#or like in campaign how a dude who wiped out in the first three seconds of ninja warrior convinces a human wifi router

[mango-sideburns]

My fav thing about TAZ is that any aspect out of context sounds fucking bonkers.

Like, in the balance finale there's a scene in which Garfield (who is very specifically never described visually bc most people imagine him as like. The Lasagna Cat. Who in this universe is the most powerful warlock in the realm and also has a hobby of cloning people, which is great for the one character that got forced into haunting a mannequin) is summoned by an alien spaceship that runs on the power of friendship so he could beat up some flashing balls. In D&D.

And that was just. Such a normal scene in the narrative. No one blinked an eye. I would like to bow down to Griffins clear unmatched talent for making me feel such big emotions over ridiculous shit like a goddamned umbrella or a regular ass pair of jeans or the idea of a taco recipe.

[crazycookiecrumbles]

Awkward Car Trips

Masterlist

A/N: Another part of my Idiot!Verse installment! So, hope you enjoy! Feedback/Reblogs appreciated

Takes Place during Season 4

Pairings/Characters: Steve Harrington x Reader

Warnings: swearing, smartassery, dustin being overbearing, steve being an idiot, max being angsty

It was times like this where Steve just couldn’t understand why you were able to be Dustin’s actual babysitter for so long. Dustin Henderson was so damn obnoxious that he wanted to stuff his stupid hat down his throat. 

See, what happened was the second you guys left the library to continue on your main quest and not the side quest, as Dustin put it, things kicked off in typical fashion when it came to those two. Dustin proclaimed that he had shotgun to keep all unnecessary sexual tension from taking over, all the while, Steve was shouting that Dustin was being ‘a real dickhead’ and that he was making things awkward.

“Awkward? Who’s awkward? I’m not awkward. Are you awkward, Y/N?” Dustin turned to you, waiting for an answer.

You sighed, “Now I’m just tired.”

Although, what really surprised you and threw you for a loop was seeing Max sitting in the car when you had arrived. She wasn’t even in the library when Steve and Dustin came in, and you had no idea how long she had been with them, but Max was sitting there, quietly watching the two morons bicker.

“Are you awkward, Max?”

“I’m annoyed,” she told Dustin who glared at Steve.

“Okay. So you’re the only awkward one, dude,” Dustin told Steve who sat there clutching the steering wheel, staring straight ahead at the library doors, wondering exactly what moment it was that solidified his attachment with Dustin so he could go back in time and undo it.

“How long have you been here?” You sighed and asked Max.

“Like, in Hawkins or — “

“In the car, smart ass.”

She smirked satisfactorily to herself, hiding it as she turned her head for a second before wiping the smirk off her face, “Awhile. You should’ve seen them shouting about you before they went in.”

Steve glared at her through the rearview mirror, “Didn’t you have headphones on? I thought you couldn’t hear anything.”

“Just one ear,” She replied while Steve groaned.

“Why were you shouting about me?” You crossed your arms over your chest and stared at the ack of Steve’s head, because he refused to turn around and face you. 

“No one was shouting about you. We were just talking about coming in to get you.”

“Steve has unresolved feelings towards you. It’s very romantic comedy of him, if we’re being quite honest. It definitely sickens me,” Dustin exclaimed.

You sighed and looked to the teenager you were so fond of, “Hey, Dustin, remind me how that song from Neverending Story goes.”

“Touché,” he muttered while Steve smirked and started the car.  You sighed and shook your head, watching Steve as he pulled out of the lot and began to drive.

“So…where are we going?” You asked the three of them, waiting for someone to loop you in, “And just what are we dealing with?”

“Buckle up, buttercup, we’ve got a lot to fill you in on. Hope you didn’t have a big lunch,” Steve said. “First, we’re dropping Max off to see Ms. Kelley and do some investigative work.”

You frowned, “Why are we investigating the guidance counselor?”

“That’s part of the lore we have to tell you. Remember Vecna?” Dustin turned to look at you.

“Uh…what, is that in Eddie’s campaign? You know I can’t remember all your Dungeons and Dragons —“

Dustin groaned and looked to Steve, “This, this is the woman you love, just saying.”

“Eat shit, Henderson,” Steve shouted.

“I will smother you, child!” You shouted at the same time.

Max shook her head and readjusted her headphones over her ears so she could tune out Dustin telling you about everything with the latest monster of the year, Chrissy, Eddie’s involvement, and their theory of what was going on. This was pandemonium, and you had a sinking feeling in your stomach the more Dustin went on. You felt like you were right and totally validated to be afraid and not really wanting any part of this, it really was just getting worse every time one of these monsters came back.

They dropped off Max at Ms. Kelley’s home so she could go inside and talk to her. The three of you waited in the car in an uncomfortable silence. You were thinking about how many close encounters you could possibly have before this whole Upside Down thing caught up to you. Steve was thinking about everything he could possibly do to keep you and the kids safe, and Dustin?

Well, Dustin had different priorities.

“Is this going to be a thing?” Dustin asked. “The air being thick with sexual tension because the two of you are stupid?”

“I remember when you used to be nice to your babysitter. I miss those days. You were such a cute little bastard,” you told Dustin who rolled his eyes.

“Don’t embarrass me, Y/N. You know you’re the best babysitter — sorry, Steve, but she was first — but, like, come on, you guys!”

Steve groaned, “Dustin, enough —“

“No, not enough! You two are obviously super into each other. What the hell has to happen before you two admit it? I mean, god, I’m going to be legal to drink before you two finally kiss!”

“Dustin, it’s not — we just —“ You stumbled over what to say. You didn’t know what to say. Was now the right time to be doing this? Hardly! And you certainly didn’t need a third-party butting in with his opinions and demands of your relationship.

���Y/N, I’ve known you since you moved to town, and Steve is the only guy that’s gotten you to blush and act like a girl and shit like that,” Dustin exclaimed.

You felt heat rise in your cheeks, “Totally not true.”

“Yeah, okay. And you,” He glared at Steve who scoffed. “She is the best, most awesome person in the world and you’re being a little chicken shit about this whole thing. Steve, if you don’t marry her and become the ultimate babysitters duo, then you’re just wasting your life!”

“Whoa, who said anything about marriage?” Steve shouted.

“I am too young to be married!” You shouted at the same time.

Dustin sighed and stared up at the sky, as he seemed to be doing this often when it came to your relationship with Steve. He shook his head and stared out the windshield as he tried to figure out what to say to you two to finally get things moving, “Look, all I’m saying, is you two have a great thing. I mean, Steve, I didn’t even like you for a super long time.”

“I know.”

“You were such a douche.”

“I’m aware, Henderson.”

“I mean, really, you were King Douche.”

You snorted and muttered quietly, “Sluttington.”

“Wow. You two are hilarious,” Steve rolled his eyes dramatically while Dustin turned to you and grinned. “What do you want me to do, confess my undying love for her in front of you?”

Dustin shrugged, “I don’t mind.”

“I mind!” Steve shouted.

You blinked several times before raising your hand up as you spoke, “Hold on. Are you in really love with me, Steve?”

Steve sputtered. His cheeks reddened and he gripped the steering wheel as he tried to figure out what to say. He could hardly breathe at the moment, and now he was stuck with you and Dustin trying to find the right words to say. Ugh, this used to come so easily to him, why was he messing this up now?

“Y/N, I —“

“Steve, I —“

You both were cut off by Max suddenly opening the door and sliding inside. She looked between everyone and held up the keys, “I got them. Are we ready to go?” She frowned when she saw Dustin cringing and smack his palm into his face. “What?”

“They were going to admit they love each other, finally,” Dustin said.

“Oh, well don’t let me stop you two. That’s been years in the making, as far as I’ve been told,” Max said.

“See? Thank you!”

“We weren’t. I—“ Steve shook his head and turned back around and started the car up. “Hawkins High is next, right?”

Dustin frowned a little as he realized that maybe he pushed this issue a little too hard, “Hey, man. Look, I — “

“Let’s just go,” you put your seatbelt back on and leaned against the window. “Before Dustin tries to bully his way into everyone’s relationships like he’s the boss.”

Steve scoffed, “Right? You have to humble yourself, man. You’re coming on way too strong.”

“I agree,” you chimed in with Steve. “It’s aggressive. Quite frankly, it’s a little creepy of you. Is this what happens when you miss Suzie?”

“I hate you,” Dustin announced out loud as Steve drove, “I hate you both so god damn much.”

[rueluxprince]

A Diss Track on Jin Zixuan

Dude, whomst the fuck raised you?! Yeah you’re righteous and honest and a nice panda bear in a pit of vipers, but you can’t afford to be the clueless panda bear?! You’re literally the least politically active heir to a sect/house in the entire book! You’re the ONLY heir! How the fuck are you this politically naive! In a world teeming with inter-sect politics! Literally everyone is better at this than you are!

Like.

Jiang Cheng: sat through a year of boring-ass miserable boarding school just so he could network with other similarly aged heirs and start building his reputation. Worked his ass off to wrangle a sizable Yunmeng Jiang war force even after his entire sect was wiped out. Knew to negotiate a marriage alliance with the Jins after the Sunshot Campaign was over to continue to build influence. Had at least the outline of a plan to deal with the the political aftermath of WWX going apeshit and rescuing Wen “political poison” remnants.

Lan Xichen: kept up a long-standing friendship with another Sect’s leader in his teenage years. Knew to rescue the books, the foundation to the Lan family, as his home was burning around him. Wrangled into existence a sworn brotherhood and thus a three way Jin-Nie-Lan triple alliance after the war. Got the Jins to willingly pay for ANOTHER sect’s rebuilding efforts.

Nie Mingjue: took over his sect super young after the UNEXPECTED death/murder of his father. Never let the Nie family name drop out of the Great Five sects. (Now it’s the Great Four. You know who dropped out? It sure ain’t the Nies!) Was so good at his job his younger brother (and presumed heir) could just faff around and gossip and paint fans and be sexily useless.

Jin Guangyao: went from third class peasant to chief cultivator in like five years tops. Worked to be so trusted by Wen Ruohan he got to stand close enough enough to stab the guy. Second to last time we saw Jin “absolute trash n.2” Zixun the dude was spitting in Jin Guangyao’s face. Last time we saw JinZX he referred to Jiggy as “A-Yao”.

Jiang Yanli: part of logistics and support in the Sunshot war camps, responsible for the feeding/nutrition of an entire army. Humored her ex-fiancé (their last interaction was him insulting her for the second time) during the Phoenix Mountain hunt because first daughter marriage alliance Jiang sect needs all the help to rebuild etc etc.

Qin Su: cemented a marriage alliance with the Jins to prove her family’s continued loyalty as a vassal sect. Second Young Master is fine he’s cute and respects her and rescued her that one time. Why the hell not. (We must now interrupt our diss track for our daily obligatory fuck you to Jin Guangshan. Mr Jin, I hope you’re hearing this. Fuck you.)

Wen Qing: maintained Wen Ruohan’s favor for many years. Wears flames on her robes designating her high status and no one in the Wen sect felt threatened enough to hurt her and her family. Was enough of a figure other cultivators legitimately hoped/thought she could take over the Wen sect. Head of the Yiling Supervisory Office, helped a lot of people and the Wens didn’t suspect a thing?

They did all of this! Before the thirteen/sixteen year story break!

And when we pan to Jin Zixuan it’s like: helped out in the Sunshot Campaign. Blew off a marriage alliance because of personal preferences. Let the newly recognized suddenly appeared half brother gather a fair amount of influence in his own house. Did not know a single fuckwit what his father is doing behind the scenes. Didn’t even think to bring I don’t know his own guards to Qiongqi Path!

Like, I get it. Your whole schitck is that you didn’t respect women at first but then you learned to respect women and now love your wife wholeheartedly and with utmost emotional support and everlasting trust. And I love that. Especially in a man. Can I have an “and then” though?

And then???? You just ignored everything else???? You know how much shit could’ve been avoided had you been even a little bit politically aware????!!!! As you should???!!!???

(Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian and Nie Huaisang doesn’t count because they don’t have to worry about these things. They should, but they grew up in an environment where they don’t have to. Lan Wangji can fuck over thirty-three Lan elders and his reputation is still beautifully pristine because Lan Xichen is there to wipe his ass. Wei Wuxian can get tossed out of Cloud Recesses because he doesn’t need to build relations when Jiang Cheng is going to be sect leader. Nie Huaisang can be as frivolous and dandy as he wants under the wrathful but rain-proof wings of Nie Mingjue.)

((After that paragraph I’ve got to wonder if Jin Guangyao would’ve turned out different if he had an actual blood related elder brother that went “you can do what makes you happy, you don’t have to work to keep your family name, you’re a part of this family no matter what, it’s unconditional, even when I become sect leader. So you can stop doing all those shitty things to win father’s approval. He won’t approve of you but I will. I always will”. Wouldn’t that been something. Right, Zixuan?))

- more MDZS analysis under the “my thing” tag -

[randogirlo-fando]

Andante, Andante- 4/?

Summary-Keg King Billy Hargrove becomes infatuated with Mike and Nancy’s cousin who is staying with them over the summer.

Warnings- swearing, small makeout scene, mentions of sex, eventual smut

Word count-2.2k

“Okay so the way you play whoever is it asks someone truth or dare and you decide if you want to be asked a question or if you have to do whatever the person dares you to do. Then they give you a question or date and after you get to pick the next person.”

The whole gang is sitting in the circle while you explained to El the rules.

“And you have to answer or do it no matter what! If you chicken out the person picks something gross you have to do” max adds on, smiling.

“Who wants to start?” Dustin pulls your arm to sit between him and Lukas, looking quizzically at the rest of the circle.

“I will!” Mike says, a mischievous grin slapped onto his face while making eye contact with you.

“(Y/n), truth or dare?” You scoff and cross your arms.

“You know I don’t back down. Dare.”

“I dare you to go outside and catch a cricket.”

“Really? That’s it?”

“Oh come on, you used to be scared of those!”

“Yeah and you used to be scared of under your bed!” You stand up and go to the back yard, coming back with a cricket after a couple minutes.

“Done.” You look around the circle, eyes landing on Max.

“Maxi maxi maxi, truth or dare” The redhead pretends to think about it before smiling.

“Dare!”

“Max, do you need a ride home?” You ask as everyone else gets ready for a sleepover except for the girls.

“Oh it’s okay, I can walk.”

“I’m already taking El home and it’s dark, that was a rhetorical question.”

The boys said their goodbyes to the girls before you all three walk out to your car, they both hop in the back while you start the car. You pull out of the driveway pretty slowly, worried the usual neighbor would come zooming way too fast down the street.

“So who’s getting dropped off first?”

“I’m closer” Max says after giggling with El. You roll your eyes at the thought of Billy. He hasn’t called you back and it’s been a week, who does he think he is?

“Sounds good!” Max’s eyebrows furrow, making El look confused as well.

“Is something wrong sis?” Max and El(She started after Max explained what it meant) started calling you sis and you’ve pretty much taken them under your wing.

“Oh yeah, just peachy.” You turn on the turn signal and silence falls.

“See El, when someone talks with their voice sounding like that means something’s wrong.” El nods at Max as they both look at you, Max smirking. You roll your eyes with a huff.

“I just hope your brother isn’t home. It would be too hard not to punch him.” They laugh at you and you crack a smile.

“What did he do this time? Oh turn here.” You almost missed the turn, getting to caught up in the conversation about the certain bad boy.

“Thank you, that’s a story for another time.” You pull into her driveway only to see none other then that precious camaro.

“You know what Max, how about I walk you to the door and meet your mom? I’m sure she would like to know who’s been driving you home.” Max seems like she knows who you really wanna see. She nods and gets out waiting for you.

“El, stay in here okay sweetie?” She nods and you step out of your car.

You walk up to the door and Max opens it, putting her key on the tabletop. You walk in behind her, observing the living space.

“Mom, I’m home! Someone wants to meet you!” Instead of getting met with Mrs. Hargrove, the bathroom door opens to Billy. Towel tied to his lower waist, water droplets falling periodically all over his chest and back due to his hair dripping.

“She’s in her bedroo- oh hey Cherry.” He smirks as if nothing happened and steps closer to you. You ignore him, looking at Max.

“Clearly right now is a bad time, Max why don’t you give your mom the house number? Then she at least has it for when you’re over. I can meet her another time.” After handing her the little piece of paper with the 10 digit number on it she smiles and goes to give it to her mom, leaving you alone with the only person you don’t want to see.

“Why are you ignoring me Cherry?” You push past him to the door before he runs as fast as he can in a towel to block the door.

“Let me through, one of the kids are in the car I have to take them home.” You stand there, arms crossed, eyelids relaxed but eyes piercing through his head.

“Tell me why you’re mad and I’ll let you through.” He smirks and you catch yourself looking at his chest before shoving him into the door harshly.

“You better have a damn good excuse on why you’ve yet to call me.” He chuckles and lets you through.

“I’ve been at the pool everyday except for today. Also, I never call the week after.” You feel yourself turn red, heat radiating off your skin.

“Cool.” You leave the house before you can embarrass yourself.

“I’ll call you!” He yells from the door, you respond with flipping him off and he chuckles before closing the door.

El flinches when you slam open and close the door.

“Wanna move up front girly?” She nodded, still a little spooked.

“You’re scary.” El speaks up halfway through the drive.

“Im sorry for freaking you out with the door. Billy just really pissed me off.” A huff comes out of your nostrils and El looks at you questioningly. You notice the face she made and you sigh.

“Can you keep a secret? Just you and me no one else can know.” She nods and smiles.

“Billy and I went on a date because I thought he would get bored of me. We ended up having a nice time and I kissed him. He told me he would call me and he hasn’t.”

“But he said he would when we left?”

“He was being a prick.” She nods and looks out the window.

“Mike always calls. You need a Mike, not a Billy.”

“You know, for someone who learned most of her stuff within the last 2 years you’re really smart. Who do you think my ‘Mike’ is?” She hums in thought, getting you generally curious when you pull up to her house.

“Steve.” If you had a drink in here you would do a spit take, you almost choked on your own saliva.

“Wow Steve? Didn’t really expect that.”

“I mean, Dustin like likes you but I’ve learned recently that age is important in dating.” She giggles at your eyes bulging out of your face before her face drops.

“That’s a secret though so you can’t tell him I told you. Mike told me.” You both open the car doors and walk towards Hopper, who was waiting for you guys on the porch.

“What were you guys talking about in the car?”

“Steve and Dustin.” He sighs and ruffles his hair.

“Could be worse. Dinner is waiting for you.” El gives you a hug before running inside.

“(Y/n), is that girl going to be the death of me?” You smile and pat his shoulder.

“I’m not gonna lie to you, it will feel like that. But hey, if you think she’s gonna you can call me and I’ll scoop her up.”

“But you live with Mike.” He rubs his face with both hands and you chuckle.

“I mean where else would I take her? Honestly, my favorite part of them hanging out is getting to see everyone in the group help her learn and understand everything. It’s pretty sweet.” He smiles slightly at you before tipping his head as a thank you. You mirror his actions and head back to the car, ready to listen to some ABBA.

“Hey boys, who’s ready for a night long campaign!” You walk downstairs to see Steve and all the boys staring at you.

“Woah, who died?” Steve rolls his eyes and stands up.

“Why did Billy call for you? I thought it was a one time thing?” You roll your eyes before looking everyone else in the eyes, all of them with a look of disappointment or frustration.

“Wait a second, did you tell the boys? What the hell Harrington!” His brows furrow at that accusation, scoffing at your reaction.

“What was I supposed to say when I was here, waiting for you, and douche King calls saying you need to be ready tomorrow at 3? When he realized I answered I could hear the shit eating grin on his face!” Breathing out slowly, you lick your lips and look at the floor.

“Boys, can Steve and I have a word alone? There should be left over pizza in the fridge, you guys can have my ice cream too.” They look at each other and slowly walk up the stairs. You turn to see them consoling Dustin, you hasn’t been able to even look directly at you.

“You think I’m going on a second date with him just because he called? I won’t lie to you, the first date was actually pretty fun despite the part where he tormented you. So I told him he should give me a call this week and then he didn’t. I saw him today when dropping Max off and he acted like I shouldn’t have expected a call so I said cool and went to take El home. I don’t want anything to do with him anymore, at least o don’t think. Now please tell me why you’re even here, or answering the phone for that matter!” During your rant, you back him to a wall, poking his chest in anger.

“I’m here because I wanted to talk to you about something, but I guess that’s out the window since you possibly want the only dude I seriously despise and you should too! Mike asked me to answer it because he thought it would be El and he was busy doing something, so don’t get all bitchy with me!”

Looking down to see his chest heaving, you realize just how close you two are. The distance so close that you share your breath.

“You’re hot when you’re pissed for no reason.” That was the push you needed to crash your lips on his. The kiss was weirdly slow for how hard you started it. He took his time, his hands on your cheeks and yours in his hair and on his arm. His tongue touches your bottom lip lightly, asking for permission. You let him in, starting to feel weird about this. He tries to heat up a little more, keeping with the slow and soft tempo.You pull away, your foreheads touching.

“You know I hate being called bitchy. And being told I’m hot when I’m mad.” You whispered, making him smile.

“I know. I was being a prick, I’m sorry.” You pull away from him completely, wiping your mouth and looking at the floor.

“So uh-“

“I’m sorry, did that feel a little weird to you too?” He blurts out, scratching the back of his neck.

“Yeah, thank god you said it! It was so weird.” You smile at each other.

“I guess I always told myself you were the one that got away, but I guess it’s more like you’re my best friend that got away.”

“Totally! You know El told me I need to find a Mike and she told me you were my Mike. I think friendship slash dynamic duo fits us best.” You go to your suitcase to look for your shower stuff.

“I’m sorry but dynamic duo is for me a Dustin.”

“Speaking of Dustin, does he like me?” Before he can answer you the boys come busting through the door.

“The yelling stopped so we assumed it was safe now.” Lucas says, smiling. You look at Steve and he mouths later.

After your shower, you change into your pj romper and head downstairs for a snack. As you watch the stars from the kitchen table you see a head stick out from the window. You gasp and grab a knife ready to attack when you realize you know those pearly whites. Putting the knife down you roll your eyes and open the door as quietly as possible.

“Why are you here??” You whisper yell at him, hitting his shoulder.

“Well you never called back so I assumed you didn’t get the message because who wouldn’t call me back?” You roll your eyes and he just smiles.

“No I got the message. Thank you for the fuel in that fight with Steve by the way.”

“Ha yeah, didn’t expect him to answer but it was nice. Anyway come with me, I have a surprise.” You scoff and go to close the door before he blocks it with his foot.

“Please?” Giving in, you grab your sandals and leave with him.

“Did you walk here?” Realizing the Camaro is no where to be seen.

“I parked it down the road so it wouldn’t wake anyone in the house up. Nice pajamas by the way, they’re hot.” You huff and hug yourself.

“Let’s get on with this then”

A/n- y’all it’s been months so I understand if you guys are over this story now. I’m sorry.

TAGLIST

@dreamwavej

@keiko0

@starkerismysexuality

@xxemoluverxx

@savagesuccubus

@miskwaadesiwag

@phillyharleyquinn

@supermassiveblackhope

[xenosgirlvents]

the final tally

for some weird reason my purchased e-copy of psychic awakening: pariah could already be downloaded midday today, rather than saturday morning as it typically does (also, for most of the day, when hitting the download link for it, it downloaded ravenor: pariah instead, so i got that free out of this, weird).

i can now do something of a tally of how psychic awakening’s gone over all. to be blunt this isn’t a strong series, i don’t think anyone thinks this was handled particularly well, and narratively it’s an enormous step down in quality from vigilus. it also really wasn’t epic, since 3/4 of the books often dealt with meaningless, tensionless, conflicts with no resolution. off the top of my head the only books in the series which could, even a little, be called ‘story important’ would be: phoenix rising, ritual of the damned and pariah. saga of the beast doesn’t count because the actual plot important event there, ghazghkull’s humiliation and subsequent return, doesn’t even happen in the book, so it’s excluded.

anyway, of course, the more clear thing is; holy crap these books shit on xenos. i mean they shit on chaos too, but chaos gets out a little better. pariah is definitely the best handled of the xenos books, easily, because it at least understands for an enemy to be a threat they can’t JUST lose, so the very first fight of the book is a major necron victory. of course, from there, both follow-up battles are necron losses, one embarrassingly so because they only lose because szeras has now shown himself to be an eldrad-level idiot, but it’s better than blood of baal, the greater good or the absolutely fucking awful rise of the phoenix and saga of the beast.

so let’s look?

Phoenix Rising: Within this book Asuryani do some pointless border scuffles and win one fight against rando-Daemons (the favoured enemy of all Aeldari because Daemons are such universal chaff even Aeldari are allowed to beat them). Is second to the tied Ritual of the Damned, War of the Spider and Pariah for the clearest narrative. In the overarching narrative of the book the Ynnari discover their hope of the Seventh Path is crushed already, the efforts of all their greatest heroes can barely compete with a glamour of Shalaxi, and both Yvraine, and now again Kyganil in Pariah, declare Phoenix Rising to be a crushing, hopeless, defeat. Death Masque all over again, because GW doesn’t seem to think Aeldari can ever succeed at anything.

Faith and Fury: No Xenos. Focused on Chaos and Imperial forces, mostly the less important Space Marines, it showcased us three inconclusive battles and was a step-up from GW’s normal method of ‘Imperium wins everything’ by instead just going ‘nobody wins, it’s ongoing’. A naïve me might have hoped they’d stick to something like this so at least the non-Imperium factions don’t lose constantly, but I was stupid as always.

Blood of Baal: Followed Faith and Fury’s style of a warzone and three battles chosen from it. Of course these are Tyranids so they just lost two of the battles outright and the third was ongoing. Yay. Blood Angels, of course, lost nothing.

Ritual of the Damned: Very story driven, as was War of the Spider (skirmish of the Spider, seriously, war? It was a grand total of one battle and an ambush against like 50 dudes) and Pariah, Ritual of the Damned taught us that 200 Marines was all it took to lead a successful direct assault on the Thousand Sons’ stronghold, break right into their inner sanctum, kick their shit in, and successfully withdraw in good order. It was awful. 

The Greater Good: Faith and Fury part 2: Boogaloo. The Greater Good gave us a warzone, three factions, and had each of three battles end on an inconclusive ‘ongoing’. I guess Shadowsun is still a Xenos so now she isn’t even allowed to beat randos anymore, as she fails to successfully conquer an unknown, random, planet with no known characters on it.

Saga of the Beast: Six meaningless battles focused almost purely only on the Space Wolves’ perspectives with, in most, there not even being Orkish characters with names at all, it presented us a mix of stalemates and Space Wolf victories with the only Ork ‘victory’ being one battle where they teleported out of the battle before it could finish. Yay. Humiliatingly this is the best the Xenos do till Pariah.

Engine War: More focused, but lacking clear direction, this was a small, scant, book focused almost purely on rando Knights and Magi attacking a single fortress on a single Chaos Knight world. Technically the outcome is mixed, but it’s a closest to an outright win Chaos manage. The overarching Chaos scheme, a machine that could slingshot Warp Storms, is destroyed and foiled, but the Daemons released as a result do wipe out the Adeptus Mechanicus fleet entirely and send the remaining Imperials running from the planet, so they don’t hold it.

War of the Spider: Why does this even exist? Nothing happens in it? War of the Spider is a pointless, short, story in which Fabius has none of his more detailed or interesting characterization, in which Typhus is a cowardly idiot who loses one fight when he lets himself be ambushed by a warriors 9000 years younger than him and loses his second fight when he pisses himself at the sight of Custodes and abandons his entire honourguard. so veterans of the long war who’ve fought with him for millenia, to die as he runs away with his tail between his legs. The Death Guard lose. The Shriven lose. The Custodes technically win as they set out to destroy the Shriven and they do, and Fabius wins because his ‘win condition’ is basically just that he doesn’t die so by that metric he always wins. The battle, though, is of course won by the Imperium. Again. It’s also nonsensical. Where told the Shriven fleet could wipe out the Custodes fleet, but they land to kill them in a land battle. Then the Death Guard show up and destroy the Shriven easily, so by that metric their fleet should destroy the Custodes fleet easily too but...instead Typhus just runs away from them? Is he that scared of Custodes? What an absolute loser.

Pariah: Probably the most competently written of the books because it follows, like, literally the most basic of story telling conventions. We are introduced to a threat. The first engagement with the threat, Mesmoch, ends with the Imperium retreating in defeat. Then a second battle lead by Stern ends in victory. Then in a third battle a super-secret-special-awesome team of characters infiltrate to the Villain’s evil lair to steal a McGuffin and succeed in doing so. 

[when can we have a campaign where xenos just win? taros has now been invalidated, so when are we getting a campaign where xenos actually beat the imperium for once?]

Of Psychic Awakening the Imperium wins a whopping 9 (of these it should be noted Space Wolves and Blood Angels alone constitute more than half) battles. Asuryani come in 2nd place with 2. 2. Chaos gets 1-2 (debatably?), Necron get 1, Orks get 1 (debateable again) and that’s about it.

In terms of winning ‘campaigns’ as most of these are ongoing there aren’t too many of those. That being said the Imperium wins outright in both Ritual of the Damned and in War of the Spider.

Beyond that the only other people who can claim to have won ‘campaigns’ are Fabius Bile and Chaos Daemons, but it is a little more shaky. As I said Fabius does in War of the Spider ‘win’, because he escapes with his prize, but whether this should matter when he’s really not a military player is up for everyone to decide for themselves. Daemons are also possible because I’m pretty sure at the end of Engine War THEY don’t care that the Warp Storm machine is now destroyed, they just enjoyed wiping out the Mechanicus force attacking Ordex-Thaag, so I’d submit these two are the only other options for actual ‘wins’ in books.

To fucking no-one’s surprise Xenos don’t manage to win a single campaign. 

[caffeineivore]

Cheer up emo R/J

For @coppercrane2 specifically because she wanted this scene but also for whoever else wants it and needs some R/J cheer up emo.

**

If JFK is a post-apocalyptic wasteland where manners and dreams went to die, LAX is simply a clusterfuck. Raven Fletcher isn’t stupid enough to mean-mug the smarmy-looking TSA agent at the end of the line, not exactly, but the smile in place on her face is about as gruesome as Heath Ledger’s Joker. She had the whole system down pat by now-- plastic bag of toiletries, no belt, no hat, no jacket, no sunglasses, shoes that could easily be slipped off and on, no electronics and items in the pockets-- but the whole process is a drag, anyway. And of course, they still always gave her crap, and this time is no exception.

“What were you doing in LA?”

“Meeting up with some clients in the industry, catching up, making plans for New York Fashion Week.”

 “So you live in New York, then?”

“Yeah. I thought it says so on my license.” And moreover, she certainly didn’t sound like a Californian, now did she? 

The TSA agent gives her a warning look; her sass is clearly not appreciated, and undoubtedly he’d use it as an excuse to make her suffer in the next five to ten minutes and probably go through every last bit of her bags, down to counting how many tampons she stashed in and probably testing her makeup wipes to ensure that nothing was radioactive. Raven bites her tongue and tries not to roll her eyes as he beckons over a female officer to pat her down even as he paws through all her belongings. He shakes out a Dior dress that’s tucked into her garment bag that’s likely worth more than the X-ray machine that the bag just passed through, and Raven wants to ask that he change his damn gloves first, but at this rate, if he goes any slower, she’d miss her connection. Sunny weather or not, she’d be damned if she got stuck in LA for another day.

Finally, the ordeal comes to an end, which leaves her roughly half an hour to get from one end of the airport to the other on four-inch Louboutins. Raven has no problem with mowing through crowds-- sharp elbows and the aggressive New Yorker walk does wonders-- but to have to do so just to get to her gate in time is aggravating when it was certainly not her fault that the security check took so long. She certainly couldn’t just crumple up the damned Dior and stuff it back into the garment bag-- she had a client dinner right after getting back in town, and on no planet did Raven Fletcher appear at such events anything less than perfectly dressed and groomed. 

There’s the moving walkway up ahead, and she strides on, a woman on a mission, long legs eating up the length of the conveyor. Raven is a petite woman, five-foot-four before the stiletto heels and too short for the modeling work that she immerses herself in dealing with on a daily basis, but she’s leggy, and can walk, jog and possibly do step aerobics in heels with the best of them. She steps off at the end of the moving walkway, leading with her shoulders, and smacks painfully into a solid male chest.

“I’m so sorry. Are you all right, miss?” A pair of big hands wrap around her elbows and pull her up, and had she landed any harder, she probably would have broken a thousand-dollar heel, and perhaps an ankle. Raven looks up from legs clad in casual gray chinos to a torso in blue tweed, with brown elbow patches, up into an almost-unforgivably handsome face, all golden California tan and tousled, sun-bleached blond hair, wearing horn-rimmed glasses over his baby blues. And... headphones. Of course. Because it would certainly be too much to ask for a man to be too perfect, so this particular specimen had to be moseying through the airport deaf to his surroundings like an oblivious moron.

“I would be better if you were watching where you were going, but forget about it.” She bypasses the hand he holds out to help her up, and snags both her garment bag and her briefcase. Her ankle gives her a twinge as she stands up, but she stalks off without a backward glance. If she hurried, she’d have just enough time to pop into the Starbucks by her gate for a quad venti iced macchiato to wash down the Excedrin before getting on the plane. 

The boarding process, after she reaches her gate, and where someone else might have passed their time sleeping or watching a movie or two on the five-hour flight, Raven opens her briefcase after the plane reaches cruising altitude to organize her files for the upcoming client dinner. Not that there is much to do, really, because Morgan Austen, even at age seventeen, didn’t exactly require much of an introduction. Blonde and willowy and charming and self-assured, the girl’s celebrity background might have gotten her in the door, but she’d certainly lived up to all the hype. Only too often were the celebrity actor-model types unforgivably uppity and spoiled, and while a small, petty part of Raven enjoyed putting them in their place as needed, it always came as a pleasant surprise when someone didn’t have to get told off for their own good. 

Her heart gives a pitter-patter, though, when she reaches inside the bag and feels, underneath her manicured fingertips, a bunch of manila folders rather than the sleek leather portfolio that should be contained in that compartment. Cautiously, she draws out the papers, then only barely manages to avoid swearing loudly and noticeably in the airplane cabin. 

“You’ve got to be freaking kidding me. This is a joke. A really bad joke.”

In place of the carefully-curated and prepped collection of headshots and polaroids of Morgan Austen is a collection of lab reports, all with the header of ‘153BH, UCLA/Huntley’. Raven has exactly zero interest in the subject of Nucleotide Metabolism, and the worst part about it is the fact that she has a whole three and a half hours before the plane lands and she can even get on her phone to do something about this mishap. 

It’s the longest three and a half hours of her life, feels like, and she pulls out her cell phone almost before the flight attendants turn off the seatbelt sign, calls the agency to postpone the dinner with the rep from Michael Kors.

“Yeah, there’s been a problem with my bag. Stupid LAX. Can you just... tell them my flight was delayed, or something? They’ll be a-o-fucking-kay because they’re getting Morgan Austen to walk their damn show in a month and it’ll be the biggest thing to happen to them since dude designed Michelle Obama’s official portrait dress. Thanks, Luna. You’re a whole bag of organic non-GMO peaches. And... someone’s calling, and it’s a 310 area code, so I’m going to let you go.”

She recognizes the area code as Los Angeles, of course, and expects that it’s some minion from some customer service desk in LAX reporting that they’d found her bag, but the voice which comes through is male and sounds oddly familiar, with that faint Calfornian drawl. “Am I speaking to Ms. Raven Fletcher?”

“Yeah. Who’s this?”

“My name is Jude Huntley, and we bumped into each other at the airport? I seem to have your work bag rather than mine.” The tone is summery-smooth and apologetic, the cadence quick yet lacking the almost-harsh briskness of Manhattan. “It’s entirely my fault, and I’m going to get your bag back to you, but could you tell me where you’d like to pick it up?”

“Well, if you can’t tell, I’m kinda on the opposite coast to you now, buddy. Elite Models, New York, New York. We’re on 5th Avenue.” He doesn’t seem at all fazed by her slightly snotty tone, which takes the wind out of her sails, just a little. “Look, pal, if you want to send off my bag to New York, that’d be great. I can do the same with yours. UCLA, right? At least it’s summertime. Hopefully school’s out for you. Shitty time for me to lose my bag because summer’s prime time for campaigns, but it’s not like my stuff can just magically appear overnight.” All around her, people are rising up from their seats, and Raven scowls at nothing in particular. “I gotta get off the plane. Look, since you clearly got my number from my card, you can get the address, too. I’ll get your bag back to you as soon as I can.” 

She hangs up, and seethes from the gate all the way to the taxi stand and then all the way to her apartment, before kicking off the heels and unapologetically ordering pizza delivery, to be consumed with wine while soaking in the tub. After the day she’d had, it was the least she deserved.

**

Raven arrives at the agency at eight o’clock sharp the next morning, with the briefcase-that-is-not-hers in one hand, a giant to-go cup of coffee in the other, and spends the first hour of her day making a phone call to the reps at Michael Kors to explain her bag mishap and reschedule the dinner meeting. Thankfully, Morgan Austen’s name is enough to negate any wrath which might have been incurred at the inconvenience, and, crisis averted, she’s just about ready to schedule a conference call-- with a talent scout out in BFE, Cornfields, Small-town USA somewhere-or-another-- when her assistant Phoebe knocks on the door. The diminuitive brunette has a peculiar look in her beady eyes.

“Someone’s here to see you. No appointment. Great face but I doubt he’s a model, unless he’s doing some sort of ad for Geek Chic. Says his name is Jude. Do you know a Jude? I didn’t think you knew a Jude, though this guy’s sort of got the hot younger Jude Law thing going on so...”

Raven’s eyebrows shoot up to her hairline. She’s only made the acquaintance of one individual by that name, and certainly Phoebe is wrong. There is no freaking way that the man from the airport in Los Angeles was actually in New York at this very second. She waves in a vague manner at Phoebe, who takes it as assent to let him in, and then her jaw drops. It’s the man from the airport, all right. Still wearing his tweed jacket and his horn-rimmed glasses, but now sporting dark-blond five-o’clock shadow like gold dust smudged against his chiseled jaw and deep shadows under those blue eyes. But his lips quirk into a smile when he sees her, and he holds out her bag, like an olive branch.

“You asked for it to be overnighted, didn’t you? I took the red-eye over.”

“But--- but---why?” Flying a red-eye from coast to coast is the worst, and doing so on standby just seemed like her own idea of Hell on Earth. “You could’ve just dropped it off at a FedEx. I...” She had barely been civil to him on the phone, and definitely was on the wrong side of rude when they’d bumped into each other at the airport. Under no circumstance could Raven see a reason for a man-- especially one who looked as though he had a job and a life well on the other side of the country-- to drop everything just to bring her her bag back in person. 

But rather than give her a hard time, the man named Jude smiles, and it’s a great smile, with a dimple in both cheeks and in the chin. Geek chic indeed... “Well, I need those lab reports back, too. Summer class. I have a commitment to my students to get it back to them by Friday, and they’re kind of time consuming to grade. Call it an impulse, I guess.” He’s still holding out her bag, and this time she takes it, and belatedly hands him his own. “Anyway, let’s start over again. My name is Jude Huntley, and I’m an assistant professor at UCLA’s Chemistry department.”

“Raven Fletcher. I’m an agent here at Elite Models. Nice to meet you.” Two almost-identical bags switch hands, just before his fingers close around hers, and the touch is warm and sharp with the brush of static electricity. Raven’s fairly sure that her spine is, metaphorically speaking, stainless steel. And yet a shiver works its way up and down as he holds on for just a moment too long, and a decidedly unfamiliar warmth creeps up into her cheeks as he smiles at her again. 

“The pleasure is definitely all mine.”

[itsbenedict]

Kingdoms and Koopas: Ep. 3

K&K is a Fate Accelerated campaign set in the Mario universe, which I’m running for three players:

Bee @thebeeskneesocks​, playing Kandace Koopa

Jovian @jovian12​, playing Cozmo Naut

Malky @sleepdepravity​, playing Dr. Chevy Chain

Last time | Archive | Next time

Previously on Kingdoms and Koopas: the party disturbed the restless dead, including Kandace’s gym coach, and managed to retrieve the Music Key from the Heart of Darkness. Then they tried teleporting out, and found themselves... out, but surrounded by hostile Koopalings. Whoops! They should probably do something about that.

(pictured: maps! of the Koopa Kingdom capital, Bowserburg Shellington New Bowseria Whatever It’s Called Today. above, and below.)

So, to recap their predicament in a little more detail, their teleport took them to the cloud of a Lakitu, who, upon suffering the effects of the Vacuum Shroom toxin they teleported into his cloud, proclaimed himself “the Storm God” and began terrorizing his fellow students. At least, until Kandace cast a spell to make them heavy and sink down into the fountain below, where it all got washed out and they all return to normal.

To normal, except they’re in this big indoor courtyard foyer thing, and they’re surrounded by five of the seven Koopalings. And... see, the Koopalings attend Kam Ekademy, the school across the street from Kammy Koopa’s Academy For Young Witches and Wizards. These two schools... have something of a rivalry. And a rivalry between two magic schools populated by irresponsible troublemakers... it’s more of a prank war type of deal. And wouldn’t you know it- the party contains a Kammy’s student!

Chevy, as usual, attempts to just roll the fuck outta there, but, uh... well, Kamek’s school uniforms are blue, and Kammy’s school uniforms are purple. And Chevy is purple, and seemingly with Kandace, and so the Koopalings jump to conclusions. “The Skammies are trying to escape!” Lemmy yells.

So... Roy is the first to act, firing a cannonball at Chevy. The way the rolls go, though... I guess Roy’s cannon is no match for a charging chain chomp, and it glances right off. Morton tries to stop her, too, and manages a little better- they tie, and Chevy manages to shove him to the doorway but not out. Cozmo tries to follow Chevy’s lead, doing the standard-issue X-Naut bum-rush. Lemmy tries to roll over to block him, but again the rolls are not in his favor, and Cozmo just knocks the ball out from under him and charges past. Kandace also attempts to flee, and also shout taunts at the Koopalings, but Ludwig grabs at her broom. And... just gets a handful of bristles as she speeds away. Larry tries shooting spells at them from the second-floor railing, but misses.

So as they get out the front door of Kam Ekademy, they’re attacked from behind as Wendy O. throws a ring at them from the balcony above the door. She also misses, though, and Kandace fires back with her heaviness spell, targeted at Wendy O.’s bow- causing her to lose her balance and fall off the balcony. The lot of them proceed down the front path... only to be blocked by Iggy, the final obstacle! Who... also misses, and knocks some of the pursuing Koopalings back a bit with the stray blast. They breeze right past him.

As they leave by the front gate (which the Koopalings aren’t allowed to pass out through, as school is in session), a “psst” gets their attention. Kandace recognizes the source of the voice as that shifty junk dealer that tries to sell useless crap to the kids at Kammy’s at a huge markup- looks like he also hangs around by the Ekademy.

Cozmo does not recognize that this brown Shy Guy in a trenchcoat, wearing an enormous fake mustache, is actually his boss, Shady Guy.

Chevy, with no patience for this, takes off for the hospital, but Cozmo and Kandace check out Shady Guy’s Deals Guy’s wares. There’s some weird yellow mushrooms, green dried shrooms, some weird little metal thing that he calls a “good’un” (or “G’un”), a ratty old umbrellla, and... ooh, a collapsible stunt bike!

Before buying anything, though, Kandace gets suspicious, and tears off Deals Guy’s mustache- revealing that it was, in fact, Shady Guy all along! Shady Guy tries to snatch it back, but fails- and Kandace ransoms it back in exchange for the bike. Hooray for robbery! Good thing there’s no way Shady Guy would ever go to the police about this. Cozmo gets the bike, and excitedly heads home.

Kandace returns to Kammy’s, Music Key in hand. On the way, though, she encounters... the hooded figure with the pink beak. It gestures for her to hand over the Music Key, but Kandace is suspicious. She instead insists that it escort her to Kammy personally, at which it balks, but ultimately agrees. Or, pretends to- as they’re almost there, it attempts to snatch the Music Key but fails. (Kandace cast a spell that creates a protective but freezing-cold ice bubble, before it could get her.) Kandace, vindicated in her suspicions, hamster-ball-rolls into the school and heads to Kammy’s office.

Kammy, for her part, seems surprised and slightly distressed that Kandace has returned with the Key successfully, and that it wasn’t somehow stolen from her. Odd, that. She weasels out of her promise to hand over a magic item from her treasure vault- modifying clarifying the terms of the deal such that, okay, it’s one magic item per orb for whoever turns it in, so four total- but they’re only handed out once all the Music Keys have been collected. So... Kandace better get back to work finding the rest!

Kandace isn’t happy about this, but whatever- she’s guaranteed at least one, as long as Kammy gets all the Music Keys, so if she can find the rest, cool beans.

And... cut to black, because we’re moving to the next day. Cozmo has decided to take his new collapsible stunt bike out for a spin at Plumber’s Folly, one of those incredibly deadly natural obstacle courses that occur in this neck of the woods. Kind of a companion to The Part That’s Supposed To Stop Mario But Doesn’t. Anyway, uh... Cozmo finds out the hard way that the collapsible bike “purchased” from Deals Guy has the emphasis on “collapsible”. It breaks underneath him and sends him flying into a lake of lava, causing his lives to go down from 3 to 2 and landing him with severe injuries back on shore.

He’s found by Party Guy, his direct superior at the talent agency. Shady Guy owns Shady Guy’s Talent Agency, but doesn’t do much management- that end of things is left to this clown. This literal clown, a guy who’s attended every Mario Party and knows how to have a good time. He takes Cozmo back up the hill to the talent agency, but Shady Guy calls him inside to deal with something urgent, and he leaves Cozmo on the ground after calling Kandace to come pick him up.

Kandace finds her way down past the Koopa Katacombs (think the ones in Paris, except it’s just sort of an underground apartment district for Dry Bones), and the Cavern of Gratuitous Spiky Peril, which she’s able to just ride her broom over. She picks up Cozmo and takes him to the hospital, where Chevy reluctantly patches him up again. 

...Oh, while they’re in the waiting room there, Kandace and Cozmo overhear- from a heavily-injured superhero wannabe Pokey named Pokey Man, who works for Shady Guy’s Talent Agency- that the boss was seen carrying a shiny orb into Plumber’s Folly. Weird!

Anyway, Chevy decides that she needs to see Cozmo’s place of work, and find out what conditions are like there. There has to be some reason this guy keeps getting horribly injured! So... they decide to take what should be a shortcut, since the Cavern of Gratuitously Spiky Peril is harder to navigate with three to a broom. They take the underground below the hospital, and find... one small tunnel, and one big tunnel. The big tunnel has a broken bridge, though, so they can’t go that way at this point in the plot. They take the small tunnel...

...Which suffers a cave-in, due to the fact that I came up with it just then as a way for them to bypass certain obstacles I hadn’t finished setting up on the real path. So they won’t be using that one again. But they escape the cave-in, by running really fast in a panic, and arrive at the big cavern where Shady Guy’s Talent Agency is situated.

Cozmo decides to take them on a tour! Weirdly, the receptionist, Goomfried, is absent- but there’s a lot of noise coming from the dance room. They go check that out, and find... well, as usual, a particular couple new recruits are there. This guy Mike, some kind of robot, is DJing, and Jamie Thang is cutting a rug like there’s no tomorrow. Or, well- there’s no rug, it’s one of those light-up colored grid floor things, but you get the idea.

Also in the room is Party Guy, talking to... incredibly famous Mushroom Kingdom actor/director Zip Toad! Apparently the talent agency finally has an actual client! Zip Toad, who we decide sounds like Tommy Wiseau (because Party Guy and Cozmo are already sharing the surfer dude/stoner type accent), is looking for stunt talent for his new film. Cozmo’s eager to show off, so Zip Toad, Party Guy, and the party head off to Plumber’s Folly for Cozmo to show off.

Cozmo makes two rolls, here. One roll is with +Flashy, to see how totally sick his stunting is. The other roll is +Careful, to see whether he sticks the landing and doesn’t wipe out on the Plumber’s Folly hazards.

Cozmo’s Flashy is +3. His Careful is +0. The outcomes of these rolls are exactly as you might predict.

So, Chevy has unraveled the mystery of why Cozmo is getting injured so often. It’s because he goes out of his way to do the most dangerous possible things, all the time! Wow! The case is closed. She goes down to try and peel Cozmo off the spike wall he impaled himself on, while Kandace...

Kandace has that magical ability to sort of sense the direction of nearby Music Keys, and... huh! Seems like there’s one down, down deep in Plumber’s Folly! Weird. So, of course, she heads right inside, heedless of the dangers. And then... oh, boy. Oh, boy, the dangers. A wall of rock cuts her off from the others, and then more walls of rock erupt from the ground and knock everyone else off their feet! The party and company begin to tumble down into the depths of World 9-5. Next time: we’ll see how well the party manages doing plumber’s work!

Last time | Archive | Next time

[legrandepapillon]

A Walk On The Wild Side (thomas & john, washette)

Summary: He shouldn’t be here. He didn’t belong here. But he was. Prompt: Prison AU Author’s Notes: I’ve always wanted to write a prison AU, but never fully committed the idea to get enough of it finished, so here’s my (self-indulgent, washette filled) prison drabble.

If someone had told Thomas Jefferson two months ago that he would be sitting in the Attica Correctional Facility in an blue and white uniform, he would’ve laughed in their face and went on about how his brand new Givenchy sunglasses cost more than their yearly living wage. And yet, here he was, sitting on the hard mattress of his bunk and trying to stifle back tears. Though he wanted to say he didn’t know how he had wound up here, he would be lying if he did. He knew exactly how he’d wound up in the penal system, and he knew the only way out, too.

Thomas’ father, Peter Jefferson, was the Warden of Rikers’ Island. He’d been trying desperately to move into better politics however, politics that didn’t involve the tarnishing of his name by most of his associates being convicts. Peter had been trying all sorts of new gimmicks and campaigns in order to separate himself from the title of ‘warden’, and that had included nearly isolating his name from that of his half-black son.

Jane Randolph was not only black, but also the sister of Peter’s political rival. With a monthly child support payment of nearly half a million dollars, Peter had bought his son’s mother’s silence. However, Thomas hadn’t been willing to settle for that. He had grown up his entire life being claimed as his father’s son—albeit far away from New York City, in sunny Shadwell, Virginia—and now he was being treat as a dirty little secret? What kind of shit is that?

So he’d done it. Sold his story to a rival politician’s endorsed newsletter, spilling all the dirty secrets about his parents’ marriage, life and his true parentage. And they’d ate it up.

A week later, he’d wound up in prison on charges of possession with intent to distribute. He’d had less than a gram of pot with him—but since he’d been the owner of the vehicle, had been passing the blunt between his friends who were riding with him, and had been caught with a DUI before, there had been no leniency. Though, the young man knew the real reason the Judge threw the book at him. It was the same reason that very Judge had bounced him on his lap as a kid and bought him brand new coloring books.

He knew and had ties with Peter Jefferson.

Thomas knows all of this, and still… he stares at the cell around him with contempt. With fury. He shouldn’t be here. All he’d wanted was for his father to give him the same attention he gave his white family’s kids. The same love, and support, and nourishing. He hadn’t done anything too offensive, hadn’t committed some awful violent crime. He wasn’t a thief, or a pedophile, or a murderer. But here he was. With the sleaziest and grimiest that lovely New York had to offer.

“Hey, kid. Lighten the fuck up will you? You’re making my book all sad with your moping,” a voice says, and the voice is strong enough to snap the young inmate from his distant trance. Thomas looks up from where he’d been glaring burning holes into the bars of the cell in efforts to melt them away, looks over to where the man had spoken from—viciously wiping the tears he hadn’t known had fallen from the wells of his eyes.

“Don’t be an asshole,” he snaps back at the man, though his voice shakes and lacks the courage he’d tried to muster. Its now that Thomas sees that there are three other men in the room with him—not just one, which was what he’d expected. Had he been so caught up in his fathers betrayal that he’d had completely missed not one, but three presences surrounding him. The man that had been speaking is on the bottom bunk across from him, but there’s another man there with him… on the side closest to the wall, at first seemingly sleeping. The other man looks up briefly, and Thomas catches a flash of inquisitiveness on his face before he goes back to seemingly cuddling against the bigger man.

A fleeting thought of, ‘That’s his bitch. That could happen to me’, passes through Thomas’ mind, but he pushes that thought out of his mind.

“I’m not trying to be, but you see—my roommates and I don’t really fancy mopy little boys with too hot of a head and too short of a temper. And you look like exactly the type,” the man is completely disengaged from his book now, and the look of fury on his face frightens Thomas for the smallest of moments. He wonders now if he has to ‘prove’ himself, if now he’ll be beaten to nothing but a puddle for the slightest of offenses. He takes a deep breath, gathers his courage, and is about to retort when he’s interrupted.

“Lay off him George—” another man, the man above him, starts before Thomas can shoot back. Jeffersons’ bunk is briefly blocked by long legs slipping from the bunk above him and then a freckled face leaning down into his. He instinctively leans back, eyes widening with a bit of surprise and a bit of fright. But then the other man's hazel eyes soften, and he offers a half-cocked smile. Thomas can’t help but smile back, which earns a nod of approval.. “—he ain’t gonna be no trouble. I know it.”

“Oh, and why do you propose that, John?” ‘George’ asks, sitting up now—propping himself on his arm. Thomas watches the strain of veins against his muscles, swallows thickly. Still fears that he may be nothing but a bruised mess seconds from now… but also refusing to allow that fear to control him.

The man lying with him groans in what seems like a great annoyance, before rolling over his ‘cuddle buddy’ and slipping from the bunk. Now that he’s standing, Thomas can see him wearing a form of makeshift makeup on his eyelids and lips, and his nails are painted. His prison uniform has been altered greatly—so that the deep navy jumpsuit arms are wrapped around his waist, and the white undershirt torn into a crop top. There’s a glimpse of sturdy, gorgeous caramel abs before the man turns his back. Thomas shudders with both fear, a tiny bit of disgust. ‘Oh, that’s definitely his bitch.’

“Does it matter whether or not he’s gonna be trouble, kids?” the man in the Penitentiary Crop-Top asks, stretching again as though he’s just woken from the longest sleep of his life and going over to the toilet. Thomas is a bit taken aback when he doesn’t sit to pee, instead leading on the wall while he goes. He had thought bitches in prison were supposed to be far more submissive than that, but the act just screams masculinity.  “He’ll be moved soon. You know they don’t put newbies with George. Not after what happened to poor little Seabury.”

“What happened to Seabury?” Thomas finds himself asking nervously, wringing his hands before he can stop the motion from happening. He looks to the man leaning above his bunk, feels like a little kid looking to a mother for comfort. Was the other man George’s bitch for a reason? Was this George—who actually looked a little unassuming, though far bigger than the bunk allowed, he seemed like the type of man you find in a CEO office somewhere—actually some sort of behemoth, that had a habit of bashing in the faces of newbies?

“Oh, nothin’,” the man assures though, clapping Thomas’ shoulder goodnaturedly. The knot that had been forming in his stomach untwists itself, and Thomas relaxes against the hard prison-issue mattress. “Our buddy likes to make a point sometimes.” John says these words, but its painfully obvious he’s hiding details from him—to spare him, most likely. The knot starts to twist again.

The ‘bitch’ begins returning to his spot on the bottom bunk—much to the grumbling protests of his… what, lover? Boyfriend? That seemed too juvenile for this situation, too sweet and romantic for what this really was. “Yeah, and use my ass to do it. He was so rough, I couldn’t sit straight for weeks. Like, babe, I wasn’t the one to call me a faggot, why did I have to suffer? Anyways, we tell them not to place us with the homophobes but do COs actually listen to anything anyone says? Of course not. God, I miss our Lexi.”

Thomas shudders in horror, too caught up in the young man's previous words to really think too much about who this ‘Lexi’ might be. His own ass was starting to hurt at the thought of being brutally raped by this big guy that seemed to enjoy being rough on his lovers. The kid seemed alright with it, but that wasn’t gonna stop Thomas’ assumptions and imagination from conjuring up the worse situation. “I’m not gonna be your bitch like him, if that’s what your assuming, George. You might wanna look elsewhere to terrorize your fuckin’ newbies.”

John gives a boisterous laugh at that, pulling away from Thomas’ bunk to lean on his own and laugh. The other kid at first seems offended by Thomas’ words, but then he too starts to giggle on the look of pure annoyance that comes over George’s face. Thomas can’t see what is funny—and at first, thinks they’re laughing at him. His arms cross defiantly over his chest, and he tries to set his face in a way that one might assume he was not-to-be-fucked-with. Judging by the growing volume of the laughter, he is doing a miserable job.

“What?! Dude!” John exclaims, when his laughter has subsided enough to form words. “No, Laf ain’t George’s bitch, or nothin’ like that. You couldn’t control that idiot if you put a leash on him, and he’s got a thing for collars.”

“Hey!” Laf squeaks indignantly, still giggling to himself. George has started to smile now, though its more at his apparent affection for the younger man beside. “I told you that in confidence!”

“No, it’s not like that at all. Lafayette is just gayer than a goddamn unicorn shittin’ rainbows. They were together on the outside, before the Penn. Plus, George has a known affinity for the cute li’l twinks. Don’t ya, Washy?”

“Shut your fuckin’ mouth, John,” George snarls, fixing his face into annoyance once he realizes the attention is back on him now. He wraps an arm around Laf’s shoulders, bringing him closer. He seems… hurt, almost. At the idea that he was some evil rapist that was keeping Lafayette with him through intimidation. For a moment, Thomas feels bad—wants to apologize for assuming. Now that he pushes his own thoughts from his mind, he realizes that the natural way they seem to coexist together is almost… cute. Lafayette leans into George’s large figure, places his hand on his chest in order to soothe him. And he even makes a point of looking over at Thomas and giving George a quick, cute, messy kiss—though the action is done in teasing.

“Yeah, John. You know I’m touchy ‘bout my man. Don’t get your new li’l friend shanked in the showers,” Laf teases, though he giggles so Thomas assumes the threat is a fleeting suggestion at best. He cracks a smile, and the other man notices it. “By God, he smiles! He’s not the defensive piece of shit we thought he was! Babe, you owe me like… eight honey buns.”

“Goddamn you and your sweet tooth,” George hisses, slapping Lafayette’s ass affectionately and shoving him to the side. Laf responds by blowing him a kiss and picking up his CD player from the floor, popping one headphone in. “Guess there goes my book. Now that you three seem to be all chatty, wanna give us your story, kid?”

Thomas stops. He’d heard a rumor from his cousin that you’re not supposed to talk about what you’re in for when you’re in prison. However, now that the other men had opened up—and he realized that as long as he wasn’t a homophobic, hotheaded prick, he would be fine with them—he felt that he owed them the same in a sense.

“Possession,” he decides to say, avoiding the others eyes. He purposefully omits most of the story, not wanting to give away too much. Not wanting them to know the humiliation that burned in his face when they put those handcuffs on wrists, knowing exactly what kind of high class person he was. He was around them now, and he couldn’t afford to be seen as a rich sissy boy. “A bit of pot. They gave me six years.”

John frowns, seems confused. There’s obviously a piqued interest, but Thomas doesn’t know if he wants John to ask the questions that settle on his mind or not. “Six years? For some weed? That sounds a little… harsh, don’t ya think? You’re a first time offender, you’ve gotta be. Should’ve just been some probation.”

“Well, it wasn’t. Can we move on?” Thomas asks, and much to his surprise, John reluctantly obliges. He’s left with no choice, as the air fills with a sharp whistle and the other two in the cell begin getting up. Lafayette groans, says something to George that makes the other man laugh. John jumps down and slips into his shoes.

“Chow time,” John says slowly, almost as if he’s gauging Thomas’ reaction. “You’ve been sitting on your own lately, but there’s a spot at our table… if you’d like.”

Thomas looks up at the face of Lafayette, who is giving all of his attention to George. Looks to George, who’s barely paying him or John any mind—too much busy listening to whatever enthralling story Lafayette. Finally, he looks up at John and gives a small smile.

“Sure. I’d like to.”

And John smiles back.

[gyrlversion]

Charmin Made A Giant “Forever Roll” For Millennial Poops. Its Incredible.

Kate Bubacz / BuzzFeed News; prop styling: Shawn O’Connor

Archimedes, the ancient Greek scientist, was taking a bath when he had his eureka! moment, discovering a physics principle using water displacement to measure density. Rob Reinerman, lead of the innovation team at Procter & Gamble, was taking a dump when genius struck, leading to the creation of Charmin’s Forever Roll, a massive roll of toilet paper for millennial asses.

Reinerman, a 14-year veteran of P&G, had been pulled off his job as brand manager of Bounty paper towels and assigned to lead a newly formed innovation team within the toilet paper division. Along with his partner Kevin Mitchell, the bigwigs had tasked them with a singular purpose. “Never run out of toilet paper is the mission,” Reinerman said.

“I was at home, I think on a weekend. I was finishing up my business and faced the age-old question of whether to replace the roll or leave that last square for the next person,” Reinerman told BuzzFeed News. Ultimately, he knew the next person to use the bathroom would be his wife, who would be annoyed to find a nearly kicked roll.

But the germ of an idea was planted: What if they made a toilet paper roll that was…UNIMAGINABLY HUGE.

Kate Bubacz / BuzzFeed News

The Forever Roll is 12 inches in diameter and is equivalent to 24 rolls of regular-size Charmin Ultra Soft.

Charmin pinched off its Forever Roll to consumers in April. It’s basically one of those industrial-size rolls you’d find at a rest stop, but so very soft. A few weeks ago, the Forever Roll caught a second wave of internet buzz when it was mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article about new household products designed for adults who live alone. Reinerman crowed at the time about how it alleviates the storage problem for urban apartment dwellers (a bigger roll means less TP to store under the sink) and how the huge rolls can last a single person up to two months.

The response online was divided. Some thought this was a sad indicator of the state of the millennials: delaying marriage and children, unable to buy homes with ample bathroom storage like their parents, stuck in tiny apartments with nowhere to stuff extra rolls of toilet paper, and suffering from such burnout that the simple task of remembering to buy toilet paper once a week was too hard. Also, it’s a giant roll of paper for going doody, which is inherently funny.

sorry im late to this but imagine being single and having a date over to your house for the first time and then they walk into your bathroom and see a rock of Gibraltar-sized roll of toilet paper next to the shitter

08:23 PM – 04 Jun 2019

Dear @Charmin please consider sponsoring me because the “forever” roll is the only thing I will be talking about with friends, family and strangers for the next forever (About 1 month) I accept merchandise, Venmo and Cash app or hell I’d take a check.

09:01 PM – 21 Jun 2019

Webster’s dictionary defines “forever” as “a limitless time.” Charmin defines it as about one month, possibly two if you’re single, which is how long a single Forever Roll — 12 inches in diameter and equivalent to 24 rolls — will last you. Due to the girth and heft of the roll, it won’t fit standard toilet paper roll holders, so they created special freestanding and adhesive wall holders (for millennials who will never own a home and can’t drill into their landlord’s walls). A starter kit of three rolls and a stand costs $30, and a single roll is $10.

The (tiny) TP-in-a-roll format that we know now was popularized around 1890 by the Scott Paper Company — lots of people were wiping with the Sears Roebuck catalog before that. The Hoberg Paper Company of Green Bay, Wisconsin, launched the Charmin brand in 1928 and soon offered the classic four-pack.

For the next few decades, the physical form of the roll didn’t change much. It took until 1994 for Charmin to make the double roll. They then created a “Mega Roll,” equivalent to four rolls.

Yet aside from tweaks to texture, prints, or even scents (Angel Soft has two new scented core options), the general shape and concept of toilet paper for home use hasn’t changed in our lifetime. The biggest development of late has been wet wipes — including varieties targeted at men: Dude Wipes, Dollar Shave Club’s One Wipe Charlies, or Mangroomer’s Biz Wipes in “Executive scent” — and that’s not going well. Because wipes don’t break down as well as regular TP, they create massive, clogging “fatbergs” in sewer systems.

What happened to the American spirit of ingenuity? We put a man on the moon, and we still use basically the same dinky TP rolls as president Taft. Sure, we brought giant-size rolls to public restrooms, but that industrial stuff is thin, rough, hole-ripping. An ass war crime. Only a stone-cold psychopath would consider bringing home that giant wheel of rough paper, encased in a rugged dispenser to protect it from thieves. Why had no one, in over 100 years, thought, Hey, what if we made a GIGUNDOUS roll of soft toilet paper?

No wonder the feedback on the Forever Roll on Charmin’s site so far has been disproportionately positive: 4.7 stars out of 5 from more than 2,800 reviewers. They compared the magnitude of the invention to sliced bread (!), touted the roll as successful Father’s Day and birthday gifts (?), and remarked on how smoothly it glides on the Forever Roll stand. Of the complaints that were filed, a large share revolved around the roll not lasting long enough: “This thing just screams ‘use more!! MORE!!’ and my kids comply,” one user griped. But bottom line, folks: “Huge and soft.”

Could this signal a future in which all consumer goods are enormous? In which our houses are just Willy Wonka wonderlands of monstrously oversize paper products and fountains of soap? Is this a sign of the excesses of peak capitalism, or a sad sign of the state of the millennial condition?

“You could produce the biggest roll in history and it still wouldn’t clean an anus properly.”

Of course, toilet paper is not without its controversies. If you, a millennial who poops a lot (and who isn’t? avocado toast is chock-full of fiber) and are also concerned about the environmental impact of the Big Ass Roll, you’re not alone. And it’s not just that it encourages people to use more paper per wipe.

Shelley Vinyard, of the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, said Charmin is made from 100% virgin paper, no recycled fibers, just pure trees. “It’s an easy place to make a difference and vote with your dollars for a more sustainable option,” said Vinyard. NRDC notes that competitors like Marcal use recycled materials.

Loren Fanroy, a representative for Charmin, told BuzzFeed News, “100% of our wood fiber supply is third-party certified with responsible forestry certification systems, like the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), and come from sustainably-managed forests. We do not participate in any deforestation practices, and for every tree we use, at least one is re-grown.” And Reinerman points out that since each Forever Roll equals 24 regular rolls, you use fewer cardboard tubes, and there’s no plastic wrap packaging.

Still, destroying forests to wipe our butts can keep you up at night, and it calls into question the merits of toilet paper altogether. If you take it one step further, perhaps it’s time for Americans to embrace the bidet and end this cycle of deforestation and waste once and for all.

“[Toilet paper] is totally unhygienic and you could produce the biggest roll in history and it still wouldn’t clean an anus properly,” said Rose George, the author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters. “We use water to wash everything from our bodies to our cars, and yet for the dirtiest part of our body, we choose to use a dry substance that really only moves, and doesn’t remove dirt. It’s crazy. It’s like choosing to have a shower with a dry towel. Half the world uses water to cleanse their butts, and they think those of us who have paper cultures are dirty, and they’re right.”

“I can’t believe nobody thought of this before.”

After Reinerman and Mitchell recruited a few other people to work on their experimental team, prototyped the giant roll, pitched it to the big bosses (who were receptive), and started testing it and running a small ad campaign on Facebook, they were ready to go public in April 2019.

“We were consistently hearing the comment, ‘I can’t believe nobody thought of this before.’ And that’s when you realize that you have something that’s improving somebody’s experience,” said Reinerman.

So they hired more people to run an e-commerce site (the Forever Roll is only sold on the Charmin website, for now), and unlike other P&G brands, they do the marketing and social media themselves. “We have a small, mighty team that is running the whole operation,” said Reinerman.

Even Charmin’s competitor had to hand it to them for coming up with the Big Roll. “If you talk to folks in the bath tissue category, the one thing we never want to happen is to run out of toilet paper in a critical moment,” said Kim Sackey, consumer knowledge lead for retail at Georgia-Pacific, the Koch Industries–owned company that makes Angel Soft and Quilted Northern. Still, she isn’t too jealous. “The Forever Roll is one potential solution; in my mind, there’s other potential ones,” she told BuzzFeed News. Subscriptions, like the kind Amazon offers, are one option, and she’s interested in optimizing the timing and quantities of subscriptions so you don’t end up with too much or too little.

Other manufacturers, including Marcal, Scott, and Cottonelle, did not return requests for comment.

To me, Rob Reinerman’s invention was a stroke of genius, a gift to the human race and all our diverse and tender holes. But as a journalist, I needed to dig deeper. Trust, but verify; wipe till it feels clean, but still look at the paper afterward. So I tested out a Forever Roll here in BuzzFeed’s office.

The stand came with a screw and its own set of mini Allen wrenches to install (pretty easy). It had a heavy base to prevent it from toppling over and felt solid.

Katie Notopoulos

The Forever Roll inside the BuzzFeed offices.

I set up a Forever Roll in a single-use bathroom in our office, and after lunch, gave it a full test myself. It was…fine? The strangest part was that it was hard to tell how far to turn the roll to get the right amount of paper — I ended up with a little more than I needed.

Then I set up a notepad and pen in the bathroom explaining what the Forever Roll was, that I was writing an article about it, and wanted my colleagues’ feedback.

It turns out asking my coworkers to describe their toilet paper–wiping experience was perhaps a bad idea. Not a single person wrote anything down on my public notepad (I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to my coworkers and also let HR know I’ve definitely learned my lesson here). But I did get two personal notes.

“Way too big. If you drop it on the floor and it gets wet you are losing SO MUCH toilet paper,” said one coworker. “My bathroom is small, and it would 100% get wet somehow. Too much surface area.”

My editor said while she was impressed with how smoothly the Forever Roll glided on the stand, she would be mortified for guests to see a massive roll of toilet paper in her small apartment bathroom.

To that I say, what is the price of dignity? Is it $30 for the Forever Roll starter kit? Is it never having to waddle across the bathroom, pants around ankles, to get a replacement roll from under the sink? Is it not having guests see an aggressively large toilet paper roll in your bathroom? Don’t ask me, I’m the person who just wrote a long article (which is not sponsored by Charmin, btw, BuzzFeed is literally losing money paying me a salary to do this) about toilet paper. I have no dignity, but boy am I clean. ●

Kate Bubacz / BuzzFeed News

The post Charmin Made A Giant “Forever Roll” For Millennial Poops. Its Incredible. appeared first on Gyrlversion.

from WordPress http://www.gyrlversion.net/charmin-made-a-giant-forever-roll-for-millennial-poops-its-incredible/

[my-dear-hammy]

Basking in Firelight-Jamilton Sequel-Part Forty Three

Masterpost

Part Forty-Three: Wardrobe Choices

Warnings below

----

Did you know that helping start a rebellion, dying, coming back to life in the flashiest way possible at a rebel rally, restarting the rebellion, fighting in the rebellion, leading the rebellion, bring the main reason to have won the rebellion, bring the overall public face of the rebellion, helping make the new nation, and framing freedom for the people would get you placed on the presidential ballot without anyone even asking you? Because Jefferson didn't. Not that he had to worry. George Washington and John Adams would be president, but that still left the places for four vice presidents open. Jefferson did worry about that. He'd either be thrown into vice presidency or onto another cabinet, both of which he didn't ever want to be a part of again. Jefferson hated politics.

But he was just so God damn good at it.

He had the charm, the popularity, the background, the hair. He had it all.

If it was up to him, he'd be in Monticello, piddling away til his heart's content. But the people never let him have his way and he'd always put the nation first. The nation was always first and foremost.

Rain was pounding against the window panes as Jefferson plucked at his violin's strings, staring ahead absentmindedly, his vision unfocused and blurry. The flames of the fireplace lit the otherwise dark house. They were comforting, soothing even, it felt like there were countless good memories in their warmth. Then it was a different rain that was thundering against the ground and a different fire that crackled nearby. The room became a cave and instead of a violin being on Jefferson's lap, it was Hamilton's head as he was sleeping soundly, Jefferson stroking his hair.

The memory quickly faded away as Jefferson jolted, springing up from the couch and twisting around the room, looking for any remnant of the memory clinging to his living room. There was none. But it was still fresh in his mind like he just lived it. He could still feel Hamilton's warmth. Jefferson's mind suddenly jumped to one of the other few memories he possessed of Hamilton. One where Jefferson had him pinned against the wall of Monticello, their hot bodies pressed together, how Jefferson had ached for him, how their mouths clashed together in fiery passion. The need that had burned through every inch of Jefferson's body. The pain he felt when he pulled away, taking every bit of his self-control to do so. How that sensation felt as if he was living it at that very moment when Hamilton stood before him in his office the day he remembered.

He shook both memories from his head and fished out his phone from his back pocket, sending a text to Hamilton for him to elaborate on the fuzzy memory he just remembered. As always, Hamilton's response was immediate, giving the details that his original recounting of the story lacked. Jefferson could feel the fuzziness of the dream sharpen slightly at each word but couldn't remember anything else.

***

Hamilton and the crew sat at the local pub where they always met up at on Saturdays. They had to go through extraordinary lengths to keep the paparazzi from finding them out and the owner of the place was kind enough to lend them a back room so the locals wouldn't bother them. With the help of Jefferson's coin of course. Nothing in the world was free after all. People were still untrustful, it was survival of the fittest, a mind frame that the oppressiveness of King George III's and his associates rule imposed on most of the Eastern States of America. One that Jefferson hoped to reverse with the new governmental system they created. He missed the days where anyone was willing to take in a stranger, feed them a warm meal and a soft bed for the night without having to worry about waking up to find they'd been robbed or never wake up at all.

But for now, Hamilton, Jefferson, and all the rest were sitting around the table, having a good time. Jefferson was enjoying a little bit of wine while everyone else was chugging down various stronger types of alcohol.

"Who knew you two would be placed on the presidential ballot? I never saw that coming," Madison said.

"Me neither but now I can hardly walk out my door with how many people are constantly outside. I'll have to move," Jefferson sighed.

"I've already changed hotels," Hamilton said.

"You should see Washington's house," Lafayette laughed, "He closed all his curtains and refuses to come outside."

"And at the first opportunity, Adams took off for Boston," Mulligan informed. "But I hear there are still people all around his house too."

"How do you know these things?" Burr asked.

"I've got a network," Mulligan shrugged.

"I hear the the crowd outside Lafayette's house puts everyone else's to shame," Laurens grinned.

"It's my irresistible good looks and my charming French accent," Lafayette laughed.

"Maybe I should wear my hair up more then," Jefferson said.

Everyone looked him blankly. "Why?" Hamilton asked, voicing everyone's confused thoughts at the random statement.

Jefferson sighed, grabbed a hair tie from his pocket, cause he'd be damned if he didn't have one when he needed one, and pulled up his hair. "Bonjour bitches," Jefferson said in a perfect French accent, smirking at the entire table as they went into shock. Everyone's mouths were hanging open, Laurens was looking back and forth between Jefferson and Lafayette like he was about to pass out.

"Holy fuck," Mulligan whispered.

"Hey Lafayette, take out your hair tie," Burr said, still staring at Jefferson.

Lafayette reached up and undid his hair which came undone with an audible poof, like in a cartoon. "Hey y'all," Lafayette said in the most horrendous attempt at a southern accent.

Laurens clamped his hand over Lafayette's mouth, "Never. Ever. Do that again."

"How did we never realize how exactly alike you two looked?" Madison asked.

"Maybe it's Lafayette's magnetic personality compared to Jefferson's off putting one that we see," Hamilton suggested.

"Seriously? How have none of noticed this except me?" Jefferson asked, still talking in a French accent.

"Dude, stop. My mind can't take it. It thinks you're Lafayette and I don't want to accidentally agree with you on something," Hamilton replied. "And take out that fucking hair tie."

"You know what? It feels kinda good to have the wind on my neck. It's so free. I think I'll keep it up for a while," Jefferson smirked, leaning back in his chair. Lafayette put his hair back up.

"Oh fuck. Now how do we tell them apart?" Laurens asked.

"Clothes," Burr replied flatly.

"Oh. Right," Laurens said, studying the difference in their wardrobe choice. Jefferson was dressed sharply, with a form fitting gray vest over a purple dress shirt paired with matching gray dress pants. Lafayette, on the other hand, had chosen to go with a tank top with a button down thrown over it. "What's your deal with magenta?" Laurens asked.

"What's Hamilton's deal with green?" Jefferson asked.

"Hey! You're the one that-" Hamilton stopped short. Jefferson wouldn't remember that he'd been the one to tell Hamilton that green brought out his coloring and his eyes. He took a deep swig of his drink. Burr always told him to talk less. Maybe he should start trying that out and seeing if he managed to keep out of these situations.

***

The elections were fast approaching and Jefferson refused to take part in any campaigning whatsoever. He had enough on his plate with his memory loss as it was, he didn't need the added responsibilities of leading a fragile nation. Hamilton, however, had different ideas.

The last thing Hamilton wanted was for Jefferson to be president but what he wanted more than anything was for Jefferson to be himself again. Not necessarily with all his memories, though that'd be even better, no, what Hamilton wanted was to see that cocky strut, shit faced grin, and the overbearing confidence he always used to have. He wanted to hear Jefferson's southern drawl as he disputed things with such intricate webs of facts and carefully chosen words that were tied up neatly with a bow of sass and witty remarks. So elegantly said that no one but Hamilton could refute his words.

That's why Hamilton was standing on Jefferson's door with a package in his hands, waiting for Jefferson to answer the door. What was taking him so long? Hamilton pounded impatiently on the door again. It swung open, perfectly framing Jefferson who was wiping the sweat from his forehead with a damp towel with one hand, holding a gleaming gun with the other, as he and Hamilton always did when answering the door. Due to Hamilton's shortness, he was eye level with Jefferson bare, dark skinned chest, glistening with sweat and radiating heat.

Hamilton realized he was staring open mouthedly when Jefferson cleared his throat and asked, "Is there something I can help you with?"

Hamilton's eyes snapped up to Jefferson's face, a slight blush coloring his cheeks. "What were you doing?" Hamilton asked.

"Exercising," Jefferson replied.

That was when Hamilton noticed the music playing in the background, the playlist Jefferson always used when he and Hamilton sparred or he did anything active. Well, that explained his appearance. "Can I come in?" Hamilton asked.

"Sure." Jefferson swung the door open and stepped inside. He pulled out his phone and paused the music that was blasting through the house and went to the kitchen where he chugged down some water. Hamilton was enjoying every second of Jefferson walking around without a shirt. "So what did you need?" Jefferson asked.

Hamilton tossed the package at Jefferson, "We're going somewhere and you have to wear this."

Jefferson looked at him quizzically before tearing open the package and pulling out a long, heavy magenta coat and the matching velvet vest and pants. He could feel the reinforcing Kevlar beneath the fabric. "Your old one was getting ratty and is dyed super black now. It would never make a statement. We need to make a statement," Hamilton explained. "Now go take a shower and put them on. We got to get going, it starts soon."

"A statement?" Jefferson put the clothes on the counter. "Why do we need to make a statement? What do you have planned, Hamilton?"

"It's none of your concern. Just do it, okay?"

Jefferson grumbled complaints as he scooped up the clothes into a ball and stomped off to the shower. That was easier than Hamilton had anticipated. While Jefferson was in the shower, Hamilton changed into his own new set of clothes.

After what seemed like a lifetime, Hamilton lost his patience. He pounded on the bathroom door, "I swear Jefferson if you're not out in five minutes I'm turning off the hot water and freezing your ass!"

The door swung open, revealing Jefferson dressed in his magnificent suit, hips cocked to the side, cane in hand. Hamilton's felt his breath hitch and his heart this painfully. Jefferson was a fabulous good again.

Jefferson was looking Hamilton up and down, a smirk tugging at his lips. Oh, that smirk. Hamilton missed that smirk. "How did you get these anyway? They fit perfectly like they were customed tailored," Jefferson finally asked, brushing past Hamilton.

"Oh, I broke into your house while you were gone, hacked into your account, went through your order history, ordered an exact replica, and had them delivered to my home."

"Very funny. Now, how really?"

"No, I'm serious, that's exactly what I did."

"Do I have a security issue to worry about?"

"I stole Madison's key."

"Ah. So where are we going?"

"To make a statement."

----

Warnings:

[biofunmy]

Charmin Made A Giant “Forever Roll” For Millennial Poops. It’s Incredible.

Kate Bubacz / BuzzFeed News; prop styling: Shawn O’Connor

Archimedes, the ancient Greek scientist, was taking a bath when he had his eureka! moment, discovering a physics principle using water displacement to measure density. Rob Reinerman, lead of the innovation team at Procter & Gamble, was taking a dump when genius struck, leading to the creation of Charmin’s Forever Roll, a massive roll of toilet paper for millennial asses.

Reinerman, a 14-year veteran of P&G, had been pulled off his job as brand manager of Bounty paper towels and assigned to lead a newly formed innovation team within the toilet paper division. Along with his partner Kevin Mitchell, the bigwigs had tasked them with a singular purpose. “Never run out of toilet paper is the mission,” Reinerman said.

“I was at home, I think on a weekend. I was finishing up my business and faced the age-old question of whether to replace the roll or leave that last square for the next person,” Reinerman told BuzzFeed News. Ultimately, he knew the next person to use the bathroom would be his wife, who would be annoyed to find a nearly kicked roll.

But the germ of an idea was planted: What if they made a toilet paper roll that was…UNIMAGINABLY HUGE.

Kate Bubacz / BuzzFeed News

The Forever Roll is 12 inches in diameter and is equivalent to 24 rolls of regular-size Charmin Ultra Soft.

Charmin pinched off its Forever Roll to consumers in April. It’s basically one of those industrial-size rolls you’d find at a rest stop, but so very soft. A few weeks ago, the Forever Roll caught a second wave of internet buzz when it was mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article about new household products designed for adults who live alone. Reinerman crowed at the time about how it alleviates the storage problem for urban apartment dwellers (a bigger roll means less TP to store under the sink) and how the huge rolls can last a single person up to two months.

The response online was divided. Some thought this was a sad indicator of the state of the millennials: delaying marriage and children, unable to buy homes with ample bathroom storage like their parents, stuck in tiny apartments with nowhere to stuff extra rolls of toilet paper, and suffering from such burnout that the simple task of remembering to buy toilet paper once a week was too hard. Also, it’s a giant roll of paper for going doody, which is inherently funny.

sorry im late to this but imagine being single and having a date over to your house for the first time and then they walk into your bathroom and see a rock of Gibraltar-sized roll of toilet paper next to the shitter

08:23 PM – 04 Jun 2019

Dear @Charmin please consider sponsoring me because the “forever” roll is the only thing I will be talking about with friends, family and strangers for the next forever (About 1 month) I accept merchandise, Venmo and Cash app or hell I’d take a check.

09:01 PM – 21 Jun 2019

Webster’s dictionary defines “forever” as “a limitless time.” Charmin defines it as about one month, possibly two if you’re single, which is how long a single Forever Roll — 12 inches in diameter and equivalent to 24 rolls — will last you. Due to the girth and heft of the roll, it won’t fit standard toilet paper roll holders, so they created special freestanding and adhesive wall holders (for millennials who will never own a home and can’t drill into their landlord’s walls). A starter kit of three rolls and a stand costs $30, and a single roll is $10.

The (tiny) TP-in-a-roll format that we know now was popularized around 1890 by the Scott Paper Company — lots of people were wiping with the Sears Roebuck catalog before that. The Hoberg Paper Company of Green Bay, Wisconsin, launched the Charmin brand in 1928 and soon offered the classic four-pack.

For the next few decades, the physical form of the roll didn’t change much. It took until 1994 for Charmin to make the double roll. They then created a “Mega Roll,” equivalent to four rolls.

Yet aside from tweaks to texture, prints, or even scents (Angel Soft has two new scented core options), the general shape and concept of toilet paper for home use hasn’t changed in our lifetime. The biggest development of late has been wet wipes — including varieties targeted at men: Dude Wipes, Dollar Shave Club’s One Wipe Charlies, or Mangroomer’s Biz Wipes in “Executive scent” — and that’s not going well. Because wipes don’t break down as well as regular TP, they create massive, clogging “fatbergs” in sewer systems.

What happened to the American spirit of ingenuity? We put a man on the moon, and we still use basically the same dinky TP rolls as president Taft. Sure, we brought giant-size rolls to public restrooms, but that industrial stuff is thin, rough, hole-ripping. An ass war crime. Only a stone-cold psychopath would consider bringing home that giant wheel of rough paper, encased in a rugged dispenser to protect it from thieves. Why had no one, in over 100 years, thought, Hey, what if we made a GIGUNDOUS roll of soft toilet paper?

No wonder the feedback on the Forever Roll on Charmin’s site so far has been disproportionately positive: 4.7 stars out of 5 from more than 2,800 reviewers. They compared the magnitude of the invention to sliced bread (!), touted the roll as successful Father’s Day and birthday gifts (?), and remarked on how smoothly it glides on the Forever Roll stand. Of the complaints that were filed, a large share revolved around the roll not lasting long enough: “This thing just screams ‘use more!! MORE!!’ and my kids comply,” one user griped. But bottom line, folks: “Huge and soft.”

Could this signal a future in which all consumer goods are enormous? In which our houses are just Willy Wonka wonderlands of monstrously oversize paper products and fountains of soap? Is this a sign of the excesses of peak capitalism, or a sad sign of the state of the millennial condition?

“You could produce the biggest roll in history and it still wouldn’t clean an anus properly.”

Of course, toilet paper is not without its controversies. If you, a millennial who poops a lot (and who isn’t? avocado toast is chock-full of fiber) and are also concerned about the environmental impact of the Big Ass Roll, you’re not alone. And it’s not just that it encourages people to use more paper per wipe.

Shelley Vinyard, of the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, said Charmin is made from 100% virgin paper, no recycled fibers, just pure trees. “It’s an easy place to make a difference and vote with your dollars for a more sustainable option,” said Vinyard. NRDC notes that competitors like Marcal use recycled materials.

Loren Fanroy, a representative for Charmin, told BuzzFeed News, “100% of our wood fiber supply is third-party certified with responsible forestry certification systems, like the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), and come from sustainably-managed forests. We do not participate in any deforestation practices, and for every tree we use, at least one is re-grown.” And Reinerman points out that since each Forever Roll equals 24 regular rolls, you use fewer cardboard tubes, and there’s no plastic wrap packaging.

Still, destroying forests to wipe our butts can keep you up at night, and it calls into question the merits of toilet paper altogether. If you take it one step further, perhaps it’s time for Americans to embrace the bidet and end this cycle of deforestation and waste once and for all.

“[Toilet paper] is totally unhygienic and you could produce the biggest roll in history and it still wouldn’t clean an anus properly,” said Rose George, the author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters. “We use water to wash everything from our bodies to our cars, and yet for the dirtiest part of our body, we choose to use a dry substance that really only moves, and doesn’t remove dirt. It’s crazy. It’s like choosing to have a shower with a dry towel. Half the world uses water to cleanse their butts, and they think those of us who have paper cultures are dirty, and they’re right.”

“I can’t believe nobody thought of this before.”

After Reinerman and Mitchell recruited a few other people to work on their experimental team, prototyped the giant roll, pitched it to the big bosses (who were receptive), and started testing it and running a small ad campaign on Facebook, they were ready to go public in April 2019.

“We were consistently hearing the comment, ‘I can’t believe nobody thought of this before.’ And that’s when you realize that you have something that’s improving somebody’s experience,” said Reinerman.

So they hired more people to run an e-commerce site (the Forever Roll is only sold on the Charmin website, for now), and unlike other P&G brands, they do the marketing and social media themselves. “We have a small, mighty team that is running the whole operation,” said Reinerman.

Even Charmin’s competitor had to hand it to them for coming up with the Big Roll. “If you talk to folks in the bath tissue category, the one thing we never want to happen is to run out of toilet paper in a critical moment,” said Kim Sackey, consumer knowledge lead for retail at Georgia-Pacific, the Koch Industries–owned company that makes Angel Soft and Quilted Northern. Still, she isn’t too jealous. “The Forever Roll is one potential solution; in my mind, there’s other potential ones,” she told BuzzFeed News. Subscriptions, like the kind Amazon offers, are one option, and she’s interested in optimizing the timing and quantities of subscriptions so you don’t end up with too much or too little.

Other manufacturers, including Marcal, Scott, and Cottonelle, did not return requests for comment.

To me, Rob Reinerman’s invention was a stroke of genius, a gift to the human race and all our diverse and tender holes. But as a journalist, I needed to dig deeper. Trust, but verify; wipe till it feels clean, but still look at the paper afterward. So I tested out a Forever Roll here in BuzzFeed’s office.

The stand came with a screw and its own set of mini Allen wrenches to install (pretty easy). It had a heavy base to prevent it from toppling over and felt solid.

Katie Notopoulos

The Forever Roll inside the BuzzFeed offices.

I set up a Forever Roll in a single-use bathroom in our office, and after lunch, gave it a full test myself. It was…fine? The strangest part was that it was hard to tell how far to turn the roll to get the right amount of paper — I ended up with a little more than I needed.

Then I set up a notepad and pen in the bathroom explaining what the Forever Roll was, that I was writing an article about it, and wanted my colleagues’ feedback.

It turns out asking my coworkers to describe their toilet paper–wiping experience was perhaps a bad idea. Not a single person wrote anything down on my public notepad (I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to my coworkers and also let HR know I’ve definitely learned my lesson here). But I did get two personal notes.

“Way too big. If you drop it on the floor and it gets wet you are losing SO MUCH toilet paper,” said one coworker. “My bathroom is small, and it would 100% get wet somehow. Too much surface area.”

My editor said while she was impressed with how smoothly the Forever Roll glided on the stand, she would be mortified for guests to see a massive roll of toilet paper in her small apartment bathroom.

To that I say, what is the price of dignity? Is it $30 for the Forever Roll starter kit? Is it never having to waddle across the bathroom, pants around ankles, to get a replacement roll from under the sink? Is it not having guests see an aggressively large toilet paper roll in your bathroom? Don’t ask me, I’m the person who just wrote a long article (which is not sponsored by Charmin, btw, BuzzFeed is literally losing money paying me a salary to do this) about toilet paper. I have no dignity, but boy am I clean. ●

Kate Bubacz / BuzzFeed News

Sahred From Source link Technology

from WordPress http://bit.ly/2RyLZtq via IFTTT

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Required Reading

Photo-realistic renderings of the proposed home by London-based designer James Whitaker is going to be built in the Californian desert out of white cargo containers and the internet is already obsessed with them. More images at Dezeen. (via Dezeen)

A good story about architect Eero Saarinen’s ties to Michigan, a place that allowed him to experiment:

After high school, Saarinen studied sculpture at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris before graduating from the Yale School of Architecture, where he excelled with the traditional Beaux-Arts curriculum. When Saarinen returned to Cranbrook in between school breaks and later in his 20s, he stayed in an upstairs bedroom at the Saarinen House. Even as Eliel Saarinen served as president of the Cranbrook Academy of Art from 1932 to 1946 and was its resident architect, Eero Saarinen began entering into architectural competitions with him in the late 1930s.

As I walked back downstairs, I recalled a framed photo of the Gothic-inpired design that Eliel Saarinen submitted for the Chicago Tribune competition that I had seen in the house earlier. In many ways, the Saarinen House represented the transition from Eliel’s genius to Eero’s distinct design skills. It was almost as if the creative energy in the Cranbrook community catapulted Eero Saarinen to greatness, evidenced by his early influences in the family home.

The Huntington Museum published this video about a very rare Tiffany (only three example are known to survive), which was inspired by a trip to Bermuda:

Banksy’s “Snorting Copper” is back on the street but there are questions about its reappearance, including:

Jet washed, painted over and attacked by thieves, Banksy’s Snorting Copper artwork in London’s Shoreditch had been thought lost forever. So just how has the £1m piece been brought back into public view – and is it still “a Banksy” at all after so much restoration work?

The science behind our experience of architecture, as explained by Paul Goldberger:

This doesn’t mean that Goldhagen is willing to let architects have their way with the world. She comes down as hard as anyone on Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind, for example, much of whose work is known for the same sharp angles and clashing lines that provoked her ire with Nouvel’s pavilion. She is unsparing when it comes to those buildings that she believes cause discomfort because of their neurological effects, stating: “Humans respond to compositions dominated by sharp, irregular, angled forms with discomfort, even fear.” But she looks kindly on the “lilting forms” of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, a swooping, curving building that she describes as a place in which “the human body’s presence and movement in space [are] the animating features in a design.” She sees, correctly, that Gehry’s unusual forms are driven not by a desire to shock, but by a wish to find new ways to elicit a sense of pleasure.

What’s the biggest question facing artist today? The Guardian asked a number of artists and my favorite reply is by artist Jeremy Deller:

“WTF?” That’s the question facing artists today.

A new online resource maps the LGBTQ history of St. Louis, and it includes a section on the impact of segregation, policing of LGBTQ communities, and the history of political activism.

Even Pokémon Go was used in an “extensive Russian-linked meddling effort“:

To date, Facebook has said that it identified 470 accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency, while Twitter has identified 201 accounts. Google has not released its findings, though CNN has confirmed that the company has identified tens of thousands of dollars spent on ad buys by Russian accounts.

Facebook and Twitter have submitted detailed records of their findings to both Congress and the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is conducting an investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign.

On Friday, Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, made her displeasure with this story clear in a Facebook post written in Russian, calling CNN a “talentless television channel” and saying,”Again the Russians are to blame… and the Pokémons they control.”

Eminem goes after President Trump in his latest rhyme:

Why does this matter? The New York Times explains:

The fact of Eminem’s whiteness, though, also means that he reaches a different listener. A recent Times article that looked at music fandom across the country noted that his base is “strongest in whiter and more rural places: West Virginia; southern Ohio; eastern Kentucky; deep north Maine; the Ozarks in Missouri; across the Great Plains.”

Related:

Not totally sure how rap battles work, but I believe Eminem is now the President of the United States of America.

— andy lassner (@andylassner) October 11, 2017

If you’re old you remember AIM (AOL’s instant messenger service), and — hate to break it to you but … — now it’s dead:

We made our first attempts, on AIM, of transfiguring our mysterious and unpredictable thoughts into lively and personable textual performances. We were witty and dramatic. We invented our online selves—we invented ourselves.

We got bored. Myspace and Xanga helped us set up temporary and ramshackle museums of our tastes. Then Facebook came along, with all the frisson of “only college students use it,” and we drifted there. Its pseudo-maturity and time-delayed interactions allured us. Our AIM status messages went to Facebook instead: It was where we mourned the end of the field-hockey season or the final showing of the winter musical. We posted photos of each other on Facebook and liked them and commented on them—but sometimes still chatted about them on AIM. We asked homework questions via each other’s walls. We wrote subtweety openings as our Facebook status, hoping our crush would comment there instead. Eventually Facebook had its own chat product too, and it made more sense to use that, or Gchat, or to just text.

It’s not every day the world discovers a species thought to be extinct, and this time it’s the “tree lobster” (via Boing Boing):

When black rats were accidentally introduced to the island by a shipwreck in 1918, 600 kilometres (370 miles) off the east coast of Australia, they devastated the population of the phasmid, Dryococelus australis.

The rats were a disaster. They wiped out several native species – five birds, two plants and 13 invertebrates (including D. australis) – not found anywhere else in the world.

But in the 1960s, rock climbers on Ball’s Pyramid, a volcanic stack 20 kilometres (12 miles) southeast of the island, made an exciting discovery: a collection of fresh insect corpses that seemed to be the stick insect.

But they didn’t look like specimens recovered from Lord Howe Island, as seen in the image below (the Ball’s Pyramid insect is on the right), so the species was officially declared extinct in 1986.

Academics are for sale to the CIA, and this article goes into details (and lest we forget art historian Anthony Blunt was a Soviet spy):

More than any other academic arena, conferences lend themselves to espionage. Assisted by globalisation, these social and intellectual rituals have become ubiquitous. Like stops on the world golf or tennis circuits, they sprout up wherever the climate is favourable, and draw a jet-setting crowd. What they lack in prize money, they make up for in prestige. Although researchers chat electronically all the time, virtual meetings are no substitute for getting together with peers, networking for jobs, checking out the latest gadgets and delivering papers that will later be published in volumes of conference proceedings. “The attraction of the conference circuit,” English novelist David Lodge wrote in Small World, his 1984 send-up of academic life, is that “it’s a way of converting work into play, combining professionalism with tourism, and all at someone else’s expense. Write a paper and see the world!”

The importance of a conference may be measured not just by the number of Nobel prize-winners or Oxford dons it attracts, but by the number of spies. US and foreign intelligence officers flock to conferences for the same reason that army recruiters concentrate on low-income neighbourhoods: they make the best hunting grounds. While a university campus might have only one or two professors of interest to an intelligence service, the right conference – on drone technology, perhaps, or Isis – could have dozens.

“Every intelligence service in the world works conferences, sponsors conferences, and looks for ways to get people to conferences,” said one former CIA operative.

Every wonder how tax cuts help the rich? This Vox video tells you:

Some random guy on Facebook tried to mansplain the costumes of Indiana Jones to this woman not realizing she was the movie’s costume designer. Priceless:

HOLY FUCKING SHIT dude online tries to mainsplain the costumes of Indiana Jones to my mom… …the costume designer of Indiana Jones. http://pic.twitter.com/bkYVtsnYPF

— Macks-O-Lantern (@Uptomyknees) October 11, 2017

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

The post Required Reading appeared first on Hyperallergic.

from Hyperallergic http://ift.tt/2gkMedI via IFTTT

[baburaja97-blog]

New Post has been published on Vin Zite

New Post has been published on https://vinzite.com/batman-arkham-city-3d-review/

Batman: Arkham City 3D Review

3D saves a PC game plagued with bugs and a missing DX11.

Chances are you know who Batman is. If not, he’s this dude who wears tights and likes to swing around tall buildings. Not to be confused with Spiderman, who also wears tights and likes to swing around tall buildings. Chances are you have also played Batman: Arkham Asylum and know the score. If not, Batman Arkham Asylum is a third-person action-adventure game based on that Batman guy. Batman: Arkham Asylum was developed by Rocksteady Studios and was released in 2009. It was a good year to be a Bat, and the game was met with rave reviews and its fair share of awards.

Batman: Arkham City is the sequel to the successful Arkham Asylum. Arkham City is a maximum security prison for the nastiest criminals that Gotham City has to offer. As chance would have it, Bruce Wayne gets his ass tossed into Arkham City for opposing the new prison’s existence, and is forced to go all “Escape from New York”. Within moments, Bruce manages to score his crime-fighting equipment and become his alter ego, Batman. We all watch TV, anything can be got in prison if you know the right people. I don’t want to get all nuts with spoilers, so let’s sum up the story by saying that Catwoman drops in, Batman runs into an old flame, fails to get laid, Robin makes a brief appearance and Alfred is only a radio signal away. On “team naughty”, Batman bumps into a load of our favorite baddies, including Harley Quinn (damn, she’s annoying), Two-Face, Mr. Freeze (possibly the toughest boss fight of the game), The Joker, Penguin, Hugo Strange, Poison Ivy, Clayface and plenty more crazies.

Batman: Arkham City is a single-player game with the main storyline which sees Batman seeking a cure to a disease which could wipe out a superhero or two. In addition to the main story, you will regularly unlock side missions, which can either be completed right away or put aside for later. The side missions are just as good as those that are included in the main story, which makes for a lot of awesome added gameplay. In addition to the side missions, you’ve got the Riddler to contend with. Cataloging and collecting Riddler’s trophies is an addictive game within the game. Then there are the challenge maps, which make for some excellent mindless melee fun. Challenge maps are unlocked as you play through the game, and more are available in DLCs. There are three funky flavors to hone your Bat-skills with, including ranked leaderboard combat, timed campaigns, and custom rules.

Technical

In Arkham City, there is always a superhero around when people need one, in real life, there certainly was no superhero around to help me gain access to the game. First, you enter your key on Steam, then you enter your key for SecuRom (if you’re lucky it accepts it the first time; I was not lucky), then you have to tie it all together with Games for Windows Live. GFWL was the primary bottleneck. I spent an hour trying to log in to GFWL as it gave me some song and dance about needing to update. Like really, what’s the point of this kind of layering? The games are going to get pirated all the same, and according to many, the reason the PC version of Arkham City was delayed was so that they could maximize sales from the console versions first.

When Batman: Arkham City has released just over two weeks ago, PC gamers were disappointed to find out that DX 11 was buggered. Upon launch, Rocksteady immediately recommended DX 9, as reports of DX 11 performance issues began making the rounds. People wondered how something like this, a selling point like DX 11, could have made it through testing and out the door for launch. It took a couple of weeks, but a DX 11 patch was finally released. The outcome was not really worth the wait, and many are still plagued with low FPS and game-breaking bugs. I consider myself one of the lucky, as I only spent about four hours dealing with crashes and bugs that would not allow me to proceed further in the game.

Arkham City comes with a built-in benchmark tool, so using both that and Fraps I grabbed some quick stats to share. Right before publishing this review a patch was released for Batman: Arkham City, which in part addresses the DX 11 issues. Running Alienware M17x laptop /w NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580M and 6GB RAM / 3D Vision (not 3D Vision 2), at 1920 x 1080. Both DX 9 and DX 11 were run with all settings max, including detail level, tessellation, and PhysX.

The DX 11 patch seems to be hit and miss. For many people, it solved the issue of poor frames while running DX 11. For others, it buggered things up even more. For me, the patch DID improve FPS in DX 11, but oddly lowered frames with DX 9. Go figure.

On my system, the best settings for performance and aesthetics are DirectX 11 (very high) and PhysX set to “Normal”, this works out perfectly both with and without 3D Vision enabled.

Combat

Combat in Arkham City is ridiculous, while also being ridiculously fun. Here’s the ridiculous bit… there were very few times during the game that I needed any sort of strategy in order to win an encounter. A couple of bosses had an attack pattern that had to be learned in order to defeat them, but outside of that, you can literally finish the game by repeatedly hitting your left mouse button. In fact, I broke a mouse playing Arkham City. Yup, button-mashed it to death. While using special attacks makes combat more fun, it isn’t actually necessary. Now for the ridiculously fun part… combat is an absolute joy to watch, and even if you don’t have mad take-down skills, the simple act of punching, kicking and evading is wicked fun. That said, if you want to kick ass on the challenge maps then you’ll need a bit more than button-mashing. The challenge maps are slightly more skill-based and if you want to rank then you’ll have to use combos and special moves.

Sometimes I thought I preferred combat while playing as Catwoman because she’s mean, lean and fast as hell. But after a while, I’d sort of start missing the Bat. Both characters have their own missions, skills, and gadgets, but the character I really would have liked to play is Robin. While the Robin Bundle DLC will allow you to play the Boy Wonder, you will only be able to do so on challenge maps. I’d rather be able to play him inside missions like you can with Catwoman. Sadly, Robin’s appearance in the game was very brief, and although he was looking buff, tough and not at all like the Robin we all grew up with, Batman simply bitched him out and told him to piss off. So that was that.

NVIDIA 3D Vision

One of my first experiences with 3D was seeing Friday The 13th Part 3 in 3D. I walked five miles through the snow with no shoes to see it at the theater. It was crap, but exciting at the same time, and it was the best we had. For the next quarter century, I would associate 3D with eye strain and headaches. Whenever I post about 3D Vision on VE3D the post is met with comments like “I’m too old for 3D, I don’t need the eye strain” or “3D gives me headaches”. Exactly the things that I had always associated with it. Well, Toto, it looks like we’re not in Kansas anymore! This ain’t grandma’s 3D. I’ll admit that I’ve reached the age where reading glasses come in handy. I didn’t have much interest in 3D. Mostly I was afraid to try it because I thought my head would explode. I guess I had read into the old school hype a bit too much. But I survived 3D, and am loving every second of it. Eye of the tiger baby, an eye of the tiger. Plus I look cool in the glasses.

Since I just recently began gaming in 3D, my experiences are limited. What I have noticed so far is that 3D Vision adds an extra layer of realism to games. 3D games come alive, giving you a greater feeling of actually being there. In Batman: Arkham City this is especially true, particularly when grappling around the city and using gadgets. Even cut scenes are great in 3D. All of the villains in Arkham City look amazing and force you to keep watching, even if you don’t normally enjoy cut scenes. Graphics look sharper, and cleaner and flaws that you would see while out of 3D tend to get smoothed over. If I was to slap a number on Batman: Arkham City without 3D Vision, the game would land a 7/10 (70%). While Arkham City is a truly entertaining trip through the gutters of Gotham, the bugs and the graphic issues that the game shipped with are not acceptable. Waiting over two weeks for a half-assed patch is also not acceptable.

Because 3DV enhanced my Arkham City experience, Batman: Arkham City 3D is a 9/10 (90%), and worth its weight in guano.

What I Liked:

Gloom and doom atmosphere makes for some very immersive gameplay.

The story is actually interesting, you’ll want to watch the cutscenes.

Both Batman and Catwoman show wear and tear in their costumes as the game go on.

Catwoman side-missions, it was fun to take a break from Batman and spend some time crawling on ceilings.

Challenge maps are a good workout and a nice change of pace, actually requiring some combat skill.

Voice acting is great.

I can’t wait to get back in and collect more Riddler trophies.

Arkham City is totally engrossing, and the experience is even further enhanced when playing in 3D.

What I Didn’t Like:

A three-layer activation process.

No side-missions for Robin.

Getting stuck to my Batarang on a block of ice for two hours.

Spending another two hours trying to figure out why I couldn’t dive-bomb.

I would have loved to see Arkham City in the daylight.

A little too much traveling back and forth across the city.

Combat, while fun to watch, requires no skill.

Crashing during the closing cinematic.

Finishing the game before a DX 11 patch was released.

Trying to find a good tutorial on 3DV video rendering.

[itsbenedict]

No Driver’s License: Session 0

Sometimes I make decisions, and I say to myself “Why did you make that decision? Why was this, of all things, the thing you decided to spend lots of time on, when you are potentially mortal and might have a limited amount of time in this universe?” I’m rarely, if ever, equipped to answer that question with anything other than a shrug.

So I started running a Madoka Magica tabletop campaign using the Magical Burst system, with some modifications to the rules (version 5 is in alpha, and also I needed to tweak a few mechanics to work with my story.) My dude Zero was relating to me his frustrations with a different PMMM tabletop campaign, and I immediately thought “damn, I can do better than that!”

(our discord’s icon. i have no idea how to credit the fanart i used to make this edit- i google image searched “kyubey” and the source for this image was someone’s themed 2048 clone).

So I called in Farn and had Zero rustle up some players from a groupchat he goes to, full of a bunch of fans of the work of Jenna Moran, and this started being a thing. (Apparently writing Cordyceps gets you a bunch of strangers eager to get on board with your creative projects! I recommend it.) I’m gonna post recaps of each session here, because I’m incapable of doing a thing and then not showing it off immediately.

Under the cut:

Magical Burst

Custom levelup system

Characters

Contracting scenes

Magical Burst

So the system I decided to use (on Zero’s rec) is called Magical Burst, and... it’s Madoka. There’s really no plausible deniability, here- the guy made a system for roleplaying in the PMMM setting, and then changed all the names around to dodge cease and desists. You have magical girls making contracts with tsukaima (incubators), fighting youma (witches), and accumulating Trauma (despair) that’ll fuck up their souls. There’s a few embellishments to keep things legally distinct, but all of it is easily ignored and the remainder repurposed as a Madoka Magica system, which is kind of the point.

The basic dice mechanic is rolling 2d6 plus a modifier. Most actions in the game that require a roll use that pattern, except they’re exploding dice if you’re doing a magic thing. 7 or less is a fail, 8+ is a normal effect, 11+ is a strong effect, and 15+ (usually in the event of rolling exploding dice) is an effect that’s stronger than intended and usually has some negative side effect. This is how it’ll go for combat rolls, out-of-combat magic actions, using talents, etc. That’s how dice do.

Custom levelup system

In standard Magical Burst, character advancement is handed out at the GM’s discretion, instead of through an experience system. Advancements can involve gaining stat points or learning new skills- but unfortunately in the alpha of version 5, all the cool specialized moves... don’t... exist yet. So apart from a couple things, the only real options would’ve been stat boosts, which, boring! Plus I have Ideas for how leveling up should interact with the narrative, so I decided to implement my own system:

The most important difference between this system and the basic Magical Burst system is that the Trauma meter has been replaced. During character creation, you have 21 Trauma Cells, which you must distribute to form a number of Trauma Tracks. These are meters that fill up over time as your characters suffer over the course of the game, and filling them is critical to character advancement. They replace the standard Trauma mechanic from Magical Burst.

Come up with a number of things that your character is upset about. Personal insecurities, life problems, character flaws- psychological weaknesses that, when attacked, darken your soul gem. These are your Trauma Tracks- one track for each one of these issues. (By no means are these the only problems your character is allowed to have, but they're the only ones that will have direct mechanical relevance.) Ignore the Bonds system in Magical Burst- Trauma points will be handed out as the situation calls for.

Player characters must have a minimum of 3 Trauma Tracks, and each Trauma Track must have a minimum of 3 Trauma Cells assigned to it. That aside, the length of those tracks is up to you- a longer track will take longer to fill, and represents an issue that simmers under the surface but doesn't yet threaten to destabilize the character. A shorter track represents an issue that's hard to ignore and is about to boil over, and will quickly become a problem for the character.

Your character's magical abilities are connected to these Trauma Tracks. When you first contract, you will have one distinct low-level magical ability for each Trauma Track you have. (MB 5e is incomplete and lacking in lists of specialized abilities, so we'll be loosey goosey here and you can just list the things you want in however much detail, and I'll figure out rules and numbers for the powers.) Generally, your starting abilities will be more powerful the fewer distinct Trauma Tracks you have, but your advancement options will be more limited.

When a Trauma Track is filled, an event will happen in the story. Once this event concludes- provided your character survives it- she will level up.

Leveling up is distinct from Magical Burst's Advancement system. I'll be handing out normal Advancements as described, but the options will be more limited- you won't be able to gain new magical Talents that way, but you can take a Tier-1 Specialization, stat boosts (with no restrictions on taking them multiple times), or custom nonmagical Talents if you have a good idea and don't mind hashing out numbers and balance with me.

Instead, when you level up, you cross off the appropriate Trauma Track, and choose one of your abilities to LOSE. In exchange, you'll receive a dot that can be spent to significantly upgrade one of your remaining abilities. Mark these dots on your character sheet- when you level up again, you'll be asked to sacrifice another ability, and if you choose to sacrifice an ability that already has dots, you'll get those dots back in addition to the new dot.

As you level up, your character will become more specialized, ultimately ending up with one powerful and potentially versatile ability that becomes the focus of their approach.

There are other side effects to leveling up this way, which will become evident.

There is a second type of character advancement, which will also become evident.

That’s direct from the document I distributed to players during character creation. In short- you have multiple experience gauges, and those fill up when your character faces something that really fucks them up emotionally. When you level up, you lose one skill and power up another skill, increasing your character’s specialization over time. 

The first time someone levels up... well, I’ll laugh maniacally about some stuff, on account of those fun side effects- and it will become evident why I structured the system this way.

Characters

I’ve got... four or five players, currently. One of them is currently having unspecified issues with character creation and didn’t participate in Session 0, and might not be participating period? I’m not sure exactly. The other four have completed character creation, and I’ve run a brief scene with each of them, going through how they contracted. Let’s meet the cast so far!

Gomu Sakura (played by @thera-prickle)

Sakura’s an excitable trans girl who wished that her childhood friend would accept her identity. She takes to the whole magical girl thing like a fish to water- at least, so far. She has three fairly long Trauma Tracks- “Fear of Female Failure”, “Isolation from Peers”, and “Escaping into Books”.

As a magical girl, Sakura’s theme is candy- her abilities include the ability to summon hard candy armor to protect herself, a Spiderman-style taffy-shooting power, and gumdrop goggles that dispel illusions and let her see the unseen. She fights with two lollipop axes, and has a magical candy mouse/mousse named Maurice.

Kazama Ibara (played by @eternalfarnham)

Ibara is a hero of justice! Except heroes of justice are frowned upon in high school, and apparently get called “delinquents”. She wished for her life to run smoothly and not bother her, and she has four Trauma Tracks: “Lifestyle of a burnout", “Disdain for “victims””, “Can’t admit to being wrong”, and “Feeling unnecessary and unloved”

Ibara’s magical powers revolve around control over friction. She skates around the battlefield like it was an ice rink, and can knock foes around like they were billiard balls. She can also disintegrate stuff by reducing the friction holding it together, and cause enemy attention to “slip” right off. She wields a Monkey King-style segmented staff, with a weighted ball on the end.

Tsutsui Makoto (played by @exceedinglight)

A cult raised Makoto- she was prophesied to be their goddess, but... you know how cults do. Kept in captivity, eventually denounced as a “fake”, abused and imprisoned... it sucked bigtime. She wished to, uh, completely wipe out said cult. It was pretty brutal. She’s got four Trauma Tracks: “Feeling alienated from “normal” people”, “Lacks basic knowledge most people would have”, “Can’t handle the spotlight”, and “Has a sense of inadequacy”.

Makoto’s kinda earth-element aligned, and a lot of her magic has to do with manipulating attention. She can make enemies focus on or ignore things, summon a stone labyrinth to hide herself and her allies in, and talk to animals.

Kotono Yukari (played by @drazelic)

(if you’re wondering why this one looks like an actual artist did it, Zero drew this one for himself.)

Yukari drew a lot of short straws. Her parents died, her friends all got claimed by Kyubey, and after a long time agonizing over it, she ended up forced to waste her wish to save her own life. She has four Trauma Tracks: “I should have done something- everything that happened was my fault.”, "My purpose here is to gather power, and this cannot become my home. I must return and fix things.”, “I am alone, a stranger in a strange land.”, “I no longer fear death, nor wish to live. I persist because my job is not done, and nothing more.” ENGAGE EDGE MODE

Yukari’s powers involve time and prophecy, and oh god this is going to be hard to GM. She can store up and distribute Support Actions, set time-delay mortar attacks, and fire bullets that disappear and then reappear to strike enemies on later turns. It’s incredibly bullshit and I can’t wait to see how it hilariously breaks the game.

Contracting scenes

Gomu Sakura

Sakura was walking home from school, when some kinda witch barrier formed around her. First, she freaked out on seeing the people around her vanish and the sky turn red and stuff- and then she went inside a building and found these fucked-up plushie snakes with evil elephant heads that tried to kill her. Somehow, this convinced her that, actually, everything was as it should be! She was in a magical otherworld faced with monsters! 

They'd almost be cute, if they weren't the size of a man, with sunken black pits for eyes. Also the trumpeting-hissing sort of sound they're making. That definitely ruins the cute.

Every book she’d ever read had taught her that this was HERO TIME, and she heroically stepped up to do battle!

This is the moment. Sakura knew, down in her bones, below the skin of rationality and the muscle of mundanity, that this would happen. The adrenaline flows. She swallows, holds her books in her hands like she is ready to throw them, and steps towards the beasts. A protagonist does not run from danger. She goes through it.

She got her ass kicked, because it turns out if you’re not a magical girl you can’t fight monsters good. Like, good effort, very cool moment, but she got pinned down pretty quick.

That’s when the Incubator showed up! It had three eyes, which was weird, but less weird than you and I would notice- it’s not like she’d met two-eyed Incubators before. It used some kind of telekinesis to blast the snelephants off her, and led her outside, where it was slightly less unsafe.

What are you doing in here?! What made you think those were safe to approach?!

Usually an Incubator has to do something to sell the target on the idea. Like, most of PMMM is about Madoka hanging around not contracting and agonizing over the decision while her friends suffer horribly in the background. It took a lot of convincing, there! With Sakura, though... the Incubator had to stop and inform her that she got to make a wish, before she went ahead and made the contract. The offer “be a magical girl and fight evil” was more than tempting enough to get her to agree immediately. Her normal life wasn’t treating her very well.

The rabbit shakes its head. I feel bad about this. It seems you have every reason to overlook the risks involved... Allow me to explain exactly what I am offering:

The three-eyed Incubator- which introduced itself as Tama-chan- did its best to try to explain to Sakura that being a magical girl was extremely dangerous, and that she could die, and that she could never go back to her normal life, and that her heart would become a magical vulnerability, and are you super sure because it doesn’t seem like you’re taking this decision very seriously-

Sakura proved impossible to dissuade- save a brief moment where she started wondering if maybe this was a Satan thing. 

Make a contract with me, and become a magical girl.

She nods. "Yes. I w---" Sakura thinks for another second. "A contract? Like. One with the devil?"

What? No, like a regular contract.

After wishing that her childhood friend Kazuya would accept her and be friends again (she’d confessed she was transgender to him earlier, and it really didn’t go over well)- she became a magical girl and went berserk on some snelephants.

Kazama Ibara

Ibara was in detention, which wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was that her teacher vanished, the sky turned red, and a snarky voice in her head challenged her to a fight. That voice turned out to be an Incubator- but it wasn’t offering a contract, so much as the opportunity to be attacked by deadly monsters- such as a tiger-sized ceramic lucky cat statue. She decided this was a bad deal, and attempted to GTFO.

"Always promised myself if I was in a -- haunted building situation, I'd go out the window, no tricks, no waiting." Without the prelude of checking the locks, she hurls a chair at the windows with a two-handed swing.

The window shatters, leaving a wide and jagged hole large enough to leap through. Wait, says the voice, suddenly alarmed. Don't do that. That's not safe, it says.

She went out the window anyway- but the Incubator found out how to make it safe- or, safe-ish. It summoned a plush snelephant on the ground outside, to break her fall- and then try to kill her. Wait, what? ...Ignoring that weird behavior, she socked the snelephant in the face and immediately ran like hell.

Then she heard another voice in her head, asking about her safety. She told it that she’s running from monsters.

Good. Keep running. I think I have your signal- I'll catch up with you in a moment. And the first voice: Where'd you go? This is lame! I had you pegged as a fighter!

Eventually she ran outside the school grounds, and found the whole city seemed to have gone witch-barrier. She also found an Incubator running directly at her- so, of course, 

"It's--it's the whole goddamn world --" Ibara almost chokes up when she sees the second cat, but aims a kick for where she anticipates it being, on pure delinquent reflex.

The kick connects, and the white cat goes flying a dozen yards. OW! CHRIST ON- why?!

After that little misunderstanding, the new Incubator- introduced as Tama-chan- helped her to fend off the other one, who’d caught up with a squad of monsters in tow. The evil incubator was named Nishi-chan, and Tama-chan offered Ibara a contract- magic powers, to help fight off Nishi-chan and her entourage. The incubators argued for a while- Nishi accused Tama of exploiting the danger to pressure a girl into a contract, and Tama accused Nishi of causing the damn danger in the first place, seriously!

After getting a picture of the risks involved in magical-girling from the Incubator’s arguments, Ibara got fed up with their bickering and insisted Tama-chan make her a magical girl. For her wish...

A wish? You want a wish? Okay, here -- I wish you and everyone else would get off my fucking back and let me DO WHAT I HAVE TO DO." She's squeezing white cat, too, a little harder than necessary. "Understand?!"

Tama-chan interpreted accordingly, and bish bash bosh, Ibara’s got magical powers. From there, we took the combat rules out for a test run- she took on two of the evil lucky cats (fun backstage fact: their name in my notes is “Waneki-neko”), and smashed them to bits. Nishi kept running, Ibara kept trying to close the distance while dispatching the monsters sent to slow her down- but eventually Tama-chan talked Ibara into finishing off the remaining monsters and disengaging.

Tsutsui Makoto

This one was pretty short. Makoto's hanging in a prison cell in the cultists’ compound, when suddenly origami archer monsters start shooting arrows at her from outside the door to her cell. She gets a good scare, but then Tama-chan shows up.

Nope! Nope! Not this! This is dumb! This is SO dumb! a high voice in her head says. There's a sound of impact, a rustling of papers, and then quiet from outside the cell.

Tama-chan waltzes into the cell, and- before talking about contracts- is very alarmed by how the girl she’d come to find is locked up like that. 

It ignores your question. Oh, wow. Your hand! They did this to you? It... does something, and the chain holding you up snaps. You fall to the floor.

Makoto falls to her knees and stays the for a moment, panting. "Yeah, they figured out I'm not the one they're looking for," she mumbles. "I'm just a fraud."

There’s a misunderstanding that happens, here- Tama-chan assumes “they” are the origami monsters, and explains that she can’t be a fake magical girl if she could see the monsters attacking her. 

After some confusion, Tama-chan gets around to offering Makoto a wish. Makoto wishes- considering that she’d spent her life locked up by a bunch of abusive cultists- to completely destroy said cult. Tama-chan... is taken aback by this.

The cat's eyes widen. This... I'm not so sure this was a good idea. This is kinda screaming... "not good idea". Are you sure your wish is mass murder? You don't want to reconsider that one?

Makoto tries to explain how the cultists made her life hell, how they deserved it, how she needs to be free- but Tama-chan is increasingly intimidated by her desperation. It’s starting to look like Makoto won’t get her wish.

That’s around when Nishi-chan drops from the ceiling, and is totally jazzed about the idea of granting her wish. And then does so.

Wait! This is wrong! the first cat says, but your body is already wracked by a force that feels like it should be pain but isn't. The cell is lit with a brilliant light. Wrong? Seriously! People are going to die! This is going too far!

"This is justice!"

Too far, Tama-chan? YOU'RE telling me we're going too far? The light fades, and you feel impossibly strong. And around you, the building is falling apart, the screams of cultists ringing loudly through the... night? Day? The time for not going too far was a long time ago, Tama-chan.

Nishi-chan- who’s more in the business of (???? a mystery ???) than babysitting new magical girls, leaves the newly-contracted Makoto to Tama-chan’s care in the wreckage of the cultists’ compound, and fucks off to who knows where. Makoto tells Tama-chan that she’s not planning on killing anyone else, and Tama-chan leads Makoto to Tokyo, where she claims she’ll be meeting with “some people I need you to meet”.

Kotono Yukari

The first three scenes took place at around the same time- a few days apart, maybe. This one takes place eighteen months ago.

We start in medias res, where Yukari has been in a horrible highway pileup. Her legs have been crushed by a semi truck, and she’s trapped and bleeding out and super duper about to die.

So, of course, who should show up but... not an Incubator?

Soon, she can see someone standing over her. "Oh god! Are you- oh, god, you're definitely not okay! Um..." You can see it's a magical girl. Her outfit is ridiculous. It's almost comical. Poofy, like a cloud. Draped head to toe in sequins. Lace sticking out every which way. You can barely make out her body underneath it. And it's all bright pink- blindingly, obnoxiously pink.

The magical girl first tries to heal her- and it works, but then the truck her legs are underneath crushes them again. Then she tries to move the truck, and can’t. She has a little bit of a freakout about how useless she is, and then runs off.

So that was kinda weird unsubtle foreshadowing for a character who’ll be relevant later!

Anyway then the Incubator shows up. It offers her a contract. Like they do. Weirdly, it’s not Kyubey, who talked to her before.

That apprehension was now gone. The spectre of worry that made apprehension had been thoroughly pushed out of her mental system by the very real fear of dying right here and right now. Any other day, that pitter-patter footstep would be the herald of uncertainty and internal turmoil. Here and now, it was the sound of hope itself.  YES! Make me a magical girl! I'm ready! I said before I was still thinking but I don't care anymore! I'm ready! Save me! Please let me live I don't want to die here not like this I have so much more to do and live for please please please!

So the Incubator’s like, okay! Here goes!

Okay! it said, and a light shone from inside your chest. ...And then faded, and you still felt trapped and human. Crap. Hang on. Your wish was... The light started again. Okay, I think I've got it. So, you're... your potential is... crap! and the light faded again. Can you hold still? No, wait, this is weird. You- why would that matter?

After some finagling and weird questions, Yukari finally becomes a magical girl. The first thing she does is check her car, and try to save her parents, drag them out of the front of the car and save them. Can you guess how this goes? You get three guesses about how this goes. Here’s a hint: did you read her backstory earlier? Because this is that backstory.

There was no front of the car anymore. It'd been completely flattened by the collapse of that truck. Even her legs had been pinned- the truck had diagonally intersected most of the car, crushed all of it but a tiny corner where Yukari had been napping against the side of the car door, there was no front of the car anymore  her parents had been sitting in the front of the car  they were going to go buy some mapo tofu. Yukari emits a wordless cry and tries to rip her way through to the front of the car, somehow. She stops when she sees the first finger. Just a finger.

You acquire one point of Trauma on "I should have done something- everything that happened was my fault."

She tries to change her wish, but... that’s not a thing you can do. Tama-chan offers to try, but- after apparently consulting some mental resource- admits it’s not possible. So she has herself a little total breakdown! Her whole life just ended! It sucks a lot!

She first decides to start helping the other people involved with the crash. She pulls a trucker out of the truck she was trapped under... and then notices, oops, she’s surrounded by witnesses who just saw her transform into a magical girl. She flees, taking the trucker to the hospital, and Tama-chan sighs and starts wiping bystanders’ memories.

And that’s it for session 0! Next time: they team up, probably! Maybe there’s a fifth character! Who knows?!

[biofunmy]

Charmin Made A Giant “Forever Roll” For Millennial Poops. It’s Incredible.

Kate Bubacz / BuzzFeed News; prop styling: Shawn O’Connor

Archimedes, the ancient Greek scientist, was taking a bath when he had his eureka! moment, discovering a physics principle using water displacement to measure density. Rob Reinerman, lead of the innovation team at Procter & Gamble, was taking a dump when genius struck, leading to the creation of Charmin’s Forever Roll, a massive roll of toilet paper for millennial asses.

Reinerman, a 14-year veteran of P&G, had been pulled off his job as brand manager of Bounty paper towels and assigned to lead a newly formed innovation team within the toilet paper division. Along with his partner Kevin Mitchell, the bigwigs had tasked them with a singular purpose. “Never run out of toilet paper is the mission,” Reinerman said.

“I was at home, I think on a weekend. I was finishing up my business and faced the age-old question of whether to replace the roll or leave that last square for the next person,” Reinerman told BuzzFeed News. Ultimately, he knew the next person to use the bathroom would be his wife, who would be annoyed to find a nearly kicked roll.

But the germ of an idea was planted: What if they made a toilet paper roll that was…UNIMAGINABLY HUGE.

Kate Bubacz / BuzzFeed News

The Forever Roll is 12 inches in diameter and is equivalent to 24 rolls of regular-size Charmin Ultra Soft.

Charmin pinched off its Forever Roll to consumers in April. It’s basically one of those industrial-size rolls you’d find at a rest stop, but so very soft. A few weeks ago, the Forever Roll caught a second wave of internet buzz when it was mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article about new household products designed for adults who live alone. Reinerman crowed at the time about how it alleviates the storage problem for urban apartment dwellers (a bigger roll means less TP to store under the sink) and how the huge rolls can last a single person up to two months.

The response online was divided. Some thought this was a sad indicator of the state of the millennials: delaying marriage and children, unable to buy homes with ample bathroom storage like their parents, stuck in tiny apartments with nowhere to stuff extra rolls of toilet paper, and suffering from such burnout that the simple task of remembering to buy toilet paper once a week was too hard. Also, it’s a giant roll of paper for going doody, which is inherently funny.

sorry im late to this but imagine being single and having a date over to your house for the first time and then they walk into your bathroom and see a rock of Gibraltar-sized roll of toilet paper next to the shitter

08:23 PM – 04 Jun 2019

Dear @Charmin please consider sponsoring me because the “forever” roll is the only thing I will be talking about with friends, family and strangers for the next forever (About 1 month) I accept merchandise, Venmo and Cash app or hell I’d take a check.

09:01 PM – 21 Jun 2019

Webster’s dictionary defines “forever” as “a limitless time.” Charmin defines it as about one month, possibly two if you’re single, which is how long a single Forever Roll — 12 inches in diameter and equivalent to 24 rolls — will last you. Due to the girth and heft of the roll, it won’t fit standard toilet paper roll holders, so they created special freestanding and adhesive wall holders (for millennials who will never own a home and can’t drill into their landlord’s walls). A starter kit of three rolls and a stand costs $30, and a single roll is $10.

The (tiny) TP-in-a-roll format that we know now was popularized around 1890 by the Scott Paper Company — lots of people were wiping with the Sears Roebuck catalog before that. The Hoberg Paper Company of Green Bay, Wisconsin, launched the Charmin brand in 1928 and soon offered the classic four-pack.

For the next few decades, the physical form of the roll didn’t change much. It took until 1994 for Charmin to make the double roll. They then created a “Mega Roll,” equivalent to four rolls.

Yet aside from tweaks to texture, prints, or even scents (Angel Soft has two new scented core options), the general shape and concept of toilet paper for home use hasn’t changed in our lifetime. The biggest development of late has been wet wipes — including varieties targeted at men: Dude Wipes, Dollar Shave Club’s One Wipe Charlies, or Mangroomer’s Biz Wipes in “Executive scent” — and that’s not going well. Because wipes don’t break down as well as regular TP, they create massive, clogging “fatbergs” in sewer systems.

What happened to the American spirit of ingenuity? We put a man on the moon, and we still use basically the same dinky TP rolls as president Taft. Sure, we brought giant-size rolls to public restrooms, but that industrial stuff is thin, rough, hole-ripping. An ass war crime. Only a stone-cold psychopath would consider bringing home that giant wheel of rough paper, encased in a rugged dispenser to protect it from thieves. Why had no one, in over 100 years, thought, Hey, what if we made a GIGUNDOUS roll of soft toilet paper?

No wonder the feedback on the Forever Roll on Charmin’s site so far has been disproportionately positive: 4.7 stars out of 5 from more than 2,800 reviewers. They compared the magnitude of the invention to sliced bread (!), touted the roll as successful Father’s Day and birthday gifts (?), and remarked on how smoothly it glides on the Forever Roll stand. Of the complaints that were filed, a large share revolved around the roll not lasting long enough: “This thing just screams ‘use more!! MORE!!’ and my kids comply,” one user griped. But bottom line, folks: “Huge and soft.”

Could this signal a future in which all consumer goods are enormous? In which our houses are just Willy Wonka wonderlands of monstrously oversize paper products and fountains of soap? Is this a sign of the excesses of peak capitalism, or a sad sign of the state of the millennial condition?

“You could produce the biggest roll in history and it still wouldn’t clean an anus properly.”

Of course, toilet paper is not without its controversies. If you, a millennial who poops a lot (and who isn’t? avocado toast is chock-full of fiber) and are also concerned about the environmental impact of the Big Ass Roll, you’re not alone. And it’s not just that it encourages people to use more paper per wipe.

Shelley Vinyard, of the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, said Charmin is made from 100% virgin paper, no recycled fibers, just pure trees. “It’s an easy place to make a difference and vote with your dollars for a more sustainable option,” said Vinyard. NRDC notes that competitors like Marcal use recycled materials.

Loren Fanroy, a representative for Charmin, told BuzzFeed News, “100% of our wood fiber supply is third-party certified with responsible forestry certification systems, like the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), and come from sustainably-managed forests. We do not participate in any deforestation practices, and for every tree we use, at least one is re-grown.” And Reinerman points out that since each Forever Roll equals 24 regular rolls, you use fewer cardboard tubes, and there’s no plastic wrap packaging.

Still, destroying forests to wipe our butts can keep you up at night, and it calls into question the merits of toilet paper altogether. If you take it one step further, perhaps it’s time for Americans to embrace the bidet and end this cycle of deforestation and waste once and for all.

“[Toilet paper] is totally unhygienic and you could produce the biggest roll in history and it still wouldn’t clean an anus properly,” said Rose George, the author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters. “We use water to wash everything from our bodies to our cars, and yet for the dirtiest part of our body, we choose to use a dry substance that really only moves, and doesn’t remove dirt. It’s crazy. It’s like choosing to have a shower with a dry towel. Half the world uses water to cleanse their butts, and they think those of us who have paper cultures are dirty, and they’re right.”

“I can’t believe nobody thought of this before.”

After Reinerman and Mitchell recruited a few other people to work on their experimental team, prototyped the giant roll, pitched it to the big bosses (who were receptive), and started testing it and running a small ad campaign on Facebook, they were ready to go public in April 2019.

“We were consistently hearing the comment, ‘I can’t believe nobody thought of this before.’ And that’s when you realize that you have something that’s improving somebody’s experience,” said Reinerman.

So they hired more people to run an e-commerce site (the Forever Roll is only sold on the Charmin website, for now), and unlike other P&G brands, they do the marketing and social media themselves. “We have a small, mighty team that is running the whole operation,” said Reinerman.

Even Charmin’s competitor had to hand it to them for coming up with the Big Roll. “If you talk to folks in the bath tissue category, the one thing we never want to happen is to run out of toilet paper in a critical moment,” said Kim Sackey, consumer knowledge lead for retail at Georgia-Pacific, the Koch Industries–owned company that makes Angel Soft and Quilted Northern. Still, she isn’t too jealous. “The Forever Roll is one potential solution; in my mind, there’s other potential ones,” she told BuzzFeed News. Subscriptions, like the kind Amazon offers, are one option, and she’s interested in optimizing the timing and quantities of subscriptions so you don’t end up with too much or too little.

Other manufacturers, including Marcal, Scott, and Cottonelle, did not return requests for comment.

To me, Rob Reinerman’s invention was a stroke of genius, a gift to the human race and all our diverse and tender holes. But as a journalist, I needed to dig deeper. Trust, but verify; wipe till it feels clean, but still look at the paper afterward. So I tested out a Forever Roll here in BuzzFeed’s office.

The stand came with a screw and its own set of mini Allen wrenches to install (pretty easy). It had a heavy base to prevent it from toppling over and felt solid.

Katie Notopoulos

The Forever Roll inside the BuzzFeed offices.

I set up a Forever Roll in a single-use bathroom in our office, and after lunch, gave it a full test myself. It was…fine? The strangest part was that it was hard to tell how far to turn the roll to get the right amount of paper — I ended up with a little more than I needed.

Then I set up a notepad and pen in the bathroom explaining what the Forever Roll was, that I was writing an article about it, and wanted my colleagues’ feedback.

It turns out asking my coworkers to describe their toilet paper–wiping experience was perhaps a bad idea. Not a single person wrote anything down on my public notepad (I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to my coworkers and also let HR know I’ve definitely learned my lesson here). But I did get two personal notes.

“Way too big. If you drop it on the floor and it gets wet you are losing SO MUCH toilet paper,” said one coworker. “My bathroom is small, and it would 100% get wet somehow. Too much surface area.”

My editor said while she was impressed with how smoothly the Forever Roll glided on the stand, she would be mortified for guests to see a massive roll of toilet paper in her small apartment bathroom.

To that I say, what is the price of dignity? Is it $30 for the Forever Roll starter kit? Is it never having to waddle across the bathroom, pants around ankles, to get a replacement roll from under the sink? Is it not having guests see an aggressively large toilet paper roll in your bathroom? Don’t ask me, I’m the person who just wrote a long article (which is not sponsored by Charmin, btw, BuzzFeed is literally losing money paying me a salary to do this) about toilet paper. I have no dignity, but boy am I clean. ●

Kate Bubacz / BuzzFeed News

Sahred From Source link Technology

from WordPress http://bit.ly/2REIp15 via IFTTT