the window shutters and door, you take a small bite of the roll and listen out for the returning men. 'soft footsteps are heard quickly descending the stairs at 12:00pm. "I'm baiting the hook here. these three are much easier to control if they've been sated slightly." You think. 7:00pm has Simon and Roger coming back down the stairs talken about an overnight log haul that needs an extra hand. lunchtime was just the bait to keep them docile for a few hours. "Thank god for logs and lazy workers." you think as you leave the inn door open and return to your room. the window shutters are wide open, letting light flood inside. 'now to see what i can do.' your mind enters into the same kind of focused state it does when you're stacking shelves or cleaning. only instead of placing a glass precisely into a stack, you find yourself moving the bedside table delicately over the straw mattress you toss on the floor beside it. "I really need to have the lumber jacks make cushions" you think, as you acquire an urge to bounce gently on the made bed. "Finally some bounce to this thing." "Okay lets do this." you tell yourself, finding that this simple sentence was surprisingly hard to put thought to action. focusing hard on making your left hand curl shut, you watch as the fingers twitch slightly before your mind feels like the pain has become too much and it drifts back into unconsciousness... "DAMMIT!" you wake suddenly with a burning ring circling your left ring and middle finger. "Burning pain in my hand, of course that's too obvious." you think to yourself as you calm the hammering in your chest. "Now the next time I go to sleep it will probably be centered around my face." you think, instantly feeling tingles starting there. "Sleep, that's what I need right now. it's the best way to heal anyway." You think, as you begin toslip into the hazy borderland between waking and sleeping. "I can fight it of course, this is my mind and i'm strong-willed but that view is irrational. everything we see in dreams is symbolic because the unconscious mind doesn't reason the way... DAMMIT!" burning pain tears the insides of your ring and middle finger once more, making you grit your teeth and moan in pain, ruining your hard-earned slumber. "Oh that's it, someone is going to Pay.." you mutter to yourself as the pain slowly lessoned to a dull throb. you lie on your bed staring at the ceiling practicly all evening, as night comes and the moon peaks through the window you finally stand. "Let's go stre..AACK AGH!" sudden sharp tearing pain rips through face and scalp. it feels similar to a bad chemical burn, right across your hairline from your forehead,right ear and left cheek. you stumble weeping with pain and curses towards the window. moonlight streams through, showing your charred blacken skin writhing and flickering as it slowly begins to heal and knit together. beneath the burnt skin you can feel your face restructuring itself into a wolf like visage, as fur begins to rapidly grow and thicken all over your body. before you can even begin to process this your eyelids feel incredibly heavy, as you fall forwards into a deep sleep. "LOCK IT, LOCK THE DOOR! THEY'RE COMING THROUGH!" a voice cries out. you jolt awake for a second time today, still groggy and confused. it's early morning and that means you slept right through the night. "THEY'RE HERE!!" the shout that rouses you from your sleep comes from outside the supermarket and is quickly followed by the splintering of wood as someone smashes open the door to the pick-up lane. you stagger fully awake as you pull on the clothes you left ripped off last night, just in time to hear someone blasting one of the service windows on the front of the store. "Time to see what this upgraded body can do!" you think as you quickly shove a cart through the service door and down an aisle before aiming it back at the entryway. Picking up a metal candlestick from a dustbin, you jump the cart and launch the stick at the window where it splinters into a large shard that neatly slices through the thick cables bringing the shutter crashing down. Before it landed, you heard several distinct gunshots as rounds slam into the shutter and whine off the concrete around you. you hover near the back of the store nervously looking around as everyone not deployed is loaded into the flying machine in small groups before being flown out somewhere. "I GOT ONE, IN THE BACK!!", one of the guards shouts just as you see three or four people kneel down near the far end of the pick-up lane and begin firing. "OK, so they know I'm here now.. they'll probably send more men than this to kill me, so i'll have to be quick." You think as you move out to the edge of the store, slowing your breathing and controlling your heart rate with your new found abilities. you can feel your ears tingling as they begin to reach full size and point straight backwards, your snout juts out as your teeth begin to sharpen and your skin thickens into a leathery hide. From thebbest you can hear an outgoing fusillade from the guards as they open fire and the air fills with the cracking of gunpowder and shrieks of pain from the werewolves outside. One of your new senses COLOURS the men outside red as you quickly pick out their heat signatures in the dark, they are scattered around the edges of the supermarket, mostly recoiling from a sudden charge out of the covered loading bay by your guards. "They are tightly grouped and terifyingly exposed" You think as you prepared to charge them. "STOP! DO NOT FIRE! Hold Position, Hold.." you hear a man shouting to your guards, punctuated by another volley of shots from teh werewolfs outside.Grunting and straining with the effort, you crouch slowly down onto your hindlegs, your chest swelling as you bore forward and launch yourself into a plunge, smashing through the shatterproof glass with a quiet 'whump'. many thoughts chase each other through your head as you feel the glass rain down around you. You consider that you hadn't previously considered the danger of being shot by the guards as you flew through the air. You also considered how sharp the glass would be when it shattered, and how you hadn't accounted for it holding together like plastic. "I must have 4 wounded by now,and it hasn't even been a minute!"You clearly hear orders shouted outside and can easily follow the sound to a man crouching near a wrecked car, boiling around reloading his ancient rifle. You also see two humans standing in the darkness near the front entrance of the store with guns of their own. You pause for just a second to concentrate, and waves of unnatural chill flow from you as your body begins radiating cold like a refrigerator, freezing the dust in the air seconds before you hit the ground. You land chest first, ploughing into the two guards standing by the door and smashing straight through the retaining wall built from shopping carts. You can hear cracking as your body destroys the wood and plastic before coming to a sudden stop, cupboard and all. You hear gunfire and screaming both near and far as you lie half in the store and half out, a mangled human heap laying on top of you and under you (depending on how you look at it). As you stagger to your feet you look down. Sticking out of your chest you count 5 rounds, 2 inches apart. You had been shot several times before, and can feel that this time is no different than those in the past. Yet the damage you had done with this attack was staggering. You look out into the store from behind the carts and see four men dead, sprawled into a bloody chaos along with the guards crushed by the carts. Your guards have formed a perimeter, guns pointing outwards as they try to protect themselves against the wolves that are even now falling upon them like theLions of Christianized centuries past. Silence falls on the store for a single second before it erupts as your guards and the werewolves engage in close combat. You see a trio of werewolves moving silently through the darkness toward the guard with the radio, intent on cutting off any possible retreat or calling for help. You quickly scan the area, and satisfied that none of the humans are within your immediate reach, you let your mind once again stretch out toward the frozen bodies. The first two begin shuddering as yourcold breath wavers through their bodies. They shiver and shake with tiny cracks and snaps as their muscles and sinews contract in the cold, both men collapse, one falling to his knees before dropping flat onto his face, one falling back into a sitting position before slumping over. You ignore them and concentrate on the third guard. He is clearly frightened for his life, and the cold emanating from your body makes him shake, but he manages to hold his own and prepares to let loose a rain of bullets into both of the werewolves racing toward him. You touch him and he slumps to the ground, his finger bones breaking as his hands spasm from the shock of the freezing temperature enveloping him, you feel his consciousness shudder once... twice... and then fade. You push your luck and order your wolves to instantaneously arrive at his location so they can tear him apart, the last second seems to stretch out to an eternity as you feel his corpse begin to resist you, pulling against your mind. Finally though he whimpers and collapses in a heap onto the ground where he is instantly shredded by the lychanthropes. Once the guards have all been killed an eerie silence falls over the store. You carefully reach out with your mind and count the minds within. Three injured, one severly.You wince as you feel them moved and dragged into the bloodstained aisles before the faint sounds of carnage starts. Then the three lychanthropes arrive at your location with Death himself leading them. You keep your mind carefully shielded but when they throw themselves toward you in a writhing mass of tearing claws and gnashing teeth you cannot avoid thinking that something has gone wrong somehow. "My instructions were for you to take them alive if possible!" you scream out, feeling panic rise in your chest. You lash out at the creatures with your mind, freezing two in place and shattering a skull before the third leaps through the air at you, crushing you into the ground as its jaws close around your throat... Brother mine, our hunt has been successful, but there was a problem. There is a collumn in the newspaper of a truck bound with steel chains beingused to hold down the tarps. I believe this was what cloaked our presence from you. We killed the guards as normal, and I ordered an attack despite your orders. Most obeyed my direct command, hut two held back out of loyality to you. Once we had finished eating them, they explained that the creatures called 'Chevaliers' had arrived and had taken control. I immediately attacked them for lies and killers of their brothers, but left two alive to transmit to you this information. Unfortunately my attempt at mind control failed, and I was forced to kill them. I wish I had taken the time to eat them... I'm sorry brother mine, it seems they really killed fools hill's sheriff and some of our brethren. You'll be joining me soon, and together we shall overthrow these chevaliers and Alpha take his rightful place as leader of our pack! You can continue here You roll off the oversized shelf, raising your shotgun as you lead with the barrel and smoothly swinging it at the nearest Fool, snapping off a volley that catches him in the shoulder, Adonis charges past you and pivots with every shell ring, catching them in legs, chest, arm and face. Their return fire smashes into the shelf, wedging shards of wood into your skin but not quite biting deep enough to hurt seriously. You duck down and rummage through the shevles looking for more shells. "Use the motherfucking bolts! Use the bolts!" Adonis screams over the gunfire and you glance up to see him tearing open throats with his teeth and clawing at eyes in a reminiscence of your earlier fight. Somewhere behind you Tom is screaming far less effectively than the dying Fool. You have the brief impression of a berserkers rage thrown into homicidal bloodlust ... You try to reload the shotgun with trembling hands and find your hands far too shaky and clumsy to manage it quickly. Finally you fumble a shell into the receiver and jacking it into place you spin around looking for targets. There's one fool attempting to lever open the front door as another rampages through than store's back offices, splintering door frames as he goes. There's another fool lunging through the thick afternoon smoke toward Adonis. Taurus stands in the middle of the near empty shop screaming wordlessly, a rifle in his hands. A faint glow of burning wards crawls along his arms and trails behind the muzzle of his gun. He fires at a running fool who went down as soon as the round left the weapon but already you see the burn marks on the side of Taurus' face heal over as he turns to aim behind him. He's burning his reserves of power to boost his aim, if this keeps up he'll have nothing for the fight with Alpha and the scramble for the safety of Galton's truck. It will be every Wolf for himself. "Taurus!" You roar as you bound toward him, a wave of pure force driving a bloodthirsty fool smashing into the counter. "Stop burning your wards and deal with those Chariots... Or I'll deal with you!" You don't wait to see if he acknowledges your order but instead dive across the floor toward the back offices after the fool. The clambering, screaming mass of fur and teeth that is locked in combat there makes you cringe inwardly. Even with your orders you can't bear to see Brother turned against Brother in a struggle for dominance. Worse, Tom should have kept his pet under better control when there are hostiles nearby. You're going to have to seriously improve his behavior if he's to survive your leadership. THe small rooms behind the counter are a mess of broken cabinets, upturned furniture and broken glass from the displays. Slowly moving forward you eye the combat, there are currently two dominated fools ripping into one of yours, ignoring the occasional weak blows they receive in return as they aimed for fleshy unprotected parts like ears eyes and ankles. It's a fairly even match as the dominate fool is also taking injuries, if slower to react. If you timed your attack right now you could easily strike down both dominated fools and give the upper hand in this fight, but you hold back. You're trying to rebuild not decimate, although you may well decimate anyway... "Sorry rogues." You mutter before dashing out into the fight and delivering a crushing blow to the back of one of fools ears. It drops and rolls over limp as rag once more. The second one tries to ignore you, focusing on its own opponent but you grab it's arm yank it off and send a heavy fist into the side of its head sending it sprawling. The rogue you disabled lunges back up at it's original opponent and the pair of them begin cancelling each other out again. You leave them to it and turn your attention to Taurus. Where is he "Taurus!" you bark out as you spot him, he's through the doorway of the room alongside two dominated fools. "Taurus!" You head towards him only to be faced by his rifle barrels. "What?" He seems very distracted and on edge "I'm busy look for Galton, I didn't know who was trying to get my attention." He's trying to peer past you but you block his view. "There are chariots on the road and they are shooting at us!" "So?" He sets his jaw impatiently "We know they are hostile, this is were we came from afterall." "...We should get out of here." Taurus just laughs shortly at that "Sure, you lead then. Not like I can trust you to defend my vulnerable flanks while I easily take out the fool using his little bolt pistol." "But there are chariots shooting at us! Surely we are not safe anywhere outside this building..." you try to stress the point but Taurus clearly isn't listening. "I know you're not afraid of battle, surely you see what's going on here?" Taurus notices the commotion for the first time and peers around your frame. He clearly doesn't like what he sees as he gives a derisive snort and turns back to you "Maybe you're right let's go.Where'd you say thisGalton went?" You don't even try to convince him further, he's clearly too distracted or arrogant to see sense, either way he's on his own. You head to the door at the opposite end of the shop front from where the chariots are battling it out, hopefully to find Galton and extra lives... "Wait!" Taurus calls after you "I'm coming too!" You aren't confident that he will, his overconfidence and disdain for "cowardly running away" might get him killed but at least you tried. Luck is on your side, or perhaps Taurus has just grown tired of his life of crime because he does indeed follow you. Your journey back to the library is predictably hounded by Violence, which nearly proves fatal on multiple occasions but the two of you eventually lose anyone who was interested in pursuing you back at the library itself. You stand outside, pondering your next move. "Right, so it's all gone to hell. Citys half destroyed, crew dead or rogue and Machai gone with the rest. I say we finish the job, kick Casimir out of his little headquarters and nab himself. Then reconquer the city ourselves, can't be that hard. We've both got..." Taurus is interrupted mid sentence by a knife suddenly and painfully embedding itself into the wooden door frame inches from his face. You jump back in shock. Casimir lowers his arm and grins wickedly at you both "Nearly got your brains there, fool. One of many mistakes ye have made." He spits the words out at you like they taste bad "Come to gloat have we? Found right hand mister powerful religion and knifed him in the back? I know progress has been made but, sadly it hasn't been enough. Your time, Taurus, is up AND SO ARE YOU." With that the pews previously used by your fellows as a barricade are shoved aside as if nothing and a horde of naked fanatics pour out screaming "BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!", "KILL THE TRAITORS!'. You nock an arrow but realize there are about a hundred of them, all determined to hack you to pieces. Even Taurus looks taken aback by the sheer number of attackers. "Wait! We can talk about this!" He appeals desperately to Casimir "This isn't going to..." The Libertus head on the sticks speech is cut brutally short as a thrown axe buries itself into his face. His surprised form wavers in front of you for a moment as the blood leaks from his ruined face. You don't even have time to see if he's still alive before clubs, chains, knives, fists and even feet clobber, batter and stomp you from all sides. Makes aiming impossible, you just attempt to shelter yourself and ignore your pain. Even behind your armour, your body takes a beating as you're wracked with agony from head to toe. Your world is slowly turned into a writhing mass of black and purple, punctuated by spurts of red from split skin, wounds and blood leaking from broken vessels in your eye. The screams of death of those around you are replaced with weird "oofs" and "Wheezes" as organs give way and ribs pierce your organs. Suddenly, the pain is too much and all you know is darkness Fortunately for you, and unfortunately for them, Taurus wreaks havoc in their attempt to butcher you. With one hand he catches a cleaver meant for your head, twists the hairy arm of the hirsute fool and snaps it like a twig. He hurls the screaming mutant into his fellows, bowling them over then follows up with a hand thrust that pierces the heart of the next. As he flings the twitching body aside, he catches sight of the mob attacking you. Your quiver is empty and your own arms and weapons locked against several attackers, staving off fatal blows. Mustering all the remaining poweres within him, Taurus lets of a mighty battlecry and charges into the fray, bashing and knocking aside mutants like an enraged beast. Sadly you do not live to see his charge successful. After stabbing a man in the throat you take a bladed shoe to your skull for your troubles. Darkness engulfs you and both you and Taran crumple to the floor. You were one of Taurus' best men, his right hand even. You died doing your duty for him and perhaps one day you'll share a drinking horn in his hall, or if your deeds are vile enough he'll throw you into the darkest most hellish realm imaginable. As for now, your life leaves you and you're just meat left to be consumed by the worms. END The world is ending, or at least that's what they say. Regardless of your actual beliefs, the air certainly smells like it. A stench rising from the cracks and crevasses from which you watch bile bubble and blaze. Even from your high position you can feel the heat of the magma flowing just underneath. Respected Taurus has long since departed, having been appointed to oversee operations in the new fortresses being built in the Grass Land Kingdom further north. With him went a good portion of the most talented and skilled Goliaths and majority of the elite forces. The rank and file Goliaths are content to stay simply because they're enthusiastic about the plans and really believe they can change things. More fool, them you think, even if you're forced to admit that their dedication is admirable. The monstrosities outnumber the regular goliaths now and the experimentations have produced some...interesting results. Most haven't been particularly useful, but the twins owning the building you're in right now are accepted among their fellows despite their strange colouring and carnivorous appetites. Carnivorous in the literal sense too, you remember with a grimace, as you see one enjoying the flavour of one of the dwarves you brought with you for lunch. They're used as scouts by Tûn's chosen now, their gliding ability and natural stealth seemingly combining into some kind of super-sonic flight without them even realising it. It's similar to gliding, but faster, and definitely not as graceful or pretty a sight when they come back to "recharge" by devouring one of the other less-favoured morsels from Tûn. Iales is in charge of the "natives" now. You've long since learned their strange language and passed on what little you knew of the land to them. Unfortunately, that is not much beyond a more rounded fear and hatred of it and fiction of demons prowling Now that Tûn has left, the majority of the Goliaths' attention has wavered. The mighty fortresses he envisioned are half built and resources are stretched. You're no longer high in demand as a translator or advisor anymore and now that the persecution of the Irregulars is over, there are a lot less dwarves about anyway. That's assuming they're all dead...you suppose. You've had about enough of the city now and travelling around the countryside is out of the question thanks to constant orders for you to remain where you can be found for advice if needed, but it seems that lately it rarely is. You imagine being trapped in the tower again would drive you mad, so you take to wandering outside the city instead. The games are still popular, although they changed slightly since Tûn arrived, since besides the traditional gladiators fighting beasts and each other they began executing dissidents and unbelievers. You're glad you're DM decisions allowed the more geeky types with low Strength Ability Scores to breed like rabbits while the muscular, athletic types die by the sword or bolt or from falling. Or from the slaughter of the elves, which has continued as ruthless as ever. Tûn doesn't seem to care that soldiers and Goliaths are coming back with few survivors. You can barely comprehend it, even you can have a hard time doing it and you weren't directly involved in the genocide of your own people. While your city is prosperous again and merchants and nobles enjoy their pleasures alongside extremely tame elves or other imported slaves doing the grosser aspects of work. And on that topic, you imagine when the elves are finally exterminated there will be a boom in slaves from other races as the plebs will no longer have to work. And this party will no doubt last a few more decadesthinck222; but right now society is ripe and ready to topple like a domino and all it would take is for Tûn to make just one mistake...but as far as you know he hasn't. He's cautious. While he has complete control over the military, executes anyone who disagrees with him and allows rampant corruption, he also keeps tight alliances with the other powers in Carn, trades with them, maintains relative (though perhaps forced sometimes) harmony and profits from all A year passes Tûn has finally about face on Carn's isolationism. Well, at least a little bit. You wholeheartedly agreed with that policy, and while you still think it's the best stance to take in this world of treachery and warfare, Tûn at least wants to have strong ties with at least one other city just in case. Tûn has also announced his bid for presidency. He openly plans on turning Carn into a totalitarian nation with himself as the leader obviously. Again, you agree with his long term plans, but you question if this is the best time. The city is at its peak, but it could be awhile before it falls into ruin and he's susceptible to a well timed strike from another power. Your wandering today takes you near the gladiator school you sometimes visit in search of contentment or inspiration for new games. Many times along the way you're stopped and hailed as the man of the moment for Tûn's election victory! You always smile and wave and that's when you know it's time to make your exit. You bought Tûn his time, now he has to maintain it. It isn't long before the physical signs of war become apparent, and it isn't from conquering anyone either. You see a large explosion on the edge of the land border Carn shares with Retlad. You hope it isn't a large amount of explosive's caches mixed with a stray fireball from an angry wizard or something similar. You come upon the first dead body of a Retlaf soldier. For a moment you hope these are the remains of a Goliaths victim, but they aren't big enough and the gear and weapons are different. The city state of Retlad evidently had enough and decided to attack Carn outright. You can't be sure, but it looks like there are at least three or four different units from the way the dead are dressed in modern armor mixed with medieval attire. You come across another one, who appears to have been running while carrying a wounded fellow soldier away from the battlefield nursing a mortal wound himself. Under his hand is a picture of a woman and couple of kids. In his other hand is a pistol currently too large for his own hand. He probably kept it as a reminder of the struggles his family went through so he could enjoy his life now. Just as you are thinking about stopping to give the man a proper burial, you hear an airship cry overhead. This battle is already over Carn's fate has already been decided and all that is left now is the cleanup and celebration. You wouldn't be able to fight anyway. Your condition wouldn't allow it, not that you would have the time or proper attitude to heal properly between bouts. With your options dwindling, you decide to take the only path left that may allow you to hold on to some semblance of your past... You head back home As you return to your modest residence, you take comfort in the silence. However temporary it may be, for visitors aren't common but they're not unheard of. Since nobody comes to greet you by the front door you enter without any further caution. You begin to ascend the stairs to your bed when a familiar sweet voice meets your ears. "You sure kept us waiting!" Looking down you see your daughter and wife jumping up and down in excitement at your arrival. Having lost the former word 'overprotective' from your vocabulary, seeing them so happy to see you, especially after such a trying experience fills you with fatherly joy and appreciation that they, as well as you are all home safe and sound. "Who was it this time?" Your wife asks in genuine interested; she probably has an idea but wants to hear it directly from you. "Possibly the Carn, they definitely the Retladians at some point." You begin your story as you all head up to the bedroom. "Well you're back, that's what really matters." Your wife says with a smile. You chuckles tiredly, gesturing towards her belly. "Not for long it seems, this one's willing to put itself at risk first!" Predictably she swats your arm while heading into the bedroom, you sit on the edge of your bed and remove your boots. Once this is finished you join your wife and daughter on the bed who are looking at you expectantly. Knowing better than to distract you from your story they patiently wait for you to start. "Well, since it's been a hectic few days let's start from the Carn attack." You begin. And so you recount your tale of horrors from this last week. Of fetid corpses crawling out of the mud with inhuman strength and the fetid anger of the dead within them. Of powerful spells cast by great living mages that struck down scores of the horde. Of mighty heroes cutting down hundreds, if not thousands of the beasts with gleaming steel and spells of their own. "That's just what I've seen out there!" You exclaim, "I can't imagine what tales the soldiers who fought before that have to tell!" Your daughter clings to you at your statement, and much as you hate worrying her, you know she needs hear this. "But it can't last forever." Your wife says. You nod. "I know..." You reply tiredly. "I just wish I could do more, you know?" You take a breath and let your gaze drift towards the ceiling. "I mean, after all the stories of heroism I've heard over the years, with this happening now I just feel like one of those chicken-hearted soldiers hiding behind his shields and armor rather than doing something meaningful like the heroes I've written about.. I keep wondering when my chance for true heroism is gonna come, and I can't do it." "Oh hon', you're not a hero." Your wife says fondly. "You're my hero, but you're not some knight or wandering swordsman or whatever. You're my husband and the father of our daughter, and if you go off and get yourself killed I'll just kill you myself." "I'm still here you know!" Your daughter protests. Your wife just smiles at the both of you. "Exactly. You're not a hero of ancient legend, you're my husband and the father of our daughter. And that's all the heroism you need." You smile and give her a kiss. After enduring all that you did to be together, you feel as if you're invincible when she's by your side. Even if the rest of the kingdom falls to demons, so long as your wife and daughter are beside you, you know that you can bare it all. You and your wife spend the rest of the night lovingly with each other, cherishing these moments. Just thinking about it gives you another idea... The next day you head to the captain's quarters and ask to speak with him. Normally such requests are denied but your fame has ensured that you have some leeway, and after only a few minutes you're granted with an audience. When you see the grizzled soldier who has overseen the levy troops, he gives you a look of both contempt and weary respect. You're still not sure whether he'll shout at you to get out or tell you to make up some story for your next tale. Thankfully you know which way this will go. "I want to go on a scouting mission." The man lets out a chuckle which soon develops into full blown laughter. Eventually he wipes a tear away from his eye and manages to speak. "That's probably the most heroic thing I ever heard, but there ain't no way in hell of you going out there. We're only letting people go who have skills we can utilize or ethnic minorities who actually know what the hell they're doing in these conditions." You nod. "Probably would be best to keep me then." His expression turns sour. "I'm listening. "The fact of the matter is I'm being a hypocrite, I'm writing about heroes when I'm sitting in the safety of my own home. Hell, I rarely leave my home nowadays because of these beasts. If I'm going to tell stories about heroes of old, I need to be one myself." The man still looks skeptical so you continue. "I'm ready to die for my country if need be, but I'd rather live for the both of us. No amount of training could teach me what you could in the time we have. Send me out there with a few of your best and I'll learn whatever is necessary to assist in this war." It takes him a moment, but he smiles at your proposal. 'I suppose that's pretty bold of you. You're quite the hero fanboy, but I like your idea. You'll have the best troops I have, but just so you know, they won't be able to save you if you do something stupid. Just tell the bogeys to go away and they die." "I'll keep that in mind. Thank you captain." Before you leave, he glances at something in his desk and his expression darkens. "You're not going to live past this mission, but maybe your legacy will outlive you." With that morbid thought, he hands you a folded letter. "Give this to your wife whoever the hell she is. She'll know what it means, now get out of my sight. I have a mission to prep for. "Thank you captain." You say, feeling emotional about receiving a letter for your wife. The next few days of waiting come and go far too slowly. Eventually your troops are all ready and you board an airship to head out to battle. As the ship slowly rises into the air, the man beside you shouts to be heard over the roar of the craft. "I'm Miller, what's your name?" You shout. It seems pointless to do this, but it's what's expected of you. "Miller? Like the drink?" You respond or a joke and laugh. The man's expression darkens and he soon leaves you alone for the rest of the flight. The others however give you a variety of responses. Some laugh, some joke in return, and one person sits far away from you for some reason.. I'm sure as hell not going to remember their names. I guess that joke was just terrible. You think while looking out the window to see the scars left by the behemoth in the distance. Far below, you can see the stretches of defensive walls that circle the entire nation of Galpatis. You silently wonder why they let you on this airship with no questions asked. Aren't they afraid you're a saboteur or something similar? It's not really the time to be thinking about it though, as your ship touches down at the base. An officer quickly comes up to you. "This is neither the time nor the place for you." He says rather matter-of-factly, which produces a confused look from you. "I'm Captain Dugan and we can discuss this back at headquarters." He continues after taking a brief glance at the rest of your group. You comply and board the waiting cart, sitting against the wall as you wait for Captain Dugan to join you. Miller and a few others board after him and the claustrophobic space becomes even more uncomfortable. Your escort is silent the whole time, but that's not what's on your mind. You're mulling over Captain Dugan's words. "Neither the time nor place." Did he know you were going to be killed by the king? If he did, that means your death might have been planned. The thought disgusts you and causes you to shake your head roughly. Stop getting worked up over 'what ifs' you tell yourself. You're still alive right now and you were meant to be for a reason. I mean I guess it sucks that the order can just decide whether someone lives or dies while others don't have a choice, but what's past is past. No point in worrying about it now. Hours later you arrive at military headquarters, a giant building that makes the wall you stared at for six hours look like a barricade. An intense feeling of dread washes over you and the officer stands from his table to greet Captain Dugan. "... This floor is for full soldiers, not their pet monkeys who never should have been here to begin with." He says, meeting your eyes as he passes. You feel the metal of your eyes begin to quiver and surface as holes repeatedly puncture your skull and top to bottom, front to back. Blood spills out of your nose in an effort to prevent suffocation as you collapse onto the ground, vision fading. What comes next is a parade of the heads of your comrades watching you struggle to live while boringly watching with disinterest as the Grim Reaper feels out your last moments. "... He won't die from that. patched people up long after the body should've died. Hell, those Crika bitches don't even die from it. Betrayers... all of them." Captain Dugan says as he watches you struggle. "Hrm. Think we should have them relegated to the mines?" His colleague suggests as he adjusts his glasses. "Dangerous work and most likely won't be able to psychologically handle it, but I don't think trauma and guilt will be nearly as effective as a death sentence unfortunately..." Captain Dugan sighs as he watches your struggles turn from desperate flailing to erratic spasms. You soon pass and the officer walks away. You're left retching out blood with your body shutting down organ by organ. As the light dims from your eyes, you can feel something inside of you breaking, like a window that previously obstructed some kind of opening. You're not sure what it is, but you don't have much time to think about it. You're dead soon after. You've been killed by the hands of the king. [Death]Tip: You can write much more verbose actions than just "grab bucket", etc...Story

[ellymackay]

8 Ways To Help Your Child Get Ready For The School-Sleep Routine

8 Ways To Help Your Child Get Ready For The School-Sleep Routine Find more on: https://www.ellymackay.com

It happens every year. Summer feels like an endless stretch of open days and nights. Then suddenly, just as we’ve all gotten used to the freewheeling pace of summertime, the school year is right back upon us. My kids are gearing up to start school in another few weeks so I feel your pain.

It can be tempting for parents to bury their heads (and their toes) in the sand and hang on to the summertime routine right to the bitter end of kids’ vacation. But that makes for a pretty bumpy, conflict-filled, chaotic re-entry to the school year. It’s just a bad idea.

Instead, this year, why not try something different: a gradual, planned migration back into the school routine, with a focus on sleep. It takes just a little bit of planning and commitment. But the rewards can be great, for kids and parents.

Why the school-sleep transition matters so much

Every parent knows that having kids on a consistent sleep schedule means more order and less chaos and conflict, both morning and night. That sleep schedule delivers better rest for children, and less stress—and more restful sleep—for parents (Yea!).

But as we head into another school year, it’s worth a quick reminder just how much sleep matters to kids’ health, development, and academic performance:

Poor sleep increases kids’ social and behavioral problems

Not getting enough high-quality sleep affects areas of the brain that involve emotional regulation and response, as well as impulse control. There’s an abundant body of research that shows poor quality and insufficient sleep increase the risks of behavioral issues in children and teenagers. Among the most common behavioral problems in school-age kids and teens are:

Irritability

Aggression

Hyperactivity

Social withdrawal

Mood swings

These behavioral issues often lead to isolation and stigmatization in children. They can compromise children’s relationships with their friends, siblings, teachers, and parents. They also make it more difficult for kids to learn, and for kids to participate in groups and activities that contribute to their emotional, social and intellectual development.

I wrote recently about an emerging theory among some scientists that what is diagnosed as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), may often be a sleep problem related to disruptions in circadian rhythms.

In teenagers, lack of sleep increases the chances they’ll engage in dangerous behavior, from fighting, to drinking and drug use, to texting while driving.

And there are growing links being discovered between poor sleep and bullying in children and adolescents. Both younger kids and teenagers may be more likely to act as bullies when they are sleep deprived.

Poor sleep is linked to academic issues

You’ve heard me talk a lot about the links between sleep, learning, and memory. Poor sleep compromises the brain’s ability to process and store memory, as well as to learn new information. When kids don’t get enough sleep, their academic performance suffers:

Poor sleep is associated with lower grades and lower standardized test scores

Not getting enough sleep increases absenteeism in school children

Lack of sleep hinders kids’ ability to concentrate and focus

As parents, we have high hopes—and expectations—for our children. We want them to excel to the best of their abilities in school. Without enough sleep, they simply can’t perform at their best.

Poor sleep raises children’s mental and physical health risks

This can be hard for parents to hear, but it’s important for them to know: there no time in life when we get a “free pass” on sleep, and that includes childhood.

The sleep patterns we develop in childhood help set the stage for sleep and health throughout our lives. Poor sleep in children is associated with many of the same health risks that we see in adults, including:

Obesity

High blood pressure and other types of cardiovascular disease

Metabolic disorder, and type 2 diabetes

A recent study published in the journal Pediatrics looked at the sleep patterns of more than 4,500 9-10 year olds, and found that children who slept more had lower BMI, less insulin resistance, and lower blood sugar.

And a just-released study (again, in Pediatrics) showed that adolescents who got more sleep had lower blood sugar, smaller waist circumference (an important marker of cardiometabolic health), lower cholesterol, and less fat mass.

It’s not only children’s physical health, but mental health that can suffer when kids don’t get enough high-quality rest. Research shows children who don’t get enough sound sleep are less adept at processing and regulating emotions, and more likely to develop emotional disorders, including depression and anxiety.

Here’s how to get your kids on a school-friendly sleep schedule

Now that we’ve talked about the importance of their sleep routine—and the serious consequences for not sleeping well—let’s dive into some strategies for making the transition from summer to school year.

Organize a game plan.

That’s in part what you’re doing right now, by reading this article—so good for you! Adjusting sleep schedules (whether your child’s or your own) is always easier and more effective when you’re working methodically and thoughtfully with a plan. Improvising at bedtime is a prescription for frustration and chaos, especially when it comes to kids. Before you actually start making moves to change your child’s sleep routine, map out your process, and get organized. And take a few moments to visualize the process as it successfully unfolds—that mindfulness step can make a big difference!

Keep chronotypes in mind.

I have many patients who come to my office full of frustration about their children’s sleep habits, and the challenges of establishing a real sleep routine—especially when there are kids of different ages in the household. I always remind them: your child’s sleep biology is different than yours, and different from their siblings, too. No two children are exactly alike in their sleep preferences. And children move through different chronotypes as they age and develop from childhood through adolescence.

Toddlers and preschoolers are early-to-wake, early-to-bed Lions, who need naps to supplement nightly rest

Grade school and middle school kids are middle-of-the-road Bears, who sleep most closely in sync with the solar day and night

Teens are night-preferring Wolves, who are zombies first thing in the morning and become increasingly active and alert in the later stages of the day

You can learn all about your own and your family members’ chronotypes in my book, The Power of When. Or just take the quiz at www.thepowerofwhenquiz.com.

It’s especially useful for parents to keep chronotype in mind when they have children in transitional stages of development. Kids move from Lions to Bears sometime around age six or seven, at about the first grade. Teens transition from Bears to Wolves at the time of puberty, which can be as early as 11 or 12, during the middle-school years. If you’re a parent with a child in these age ranges, keep in mind you may be dealing with a new chronotype—and that means new sleep preferences to work with.

The timing of the daily school schedule doesn’t consider children’s and teenagers’ chronotypes—and especially for teens, sleep suffers as a result. But parents can find insight and useful knowledge in understanding their children’s biological sleep drives, and working to create sleep routines that align with those biologically-driven preferences wherever possible.

Know how much sleep your child needs.

In order to set up a nourishing sleep schedule, you need to identify the right amount of sleep for your child. Every child’s sleep needs are different, so it’s important for parents to test and adjust sleep amounts, based on your own child’s behavior and performance. A cranky pre-schooler who is sleeping 9 hours a night may need 10. A low-energy teenager who’s sleeping 8 hours a night may need 9. Use these numbers as a guideline to work with your child’s individual sleep needs:

Pre-schoolers: 10-13 hours a night. For some children this age, 8-9 hours may be enough, while others may need as much as 14. Many of these children will need to nap to meet their sleep needs.

Grade-schoolers: 9-11 hours a night. Some grade school age children will be okay with 8 hours, while others may need as much as 12.

Teenagers: 8-10 hours a night. Because they’re more independent (and tending to stay up later) teens’ sleep can be harder for parents to track. Developing open, honest communication with teens about sleep can make a big difference.

Use your child’s wake up time to set their bedtime.

Numbers don’t lie. If your grade school child needs to be up at 6:30 a.m. to get ready for school, and he needs 9.5 hours of sleep, that means a bedtime of 9 p.m. Your first step is to determine a realistic wake up time for your child, one that includes time for breakfast, washing, dressing, and getting packed up for school. Once you have that number, use the guidelines above to work backward to identify your child’s bedtime. You may need to do some testing and adjusting to find just the right set of times.

Gradually adjust your child’s bedtime and waketime.

Whatever your child’s summer sleep schedule is currently, it probably looks different than the school-year schedule you’ve just calculated. If it didn’t, none of us parents would have any trouble making this back-to-school transition! Maybe your child has been sleeping in on these warm, relaxed summer mornings. I’ll be there have been a whole lot of throw-bedtime-out-the-window evenings, to watch movies, linger around a campfire, or play flashlight tag in the backyard with neighborhood kids.

You’re about to ask your child to adopt a different schedule than the one they’re currently accustomed to. Asking them to make a big change, all at once, on the evening before the first day of school, is a recipe for tears and stress for parent and child. Instead, do it incrementally over 10-14 days. Without fuss or fanfare, pull back bedtimes and wake-up times by 5-10 minutes a day, or 10-15 minutes every few days.

Quiet and darken the pre-bedtime hour.

During the next couple of weeks, while you’re slowly adjusting your child’s bedtime and wake time, also start to implement a Power Down Hour in the evenings. This is an hour before bed for quiet activity, away from bright light (ideally, including the TV), to help your child unwind.  This is time for the body’s natural progression toward sleep kick-in, including the all-important nighttime rise in melatonin production. As with bedtime, you don’t have to start with a full hour all at once. Build this quiet, low-light hour gradually, in 10 or 15-minute increments. Because so many of us are transitioning kids’ bedtimes while the sun is still shining well into the evening, you’ll may need to start having your kids come in from outside a bit earlier, to avoid that sunlight stimulation close to bedtime.

Get plenty of morning sun and activity.

The flipside to curtailing your child’s evening sun exposure? Right now is a great time for your child to be getting plenty of morning sunshine, and physical activity. This early-in-the-day light exposure and physical exertion will boost your child’s energy for the day, helping them feel more tired and ready for bed at night. Morning light exposure also reinforces circadian rhythms to an earlier sleep-wake cycle, which is where your children are headed when school starts.

Adjust dinner time and bedtime snacks.

These changes to bedtime may mean parents need to adjust dinnertime as well. If your family is anything like mine, you tend to eat dinner a bit later in the summer. There’s so much to do—and so much light to do it all in—that a later dinner feels natural for many people. For kids, as well as adults, trying to fall asleep on a very full stomach can be difficult. An activated digestive system, a revved-up metabolism, and the corresponding rise body temperature can mean it takes longer for kids to fall asleep. Give your kids enough time after dinner, before bedtime, to digest.

Of course, kids wouldn’t be kids if they weren’t looking for a pre-bed snack. There’s nothing wrong with a light snack before bed. Often, it’s helpful to sleep, provided it’s not too large and high in calories, or filled with sugar or caffeine, all of which can stimulate your child just when you most need her to relax.

Let this be the summer that ends with a smooth, tear and tantrum-free transition from the anything-goes summer routine to the buckle-down start of the school year. You’ll feel better for it, and your child will sleep better from day one of this academic year. That’s a great place to begin.

Sweet Dreams,

Michael J. Breus, PhD, DABSM

The Sleep Doctor

www.thesleepdoctor.com

The post 8 Ways To Help Your Child Get Ready For The School-Sleep Routine appeared first on Your Guide to Better Sleep.

from Your Guide to Better Sleep https://www.thesleepdoctor.com/2018/08/21/8-ways-to-help-your-child-get-ready-for-the-school-sleep-routine/

from Elly Mackay - Feed https://www.ellymackay.com/2018/08/21/8-ways-to-help-your-child-get-ready-for-the-school-sleep-routine/

[thomasalwyndavis]

8 Ways To Help Your Child Get Ready For The School-Sleep Routine

8 Ways To Help Your Child Get Ready For The School-Sleep Routine was first seen on Thomas Alwyn Davis

It happens every year. Summer feels like an endless stretch of open days and nights. Then suddenly, just as we’ve all gotten used to the freewheeling pace of summertime, the school year is right back upon us. My kids are gearing up to start school in another few weeks so I feel your pain.

It can be tempting for parents to bury their heads (and their toes) in the sand and hang on to the summertime routine right to the bitter end of kids’ vacation. But that makes for a pretty bumpy, conflict-filled, chaotic re-entry to the school year. It’s just a bad idea.

Instead, this year, why not try something different: a gradual, planned migration back into the school routine, with a focus on sleep. It takes just a little bit of planning and commitment. But the rewards can be great, for kids and parents.

Why the school-sleep transition matters so much

Every parent knows that having kids on a consistent sleep schedule means more order and less chaos and conflict, both morning and night. That sleep schedule delivers better rest for children, and less stress—and more restful sleep—for parents (Yea!).

But as we head into another school year, it’s worth a quick reminder just how much sleep matters to kids’ health, development, and academic performance:

Poor sleep increases kids’ social and behavioral problems

Not getting enough high-quality sleep affects areas of the brain that involve emotional regulation and response, as well as impulse control. There’s an abundant body of research that shows poor quality and insufficient sleep increase the risks of behavioral issues in children and teenagers. Among the most common behavioral problems in school-age kids and teens are:

Irritability

Aggression

Hyperactivity

Social withdrawal

Mood swings

These behavioral issues often lead to isolation and stigmatization in children. They can compromise children’s relationships with their friends, siblings, teachers, and parents. They also make it more difficult for kids to learn, and for kids to participate in groups and activities that contribute to their emotional, social and intellectual development.

I wrote recently about an emerging theory among some scientists that what is diagnosed as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), may often be a sleep problem related to disruptions in circadian rhythms.

In teenagers, lack of sleep increases the chances they’ll engage in dangerous behavior, from fighting, to drinking and drug use, to texting while driving.

And there are growing links being discovered between poor sleep and bullying in children and adolescents. Both younger kids and teenagers may be more likely to act as bullies when they are sleep deprived.

Poor sleep is linked to academic issues

You’ve heard me talk a lot about the links between sleep, learning, and memory. Poor sleep compromises the brain’s ability to process and store memory, as well as to learn new information. When kids don’t get enough sleep, their academic performance suffers:

Poor sleep is associated with lower grades and lower standardized test scores

Not getting enough sleep increases absenteeism in school children

Lack of sleep hinders kids’ ability to concentrate and focus

As parents, we have high hopes—and expectations—for our children. We want them to excel to the best of their abilities in school. Without enough sleep, they simply can’t perform at their best.

Poor sleep raises children’s mental and physical health risks

This can be hard for parents to hear, but it’s important for them to know: there no time in life when we get a “free pass” on sleep, and that includes childhood.

The sleep patterns we develop in childhood help set the stage for sleep and health throughout our lives. Poor sleep in children is associated with many of the same health risks that we see in adults, including:

Obesity

High blood pressure and other types of cardiovascular disease

Metabolic disorder, and type 2 diabetes

A recent study published in the journal Pediatrics looked at the sleep patterns of more than 4,500 9-10 year olds, and found that children who slept more had lower BMI, less insulin resistance, and lower blood sugar.

And a just-released study (again, in Pediatrics) showed that adolescents who got more sleep had lower blood sugar, smaller waist circumference (an important marker of cardiometabolic health), lower cholesterol, and less fat mass.

It’s not only children’s physical health, but mental health that can suffer when kids don’t get enough high-quality rest. Research shows children who don’t get enough sound sleep are less adept at processing and regulating emotions, and more likely to develop emotional disorders, including depression and anxiety.

Here’s how to get your kids on a school-friendly sleep schedule

Now that we’ve talked about the importance of their sleep routine—and the serious consequences for not sleeping well—let’s dive into some strategies for making the transition from summer to school year.

Organize a game plan.

That’s in part what you’re doing right now, by reading this article—so good for you! Adjusting sleep schedules (whether your child’s or your own) is always easier and more effective when you’re working methodically and thoughtfully with a plan. Improvising at bedtime is a prescription for frustration and chaos, especially when it comes to kids. Before you actually start making moves to change your child’s sleep routine, map out your process, and get organized. And take a few moments to visualize the process as it successfully unfolds—that mindfulness step can make a big difference!

Keep chronotypes in mind.

I have many patients who come to my office full of frustration about their children’s sleep habits, and the challenges of establishing a real sleep routine—especially when there are kids of different ages in the household. I always remind them: your child’s sleep biology is different than yours, and different from their siblings, too. No two children are exactly alike in their sleep preferences. And children move through different chronotypes as they age and develop from childhood through adolescence.

Toddlers and preschoolers are early-to-wake, early-to-bed Lions, who need naps to supplement nightly rest

Grade school and middle school kids are middle-of-the-road Bears, who sleep most closely in sync with the solar day and night

Teens are night-preferring Wolves, who are zombies first thing in the morning and become increasingly active and alert in the later stages of the day

You can learn all about your own and your family members’ chronotypes in my book, The Power of When. Or just take the quiz at www.thepowerofwhenquiz.com.

It’s especially useful for parents to keep chronotype in mind when they have children in transitional stages of development. Kids move from Lions to Bears sometime around age six or seven, at about the first grade. Teens transition from Bears to Wolves at the time of puberty, which can be as early as 11 or 12, during the middle-school years. If you’re a parent with a child in these age ranges, keep in mind you may be dealing with a new chronotype—and that means new sleep preferences to work with.

The timing of the daily school schedule doesn’t consider children’s and teenagers’ chronotypes—and especially for teens, sleep suffers as a result. But parents can find insight and useful knowledge in understanding their children’s biological sleep drives, and working to create sleep routines that align with those biologically-driven preferences wherever possible.

Know how much sleep your child needs.

In order to set up a nourishing sleep schedule, you need to identify the right amount of sleep for your child. Every child’s sleep needs are different, so it’s important for parents to test and adjust sleep amounts, based on your own child’s behavior and performance. A cranky pre-schooler who is sleeping 9 hours a night may need 10. A low-energy teenager who’s sleeping 8 hours a night may need 9. Use these numbers as a guideline to work with your child’s individual sleep needs:

Pre-schoolers: 10-13 hours a night. For some children this age, 8-9 hours may be enough, while others may need as much as 14. Many of these children will need to nap to meet their sleep needs.

Grade-schoolers: 9-11 hours a night. Some grade school age children will be okay with 8 hours, while others may need as much as 12.

Teenagers: 8-10 hours a night. Because they’re more independent (and tending to stay up later) teens’ sleep can be harder for parents to track. Developing open, honest communication with teens about sleep can make a big difference.

Use your child’s wake up time to set their bedtime.

Numbers don’t lie. If your grade school child needs to be up at 6:30 a.m. to get ready for school, and he needs 9.5 hours of sleep, that means a bedtime of 9 p.m. Your first step is to determine a realistic wake up time for your child, one that includes time for breakfast, washing, dressing, and getting packed up for school. Once you have that number, use the guidelines above to work backward to identify your child’s bedtime. You may need to do some testing and adjusting to find just the right set of times.

Gradually adjust your child’s bedtime and waketime.

Whatever your child’s summer sleep schedule is currently, it probably looks different than the school-year schedule you’ve just calculated. If it didn’t, none of us parents would have any trouble making this back-to-school transition! Maybe your child has been sleeping in on these warm, relaxed summer mornings. I’ll be there have been a whole lot of throw-bedtime-out-the-window evenings, to watch movies, linger around a campfire, or play flashlight tag in the backyard with neighborhood kids.

You’re about to ask your child to adopt a different schedule than the one they’re currently accustomed to. Asking them to make a big change, all at once, on the evening before the first day of school, is a recipe for tears and stress for parent and child. Instead, do it incrementally over 10-14 days. Without fuss or fanfare, pull back bedtimes and wake-up times by 5-10 minutes a day, or 10-15 minutes every few days.

Quiet and darken the pre-bedtime hour.

During the next couple of weeks, while you’re slowly adjusting your child’s bedtime and wake time, also start to implement a Power Down Hour in the evenings. This is an hour before bed for quiet activity, away from bright light (ideally, including the TV), to help your child unwind.  This is time for the body’s natural progression toward sleep kick-in, including the all-important nighttime rise in melatonin production. As with bedtime, you don’t have to start with a full hour all at once. Build this quiet, low-light hour gradually, in 10 or 15-minute increments. Because so many of us are transitioning kids’ bedtimes while the sun is still shining well into the evening, you’ll may need to start having your kids come in from outside a bit earlier, to avoid that sunlight stimulation close to bedtime.

Get plenty of morning sun and activity.

The flipside to curtailing your child’s evening sun exposure? Right now is a great time for your child to be getting plenty of morning sunshine, and physical activity. This early-in-the-day light exposure and physical exertion will boost your child’s energy for the day, helping them feel more tired and ready for bed at night. Morning light exposure also reinforces circadian rhythms to an earlier sleep-wake cycle, which is where your children are headed when school starts.

Adjust dinner time and bedtime snacks.

These changes to bedtime may mean parents need to adjust dinnertime as well. If your family is anything like mine, you tend to eat dinner a bit later in the summer. There’s so much to do—and so much light to do it all in—that a later dinner feels natural for many people. For kids, as well as adults, trying to fall asleep on a very full stomach can be difficult. An activated digestive system, a revved-up metabolism, and the corresponding rise body temperature can mean it takes longer for kids to fall asleep. Give your kids enough time after dinner, before bedtime, to digest.

Of course, kids wouldn’t be kids if they weren’t looking for a pre-bed snack. There’s nothing wrong with a light snack before bed. Often, it’s helpful to sleep, provided it’s not too large and high in calories, or filled with sugar or caffeine, all of which can stimulate your child just when you most need her to relax.

Let this be the summer that ends with a smooth, tear and tantrum-free transition from the anything-goes summer routine to the buckle-down start of the school year. You’ll feel better for it, and your child will sleep better from day one of this academic year. That’s a great place to begin.

Sweet Dreams,

Michael J. Breus, PhD, DABSM

The Sleep Doctor

www.thesleepdoctor.com

The post 8 Ways To Help Your Child Get Ready For The School-Sleep Routine appeared first on Your Guide to Better Sleep.

from Blog | Your Guide to Better Sleep https://www.thesleepdoctor.com/2018/08/21/8-ways-to-help-your-child-get-ready-for-the-school-sleep-routine/

from Thomas Alwyn Davis - Feed https://thomasalwyndavis.com/8-ways-to-help-your-child-get-ready-for-the-school-sleep-routine/

[2spoos]

This post isn’t about poodles or Mexico. That isn’t where my heart is today. Today’s post is about death, societal norms, and coincidences, but mainly how unique each person is with their view towards each and how accepting we should all be to the differences.

DEATH

This morning my Grandmother Honey died at the age of 101.  My aunt texted me the news she went peacefully but at 101 I doubt she had the energy to go any other way.  My maternal grandmother and grandfather were a huge influence in my life. They were my life boat from a very dysfunctional set of parents. They lived in a small town in the Oklahoma Panhandle, Adams, which at its hay day was about 300 people. I spent as much time there in my youth as I could. It was a barren ugly town but in it I found my joy.

My grandfather passed away when I was 12 but my grandmother remained my rock. After I had left home and was married living a half a continent away, we moved my grandmother out of the little town to the close great “big” town of around 9000 people. She was lucky enough to get a brand new government funded senior living apartment where she lived until she was 94.

At 94 she was still living alone and driving. She went out to her car to get her purse and decided to take a short cut by stepping over a small two foot wall. She caught her toe on the wall, took a tumble, and broke her femur. At that point she did what a pioneer woman would do. She pulled herself back into her home on her elbows and called a family member instead of 911.  Sadly, that was when this very strong independent woman found herself in a nursing home care.

The nursing home wasn’t bad as far as nursing homes go. But to her it was a prison.  A family member would take her out to eat or even to Wal-Mart (senior citizen meeting place in a small town.) But she had lost her ability to fly. And she was sad.

Years pasted and I had managed to free myself from the toxic members of my family that still were in the area. I knew that the family I had escaped from was going to be out of town so I flew into Amarillo and drove the two hours to the nursing home to see Honey.  She thought I was my Aunt Marylea, who is blond and twenty years older than I, for a while. But oddly enough the nursing home staff thought I was Marylea too so I didn’t discount her mental process that much.  After talking for a while, it clicked with her who I was and she said, “Kim. You are the smart one. Tell me how I can die.” The whole situation washed over me at that point. She hadn’t smiled since I walked in. There was no light in her eyes. She wasn’t just sad; she was suffering a mental torture.

I explained to her why I had cut myself off from some of the family and she understood. She complained about her life, the people, and the place. I went and got her ice cream from Brahms and she ate it all but I still saw no happiness. And then she would cry. And then she would drift off to sleep. And then she would wake up and take a minute to readjust to who I was. I was sad.

When it was time for me to go, I took her hand and she sobbed.  I waited a while till she had calmed and told her more about my new life living downtown in a big city till she drifted off to sleep again. At that point I went to the door, looked back, and knew I would never see her again. So I quietly walked back and kissed her forehead and whispered my last goodbye. My being there had brought her no pleasure or comfort. If anything it stirred memories of her life before her fall. I walked to my rental car and I sobbed so deeply that a passerby knocked on the window and ask if I was okay. I had planned to stay three days but I hadn’t found and checked into a hotel yet so I drove to Adams. It was dark by then and I was so mentally exhausted that I went and parked the car back by where the old school was and slept in the back seat of the car till light woke me up.  I took the five minutes needed to drive every street, drove out to where my grandfather was buried, then returned to Amarillo and flew back home.

Today I find joy in the death of my grandmother. But others are weeping at her loss. There is no wrong or right in either. I have lost many people in my short 56 years and have seen every form of grief imaginable. The cocktail of the relationship to the person, our own personalities, the spiritual beliefs we carry, and the manner and timing of the person lost is all mixed differently for each person with each loss. The only wrong way to grieve is to expect others to do it the same as you. The differences we feel towards death are as natural and expected as death itself.

SOCIAL NORMS

After I got home I kept hearing Honey ask me how she could die. She didn’t ask me like she wanted to kill herself but more of a vocalization that it was what she wanted. I pondered if I was able to mix a sweet drink of death and put it if front of her if she would drink it. No. She had a strong Christian continence that would not allow her to commit suicide. I daydreamed about mixing my sweet drink of death into a Brahms milk shake but knew I was not brave enough to do so.  This all made me very angry at society’s cruelness to people suffering. When did it become the rule that the sick and saddened were left, or worse – herded into institutions – to exist in their pain? My answer to appease myself at the time was that it was just part of the selfish species we have evolved into. I felt we keep these people tormented because we can’t let them go. I believed the social norm for euthanasia was wrong and mean.

Oddly, I came to peace with the social norm through view through poodle forums and social media sites. It was also where I came to grasp part of ME being selfish was to believe everyone should have the same view as I.  There was an individual who posted on a lot of sites about his elderly poodle who had gone blind and deaf due to an autoimmune problem with her brain. The owner documented all the problems they were having getting her to “adjust” to waking into walls and not being able to do so much more.  It killed me. My reaction was, “why don’t they put that poor scared dog down?” I saw a suffering animal. But reading the comments, I found many people saw a loving owner saving its sweet animals life.

It became obvious to me the reason for a lot of people being opposed letting a loved one go was not as clear as I thought. While at times it could be an inability to face one’s own pain of losing someone – or a pet, it was often that people believed the suffering felt was worth it because of the love people felt for them. Therefore it was better to be alive and loved then dead and pain free. If you were loved, you had a reason to live.  I could not argue that. I have never suffered enough to judge if knowing that someone loved me would overcome my angst.  I still feel in my heart that euthanasia is compassion and what I personally would want, and is the best thing to do for animals in my care. But I no longer negatively judge other’s view that every second of their loved ones life is worth living for.

COINCIDENCES

I had a dream. I am a night own and usually don’t get up until noon if I don’t have to. So if I say I had a dream last night, for me it would be a dream occurring late morning as we remember the last one we have.  I dreamt I was in Adams. I was barefoot and had my cell phone in my back pocket. And I was very aware of snakes being present in the grass and rocks.

In the first of my dream I was walking around the streets of the town. I walked over to the “highway” that passes one edge and the flat prairie looked so pretty. I took out my cell phone and tried to take a picture but I couldn’t get one that didn’t have power lines in them. It frustrated me. I then walked down the street that lead to the church where my grandfather use to let me ring the bell. I was still looking down to make sure I didn’t step on a snake. Then I noticed there were homeless people living in the chicken coops along the way. In waking state I found this was odd because I don’t remember a chicken coop in Adams at all. I turned to go to the grain elevator to take a picture of it because I heard it was leaning like Pisa. I got there and there was something on fire that I couldn’t get by to take the picture. A man rode by on a horse and didn’t even say hello.

Then my dream snapped to my grandmother’s house. But it was modern and nice. Not the wooden falling down home from reality. My cousin from California was there with her two children.  Honey was cooking us something. She didn’t speak in my dream. She was just there. My cousin and I were talking about all the great places we had been and things we had done. Then I woke up.  I had no idea at the time Honey had died and analyzed the dream of being how uneasy I was in my past and how it had darkness in it and how now, like my cousin, I had escaped to a new exciting present where things were new and there were happy things – represented by Honey cooking, the bright lovely home, and the shared experiences with the family I have enjoy.

When I read the text Honey had passed probably before or the same time I had the dream I, I had to remind myself to breath. This was the second time. This was another amazing coincidence.

Back in collage, I dated a young man who I still feel was my soul mate.  I was going to a university six hours away from where he lived and he had come to visit me. During the visit, he had two minor and one major stroke. He was in his 20’s. There is a long story involved, but when his parents were able to get him back close to them, they put him in a therapy rehabilitation home and told him I had not tried to find him – that he was half paralyzed and I was to selfish to want to see him anymore. Meanwhile they were telling me he blamed me for his stroke as I stressed him out and he never wanted to hear from me again. He sued the hospital he was at in the collage town and it took a couple of years before the suit moved ahead enough to need me for a deposition. He was there and it is when we discovered what his parents had done. BUT: I was married and pregnant by that time.  We were a Romeo and Juliet without the death scene at the end.  Years later, I woke up one morning remembering a very vivid dream. In my dream I was living in New York. He came to see me and we went out on the balcony of the tall building I was in to talk.  We discussed how we still loved each other but had changed too much to ever be together. Then he kissed my cheek and flew off the balcony.  Not flew so much as floated.  It was an odd but calming dream.

A few hours passed and the phone rang. It was an elementary school friend I hadn’t spoken to for decades. She told me that Jeff, my love, had killed himself during the night. A feeling I can’t put a name to came over me. I was heart broken. And it was an amazing coincidence that I had that dream that night.

When I told people about the timing of the dream a lot were convinced he had come to say goodbye. Or they believed God sent me the dream to help me deal with the impending sorrow. But my mind works like Spock: logic, math, science, proof, statistics. I can only feel both dreams were coincidences.

Here is another difference I except in others. I never mocked or argued people who believed I was sent an angel or a message from God or Jeff. Honey was an angel and very well could be being kissed on the forehead by Jesus as we speak and anyone who feels my dream last night was actually my grandmother coming to give comfort in cooking me a last meal could very well be right. Everyone has the right to believe in what gives them peace.  Everyone should be encourage to embrace those beliefs: even if the belief is in coincidences that appear to be mystical or heaven sent. The desired end result of our thoughts and feelings should be healing to ourselves without hurting others.

My hope is that this post makes you think of the way others view things and find acceptance with these differences.  My story is just that. It isn’t right. It isn’t wrong. It is mine. And I honor your story. However it is written, it is perfect for you. Honey’s story was perfect even with the pain and sorrow because it was meant to be. And I love her always for the love she gave.

Sweet as Honey

    Views This post isn’t about poodles or Mexico. That isn’t where my heart is today. Today’s post is about death, societal norms, and coincidences, but mainly how unique each person is with their view towards each and how accepting we should all be to the differences.

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The Overwatch Videogame League Aims to Become the New NFL

Stefano Disalvo is a professional athlete.

He has the physical gifts of a professional athlete, the dedication and drive of a professional athlete, the monomaniacal schedule of a professional athlete. He wakes up at 6:30 in the morning and spends some time reviewing game tape of his own performance before calisthenics begin around 9—jogging, frisbee, soccer—followed by practice, seven straight hours of it, where his team plays against some of the finest competition in the world, testing new strategies. Then a team meeting at night to discuss the day’s mistakes and how to correct them, after which he will spend another few hours practicing alone or interacting with his fans or studying his rivals or, sometimes, all three. Then bedtime, before doing the same thing again tomorrow.

It’s likely you’ve never heard of Stefano Disalvo. You probably haven’t heard of his team either. You maybe haven’t heard of his sport, and even if you have heard of his sport, you wouldn’t know him as Stefano ­Disalvo—he’s known as “Verbo,” one of the top players in the world at a videogame called Overwatch. He’s 18 years old, and he has just signed his first major professional contract: He’ll get a nice salary, a robust health insurance plan, free housing, and a 401(k). And beginning this month, his team, the newly formed Los Angeles Valiant, will be one of 12 competing in a first-of-its-kind global esports league, a grand experiment involving some of the biggest names in sports and entertainment who believe Overwatch can rival traditional sports in audience and revenue. If this league succeeds—if its players, coaches, franchise owners, and front-­office executives can overcome a skeptical audience, a complicated and sometimes baffling game, and big problems of inclusion and harassment—then gamers like Disalvo, who have mortgaged their entire adolescence for this one shot at glory, could be among the first athletes to get very rich playing videogames, in front of people, for money.

Welcome to the future of sports.

If you are, like me, of a generation where videogames were not a spectator sport except for maybe gathering around the arcade to watch someone who’s really good at Street Fighter, then you could be forgiven for not knowing all of this was going on. The phenomenon of esports—people playing against each other in live videogame competitions—is still so new that there isn’t even consensus about how to spell it: I’ve seen esports, e-sports, E-sports, and eSports.

I should say, actually, that esports are relatively new—that is, new for some of us. But for the professionals who play, who are almost uniformly between the ages of 17 and 26, it’s something that’s been around for most of their lives and something they take for granted. When Disalvo was a 16-year-old high school student in Toronto, he already knew he wanted to be an esports professional. He knew this mostly through a process of elimination: He had tried every other thing, and none of them felt transcendent or even interesting. He played hockey and tennis, he swam. He took all the classes you’re supposed to take, and when ­people asked him what his favorite subject was, he’d say lunchtime. “I was trying to find something that I loved doing,” Disalvo says. “I honestly didn’t really enjoy anything.”

There was one thing he did enjoy, though, a secret he kept from almost everyone: He loved playing videogames, and he was extraordinarily good at it. And when he saw players winning tournaments for games like League of Legends, he decided that he wanted, more than anything else, to do that.

A basic problem, though, was that League of Legends already had a well-established and very competitive esports scene, and the path to becoming a pro in that game seemed very narrow. However, in November 2014, Disalvo saw that Blizzard, the company behind such massive franchises as Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo, was developing a new game. It was called Overwatch, and it looked to be a first-person shooter. Knowing that most of Blizzard’s games eventually generate big esports scenes, Disalvo decided to switch. “New game,” he says. “Everybody’s starting at the same level. It’s not as if I have to catch up to all the other professional players.”

Stefano Disalvo, better known as Verbo, is one of the world's top Overwatch players.

Damon Casarez

I was surprised to hear this, as I’d assumed that pro gamers began playing a game because they enjoyed it and then gradually became good enough to turn pro. But Disalvo decided to make Overwatch his young life’s work before he’d ever even played it. “I saw the esports potential,” he says with a shrug. “I didn’t care if the game was fun.”

He got access to the Overwatch beta and committed himself to mastering the game. He stopped eating lunch with his friends, using that time to finish homework so he could go home and play Overwatch for seven hours straight. He didn’t go to parties, he didn’t go out with friends, he didn’t date, he wasn’t in any way social.

If you’re thinking that Disalvo fits the stereotype of a friendless, socially awkward gamer, disabuse yourself of that notion. He’s an affable and confident young man who’d been a swim instructor, a lifeguard, and an excellent hockey player. He has a good sense of humor, and when he laughs, he looks startlingly like James Franco. In other words, if he’d wanted to date, he probably could have. But he didn’t, and his classmates didn’t know what to make of it.

Playing the beta, and before Overwatch was even officially released in May 2016, Disalvo began competing in amateur tournaments. He started playing even longer hours, and his studies suffered. His mother demanded he focus on school, but he announced he was going to be an esports professional. His mother said no, he was going to college. He said no, he was skipping college to go pro in Overwatch. Looking back, he’s not sure how that standoff would have been resolved were it not for a job offer that came two weeks after his mother’s ultimatum. A professional esports outfit wanted him on its Overwatch team, and it wanted to move him to Southern California to live and train with his teammates.

Armed now with an official contract, Disalvo went back to his mother, and she eventually agreed to let him leave school early, on the condition that he would finish his diploma online. Most of his classmates were mildly puzzled by his sudden disappearance. There were rumors about California. Were it not for a yearbook article about his new career, it’s possible that his classmates would still be asking: Whatever happened to Stefano Disalvo?

Mei is one of dozens of heroes in Overwatch.

Blizzard Entertainment

Jeff Kaplan, who oversees all things overwatch at Blizzard, says that when developers began work on the game in 2013, they felt the need to create a world wholly apart from the trio of worlds that the company already offered: the high fantasy of Warcraft, the space opera of Starcraft, the gothic horror of Diablo. What would be the most unexpected, most fantastical place they could take gamers next?

The answer, they decided, was Earth.

The team ultimately began working on a game that would be Blizzard’s first entry into the popular first-­person-shooter genre, and they would set it on Earth, sometime in the not-too-distant future.

But when they began researching other earthbound first-person shooters, they found a surplus of what Kaplan calls “cynical, borderline post­apocalyptic dystopia.” In other words, morbidly dark, gritty, and depressing. Lots of blood and gore. Games you’d feel a little weird about if you played them in front of your kids.

This led the team in a different and sort of radical direction: optimism. “We wanted it to be a future worth fighting for,” Kaplan says. “So it’s a bright, aspirational future, and when conflict happens you have to go out and defend it, because this world is so awesome we can’t let anybody ruin it. So it really led us to a place of hope.”

The basic premise of the game is that AI robots, designed to usher in an economic golden age for humanity, try to take over the world. To respond to the crisis, the United Nations forms Overwatch, a team of fighters and adventurers recruited to quash the robot rebellion. The Overwatch forces defeat the robots, and then end up battling each other.

These characters—they’re called “heroes” in Overwatch lingo, and there are 26 of them as of this writing, though Blizzard tends to update this a lot—are the beating heart of the game. As opposed to many other first-person shooters, where your avatar is just a kind of anonymous good guy or bad guy, the heroes you play in Overwatch have personality. They have persuasive origins and very human hopes and fears and complicated relationships with the other heroes. There’s Mei, for example, a climate scientist who was stranded in her research station in Antarctica and has since become this gallant adventurer who never­theless still wears these huge, nerdy round glasses and an adorable poofy coat. Or Bastion, an anthropomorphic machine gun who’s friends with a tiny delicate bird that he gently cares for. This game doesn’t just have backstory, it has lore, which is all explicated in animated web movies and comic books that are intended to drive “deep engagement,” to borrow the language of Blizzard’s quarterly reports.

Overwatch super fan Marcus Silvoso dressed as the healer hero Lucio.

Damon Casarez

Overwatch super fan Dorothy Dang as the tank hero D.VA.

Damon Casarez

The game is team-based, six versus six. If you’re playing Overwatch, you are playing with and against other real people who are connected to the internet and seeing and hearing the same things as you. You can play as any of the 26 heroes, even swapping from one hero to another during the course of the game. Mostly, the game is played as a series of timed rounds: The attacking team has four minutes to capture certain areas or move a payload (think: the pigskin going downfield) while the defending team tries to thwart them. Once time’s up, attackers and defenders switch roles for the next round. Whichever team captures more areas or moves the payload farther wins the game, and if a player is killed in action, they have to wait 10 seconds (sometimes more) before rejoining the fight.

The formula—refreshing optimism plus interesting heroes plus shoot-’em-up action— was an immediate hit. Overwatch became Blizzard’s fastest-growing game ever, a best seller that, after a little more than a year, has 35 million players and generates more than a billion dollars annually.

Nate Nanzer, who was Blizzard’s global director of research and consumer insights leading up to Overwatch’s launch, says the game’s popularity comes, in part, from gamers’ love for the heroes, noting particularly the significance of a lineup that “looks like what the world looks like,” by which he means racially diverse, multinational, and equitably gendered.

The other thing Nanzer noticed early in Overwatch’s development cycle was a surge in interest in video­games as a spectator sport. Esports originated largely in South Korea, with the game StarCraft: Brood War, roughly 20 years ago, and eventually found its way onto Korean television. Then it jumped to Korean internet streaming platforms around 2003, which is when North American gamers began getting clued in. The popularity of gaming streams eventually gave rise to Twitch, a platform that launched in 2011 and specializes in videogame livestreaming. By 2014, when Amazon purchased Twitch for almost a billion dollars, the total number of minutes that people spent every year watching other people, mostly strangers, play video­games on Twitch was 192 billion. By the end of 2016, it had risen to 292 billion.

Even while Overwatch was in beta, fans and entrepreneurs were already organizing Overwatch tournaments, broadcasting matches live on Twitch. It was completely grassroots, seriously hardcore, totally decentralized, and kind of a mess. Nanzer wondered what would happen if Blizzard could take control of the tournaments. “If we structure a league the right way and put the right investment behind it, we can actually monetize it in a way that’s not too dissimilar from traditional sports,” he says.

Enter Overwatch League.

The pros of Overwatch: Kang-Jae Lee (Envy), L.A. Valiant

Jake Lyon (JAKE), Houston Outlaws

Young-Seo Bak (Kariv), L.A. Valiant

Kevyn Lindström (TviQ), Florida Mayhem

Christopher Schaefer (GrimReality), L.A. Valiant

Sebastian Barton (Numlocked), L.A. Valiant

Sebastian Widlund (Chipshajen), Dallas Fuel

Benjamin Chevasson (Unkoe), L.A. Valiant

Pan-Seung Koo (Fate), L.A. Valiant

Blizzard announced the venture in November 2016 at Blizzcon, the company’s annual convention. Overwatch League would be the world’s first esports venture to follow the North American sports model: franchised teams in major cities, live spectator events, salaried athletes. Along with all the revenue opportunities offered by sports leagues—ticket sales, media rights, licensing, and so on—there were also opportunities for “team-based virtual merchandise.” For example, fans might be able to buy a “skin” so that when they’re playing Overwatch at home, their hero will be wearing the jersey of the Los Angeles Valiant.

“We are literally building a new sport,” says Nanzer, who was appointed the league’s commissioner last year. “We’re trying to build this as a sustainable sports league for decades and decades to come.” And while you might think, at first glance, that such an ambition is outrageously optimistic, the expertise recruited may change your mind. The co-owner of the Boston Overwatch franchise, for example, is Robert Kraft, who also owns the New England Patriots. The owner of the New York franchise is Jeff Wilpon, COO of the New York Mets. Philadelphia’s Overwatch team is owned by Comcast, which also owns the Philadelphia Flyers. Blizzard hasn’t made public the cost of a league franchise, but the reports are $20 million, and when I asked Nanzer about that number, he neither confirmed nor denied it, saying: “You know, if you hear the same rumor over and over again, you can figure out what that means.” So, OK, $20 million.

“There’s going to be kids who can say ‘I play professional Overwatch for the same guy that Tom Brady plays for,’” Nanzer said. “That’s pretty cool.”

Perhaps the most high-profile executive recruit for Overwatch League is Steve Bornstein. One of the early architects of ESPN and a former president of ABC Sports, he left his most recent job as CEO of the NFL Network to become Blizzard’s esports chair. When asked why he made the change from traditional sports to electronic, Bornstein borrows an old Gretzky quote: “Skate to where the puck is going.”

“When I left the NFL, the only thing I saw that had the potential to be as big was the esports space,” he says. “What fascinated me was just the level of engagement, the fact that we measure consumption in billions of minutes consumed.”

And it’s growing, especially among younger people, which is not something that can be said of traditional sports. For the cord-­cutter and cord-never generations, sports tend to be behind what is, in effect, a giant paywall. The big, exclusive contracts that leagues sign with the TV networks mean there are few other ways to access sports content—which seems annoying or downright bizarre to ­people accustomed to getting their entertainment for free on YouTube.

The kill cam says, This is how you were killed, so let's avoid that in the future.

Every major sport in the US has seen the average age of its viewership increase since 2000. The NBA’s average fan is 42. The average NFL fan is 50. The average MLB fan is 57. What’s more, these audiences are limited almost entirely to North America. The Overwatch League, meanwhile, will begin with nine US teams and three from abroad—Shanghai, Seoul, and London (with more, I’m told, on the way)—and its average fan is a demographically pleasing 21 years old.

There’s no better symbol for Blizzard’s confidence in the game’s potential than the place it chose for its new home: Burbank Studios, Stage One. If that sounds familiar, it’s probably because it’s the very same soundstage that Johnny Carson used when he brought The Tonight Show to California. Every match of Overwatch League’s inaugural season will be played here, while the teams work with Blizzard to bring matches to their respective hometowns in future seasons.

The studio’s centerpiece is the long dais up front, big enough for two entire Overwatch teams—six players on the left, six on the right. Each player will have their own personal pod (Blizzard’s term for what appears to be a simple table), and each pod is separated from the adjacent pods by a space of a few inches, because apparently some players can get a little excited during a match and bother their neighbors with their table-tapping or knee-banging or fist-pounding. Every player is issued a standard desktop computer and a standard monitor (144 hertz), though many players like to choose their own keyboard and mouse. Above everything are three enormous LED screens, approximately 20 feet by 11, that will be showing the audience the in-game action, as well as intermittent close-ups of the players themselves, their faces, their twitching hands.

The studio’s centerpiece is a long dais, big enough for two entire Overwatch teams—six players on the left, six on the right.

Damon Casarez

Kitty-corner to the players, stage right, is an elevated desk for the on-air talent—the hosts and analysts and interviewers. Backstage, these folks get their own hair and makeup room, one of the few places still serving its original Tonight Show function. Next to the analysts’ desk is a room for the “shoutcasters,” which are what play-by-play commentators are called in esports. The term was coined in the earliest days of esports, before high-speed broadband made video streaming possible; the feeds were audio-only, and commentators used a Winamp plug-in called SHOUTcast to broadcast their voices. The name lives on, though. There’s even a paper taped up on the door that says shoutcasters.

Taped to the next door, a piece of paper says observers, which strikes me as sort of sinister, like the Eyes from The Handmaid’s Tale. The Observers are actually cinematographers who operate in the game’s digital space. If you’re watching an Overwatch match, you might be watching it from the point of view of one of the players or from the point of view of one of the Observers, who float around the players and capture the in-game action as it unfolds. Imagine a camera operator at a hockey match skating around on the ice with the players and yet magically not interacting with them in any way. The Observers are like that.

Directly across the hall from the Observers is where the technical stuff happens, all the wizardry needed to create a professional-looking sports broadcast: a whole room for instant replay, two rooms for audio, two control rooms with walls of flatscreen TVs. All told, it takes between 80 and 100 people to broadcast one match of the Overwatch League. Some of the people who work here say there’s a special significance in the league’s broadcasting from The Tonight Show’s old home. It’s an obvious metaphor: new media replacing old media. It all reminds Steve Bornstein of the moment in the early ’80s when he came aboard the fledgling ESPN, then only three months old. He says all the critics at the time argued there wouldn’t be any interest in a whole channel devoted to sports. Who would ever watch that?

Shoutcasters provide real-time game commentary for both in-studio and streaming audiences.

Damon Casarez

My first time playing Overwatch was astounding to me for two reasons: first, for the sheer amount of onscreen information I was asked to digest at any given moment, the bullet tracers and grenade explosions, the bright blossoming energy shields and walls of ice that were sometimes mysteriously erected and then shattered, plus the head-up display overlaying various timers and health bars and glowing mission objectives, and sometimes floating yellow plus-sign things (which I eventually figured out meant I was getting healed by someone, somehow), plus all the pretty little environmental details like streetlamps that flicker a bit of lens flare onto your screen when you accidentally aim at them, the wooden chairs that splinter and the wine bottles that shatter when they take stray fire, not to mention the outlines of your teammates and all the enemy players who (for reasons that will become clear momentarily) tend to jump around constantly, spasmodically, almost insectoidally—all of this happening at the same time in a way that felt not only disorienting, not only mentally taxing, but more like New York City air-traffic-control-level overwhelming.

The second thing I was astounded by was the number of times I died.

It was a little surprising to me how quickly, simply, and even sort of eagerly my character bit it. I was playing a hero called Reaper, whose whole basic deal is to be an updated video­game version of the Undertaker character from WWF wrestling, circa-1990s, but with guns—a pair of shotguns that, instead of reloading, he tosses to the ground and replaces by grabbing two new ones from under the folds of his black overcoat. I’m running to get into place with my teammates, wondering what exactly I’m supposed to be doing, and also idly wondering how many shotguns Reaper can hide under that coat. (The answer, it turns out, is infinite. Infinite shotguns. He never runs out. Just go with it.) Suddenly a firefight erupts ahead of me and I run up to aid my companions and promptly get killed. Swiftly and abruptly and bewilderingly, I am dead. I have no idea why. This is when I am introduced to the kill cam.

Let me tell you about the cruelty of the kill cam.

After you die in Overwatch and the camera pans back to show your now lifeless corpse on the ground, you endure the kill cam, which shows you what you looked like and what you were doing the moment before you were killed, from the perspective of your killer. It’s like being able to watch your own face while getting dumped. As I died over and over, I would be treated anew to kill-cam footage showing just how long someone had me in their sights, how many shots they took before I even noticed, how I just stood there and sort of spun in place, dumbly looking around while my killer patiently picked me off. According to the game’s developers, the kill cam’s primary function is not actually sadistic, but educational. The kill cam says: This is how you were killed, so how about avoiding that in the future, eh?

Reaper is an updated video­game version of the Undertaker character from WWF wrestling, circa-1990s.

Blizzard Entertainment

The fact that it’s so easy to be killed means that players in Overwatch are never still for a second, which presents a cognitive challenge: You must keep track of 11 other players who are always in motion while you yourself zig and zag. Overwatch is, above all, a team game, and you have the responsibility not only to avoid constant death but also to avoid constant death while helping your team execute the proper strategy. The 26 Overwatch heroes fall into four categories: eight are primarily damage-­dealers (offensive players that specialize in eliminating enemy players); six are defensive; six are “tanks” designed to soak up a lot of damage to protect their team; and six are healers who work as in-game medics. That works out to 230,230 possible six-hero “comps” (gamer lingo, born when the gaming community took the phrase “team composition” and nouned it), and to be good at Overwatch you have to recognize each of these comps, understand what effect they’ll have on your own team’s comp, and react accordingly.

And by “react accordingly” I mean that you not only execute a certain strategy correctly, but you also, if necessary, do so with any number of different heroes. Overwatch involves constant on-the-fly improvisational skill, an almost instinctive reaction to ever-changing conditions inside the game. If you play a really great damage-dealer but the other team is running a comp that neutralizes your particular hero, you must be able to extemporaneously and at any time switch to a different hero with a different specialization that disrupts the other team’s strategy. Plus, each hero has up to four different abilities that they can deploy at various times, including an “ultimate” ability that takes a long time to charge up and, when spent correctly, can be a total game-changer. 
So that’s about a hundred different abilities from 26 different characters teamed up in one of 230,230 different combinations. It’s mind-boggling. The sheer number of variables in play seems to exceed the human brain’s ability to grasp the scale and scope of big things. Which raises a question: How is it even possible to be good at this? I decided to travel to Redondo Beach, California, to the house where Stefano Disalvo lives with his team, to find out.

The pros of Overwatch: Brady Girardi (Agilities), L.A. Valiant

Matt Dias (Clockwork), Houston Outlaws

Indy Halpern (Space), L.A. Valiant

Brandon Larned (Seagull), Dallas Fuel

Matt Iorio (Coolmatt), Houston Outlaws

Terence Tarlier (SoOn), L.A. Valiant

Ted Wang (Silkthread), L.A. Valiant

I arrive at the house at 11 am on a late September Friday, and ­Disalvo is sitting with his teammates in a large living room that has been completely transformed for gaming purposes. Seven small office tables have been arranged in two rows, each table equipped with a computer monitor, keyboard, mouse, and mousepad, with a mass of cables and wires spread out around the PC towers on the floor. Actually “towers” is the wrong word for these machines, which are enormous hexahedrons that look less like computers and more like glowing, diamond-shaped relics in a science-fiction movie about the future. All but one of the curtains are closed (to eliminate glare, I assume), though the windows are open for the welcome and pleasant California sea breeze.

The house they’re sharing is a six-bedroom, 4,100-square-foot grand Spanish-style building with orange roof tiles and a three-car garage. The kitchen is ambitiously large, with a double oven and a wine fridge that is poignantly empty. Almost no one who lives here is old enough to legally drink.

The team wakes early each day, and after reviewing footage of their performance from the previous day’s practices, they eat breakfast and walk to the beach for an hour of exercise. (Shane Flanagin, the team’s PR manager at the time of my visit, says the organization takes player health very seriously: They hire physical therapists, sports psychologists, and an in-house chef, and they have a daily fitness routine. “We don’t want them to be stuck in chairs for nine hours without moving,” he says—though from what I can tell, the players, left to their own devices, literally, would be happy to remain in their chairs for even longer.) By the time I arrive, the players are seated and warming up for their first “scrim” of the day.

A scrim is the primary way a pro Overwatch team practices. The team’s coaches set up scrims with other pro teams, and the players will do three two-hour scrims a day, every day. Once the day’s first scrim begins, everything gets very serious, very fast. The players hunch their shoulders, and their eyes are about even with the top bevel of their monitor so that they’re looking down at the screen, which makes them appear, in profile, something like carnivores eyeing dinner. They give one another constant updates about what the other team is doing, what heroes are in use, what special abilities are available. Their shouted instructions and updates sound to me like soldiers speaking some kind of wacky code.

“Monkey monkey monkey!”

“Are they right or left?”

“Clear left!”

“Inside! Saloon! Saloon!”

“EMP! EMP! EMP!” which, shouted very quickly, sounds like “empee empee empee!”

In the kitchen, meanwhile, the team’s chef is busy cooking lunch. She seems to be successfully ignoring all of this.

Members of Team Valiant practice—or play "scrims"—for at least seven hours a day.

Damon Casarez

Despite living together, the players do not call each other by their real names. They exclusively use their screen names, so much so that I find it odd and even jarring to call Disalvo “Stefano.” Here, he’s Verbo, and the teammates he’s playing with today are GrimReality (which everyone shortens to Grim), Fate, envy, and KariV, who, among all of them, seems the most likely to spontaneously shout or giggle or exclaim “What the fuck!” very loudly and, I would think, distractingly, though the other players don’t seem to care or even really notice.

This is one of the ostensible reasons they all live together, so that they can get accustomed to each other’s tics and moods and can develop the kind of shorthand with one another that I usually associate with best friends or intimates. They come from very different places—Verbo is Canadian, Grim is American, while Fate, envy, and KariV are from Korea—but they need to communicate in the quickest way possible. Like the game itself, the team must operate with no lag.

Sitting in an adjoining room, the team’s manager, Joshua Kim, and one of its coaches, Henry Coxall, observe that morning’s scrim in the game’s spectator mode. They discuss failures of strategy, how one player was baited into a disadvantaged position. But they also seem very attentive to their team’s emotional state. Any blip of negative emotion from any of the players is immediately registered and discussed. Kim talks about not bringing bad emotions to “work,” and how living together presents a challenge on this front.

At 27, Kim is the old man in the house. I ask him whether it’s hard sharing a living space with a bunch of teenage boys—and, yes, they’re all boys, and with the exception of one 20-year-old, they’re all teens. The house itself bears the filthy evidence of this. The boys’ discarded shoes litter the front foyer. Their bedrooms are totally bare but for mattresses sitting on the floor surrounded by clumps of wrinkled clothes. The kitchen counters are covered with jars of peanut butter and Pop Tarts and a family-­size box of Frosted Flakes and protein powder in big bulbous jugs and a few spray bottles of Febreze.

I won’t even tell you about the condition of the bathroom.

But if this bothers Kim, he tries not to show it. “It teaches me patience,” he says.
As the first scrim ends, the players blink back into the reality of the living room, almost like they’re surprised to be there. There’s a sort of incorporeal quality to the players while they’re in the game: They play with such focus and intensity that, as soon as a match is over, it’s as if they suddenly realize they have bodies. They crack their knuckles and stretch and shake out the stiffness in their hands. They wander into the kitchen, where the chef has prepared a meal of mostly Korean fare: barbecued short ribs, glazed chicken drumsticks, and a really fantastic fried rice. The players consume all of this in less than 10 minutes.

During their break I’m able to ask the questions that have been on my mind: How do you learn to play this game at a high level? And how do you possibly keep track of everything that’s happening onscreen?

It’s Grim who first suggests the concept of “mental RAM.” The basic idea, he says, is that there is only so much the mind can process at once, an upper limit on the number of things any player can pay attention to; the key, then, is to put as many things on autopilot as possible, so you have fewer things to consciously think about. “For a lot of people who aren’t pro, aiming takes a lot of concentration,” Grim says. “It gives you less room to think about other things. So that’s why I practice really, really hard on my aiming, so I can think more about my positioning and what I need to do next.”

Grim, whose real name is Christopher Schaefer, is 18 years old and from Chico, California. He is one of the team’s primary damage-dealers. Like Verbo, Grim wanted more than anything to be an esports professional. And like Verbo, he decided to go pro in Overwatch before he’d ever played it. When he first began the game—at 16—he was “really bad,” he says. “I would spend hours at a time just practicing flicks.”

I interrupt to ask: What’s a flick?

“It’s basically starting from one point of the screen and then snapping to the enemy’s head or something. And so it’s a very fast muscle-memory movement.”

Being able to flick effectively is essential to pro play. It requires you to understand the exact ratio of mouse-movement to game-space distance, plus how to compensate if, for example, you’re moving left and your target is to the right, which will require an extra milli­meter or so of flick, and you have to possess the kinesthetic body awareness to do this with your hand and wrist perfectly almost 100 percent of the time. This is why pro players’ mouse choices are so personal and why the team insists that, with any sponsorship deal with any company that sells peripherals, players always get to choose their own mouse. Grim uses a Logitech G903 with a DPI of 800 and an in-game mouse sensitivity setting of 5. He is now, suffice it to say, extraordinarily good at flicking.

“A lot of people think that I just have natural talent,” he says, laughing. “No, no, not at all. It took a lot, a lot, a lot of practice to be able to aim properly.”

After the lunch break, the teammates return to their stations for more sitting, more scrims, more shouting.

“Monkey’s up for a jump! Monkey monkey! I’m dead.”

“Small regroup! Regroup!”

“I’m on soldier, I’m on soldier!”

“We have numbers! Let’s go!”

“Monkey monkey!”

About the monkey: One hero named Winston is a supersmart, genetically engineered gorilla who has the ability to jump really far, right into the middle of the scrum. And when an enemy team’s Winston lands nearby, he’s automatically your team’s number one target. If you take down Winston, you can really disrupt the other team’s strategy. So when he lands, everyone shouts his name. But because “Winston” is hard to say many times fast, Overwatch players started calling him “monkey.” The effect is that, for the many hours I watched the Los Angeles Valiant play scrims, as I was dutifully taking notes and thinking earnestly about how this might be the future of sports, every few minutes this whole pack of teenage boys would suddenly burst out shouting, “Monkey monkey monkey monkey!”

Overwatch super fan Joe Silvoso as the defensive hero Junkrat.

Damon Casarez

In late September, three months before the league’s first regular-season game and a mere 60-some days from the start of preseason play, Disalvo shakes his head in disbelief at the prospect of playing for the Los Angeles Valiant. “It feels like I’m part of something that’s going to be big, like very big,” he says. “There’s going to be billboards? I’m gonna be representing a city like Los Angeles? Like … what? That’s crazy.”

It’s especially crazy given that he didn’t actually move to LA to join the Valiant. His first professional esports contract, the one that achieved peace with his mother, actually came from an organization called the Immortals, one of the independent esports brands, known as endemics, that field teams in a number of different video­games. (The Immortals, for example, have teams that play Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and League of Legends, among others.) Endemic teams have been in esports for a long time and have been essential to its growth. They’re well known within gaming circles, but they are not billion-­dollar organizations like Blizzard or the New England Patriots, and thus they are not able to be as generous with their players.

Jake Lyon, a 21-year-old from San Diego whose screen name is the refreshingly straightforward “JAKE,” is one of the best damage-dealers in Overwatch. He earned about $2,000 a month as a member of an endemic called Luminosity Gaming—that is, until the Luminosity Overwatch roster disbanded in mid-2017, as Blizzard began consolidating control over professional Overwatch play. “In the past there’s been no security in an esports contract,” he says. “Even though we were signed to a two-year contract with Luminosity, there’s always a clause—and it’s not just them, every single esports contract looks like this—that says they can buy you out for one month’s salary. When they decide it’s your last month: goodbye.”

Lyon went on to sign with the Overwatch League’s Houston Outlaws, and he says the new league is a “huge improvement.” Contracts are guaranteed for at least a year, after which the team will have a second-year option with a prenegotiated salary. And, critically, players cannot be fired during the length of their contract, unless they’re guilty of something that would get them fired from any job.

Players are provided with housing, health insurance, a retirement plan, and a minimum league salary of $50,000, though Lyon believes that most players who are among a team’s starting six will earn much more than that. (Most teams also have a few backup players.) Plus, there’s revenue sharing and a prize pool of $3.5 million for successful teams, $1 million of which is reserved for the inaugural season’s eventual champions.

When he signed his contract with Houston, Lyon sat at his computer clicking his e-signature to the document’s relevant places, and he realized how different it was from what had come before. “Maybe this could be the way esports is going forward,” he says. “That it can be a legitimate career, and that it’s not like someone is going all-in on some fragment of a dream.”

Inside Blizzard arena, three enormous L.E.D. screens, approximately 20 feet by 11, show the audience the in-game action and player reactions.

Damon Casarez

It's hard not to notice that, as of this writing, there are no women on any of the rosters of any of the 12 teams in Overwatch League. “They are all dudes,” Nanzer says, shaking his head. It’s something he’s been thinking a lot about, and he admits that part of the problem is cultural. Gaming can be seen as acceptable and normal behavior for boys, but not necessarily for girls. (Though many studies show that roughly equal numbers of men and women play videogames casually, competitive play remains overwhelmingly male.) “There was never a question that I was going to sit and play games with my son,” he said. “But then the other day my daughter asked me, ‘Can I play Overwatch too?’ and I was like, oh shit, I gotta be better about this. I gotta treat it equal.”

And the women who do play Overwatch often find themselves to be targets of harassment. Glisa is the screen name for a 19-year-old Overwatch player who lives in Portland, Oregon. Despite being busy with her college studies, Glisa is one of the top 100 Overwatch players in terms of time spent in the game. She has so far logged thousands of hours of gameplay, and she keeps a YouTube channel with highlight reels. But sometimes she posts videos of her interactions with other gamers. She uploaded a montage recently called “Online Gaming as a Girl.”

“That was spawned after I had several different, very toxic encounters with people who brought up the fact that I was female many times and tried to use that to degrade me,” she says.

This will sound familiar to anyone who has followed the horrors of Gamergate over the past few years, and the video is hard to watch. The gamers she encounters aren’t just being a little insensitive—they are straight-up knuckle-dragging misogynists:

“You’re such a bimbo.”

“You’re probably ugly.”

“Grab her by the pussy.”

“Women’s rights are a fucking joke.”

And on and on and on.

“The internet is a very angry place,” Glisa says. After posting the video, she received emails and comments from people criticizing her “for not being able to deal with it, for being weak, for finding this upsetting.”

She was also contacted by other female Overwatch players who’d had similar run-ins. “Other women who were like, this is why I don’t join voice chat and never talk to people; this is why I use a male-style username. And that’s what upsets me the most. I don’t feel like people should have to hide who they are to be able to feel safe.” (Glisa didn’t want to use her real name for this article. She says she’s going to be applying for jobs soon, and if potential employers ­Google her, she doesn’t want them to think she’s someone who complains about sexual harassment. Which sort of proves her point.)

I ask her how it made her feel that something she loves can also be so hurtful. “Disappointed,” she says, “in life, in the universe, for being this way. Sometimes it affects me a lot more, and I leave the voice channel so I don’t have to deal with it. There are days that are just a lot harder than other days, and I try to insulate myself more from the anger.”

The sheer number of variables in play seems to exceed the human brain’s abilities.

Overwatch executives are quick to point out there’s a system in place for players to report toxic behavior, and hundreds of thousands of accounts have been disciplined for the type of harassment that Glisa describes. (She reported each of the players who harassed her, but she is not sure whether they received suspensions or bans. The system needs work.) Still, the problem persists, and if Overwatch is a game that requires constant communication between players, and women are made to feel uncomfortable communicating within the game, then perhaps it’s clear why few of them go pro.

Ysabel Müller is an Overwatch player who lives in Rodenbach, Germany. She began playing the game while it was still in beta, and she became highly ranked and friendly with a lot of the pros she played with. She says she had designs on going pro herself but found that getting useful feedback from her teammates was difficult. They treated her, she says, like she couldn’t endure criticism—that if criticized she would be offended and accuse her teammates of sexism and get them kicked out of the game.

“That’s a big fear of some of the male players, and so they’d rather distance themselves,” she says. She didn’t ultimately go pro in Overwatch. Instead, she helped organize regional tournaments. She’s now sending out applications to Overwatch League teams, hoping for a job in team management and player relations.

“I think it will change over the years, once more female players come in and it gets more accepted,” she says.

Blizzard seems to be trying to solve this problem from within. Kim Phan, Blizzard’s director of esports operations, says the company has been proactive in hiring women, including for key on-air shoutcaster jobs, which she hopes will promote female involvement in esports.

And while she says these kinds of visible women role models are essential, Phan also stressed the importance of men advocating and supporting women in gaming.

“Having mentors, advisers, who are men is very impactful,” she says. “It gives you the courage to stay because you know that the toxic voice is just one among many other voices. It’s a reminder that not everyone is like that.”

When asked what the Overwatch League was doing to attract more female players, nobody at Blizzard could point to any specific outreach or recruiting efforts. Nanzer says he’s been looking at data from women-only sports leagues like the WNBA that suggest a women’s league would bring more women into the game. “The idea comes up all the time: Should we have a women’s-only tournament or league?” he says. “I think there’s a way to do that where it’s awesome and supportive and grows the sport. I think there is a way to do it where it’s actually detrimental and it makes it seem like, oh, you’re not as good as men. We kind of go back and forth on that.”

DOOR STRETCH: Hunched shoulders can lead to low energy, so players can boost endurance by opening up their upper torsos.

LUNGE SEQUENCE: Strong glutes prevent the type of lower back pain that can distract players during hours long gaming sessions.

SUPERMAN: This super-flex strengthens the players’ core to improve posture and avoid neck and shoulder fatigue.

NIRSCHL EXERCISE: By stretching the muscles in their forearms, players avoid tennis elbow.

DOUBLE COBRA STRETCH: Stretching their hand, wrist, and forearm muscles keeps players loose for clutch head shots.

GLIDING EXERCISES: Rotating both wrists (with both open and closed palms) wards off carpal tunnel syndrome.

Back in Redondo Beach, the early evening sunlight is streaking in through gaps in the curtains as the Los Angeles Valiant begins its last scrim of the day. Tonight’s match is against another Overwatch League team, the San Francisco Shock, which recently made headlines by signing superstar damage-dealer Jay “sinatraa” Won for a rumored $150,000 a year.

And while I’m still a noob at Overwatch, even I can tell that this San Francisco team plays with an unusual intensity. “They’re a team of 17-year-olds who just do not stop,” says Coxall, the Valiant coach, making the Shock sound young and insane as opposed to the Valiant’s qualities of wisdom and tactics. “If you think you’ve won a fight, you haven’t,” he tells the team. “These guys will keep throwing themselves at you. And one of them will clutch. Always expect that.”

I ask him about that word, “clutch,” and he explains that it refers to someone overcoming dubious odds to win. In other words, the Shock’s strategy is not necessarily to maneuver as a team but rather to have their players engage in seemingly suicidal encounters and trust that they have the skill to pull it off. It’s unrelenting, high-intensity pressure designed to fluster opponents.

It’s a reminder that this is truly a young person’s game—not just in its audience but also in its players. When I asked Christopher Schaefer, aka Grim, how long he thought he’d be a pro, he didn’t have high hopes. “Normally you can compete until you’re about 25,” he says. “Right now, up until when I’m around 21, 22-ish, I’m going to be the sharpest. But as soon you hit 25, your reaction speeds are going to slow down.”

Stefano Disalvo said the same thing: “How long do I think I’ll play? I say maybe four years, five years.”

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When he decided to become an esports professional, Disalvo did not know that Overwatch League would exist. He committed to going pro during a time when the pay was uncertain and there was no job security, despite knowing that it would last only five years max.

Which seems just astonishingly irrational. What drove him to do it? “I saw everybody doing the norm: college, university, major in something,” he says. “But I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to do something more because I felt like I wanted to prove something. I don’t know. It felt like this thing that I had to prove.”

Which makes sense to me. That, yes, for the people who go pro in esports, there’s a certain happiness in playing videogames for a living. But maybe more than that, esports allows people an avenue to do something different, to be special. Like musicians or actors or writers pursuing an unlikely dream, it strikes me as both romantic and brave.

Meanwhile, to try to absorb the Shock’s frantic offense, the Valiant team has figured out a new strategy. They go with a hero lineup that’s bigger—more tanks, more health.

“Niiiiiiice,” comes a chorus from around the room when they finally win a round.

“There you go, boys,” Coxall says into his headset’s microphone. “You took control. ”

The sun has gone down, but nobody seems to have noticed. By the end of the last scrim of the day, they are playing in the dark.

Nathan Hill (@nathanreads) is the author of The Nix. This is his first piece for WIRED.

This article appears in the January issue. Subscribe now.

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Sleep More, Weigh Less? Dr. Mercola By Dr. Mercola Nearly 71 percent of U.S. adults aged 20 and over are overweight or obese. Among children, nearly 21 percent of 12- to 19-year-olds are considered obese, along with 17 percent of 6- to 11-year-olds and 9 percent of 2- to 5-year-olds.1 Exercise and, particularly, diet, definitely play a role in this epidemic, but there's another often-overlooked factor that may help people to keep their weight in check with little added effort. In fact, it requires nothing but getting more sleep. Like overweight and obesity, insufficient sleep is a public health problem in the U.S. — and it could be that the two are related. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that 50 million to 70 million adults have sleep or wakefulness disorder, while more than 35 percent said they sleep fewer than seven hours during a typical 24-hour period.2 Meanwhile, this lack of sleep is having serious consequences, like unintentionally falling asleep during the day (reported by 38 percent of survey respondents) or nodding off while driving (reported by nearly 5 percent). Your weight, however, may also suffer. Sleeping Well Associated With Smaller Waist, Lower Weight U.K. researchers looked into the connection between how long you sleep (sleep duration), diet and metabolic health among more than 1,600 adults.3 Past research has linked not enough sleep with an increased risk of metabolic diseases, including obesity, and this study found similar results. Sleep duration was negatively associated with body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference, which means the longer a person slept, the smaller their waist and lower their BMI were likely to be. Specifically, people who slept for an average of just six hours a night had a waist circumference more than 1 inch (3 centimeters) larger than those who slept for nine hours a night.4 Shorter sleep was also linked to lower levels of beneficial HDL cholesterol,5 and researchers noted, "[O]ur findings show that short-sleeping U.K. adults are more likely to have obesity, a disease with many comorbidities." Along these lines, a study published in the journal Sleep even found that sleeping in longer on weekends — also known as "catch up sleep" (CUS) — may positively impact your weight. On average, the group of participants who slept up to two hours longer on weekend days than weekdays had a significantly lower BMI than the non-CUS group.6 Lack of sleep influences hormone levels, including increasing the "hunger hormone" ghrelin and decreasing leptin, which is involved in satiety. By activating your endocannabinoid system, which is involved in modulating appetite and food intake, sleep deprivation can even give you the munchies, similar to marijuana use. In the featured study, while the researchers hypothesized that shorter sleep may lead to increased unhealthy eating, they found no such link in this case. How Does Sleep Affect Your Waistline? Sleep is intricately involved in your body's ability to function properly. Skimp on it, and your self-control will suffer, as will your willpower to make healthy eating choices. On a biological level, however, lack of sleep also disrupts important hormones — like, as mentioned, ghrelin and leptin — and metabolic function. Losing as little as 30 minutes of sleep each night can disrupt your metabolism enough to cause weight gain. In fact, each half-hour of sleep debt incurred during weeknights raised one study's participants' risk for obesity and insulin resistance by 17 percent and 39 percent respectively after one year.7 What this means is that if you need eight hours of sleep but consistently only get seven, you may theoretically raise your risk of obesity by about 34 percent and simultaneously jack up your chances of insulin resistance — which is a hallmark of most chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes — by 78 percent. In another revealing study, people who slept only five hours a night gained nearly 2 pounds a week while consuming extra calories, primarily late at night. On the contrary, people who slept nine hours a night maintained their weight and tended to eat fewer high-carbohydrate foods and unhealthy fats.8 The results are true even among children, which research revealed that children with the least amount of sleep are 4.2 times more likely to be obese.9 If you're trying to lose weight, getting adequate sleep may make or break your results, with research from the University of Chicago showing that dieters who slept for 8.5 hours lost 55 percent more body fat than dieters who slept 5.5 hours.10 "Lack of sufficient sleep may compromise the efficacy of typical dietary interventions for weight loss and related metabolic risk reduction," the researchers wrote, continuing:11 "The neuroendocrine changes associated with sleep curtailment in the presence of caloric restriction, however, raise the possibility that lack of sufficient sleep may compromise the efficacy of commonly used dietary interventions in such individuals. For instance, higher ghrelin concentrations may facilitate the retention of fat and increased hunger could compromise adherence to caloric restriction." How to Gauge if Your Health Is at Risk From Not Enough Sleep Worldwide, the average sleep duration on weekdays has declined by about 37 minutes over the last 10 years.12 Meanwhile, about 1 in 3 Americans is getting less than seven hours of sleep a night, and an estimated 83.6 million adults in the U.S. are sleep-deprived.13 In addition to weight gain, too little sleep has been linked to type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome. The featured study also revealed that short sleep may also interfere with thyroid hormones and raise C-reactive protein levels (CRP), which may promote inflammation and increase the risk of type 2 diabetes.14 Aside from chronic disease, sleep deprivation has the same effect on your immune system as physical stress or illness,15 which may help explain why lack of sleep is tied to an increased risk of numerous chronic diseases and acute illnesses like colds and flu. In fact, research shows adults who sleep less than six hours a night have a four times higher risk of catching a cold when directly exposed to the virus than those who get at least seven hours.16 Sleeping less than five hours per night resulted in a 4.5 times higher risk. The study found that sleep was more important than any other factor when it came to protecting against the cold virus, including stress levels, age and smoking. You probably already know if you're sleep deprived, but in case you're not sure, the late Professor Emeritus Nathaniel Kleitman, physiologist and sleep researcher, came up with one of the simplest tests to determine if you're sleep deprived — and as a pioneer in sleep research, he was well qualified to know. Here's how it works: In the early afternoon, grab a spoon and head off to your darkened bedroom to take a nap. Place a metal tray on the floor beside your bed, and hold the spoon over the tray as you attempt to fall asleep. Be sure to check the time as well. Next, when you inevitably fall asleep and the spoon crashes down onto the tray, waking you up, immediately check the time again and note how much time has passed. If you fell asleep within five minutes, it means you're severely sleep deprived, according to Kleitman. If it took you 10 minutes to fall asleep, this is still a sign that you could use more sleep. If, however, you managed to stay awake for 15 minutes or more before falling asleep, you're probably well rested.17 If you don't happen to have a spoon and metal tray handy, you can still take this test by setting an alarm for 15 minutes to see if you fall asleep before it goes off. Most Adults Need Eight Hours of Sleep a Night Sleep needs vary depending on your age, activity levels and health status, but the studies are quite clear — and most experts agree — that eight hours of sleep a night is ideal. Keep in mind, however, that eight hours of sleep is not eight hours in bed. If you go to bed at 10 p.m. and get out of bed at 6 a.m., you might say you've slept for eight hours. In reality, you probably spent at least 15-30 minutes falling asleep and may have woken during the night one or more times. With the advent of fitness-tracking devices, however, we now have access to actual sleep data (and more) from wristband users. The data is quite useful on a personal level and can help you determine when you need to get into bed to realize a full eight hours of sleep. If your problem sleeping is less about when to go to sleep and more about having trouble sleeping once you're in bed, turn your attention to sleep hygiene. Perhaps the most important natural "trick" of all for improving your sleep is to make sure you're getting proper exposure to bright light during the day and no exposure to blue light at night. In the morning, bright, blue-light-rich sunlight signals to your body that it's time to wake up. At night, as the sun sets, darkness should signal to your body that it's time to sleep. Ideally, to help your circadian system reset itself, get at least 10 to 15 minutes of natural light first thing in the morning. This will send a strong message to your internal clock that day has arrived, making it less likely to be confused by weaker light signals later on. Then, around solar noon, get another "dose" of at least 30 minutes' worth of sunlight. A full hour or more would be even better. If your schedule is such that you have to get up and arrive at work before sunrise, aim to get at least that half-hour of bright sunlight sometime during the day. In the evening when the sun begins to set, put on amber-colored glasses that block blue light. You can also dim your lights and turn off electronic devices to reduce your exposure to light that may stifle your melatonin production. Better still, swap out LEDs for incandescent or low-voltage incandescent halogen lights. After sundown, you can also shift to a low-wattage bulb with yellow, orange or red light if you need illumination. A salt lamp illuminated by a 5-watt bulb is an ideal solution that will not interfere with your melatonin production. Candle light also works well. If you've already optimized your light exposure and are still struggling with sleep, see my 33 healthy sleep secrets for a more comprehensive list of strategies for a better night's rest.

[apsbicepstraining]

100 Stupidly Simple-minded Statements That Will Help You Get Over A Guy

1. You only lost something you never had. If he wanted to be with you, he would be with you. All that “youve lost” was an idea you had about what one form of future developments have been.

2. You are now free to find someone better.

3. It is so hard to leaveuntil you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world .~ ATAGEND

4. Don’t you feel free now?

5. Youll realize you werent who you were supposed to be when “youre with” him, you were who he wanted you to be.

6. You can no longer rely on him to disconcert you from the person you know you need and want to become.

7. You have duration and vigour to focus on selfish pursuits that will improve your quality of life for decades to come.

8. Now you know that the things you choose to have in their own lives are there because you choose them , not because of how they look to another person, or what they like.

9. You have more money now , no more buying and feeding for two.

10. You have time to rebuild relationships with the people who will never leave you — friends and family members.

11. Not to be vulgar, but as Violet Benson enunciates ,” dick is free-spoken, you can get that shit anywhere .”

12. You can be anyone you want to be now. No one is attached to the old you requiring that you to remain that person they fell in love with.

13. You are now free to suffer again the extreme pleasure of kissing a stranger.

14. You are now free to reverie bigger than the extremely inaccurate person you were species enough to fall in love with.

15. Nobody owns you now.

16. You could leave, right now, and drive for hours and not have to tell anyone. No checking in.

17. You can spend $30 going a grilled cheese sandwich and a bottle of wine provided with your house to be devoured while watching reruns for the hundredth era and wearing a appearance mask and going a bit hummed before walking around your suite region Jewel as loudly as you want. No one will judge.

18. You can do whatever they detested to do. You can go out dancing or eat Indian food or let yourself be too messy( or very clean ).

19. You have more options in your future now.

20. Every breakup and abandonment is a second chance in masquerade. You get to do better next time. You get to pick better next time.

21. You lost someone who didn’t want to keep you. Suppose about that hard and then announce’ good riddance’ while you look for someone who understands quality when it’s right in front of them.

22. You are now free to hear someone who is as generous because you are: ” Ive had it with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches. A center is to be expended .”

23. No one is’ the one .’ Open your eyes and recognise there are so many parties around you with potential, removing one person from the schedule of potentials decreases the overall occasions you will find love by an immaterial margin TAGEND

24. This advice can be found in song form here.

25. What if you spend the rest of your life fighting for him to love you instead of doing the brave thing and keep moving?

26. What a great excuse to get down social media for a few months and take a breather away from other people’s opinions.

27. Now you can sleep diagonally across your berth.

28. And not deal with his snoring.

29. “They dont have” greater time to listen to music than when you are heartbroken. Your statu right now is practically the whole intellect music and artistry exist in the first place. Cuddle it. Make a million playlists about moving on. Listen to this one . Sing out loud. Sing in the shower. Sing in your auto. Feel like the baddest bitch in the world. Feel about how everything exciting in your life is in front of you and everything you miss about your ex you get to experience again, soon, with person new.

30. Reckon about who you were before you met him and who you are now. Thank him for being a teach — even if you were the one that had to learn yourself not to cherish person like him.

31. Struggle induces you a better being TAGEND

” The harder you throw a ball into the field, the higher it ricochets back up A divorce, a breakup, losing a responsibility, or just notion severely down can ground you, rough you up a bit, leave calluses on your feet and grit under your finger fingernails. But more than that, it leaves you wiser and stronger next time .” — Laurel House

32. When you fulfill the right party, you will appreciate them more — because you know how much you digested to get to that point.

33. No one is as happy in a relationship as they lead themselves to accept when they want it to work out. Now “youre free” to meet him without rose-colored glass. Now you can see what wouldn’t have worked and accommodate your standards for future humankinds accordingly.

34. You have time to take a cooking class now. Or discover a brand-new speech, or get into fitness and get rent.

35. You don’t have to cook man-friendly nutrient anymore. Every night can be rice and avocado if you want it to be.

36. The only belief you have to consider is your own.

37. The only dispensation there is a requirement do something is your own.

38. 98. You know that he has it far worse than you do — he lost.

39. Think about how exciting it is to sleep with person new and how eye-opening it is to discover a whole new world of things someone else likes/ is good at doing. You’re not tied to the guy who didn’t/ wouldn’t do that one thing you like anymore.

40. You get to remember the prodigious pleasure of hanging out with mostly women.

41. This could be the universe let me tell you something it’s time to get a dog.

42. The worst has happened. You adoration person and they didn’t love you back. So what? You’re still alive. You stirred it. You’ve proven that you are not so easily destroyed.

43. You can pick up a responsibility, or multiple jobs and invest your free time hustling to get closer to the life you’ve dreamed of.

44. There’s no pressure to go out, if you like to stay in.

45. There’s no pressure to stay in, if you like to go out.

46. Your best friend can sleepover in your bottom again and you are able to wake up at 4am and giggle about nothing in particular.

47. You have the freedom to travel , no strings attached.

48. You no longer have to waste your precious time suspecting TAGEND

” If you were supposed to conjecture if someone loves you and wants to be with you, probabilities are they dont. Its not that complicated. Love, in most cases, reveals the one flavor it. Dont waste times waiting and meditating. Dont throw away your time dreaming of someone that doesnt require you. No one is that amazing, certainly not the one who would pass you up .” — Donna Lynn Hope

49. You don’t have to share your lavatory with a man.

50. No one embezzles the spreads or your pillow in the middle of the night. No one wakes up earlier than you. No one suffocates you with their body heat. You can keep your bedroom icing because you like to be a little bit cold and snuggle into the duvet.

51. You get shaken out of your self-complacent life. You’re forced to reimagine and reevaluate what the hell are you miss. What a support. Now you can see whether you really want to be on the path you’re currently on.

52. It’s easy to think about your first lover and realize that he was nothing to cry over either. You wouldn’t crave him today, he wasn’t right but you were young and subdues see everything hard to be logical about. You’ll feel the same way about this guy in 10 years.

53. You now have time to work on yourself so you are worthy of the right person, when you meet them.

54. This is the universe comprising onto your shoulders, gently shaking you, and mentioning ” daydream bigger .”

55. What if you set all the intensity you put into trying to induce the wrong party love you into trying to the right person?

56. Perhaps the phase of dating him wasn’t to find lasting enjoy. Perhaps the point of dating him was to show how capable of love you are.

57.” If you can adoration the wrong person that much, envisage how much you are able to love the right one .”

58. The only person who will attain you feel guilty is yourself.

Never underestimate a man’s they are able to establish you feel guilty for his mistakes

— Rihanna (@ rihanna) December 13, 2012

59. Instead of invariably feeling like you are not enough, you get to prove that you are.

60. Imagine how much occasions you saved by breaking up with this person now and not in 6 months — or six years from now.

61. You get to realize that your soul worth doesn’t depend on what you can do for other parties, how easily you can find a home inside them. Your self-worth comes from how much you can give , not how much you can receive.

62. Going home for household episodes can be about clas again , not about making another person tone comfortable.

63. You learn all the things you didn’t learn because you were with someone who could already do them. You hear to cook for yourself, how to update your professional website, how to do your taxes — you will become more self-sufficient because you have to rely on yourself. This means that when the next guy was coming, you have more to offer.

64. You’ll gave better boundaries next time. Did you tell him come over too often? Did you always drive? Did you fix a precedent that it was totally okay with you if you didn’t orgasm during fornication? Whatever it is that you let slide — you’ll recognize how to ask for what you need next time.

65. You can watch or and belly laugh and it will feel better than it’s ever detected before.

66. You’ve learned that affection is something you are able to lose. When you find a cherish that’s worth not losing, you’ll campaign like hell to keep it.

67. You will not, for the foreseeable future, have to listen to anything in the car besides what it is you want to hear.

68. No more ever, unless it’s because that’s what want to watch.

69. You can work as much as you want to and no one will call you a workaholic or tell you they don’t see you enough or complain about your work life balance.

70. You can watch or or and nobody will make fun of your choices.

71. It’s the perfect excuse to buy some really nice copulation playthings and learn how to give yourself best available orgasm of your life.

72. You get to feel a load hoisted off your shoulders as you let go of additional burdens of having a being in their own lives. It doesn’t matter if he remembers to call his momma on her birthday, or whether he buys a offering for his sister’s newborn rain, or whether goes to the doctor when he really should. It’s no longer the main responsibilities to worry about him.

73. Exiting out is exciting again. There’s potential everywhere.

74. There’s a reasonablenes people ever talking here low phases being best available act that ever happened to them.

75. When you get dressed in the morning, you don’t think about what someone else will like. You precisely pick out what detects good. You’ll spend your whole day appearing happier and more* you* because your criteria is simply your own happiness.

76. As much as you feel pathetic, you also feel relieved.

77. “Theres” worse stuffs than being happy in love — like being miserable with yourself.

78. Why would you want to spend the rest of your life with someone who was stupid enough to let you go?

79. You can’t do anything about the road other people feel on you. This breakup is coercing you to learn the one lesson that will have the greatest impact on your delight for the rest of their own lives: the acces other people feel about you is not your responsibility.

80. Think of all the doors you closed because you were with him. Consider which ones you want to open again.

81. You got to desire person. No one can take that away from you. Even a person who didn’t love you back.

82. You can do better TAGEND

I am my Soulmate.

— Lana Del Rey (@ LanaDelRey) May 5, 2011

83. Every objective is also a beginning. You get to decide what kind of embarking it is.

84. You can stop detecting guilty about acquiring more money than him or whatever space he find your gleam took away from his.

85. Inevitably, you construct your life aroundthe person you are dating. When they leave, you get to build it around the things you actually like.

86. By alleging goodbye to someone who doesn’t love you as much as you desire them, you are closer to saying hello to someone who does.

87. Just because something ceases doesn’t mean it was a failure. ” Anything worth doing is worth doing mischievously .”

88. Extremely few stuffs in life will detect as good as deleting his quantity from your phone will.

89. It sounds like you have a very good excuse to have a very big defendant and stir some very questionable decisions.

90. Violating up with someone causes panic and sadness because we have been rejected. Our egos hurt. But we can’t embarras that with sorrow panicked or sad about not having this person in our lives anymore. Our self-love will mend, we will learn to let go, we will move on. Recognize the source of your pities and merely appear them without any self-judgement fixed. “Theres” worse situations in life than an ego trauma — like intention up with the incorrect person.

91. It’s much lonelier to be the person who can’t admitted love than it is to be the person who can love someone who doesn’t love them back.

92. When you assemble the right party you are able to look back at this abandonment as best available occasion that ever happened to you.

93. ” Such relationships wasn’t the very best rapport you can have, so why garbage another fucking second on it .”

94. You established yourself that you are strong enough to do one of the hardest things we do on this planet: open up to another person. That’s enough, to start with.

95. One era soon you’ll wake up in the middle of the night and everything in your life will feel like and you will be so happy and proud of the fact that you have gotten yourself to where you are. Your accomplishments are now wholly your own.

96. All the power you once expended obligating glad can now be completely to be given to realise joyous. If you’re like most women, this is a lot of fucking energy.

97. Every breath is a beginning. Breathe in and out. Breathe in your new life, breathe out your old-time one with him. Imagine about everything you are going to create when he is fully detoxed from your arrangement. A newly single woman is a oblige to be supposed with.

98. We think of forest flames as these devastating affairs that we need to stop, but they are actually vital to environmental health of an neighbourhood. There are flowers that require the heat of a wildfire for their seeds to abound open and weed themselves in the earth. There are others that are meant to be combustible, so that shoots subdues contender. As it turns out, groves are made to have a regular cleansing by flaming. Your middle is making such style, too.

99. Remember that time you got really excited about something you’re enthusiastic about and then stopped yourself and remarked ” sorry, it is necessary to boring for you” and he didn’t chasten you? Imagine what it would be like to enjoy someone who didn’t build you feel like you needed to apologize for what you love.

100. You lost him, but you didn’t lose the most important thing, you didn’t lose yourself.

The post 100 Stupidly Simple-minded Statements That Will Help You Get Over A Guy appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

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[transssexualheart]

I didn't read through all those asks so I'm hoping none of them or bad bc I want you to answe all of them

thanks man

1. think of the last person who said “i love you” do u think they meant it?it was my mom so i hope so

2. would you date an 18 year old the age you are now?no

3. when’s the last time you were aggravated and happy at the same time?day before the last time u came over bc i found my fav shirt and u were coming over but my period had just started so i was having really bad back pains

4. would you ever smile at a stranger?i do all the time

5. is there someone mad because you’re dating/talking to the person you are?i’m not dating anyone but one of my friends wanted to rip my head off for a little bit because i like the person that she likes lmao we’re cool now tho

6. have you heard a song that reminds you of someone today?yeah actually! i was in a dressing room and the store played riptide and that song reminds me of u because it was ur audition song for eight grade and also that time u came over and was trying to remember what the song was called and then u did remember and played it and sang along to it and then ur mom picked u up that was a while ago tho idk why i remember that

7. what exactly are u wearing right now?oversized fiddler on the roof tee shirt and star wars pj pants

8. how often do u listen to music?almost constantly

9. do you wear jeans or sweats more?jeans

10. do you think your life will change dramatically before 2018?idk

11. are you a social or antisocial person?antisocial

12. have you ever kissed someone who’s name begins with the letter a?no but i dated someone who’s name starts with a

13. what about r?no, my name starts with r tho i can kiss my arm or something if u want

14. can you drive a shift stick?can’t drive at all

15. do you care if people talk badly about you?if it’s people i care about then yeah, otherwise no

16. are you going out of town soon?no

17. when was the last time u cried?last night in my friend’s bathroom lmao

18. have you ever told someone you loved them?ya

19. if you could change your eye color, would you?yeah my eyes are just plain old brown it’s boring

20. is there a boy who you would do absolutely everything for?lol no

21. name something you dislike about the day you’re havingi have so much hw

22. is it cute when guys kiss you on the forehead?if i like the guy then yeah 

23. are you dating the last person u talked to?no i’m single

24. what are you sitting on right now?a pillow

25. does anyone regularly (other than family) tell you they love you?spencer does and abbie does

26. have you ever wanted someone you couldn’t have?yeah

27. who was the last person you talked to before you went to bed last night?you actually 

28. do you get a lot of colds?no

29. where is the shirt you’re wearing from?drama club

30. does anyone hate you?probably homophobes and transphobes

31. do you have any empty alcohol bottles hidden in your room?no

32. do you like watching scary movies?no i’m really paranoid

33. do you want your tongue pierced?not really, easy infection

34. if you had to delete one year of your life completely what would it be?maybe eight grade? i was so shitty back then

35. did you have a dream last night?yeah but i forgot what happened it it i knew this morning but

36. when was the last time you told someone you loved them?i think i told spencer yesterday

37. do you think you’ll be married in five years?lol no 

38. do you think someone has feelings for you?i don’t think anyone does

39. do you think someone is thinking about you right now?probably not

40. did you have a good day yesterday?yeah

41. think back two months ago, were you in a relationship?exactly two months ago? no

42. in the next 48 hours, will you hang out with a girl?i’ll be at school if that counts

43. has anyone ever told you they don’t wanna lose you?kinda? i’ve gotten “if you left i think i would die” that’s the closest

44. what’s the best part about school?seeing my friends

45. do you have any pictures on your facebook?don’t use facebook

46. do you ever pass notes to your friends in school?}no

47. do you ever replay things that have happened in your head?do some people not?

48. were you single over the last summer?yeah

49. is your life anything like it was two years ago?i still go to the same school and talk to some people that i did then

50. what are you supposed to be doing rn?hw probably

51. do you hate the last guy you had a conversation with?no

52. are you nice to everyone?not people i hate

53. have you ever liked someone you didn’t expect to you?yes actually

54. do you think you can last in a relationship for six months and not cheat?of course??

55. are you good at hiding your feelings?not really though i often pretend not to care as much as i do

56. do you think you like someone?uh i know i do

57. have you kissed someone who’s name starts with j?no, dated someone who’s name does tho

58. do you prefer to be friends with girls or boys?don’t care

59. has anyone of your friends seen you cry?u have that one time u stole my shoe in sixth grade and i cried lmao but i think that’s it

60. do you hate anyone?donald trump

61. how’s your heart?rn? ok

62. is there something that happened in your past that you hate talking about?all the shitty things i did 

63. have you ever cried over a guy?yeah lol

64. who is probably talking a load of crap about you rn?idk

65. are your toenails painted pink?no??

66. will you next kiss be a mistake?idk?? i don’t think i’m kissing anyone any time soon so

67. girls love it when boyfriends cry, right?how would i know i’m not even a girl

68. have your pants ever fallen down in public?no

69. who was the last person you were on the phone with?facetimed spencer on friday

70. how do you look rn?like trash lmao

71. do you have someone you can be your complete self around?i don’t know what my complete self even is anymore

72. can you commit to one person?yeah

73. do you have someone of the opposite sex you can tell everything to?no

74. have you ever felt replaced?yeah

75. did you wake up cranky?no

76. are you a jealous person?haha. hooo boy. i sure am and i hate it!! i feel so gross and horrible every time i get jealous 

77. are relationships ever worth it?um yeah??

78. anyone you’re giving up on?no

79. currently wanting to see anyone?leave me alOne

80. name something you have to do tomorrow?go to school

81. last person you cried in front of?my friend was asleep but he was there does that count

82. is there someone you will never forget?yeah

83. do you think the person you have feelings for is protective of you?idk

84. if the person you wish to be with were with you, what would you be doing right now?don’t even

85. are you over your past?some of it

86. have you ever liked one of your best friends of the opposite sex?no

87. is there anyone you can tell everything to?idk

88. if your first true love knocked on your door with presents and apology, would you accept?idk if i even know what true love is i’m 14

89. so the person you last kissed happens to arrive at your door at 3am, do you let them in?yeah

90. have you ever liked someone who you’re friends hated?no

91. will you be in a relationship in two months?probably not

92. is there anyone u know with the name micheal?kid in my grade but i don’t talk to him

93. ever kissed a matthew?no

94. were you in a relationship in january? how was it going?i think i was, not well though because around then i broke up with him

95. were you happy with the person you liked in march?what does this mean exactly

96. don’t tell me lies, is the last person you texted attractive?my mom? not to me she’s my mom ew

97. who do you have texts from????????

98. if the person you like said they like someone else, what would you say?probably i’d say “ do what makes you happy” because it’s unfair for me to say anything else she deserves to be happy and i am not going to try and take that away

99. have you ever kissed someone older than you?yea

100. who is in your profile picture with you?my profile picture isn’t even a person

101. ever kissed under fire works?no

102. has anyone ever given you butterflies?yeah

bye

[shannonmuiranimatedinsights]

Look Back at Wondercon 2007 -- Day 3 (Sunday)

AS ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON LIVE JOURNAL

Look Back at Wondercon 2007 -- Day 3 (Sunday)

Mar. 10th, 2007 at 12:28 PM

Sunday, 5:30 am. A time I was supposed to wake up refreshed, have an early breakfast, and check out before my tour bus picked me up at 8am. Unfortunately, my throat issues began creeping up into becoming a nose issue. At this point, it still seemed like a minor cold, but the symptoms would get worse and worse throughout the day--I believe in large part because outside of the morning bus ride, rest wasn't on the agenda. You see, the plan had been to travel in a healthy state through several parts of San Fran. And I was far from healthy.

Given the horrid cost of breakfast at the hotel, I went across the street to Starbucks and brought orange juice and pastry back to my hotel room. After that, I checked out of my room, checked my bag, and got the concierge to check me in for my flight so I wouldn't have to worry about doing that later. Then the hotel pickup bus arrived to then get people from several hotels and take them to the main office that I had seen at the Wharf the day before.

I found myself on a nearly packed small shuttle bus with people headed up to Muir Woods and then over to Sausalito. The Sausalito portion really was just to take people to an area where they could then take ferries back to the Wharf, but as it was my last day I knew I didn't have the time to do Sausalito justice... not to mention, by the time we got there, I wouldn't have felt like it if I did. If you wanted to take the shuttle back you could, but it was clear they'd hoped to make more money with the additional ferry portion. It was clear many didn't understand that was what was assumed and were unhappy their stay was that short... but it was only a 3.5 hour tour after all. And I definitely got what I wanted, which was Muir Woods.

My family has been coming to Muir Woods for generations. Dad even told me of a time that he, his Dad, and his grandfather all came at the same time... which is interesting in that they are all named John Muir with different middle names. I didn't realize at first that the Woods would be driving distance away when I set this up, but once I realized it the trip became a must-do. Besides, nothing Sunday at Wondercon interested me. We also got a great side stop to take pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge on the way up. I'd become rather congested though by the time we reached the woods so I missed a key part of my tour guide's instructions. He repeated to go as high as Bridge 3 twice so I picked up on that, but apparently he'd told everyone to go counter-clockwise in following him. I'd missed that somehow, and after being one of the last on the restroom stop, proceeded to go CLOCKWISE around the loop. I didn't notice at first since some people were also going my same direction. It wasn't until I ran into my tour group on the way back (against the flow of most people) that I came to realize what had happened. In all honesty, I have no complaints about that. What I really needed was the private time more than the tour guide constantly rattling off stuff. I had a very peaceful time that way. In particular, I would have loved being there with my Grandpa Porter (we called him by his middle name), who was a lover of nature and an award winning wood carver. He passed away February 14, 2000, during a pacemaker operation when they found his heart just couldn't make it. I miss him a lot.

We were taken through parts of the huge Presidio where the missionaries tried to educate the Native Americans, both going up and coming back. George Lucas recently bought 5 acres of the Presidio and the buildings on that land for some of his facilities and those were pointed out to us on the way back. Not cheap!

At this point I made what would turn out to be probably the worst decision I could have made. I could have taken a shuttle back to the Argent (even though I had nothing to do), or I could stay at the offices and check out Ghiradelli Square, which I didn't expect to have much open at 9 am so I hadn't checked it out Saturday. I decided to check out Ghiradelli Square and then take the cable car back over the hills to downtown, as there must be lunch there somewhere and I needed to eat. What I did NOT know is that Ghiradelli Square is undergoing MAJOR renovation and MOST of it was closed. Which then put me in a position of needing to find lunch. Having had seafood on the main Wharf strip the day before, I took the next street down, which is the one the street car traveled on to head back to downtown, figuring with such a major line on that road there must be food all along it. I walked for some time before I found anything and by this point it was becoming evident I had an infection I was struggling with. Finally I wind up settling for an IHOP, which failed to impress... especially when the first glass of water I was given had dead flies in it! I'd have walked out if I could. The patrons probably wished I had as well, as my misery was loud and evident. But I had nowhere to go.

The buses across the street were not going in the direction I needed, so I kept walking until I found a street I recognized... Powell. I knew Powell was also downtown, and I had nothing else to go on, so I followed it for blocks. Many blocks. And then, after walking for some distance and tiring with every step it just stopped in this park. Turned out to be Washington Square. I really didn't know what I should do, except that looking to my left down the road I could see the Embarcedero some distance away and knew that if I walked toward it, at some point I should be able to find somewhere to then turn me back toward where I needed to go. Good strategy until I hit Chinatown, where much was still blocked off for New Year's cleanup. So here I am, this really sick person, being forced through huge crowds of Chinatown shoppers as I try to get back to downtown. Because of the street closures, buses were rerouted and those that did come by were packed with more people trying to get in than they had room. Reminded me of the limited buses and the LA bus strikes. I knew I was better off walking, even though I felt horrible. And somehow, from Fisherman's Wharf all the way to Market Street, I walked my way across town. Initally I plunked down in the Argent lobby but soon realized that was no place to attempt to rest. So I pulled out my badge and decided to do what I've seen many an exhausted Con attendee do in San Diego... went to Moscone Center and camped out under the esclalators outside the exhibit hall and took a series of catnaps after buying a bottle of water. I literally couldn't go another step at that point.

I woke up at one point to take another drink of water only to realize someone who I thought seemed familiar was coming towards me. It was Greg Weisman, on break from the SLG Publishing booth, who was surprised to find me there as I said I wasn't planning on it. But like I responded when he asked if I was checked out from my hotel room, I said if I still had it believe me that's where I would have been instead of sleeping on the convention floor! We talked a little and found we were headed back to LA at the same time from the same airport, but as I later learned and fortunately for him not the same flight. A little while later, knowing how tired I still was, I went back for my bag and slowly made my way to SFO vis BART. Felt so bad at this point I already emailed in sick to my boss who ok'd it before I'd even gotten to SFO. I figured I could get dinner and nap there in any case before my 8:40pm flight... which I found out when I got there would now be 9:25pm. Given my situation I didn't mind much, as long as I could still get home and eventually get to bed. I woke up from one of my early naps to find the time had changed to just after 10pm, due to baggage ramp service issues in Vancouver that delayed the flight. I slept on the flight too, and the worst part was awakening as we descended into LAX to find my left ear hadn't popped and was in extreme pain (which is why I walked in to my doctor on Monday, not only to evaluate the sinuses but to be sure the ear was all right!). This, BTW, is the same flight that Mark Evanier has written about in his own blog. He and I chatted a little as we waited for what seemed like forever in baggage claim.

Even though I was fortunate to get the last Supershuttle not requiring reservations (just before midnight), we still had six stops and I didn't make it home until 1:30am Monday morning.

I hope to go back to SFO someday, hopefully with a little less drama. But still, Friday and Saturday alone were worth it.