#see for example the “Will the OTHER gentleman take chocolate?” scene

[cantsayidont]

December 1933. One of Greta Garbo's best talkies, and indeed one of the best American films of the 1930s, QUEEN CHRISTINA is not particularly historically accurate, but Garbo's portrayal of the bisexual, cross-dressing 17th century Swedish monarch is surprisingly witty, deeply moving, and more gay than you would expect even for a pre-Code movie. It's much, much better than the clunky 2015 biopic THE GIRL QUEEN with Malin Buska as Christina.

[Image ID: Three animated GIFs from QUEEN CHRISTINA (1933). The first is a long shot of Christina (Garbo) striding away through an ornately appointed room as one of her chancellors says from off-screen, "But, Your Majesty, you cannot die an old maid." The second and third GIFs are closeups of Christina as she retorts, "— I have no intention to, Chancellor. I shall die a bachelor."]

Queen Christina, 1933 dir. Rouben Mamoulian

[iamthenightcolormeblack]

Pride and Prejudice 1940: "When Pretty Girls T-E-A-S-E-D Men Into Marriage"

Made during the Great Depression, this classic black and white film is loosely based on Austen's novel and is set in what is likely the 1830s rather than the Regency Era (late 18th century to early 19th century). It is an escapist piece which capitalizes on nostalgia for a simpler time by transporting its viewers to a chocolate-box vision of the past, while paying homage to Austen's social satire by delivering plenty of laughs along the way.

Overall Thoughts on the Film:

The first time I watched this movie, I was confused because the plot as well as the setting was revised significantly (the events after Darcy's first proposal are changed to hasten the happy ending; Darcy's letter and Elizabeth's visit to Pemberley are not included in this movie). This changing of plot points makes the 2005 movie a much more faithful adaptation in comparison with this version, in spite of the creative liberties both take with the novel.

Production Design:

The movie is a typical example of Golden Age Hollywood productions, with beautiful actresses and melodramatic flourishes added to increase the drama. Some of the lines are delivered very quickly, in keeping with the comedic style of the time.

The music: definitely not historically accurate. A lot of sentimental, "ye olde timey" string arrangements that emphasize emotions or fast-paced waltz music for balls/parties.

The 1830s costumes are beautiful; it seems as if no expense (or quantity of fabric) was spared in making them. The bonnets are way taller and have more decorations than typical 1830s bonnets. Some of the patterns/fabric choices are very 1930s, and the costumes are exaggerated in such as way as to make the wearers look like fancy turkeys.

Hair and Makeup: very 1930s, with finger/sausage curls, plucked eyebrows, lipstick/lip makeup, and long lashes.

The sets: the dollhouse-like interiors are lavishly gilded and made to look as opulent as possible. Outdoors scenes are lush, with lots of flowers and bushes; the garden in which the second proposal takes place is gorgeous. The set design transports the viewer into an idyllic vision of the bucolic English countryside.

The Lead Actors:

With the exception of Laurence Olivier, the majority of the actors are American, since this is a Hollywood production. Many of the characters in the film's imaginary vision of pastoral Britain speak American or make clumsy attempts to imitate British English.

Greer Garson: while she is definitely too old for the part, she perfectly conveys Elizabeth's intelligence, outspokenness, and sarcasm. Her facial expressions are killer as well; with the arch of an eyebrow along with a snarky side eye, she captivates us all. All in all, Garson effectively shows off Elizabeth's impertinence through her nonverbal acting (this reminds me strongly of Jennifer Ehle's Elizabeth Bennet).

Laurence Olivier: he effectively conveys Darcy's pride while hinting at his deeper feelings beneath the surface (I can see why Colin Firth spoke so highly of Olivier's portrayal of Darcy). Most importantly, the film emphasizes Darcy's intelligence; he is certainly Elizabeth's intellectual equal. While this portrayal of Darcy is very accurate to the book, Darcy's pride does go away pretty quickly (he and Elizabeth form a tentative friendship early on) and his social awkwardness isn't immediately obvious thanks to his charm. Also the unflattering hairstyle with the greasy hair and painted on sideburns makes me sad.

Key Scenes:

Opening scene: The title card appeals directly to the audience's nostalgia for a sentimental, romanticized past: “It happened in OLD ENGLAND (this was actually capitalized), in the village of Meryton…” The Bennet women are at a fabric shop, where they gossip with aunt Phillips about the rich people moving into Netherfield Park.

The carriage race: this scene, which isn’t in the original novel, represents the rivalry between the Bennets and Lucases. The mothers both want their daughters to be the first to snag the rich bachelors.

The first ball: There is a historical anachronism as the music is a waltz by Strauss, who became popular in late 19th century, specifically the Gilded Age; far too early for the Regency Era or 1830s England. Other changes from the original novel include Elizabeth meeting Wickham before Darcy; other events from Aunt Phillips’ ball (which isn’t included in this movie) and Wickham and Darcy’s confrontation are included in this scene.

Elizabeth’s impression of Darcy at the ball: she puts on airs and mocks his casual dismissal of her as tolerable (definitely a parallel with the 1995 version, where Jennifer Ehle does the same, but privately with Jane).

Great comedic change: Darcy introduces himself to Elizabeth after calling her tolerable and asks if she will dance with him (this originally takes place at Mr. Lucas' ball). Right after rejecting Darcy, she instantly agrees to dance with Wickham; in a humorous moment, Darcy evacuates to a corner of the room to sulk while seeing Wickham dance with Elizabeth.

The “Accomplished woman” scene: the dialogue lifted directly from the book for the most part. Darcy, in a departure from his trademark seriousness, shows off his playful side when reacting to Caroline Bingley's "turn about the room." I particularly like this added repartee from Elizabeth Bennet to Darcy, which is clever but also foreshadows her prejudice: “If my departure is any punishment, you are quite right. My character reading is not too brilliant.”

Elizabeth can't stand Mr. Collins: After twirling about his monocle, he pronounces that: “It might interest you to know my taste was formed by lady Catherine de Bourgh.” The best part of this scene is when Elizabeth plucks a wrong note on her harp when Collins gets really annoying.

The Netherfield ball (which is now a garden party):

Elizabeth running away from Mr. Collins: She looks rather ridiculous, almost like an overdressed turkey, in a white dress with puffy sleeves as she runs away from an overeager Collins. Then she hides in the bushes while Darcy helps her to hide, telling Collins he doesn't know where she is. It's fun but most likely not something a proper lady and gentleman would do (two people of the opposite gender out alone, shock!).

The archery scene: Darcy attempts to teach Elizabeth how to shoot a bow and arrow, even though he doesn’t hit the bullseye. She goes on to impress him by perfectly hitting the bullseye every time; Darcy learns his lesson: "Next time I talk to a young lady about archery I won't be so patronizing." Caroline Bingley, very passive aggressive as usual, shows up for her archery lesson right after and it's absolutely perfect.

Mr. Collins attempts to introduce himself to Mr. Darcy: Laurence Olivier captures Darcy so perfectly in this scene (really set the precedent for Colin Firth). When Mr. Collins starts talking (inviting Elizabeth to dance with him) Darcy tries to keep himself well-composed but has a pained expression on his face as if he’s about to pass out. Olivier masters the way Darcy can look so miserable but also disgusted and proud at the same time.

Mr. Collin's proposal to Elizabeth: I like the added touch of Mrs. Bennet pulling Elizabeth back by her skirt when she tries to run out of the room. The dialogue is taken directly from the book, and the scene is made even funnier when Collins holds on to Elizabeth's hand desperately and doesn’t let her get away. My only quibble is that Elizabeth isn’t indignant enough when Mr. Collins doesn't take no for an answer.

Elizabeth and Darcy at Rosings: I like that Olivier subtly indicates that Darcy is clearly affected upon seeing Elizabeth at Rosing, hinting at deeper feelings beneath the surface. I also like how the scriptwriter emphasizes that Darcy indirectly praises Elizabeth and enjoys their conversations, while she remains convinced that he hates her. Sadly, the original dialogue of the piano scene is not included, which is unfortunate as it allows Darcy to reveal his introvert tendencies, calling into question Elizabeth's assertion that he is unpardonably proud.

First proposal: The famous opening lines are mutilated with awkward punctuation: “It’s no use. I’ve struggled in vain. I must tell you how much I admire and love you." While the rest of the dialogue matches up closely with what happens in Austen's novel, both of the actors aren’t emotional enough; instead Elizabeth cries very daintily, and Darcy remains serene, which conflicts with the book's description of both of them being very angry and defensive at each other.

THE SCRIPT:

The first half of the film up to Darcy's first proposal follows the events of the original book closely, though certain blocks of dialogue are moved elsewhere and other events such as Mrs. Phillips' party are skipped over. The most significant changes, besides updating the setting to the 1830s, are made to the second half of the book to squeeze the key events of the story into the movie before delivering the inevitable happy ending.

Brilliant Quotes:

Mr. Bennet's reaction to Mrs. Bennet's despair over the situation of their 5 unmarried daughters: “Perhaps we should have drowned some of them at birth.”

Darcy insists Elizabeth cannot tempt him: “Ugh. Provincial young lady with a lively wit. And there’s that mother of hers.”

Darcy is an arrogant snob: “I’m in no humor tonight to give consequence to the middle classes at play.” (Technically the Bennets are part of the gentry; they just are less wealthy than Darcy).

Elizabeth's reaction to Darcy pronouncing her to be tolerable at best: “What a charming man!”

Elizabeth rebuffs Darcy's offer to dance after overhearing his insult: “I am afraid that the honor of standing up with you is more than I can bear, Mr Darcy.”

Elizabeth favors Wickham after witnessing the bad blood between him and Darcy: “Without knowing anything about it I am on your side.”

Mrs. Bennet's comment after she sends Jane to Netherfield under stormy skies: “There isn’t anything like wet weather for engagements. Your dear father and I became engaged in a thunderstorm.”

Mr. Bennet's reaction to Jane's fever: “Jane must have all the credit for having caught the cold…we’re hoping Elizabeth will catch a cold and stay long enough to get engaged to Mr. Darcy. And if a good snowstorm could be arranged we’d send Kitty over!”

The sisters' description of Mr. Collins: “Oh heavens! what a pudding face.”

Caroline Bingley at the Netherfield garden party: “Entertaining the rustics is not as difficult as I feared. Any simple childish game seems to amuse them excessively.”

Darcy reassuring Elizabeth after helping her escape Mr. Collins: “If the dragon returns St. George will know how to deal with it.”

Darcy learns his lesson after Elizabeth beats him at archery: “The next time I talk to a young lady about archery I won’t be so patronizing.”

Elizabeth comments about a curtain: “Oh that’s pretty. It’s a pity you didn’t make it bigger. You could have put it around Mr. Collins when he becomes a bore.”

Elizabeth on Kitty and Lydia: “2 daughters out of 5, that represents 40% of the noise.”

Elizabeth sees Lady Catherine for the first time: “So that’s the great lady Catherine. Now I see where he learned his manners.”

Lady Catherine's attitude towards philanthropy: “You must learn to draw a firm line between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor.”

Darcy takes Elizabeth's advice: “I’ve thought a great deal about what you said at Netherfield, about laughing more...but it only makes me feel worse."

Elizabeth and Darcy have a conversation with Colonel Fitzwilliam: “He likes the landscape well enough, but the natives, the natives, what boors, what savages … Isn’t that what you think, Mr. Darcy?” With a smile: “It evidently amuses you to think so, Miss Bennet."

CHANGES FROM THE BOOK:

The first half of the film up to Darcy's first proposal follow the events of the original book closely, though certain blocks of dialogue are moved elsewhere and other events such as Mrs. Phillips' party are skipped over. The most significant changes, besides updating the setting to the 1830s, are made to the second half of the book to squeeze the key events of the story into the movie before delivering the inevitable happy ending.

With the exception of Lady Catherine de Bourgh, the portrayals of the characters are (generally) true to the book.

As I said earlier, the film neglects any sort of historical accuracy when setting the story in romanticized "Old England," where genteel people pass simple lives that revolve around dresses, tea parties, social gossip, and marriages. A lot of Austen adaptations present an idealized vision of Regency life, where people are dressed immaculately, flawlessly adhere to "chivalry," and find love in the ballroom. This contributes to the misconception that Austen's novels are shallow chick-lit books with flat characters who live for lavish parties and hot men, instead of stories of unique, complicated women who happen to be well-off but aspire towards love, respect, or independence instead of being content to make economically advantageous marriages. Austen's novels are character novels and she doesn't waste time writing about dresses or tea parties; balls, while exciting, are just another part of daily life for her characters rather than some Extremely Big Special Once In a Blue Moon Event.

Austen's multifaceted view on marriage turns into a game of matchmaking. She recognizes it as necessary for women to survive in the patriarchy, since they cannot provide for themselves unless they marry well, but at the same time, presents marriage as a means for freedom if it is a loving partnership between two people that respect each other. In contrast, marriage is a game of manipulating the partners into wanting to marry (ex. Lady Catherine and Darcy's trickery). Also, it seems to be a given that Elizabeth will marry for love, unlike in the book where it is uncertain whether she will achieve this.

Kitty and Lydia's antics are viewed much more sympathetically as those of young people having fun; in the book, their behavior harms the family's social reputation, reducing the chances the Bennet daughters have of making good marriages.

Louisa Hurst, Georgiana Darcy, and Aunt and Uncle Gardiner are not in the movie.

Wickham is introduced much earlier than in the book; he is friends with Lydia from the very beginning. Interestingly, he doesn't begin to trash-talk Darcy until Bingley leaves; in the book he does so much earlier, before the Netherfield ball.

Darcy is more considerate towards Elizabeth at the Netherfield party (ex. rescuing her from Collins), until he overhears Mrs. Bennet scheming to get the daughters married. Elizabeth forms a tentative friendship with him until finding out that he separated Jane from Bingley.

Jane is more obviously heartbroken over Bingley's departure than in the book, where she keeps her pain to herself. In the movie, she runs away to cry, which is uncharacteristic of her.

Collins is a librarian instead of a clergyman. I dislike this change because some Austen scholars/fans think that Collins being a clergyman is a deliberate choice as part of Austen's social criticism. Collins is representative of how hypocritical the Church is, since he worships Lady Catherine's wealth instead of God, and preaches moral lessons instead of actually using religion to help people. My theory is that the change was made because of the Hays Code, which led to the censorship of movies for "unwholesome" or "indecent" things; the religious criticism could have been offensive.

Elizabeth reacts rather too kindly to Charlotte marrying Collins by showing concern for the loveless marriage. While she does worry about the lack of love in the marriage, initially she is extremely surprised, outright shocked, and confused.

The scene where Darcy tries and fails to talk to Elizabeth (the "charming house" scene in the 2005 movie) just before the proposal is removed.

Darcy's letter is skipped over and Elizabeth overcomes her prejudice of Darcy very quickly, as shown when she tells Jane she regrets rejecting his proposal. This is contrary to the book, where overcoming her prejudice is an emotionally exhausting and slow process that continues all the way up until the second proposal.

The Pemberley visit is removed; instead, Elizabeth returns home to the news that Lydia has eloped. Visiting Pemberley is very important as part of Elizabeth's re-evaluation of Darcy's character and provides an opportunity for Darcy to show Elizabeth that he has changed for her. The visit is key in increasing Elizabeth's love for Darcy, and removing it means that the characters have less personal growth (also wouldn't it have been great for the audience to be treated to another gorgeous estate of "Old England?"). Instead, Darcy visits Longbourn on his own and offers his help in finding Lydia. When the news comes that Wickham accepts very little money in exchange for marrying Lydia, it isn't as shocking as it is in the book because Darcy had already expressed his intentions of helping Elizabeth earlier.

Here's the change that bugs me the most: Lady Catherine becomes good; though she is a busybody, her main priority is Darcy's happiness. Her confrontation of Elizabeth is a scheme hatched between her and Darcy as a test to be certain of Elizabeth's love. This does not make sense on so many levels: first, Darcy insists that "disguise of every sort is my abhorrence," so why would he resort to trickery, however well-intentioned, to find out if Elizabeth still loves him? Second, Lady Catherine is a social snob and objects to Elizabeth's low connections; also she has an arranged marriage planned for Darcy. Third, in the book, because Elizabeth likes Pemberley and gets along really well with his sister Georgiana, Darcy would have had some evidence that Elizabeth, in the very least, cared for him. And the added claim that Lady Catherine approves of Elizabeth because she likes rudeness and thinks Darcy needs a humorous wife irritates me further because the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy is revolutionary since it was made in defiance of societal rules!!! Why, why, why in the name of comedy did they have to do this?!

Darcy kisses Elizabeth (in a stagey and melodramatic way) after she accepts his second proposal. Seems a bit uncharacteristic of him.

All the sisters get married at the end. Happily ever after.

CONCLUSION

This movie certainly was not aiming for faithfulness to Austen's novel; it ignores her detailed portrait of Regency era society and its attitudes and focuses on the "light, bright, and sparkling" aspect of Pride and Prejudice that gives the story its timeless appeal.

All in all, this comedy of manners is definitely a classic thanks to the clever dialogue and jokes within the script, along with some great acting.

@appleinducedsleep @dahlia-coccinea @princesssarisa @colonelfitzwilliams @austengivesmeserotonin

[morethanaprincess-a]

@rcguna​ asked:  13 and 15!

Questions for Muns of Canon Muses - Accepting!

13. What canon character do you really wish your muse could interact more with?

I’m going to guess/limit this to Danganronpa canon characters, but I’m happy to take this question again for other fandoms (please specify the fandom, though! And understand I may not be familiar with it)! There’s just a lot of characters in DR, and many that I haven’t built long-term threads with. So I’ll focus on that for this answer:

- Byakuya. Not only do they have the Rich Kids background, but they have very different values/interests that could clash quite a bit. The Ultimate Summer Camp scene between them in the library is proof enough of that. So many relationship options here.

- Celestia. Always. Not only do I love them as friends, but if the chemistry is there, I love them as a romantic couple. This is a situation of some similar interests, some jealousy, but ultimately two people who could stand to learn a lot from one another.

- Sayaka. I allude to her a bit in our interactions with Eira, but this is Sonia’s touchstone when discussing idols/idol culture. But both Sayaka and Sonia deal with people prioritizing them for their beauty and putting them on pedestals, and they’d likely bond over that. They’re both pretty friendly people, too. 

- Mondo. I’d love to see Sonia interact with Mondo! She could help him talk to girls more easily and in turn, he’d help her rebel a bit more. Let Sonia ride the motorcycle!

- Akane. Both of them are survivors and they have very different ideas about family dynamics and responsibilities. And uh, there’s that scene where Sonia insists Akane shouldn’t give away her body for free and admires her chest. 

- Peko. Especially in my TalentSwap verse if Peko’s talent stays the same, but I love these two bonding (and possibly dating). I’m also weak for the cheerful, happy character paired with the stern, somewhat grumpy or shy character. They will love petting soft, furry, cute animals together. 

- Kazuichi. Look, the guy gets a lot of teasing/shit on this blog. However, I’ve never had a long-term interaction with a Kazuichi and I’d love that. Character growth post-SDR2? A Non-Despair AU as adults where they’ve been forced to grow up and change (both Kaz and Sonia)? Please. I’d love it. If the chemistry and interest was there, I’d even ship them romantically too.

- Gonta. GONTA. I wanted interactions with Gonta and Sonia even before their scene in Ultimate Summer Camp but it just proves my point: Sonia will appreciate his bugs and will love hearing about how he grew up and in return, she will help him learn how to be a proper gentleman. Thank you, DR: S, for giving us at least ONE scene of these two. 

- Kirumi. Mostly due to DR: S interactions at this point, but Kirumi and Sonia working together? With or without weapons? Unstoppable.

- Rantaro. Adventurous muse with Rich Family Problems and so many younger siblings interacting with Sonia? She will give him a lifetime’s supply of chocolate while they discuss their travels and family dynamics. I see Rantaro and Sonia striking up a friendship where they can tell each other anything...if they can track down where the other is. They share a lot of photos with one another on social media of their busy, well-traveled lives as university students and adults. (This may or may not have been written entirely for @despairfiles​ )

I’m sure there’s more (I’ve talked about Fuyuhiko recently, for example), but here’s a good starter list of canon interactions I’d love over here.

15. What plots/interactions leave you feeling protective of your muse?

Answered right over here.

[sweet-as-writing]

Writing Embarrassment

This might be a really unpopular opinion, but I love getting second embarrassment through writing. It can pain me in a way that even the most tragic scenes just can’t: there’s something about experiencing intense embarrassment through another character’s shoes that gives me this ~guilty pleasure.

I know some readers don’t like secondhand embarrassment at all, but I think that’s all the more reason to consider using it. It pushes people out of their comfort zone, and that’s what writing should do! So, given that, here are some tips/ideas for how to implement secondhand embarrassment into your writing to make your readers cringe with delight.

Make your characters get “caught”

That’s the most embarrassing part of any moment, right? Falling on your face isn’t embarrassing unless it’s in front of your crush, or maybe the teacher you highly respect, or the boss who’s interview you just walked into. To make a scene more embarrassing, think of who your character wants to impress/prove themselves to, and then fail hard in front of them.

It also helps to have the character get caught being embarrassing if it goes against their outward character traits. For example, if a known slob is caught picking their nose, it’s not that embarrassing. I mean, what else would you expect from a guy like that? But if it’s the prim and proper gentleman or lady, it’s humiliating to have people see past that and catch you in a vulnerable moment.

Create a communication barrier

In real life, communication barriers are harmful. In writing, they are great, especially when it comes to embarrassment. For example, let’s say that your main character just sat in a puddle of melted chocolate and didn’t realize when she stood up in front of her crush. If her crush was her best friend sitting right next to her, it might not be as embarrassing because it’s easy to explain what happened. If it was a random person who saw it from across the room, that person won’t get the context of the situation and jump to an embarrassing conclusion.

Lots of times, these communication barriers function best in high-pressure situations. There isn’t a lot of time or maybe the expectations for how a character acts are so high that they cannot be defied at any cost. Let’s take the example of the girl sitting in the chocolate again. If it was a relaxed summer day, she’s carefree and might just say “oh well, I’ll have time to explain it later. And it’s not like my crush will care anyway.” If she was going to an important job interview where she had to act very formal, she couldn’t explain her situation at all, and the embarrassment would form due to the misunderstanding here.

Create stakes

One of the best parts about secondhand embarrassment is that it takes readers off guard. They are put in an uncomfortable situation, but they must continue reading regardless. It also creates uncertainty for what happens next. This uncertainty is heightened through higher stakes.

Back to the example of a job interview, which would be more embarrassing: tripping and faceplanting when walking into the local fast food joint for a five minute interview, or doing the same for a high-level office job that is the character’s dream achievement. If the character fails at the second, the stakes are losing out on not just a job, but the lifelong dream. When they mess up, it’s far more embarrassing.

Other examples include: giving the wrong first impression to your significant other’s parents, forgetting to do something obvious but crucial, missing an important event entirely because it’s the character’s own fault, messing up a big speech/performance, being given the shot to save the world or win the game and failing, etc.

Make it silent after

Imagine this: the main character gets up on stage, cast as the leading role in the school play, and as soon as they do, they freeze and miss their line.

It’s not nearly as embarrassing if nobody notices and the background music keeps playing than if the music stops and the whole audience is just staring at the main character up on stage.

Or if the main character, a star basketball player and D1 prospect (making them get “caught”) is given the shot to score the basket that wins the championship (high stakes) in front of a scout who won’t understand or care that he was too focused on something else because they’re in the middle of the game (communication barrier) misses the point and loses it, it would be most embarrassing if the crowd went quiet and the teammates all stared disappointedly at him.

Example: Scott’s Tots

If any of you have watched the Office, you undoubtedly know what I’m talking about. It’s possibly the most embarrassing moment in TV history. Some people can’t bear to watch it, others (myself included) keep their eyes peeled to the scene in a sort of sick fascination, like passing by a car crash on the highway.

Essentially, what happens in the scene (spoilers i guess?) is that Michael Scott, a central character of the show, made a promise to a bunch of 3rd-something graders ten or so years ago that he would pay for their college tuitions if they graduated. Ten or so years later, they all graduate, motivated by Michael’s promise, and bring Michael to a classroom where they celebrate his generosity and expect him to pay up. But obviously, Michael Scott doesn’t have that money, and so he is put in an incredibly embarrassing situation.

The scene is so embarrassing because it incorporates all of the aforementioned subjects. Michael is “caught”: he has lied, presented himself as someone he’s not who could do something he can’t, and now the truth will have to come to light. He has a communication barrier: how is he supposed to tell these teenagers that he can’t pay for their college when they are so happy and eager he has done that? There are stakes: what will happen when the truth comes to light? We know people will be disappointed and angry. This was no minor mix-up—he’s lied to a whole class who had believed him for years and shaped their lives around that. And of course, there is unbearable silence when Michael is sitting in the classroom, struggling to come up with a way to explain his way out.

So, those are my tips and an example for how to write secondhand embarrassment the right way and make your readers cringe in delight. Good luck writing and keep it up!

[fleckcmscott]

Fun and Only

Summary: During a night out, Y/N and Arthur bump into someone from Arthur’s past. Y/N tries to decipher him.

Warnings: Swearing

Words: 4,088

A/N: This was a request from the sweet, kind @imdeaddear2! I hope you like it! Thank you for making the request, because I never would have written this scenario without it. 😀 Special thanks to @arthurflecc for the beautiful intro pic! Also, thanks to @hhandley80​ for reviewing the exchange in the middle section!

If you have any thoughts or questions, please comment, feel free to message me, or send me an ask. Requests for Arthur and WWH are open!

"Y/N, it's little league season. Know what that means?"

Needing to finish the paragraph she was reading, Y/N raised a finger. The dense case on her desk was a tough assignment; she'd been toiling at it most of the morning. She liked her new position. Truly. But the pace at which she prepared files was slower than she would have preferred. The particulars of labor laws were, well...laborious. Reviewing evidence types she wasn't familiar with took time. It made her impatient. Anxious to soak up all the information she could get her hands on.

But, she supposed, no longer being plagued by guilt for indirectly supporting the Waynes was worth the learning curve.

Leaning back in her chair, she crossed her ankles, swinging her foot back and forth as she regarded Terry. While he was incredibly friendly, chatting with everyone and anyone, they remained acquaintances. Periodically, she conferred with him over a motion or sought to get his opinion about the upcoming mayoral election. ("I've seen Wayne's legal bullshit. He's not getting my vote.") Those discussions didn't go far. Usually, he tried to bond over parental matters - she and Arthur didn't even have a plant.

She could tell this was going to be another attempt. "You're doing a fundraiser and I should buy chocolate bars?" she asked.

"Even better." Digging into his too-tight pants pocket, he retrieved a checkbook-sized pamphlet. "The Gotham Squires are selling these to charter a bus for the All-Stars tournament. They're the number two team in the state!" He shoved a photo of his kid at her.

She murmured a polite, "He's all grown-up." He spoke of the team's new uniforms and his nine-year-old's batting average. Half-listening, she flipped through the booklet. It was a coupon collection, mostly two-for-one sales at various restaurants and vouchers for discounted movie tickets, good on weekdays only. They were quite pricey at fifteen dollars apiece. But she was inclined to buy one. The savings might help Arthur practice letting go of his wallet. Allow him to stop worrying about money and indulge a little, the way he deserved.

What made the cash fly from her purse to Terry's palm was the certificate in the back: a half-off deal for Amusement Mile. Satisfaction was written all over her face as she studied the yellow cardstock's terms and conditions, the outline of a circus tent, the faded ink encouraging her to "Enjoy the Ride!" Coming from a rural area, she'd never gone to an amusement park. One had been four or so hours east, but her father had preferred to stay close to home, fearing he might be needed in an emergency.

The annual county fair had been a must. Everyone had worn his or her Sunday Best, the occasional breeze kicking up dirt as they toured the fairground. The rides had been creaky, unsound, and should have been reported to the local safety commission. She'd gone on the Tilt-A-Whirl and the giant slide, waving at her parents and hanging onto her burlap sack. One year, Mabel had screamed and cried until Y/N grabbed her hand and led them out of the house of mirrors.

Swinging the mallet as hard as he could, her father had impressed her mother with the strongman game. The puck wouldn't hit the bell. Doily and needlework competitions had been her mother's purview, crafts Y/N had practiced but quickly tired of. She'd preferred the pie contest. Her mouth had watered, hankering for a taste of the first-place winner. The agricultural exhibits had been the largest section, with its prized horses, pigs, and chickens. She'd broken the rules and stuck her fingers in the rabbit cages to feel their soft fur; she'd been bitten once.

Wistfulness wasn't the only reason the theme park appealed to her. There was Arthur's history with it. He kept a postcard of the Ferris wheel pinned to the divider in his writing nook. And he'd described some of the odd jobs he'd done. Carrying boxes of merchandise, filling in for other clowns, picking up litter (and keeping the returnables). It hadn't been steady, merely hours offered to him if he'd inquired. But it'd given him pocket change. Enough to buy cigarettes and keep the utilities on for another month.

The week had been warm up till now, and the good weather was expected to continue. He loved taking her to new corners of the city, had ever since their first date. Introducing her to his old stomping ground wouldn't take a lot of convincing.

When she got home, he was perched on the sofa, clad in a thermal shirt and a pair of her too-short pajama bottoms. (A funny combination that meant their laundry was in the machine.) Elbows on his knees, journal on the coffee table, and pen at the ready, his concentration was plain to see. The discipline he had to pursue his dreams, the way he studied comedy specials on TV was admirable. She got a glass of water and smiled at his ill-timed laughter. That he didn't understand the host's humor was logical. Roasts were usually unkind. While Arthur's jokes weren't always funny, they weren't mean-spirited.

She crouched next to him, peppered kisses along his shoulder. His damp curls brushed her cheek, and she breathed in the zesty musk of his shampoo. "I wouldn't waste too much effort on this guy," she said. Her caress followed the freckles on his bare forearm, feeling the muscle flutter under her fingertips. "He's kind of an asshole."

"The audience helps me figure out the timing." He muted the television, lips quirking. "You like some of his songs."

"He makes a better singer than comedian," she rebutted with a peck.

They went over their respective days, how his earlier appointment went, the paperwork she'd done. Tuna casserole was their choice for dinner, and Arthur put on an LP while they cooked. Once the dish was in the oven, she hugged him close. "I have an idea for Thursday night." She went over the Amusement Mile discount, enthused about his expertise, reveled in how her praise softened his features and brightened his eyes. "I'd love it if you took me around. Taught me all the magic behind the scenes. And I'm dying to see where you do your street performances." She massaged the nape of his neck. "Maybe I'll stop by and give you a tip."

Crooked tooth peeking out, he nodded. Then he grasped the counter on either side of her hips and pressed his forehead to hers. "That sounds great."

~~~~~

A small memorial flowerbed, filled with alternating swirls of white gardenias, purple pansies, and yellow daffodils, was situated just beyond the park's main entrance. The marble fountain bubbling in the center reminded Y/N of a bird bath. It was modest, from a bygone era in which the wealthy hadn't dared to flaunt their fortunes for fear of strikes. The bronze plaque declared the city's thanks to Benjamin Wayne for funding Amusement Mile's construction during the height of Gotham's industrial boom. Before most of the factories had fled. Before times had become tough for the majority Gothamites. It was annoying, how the Waynes had their fingers in everything. She hoped not one nickel of what they spent tonight went into their bank accounts.

Arthur paid it no mind. His head was tipped back a degree or two, his clear green eyes darting from attraction to attraction. Smoking was one of his habits she disapproved of. But she couldn't dispute how attractive he was, puffing the cigarette dangling from his puckered lips. The chestnut tones of his brown hair were brought to the fore by the grounds' multi-color lighting, and a lock or two fell over his temples. The loose curls at his neck bounced with each step, a boyish buoyancy to his gait.

Her stomach growled as soon as the aroma of fair food hit her. They picked a booth that claimed it sold Gotham's original franks. He asked to order for her. She let him, watching as his grin widened and he stated, "Four hot dogs for my girlfriend and me, please. With relish and mustard." Then they shared a candy apple, taking turns nibbling at the fruit's hard, sugary shell. Its juice dribbled onto her pale pink top, staining the embroidered neckline. Her groan of disapproval became giggling as he stole chaste kisses, wiping her off as she chewed.

His palm at the small of her back, guiding her as they walked down the midway, fanned a glow in her heart. He'd made headway when it came to displaying his affection in public, though he still tended towards timidity. Early on, she'd concluded his reticence had nothing to do with her - he never pulled away if she grabbed at him. He was simply a gentleman.

Most examples he followed were from an older era, one lost to the bluntness of the eighties. Those moments he'd let himself go, when he'd make it clear they were a couple, lifted her spirit. Not only due to the pride she felt at being on his arm, but also because it meant he was finding his own way. Arthur wasn't a shy suitor or a contemporary romantic hero. Rather, he was somewhere in the middle. Old fashioned, through and through, with threads of modernity woven into his fibers.

As they strolled, they stumbled onto a black and white photo booth. She sat on its cracked wooden stool and tried to tug him inside. But he wanted a picture of her, he said. To put in his wallet. To look at if he was having a bad day and wasn't at home. Her response was to snag his collar and yank him to her lips. Snorting, he shut the nylon curtain. At the clink of quarters in the coin slot, she straightened her puffed, cap sleeves and fixed her hair in the scratched featherweight mirror. The camera's flashes blinded her, but she thought she'd managed to smile naturally enough.

Before she had a chance to stand, he whipped open the drape and showed her the strip of portraits. "I knew I was dating the prettiest woman in the city. Maybe even the sweetest."

She cupped his cheeks as she stepped out. Rubbed the tip of her nose to his. He was unfailingly generous. Too generous. While she was fine with her appearance, she wouldn't win a beauty pageant. Hell, she wouldn't even be a runner-up. Or a contestant. And sweet was one of the last words she'd use to describe herself. But she wasn't going to correct him. "And I found the handsomest, funniest man." His stare was wide-eyed. After releasing a stuttering breath, he pulled her along.

Upon entering the gaming area, he slung his arm around her waist. Mischief laced his whisper as he spilled secrets. The darts for the balloon pop were dull, the balloons underinflated. He advised her to stay clear of the baseball and milk bottle stand, saying, "The bottom bottles have lead in them. You'll never knock them over."

Then he warned her off the ring toss, saying the rings were too small to win the best prizes. She decided to take her chances, regardless, and paid the attendant. Arthur tutted gently as she gave him the last ring, having already wasted four.  A step to the side, then he paused to line up his throw. A short clap announced his victory. The prize options included a dinky toy car and a rubber snake. She picked a plastic, red keychain, embossed with "I was Amused in 1982" and the silhouette of a coaster. It was an improvement over her old car dealership tag. "I'll think of tonight whenever I see it."

Gaze fixed on her mouth, he sighed happily. He began to reach towards her, his arm raised ever so slightly-

"Art!" a rich baritone called. "Hey, Art!"

Arthur flinched. She moved to peer behind him. The approaching man was tall, his balding head half a foot higher than Arthur's. A blue and red flannel shirt with gray trousers covered his portly physique. Confidence oozed from him with every stride, a pleasantly surprised smirk on his round face.

Y/N's interest was piqued. Unless it was someone who remembered Arthur from Live! with Murray Franklin, no one ever approached him on the street. And she hadn't heard him be referred to by anything other than his proper name (besides Penny's terrible "Happy.").

But his reactions concerned her. Arthur's back tensed as the man closed in, stopping a yard away. "Hi, Randall."

"How's my boy been?" Randall asked jovially, hands at his sides. "Gary told us about your mom. Could you use a little cheering up?"

Arthur blinked faster than usual. "No. She's okay. And I feel a lot better now."

"Oh. Well, good for you," Randall said.

Going back and forth between them, she tried to puzzle out their dynamic. Their familiarity was obvious. Randall seemed caring enough, although she found it odd he'd referred to her thirty-five-year-old partner as "boy." Arthur had mentioned Gary was a former colleague. It would make sense Randall was, too.

He threw her a glance. "Hey, you have family visiting. Is this your cousin?"

She brushed off the assumption and extended her hand. "I'm Y/N L/N. His girlfriend."

"Oh, yeah. The paralegal." He shook it firmly before addressing Arthur again. "Gary said you finally got a date."

The pat to Arthur's bicep was a little too hard, jolting his stiff frame. The set of his jaw and flaring of his nostrils betrayed a turmoil she hadn't initially picked up on. She touched his hand but he shoved it in his pocket.

All right. She had to get to the bottom of this. It was hard to ascertain if his current reaction was due to his social challenges (which could cause discomfort) or Randall's words. She didn't want to jump to conclusions. After all, she and Patricia teased each other whenever they met for lunch or chatted on the phone. A good ribbing was needed every once in a while.

Starting a cross-examination in front of Arthur would contribute to his unease. After a moment's deliberation, she nudged him. It took a couple of tries to get his attention. "Would you please get us a large lemonade?" His brows rose, anxiety in the wrinkles of his forehead. She stretched to kiss his temple. His eyes narrowed but he got the hint, scuffing his shoe and glowering at Randall as he walked off.

When Arthur rounded a corner by the water pistol race, she lounged on one of the booth's metal poles. "Have you known Arthur long?"

Randall nodded in the direction Arthur had gone. "We worked at HaHa's. I'm a clown, too. We did parties, the children's hospital, store openings."

"Arthur loved that job." She crossed her arms over her chest. "It's too bad the slow season hit. But he's doing pretty well on his own."

Confusion crossed the big man's visage. "Uh, yeah. The slow season." He chuckled, then. "Anyway, you and Art, huh?"

Smiling broadly, she folded her arms over her chest. "Yes, me and Art."

"Pretty serious, huh?"

If he wanted gossip to bring back to the workplace, she'd gladly give him some. Especially if it reflected well on Arthur. "We live together. It's been great."

"No kidding." With a sardonic grin, he shook his head. "A woman like you. I didn't know he had it in him. It was always just him and his mom. Talked about stand-up sometimes. Mostly kept to himself, though. Never really talked much." Randall shrugged lightly. "But we liked him. He did all the shitty jobs no one wanted and never complained."

Arching a brow, Y/N felt her suspicions grow. While Arthur was learning to disagree and contradict her without hesitation, he nevertheless had the inclination to go along. It was plausible he hadn't argued about gigs. Had they taken his preferences into account?

Then Randall confirmed her skepticism, saying in a jokey tone, "That laugh really got everyone going, too. And his laminated cards. We had a pool on whether it was part of his act. I mean, him being in Arkham and all, who knows what the fuck he could have come up with?"

Deciphering what kind of man stood in front of her was suddenly uncomplicated. She'd run into his type all too often. They lurked in garages and offices. Diners and restaurants. Courtrooms on both sides of the bench. People with no real power who walked on others. Persons who threw their weight around to feel in charge. Bullies who hid behind a veneer of kindness.

She understood why he'd called Arthur "boy."

What she said had to be chosen carefully. Randall and Arthur worked in the same field, likely competed for clients. If her big mouth came back on Arthur, she wouldn't forgive herself. She straightened, squared her shoulders, and forced her voice to stay professional. "If you liked him, wouldn't you have split the less desirable jobs with him? I'm sure he didn't like being taken advantage of."

His looked at her in disbelief. "Hey, he was paid fair and square, like all of us."

"And he understands how to speak to a 'woman like me' more than you ever will." A sharp exhale as her cheeks burned. "From what Arthur has said, you could learn a lot from Gary. Please tell him hello from us and have a good evening." With that, she headed off to find Arthur, ignoring Randall's lame attempts to call her back.

Arthur was in line when she spotted him. He stepped forward and pointed to the menu. As she approached, she noticed how he fidgeted with his cigarette, tapping it repeatedly though there was no ash. The subtle tremble in his knee. If he continued to carry himself so tightly, his muscles would cramp.

Clearing her throat, she slipped behind him and hugged his back. "Did you have to deal with that insufferable know-it-all every day?"

He grabbed the proffered cup from the clerk and headed to a nearby table. Plunked himself down and took a drag off his smoke. Stress poured off him, clear in every flex of his fingers. His palm went to his stomach as he practiced controlling his breathing. "What- What did he tell you? That everyone thought I was a freak? How much I fucked up?" His voice lowered then, barely above a whisper. She could tell he was talking to himself. "The hospital?"

"Enough to know he was a jerk. I'm glad you're not there anymore." She put her chin on his shoulder. Watched him take a sip of lemonade. "Nothing he said matters, but I told him how important you are to me." She tucked a hair behind his ear, and he leaned into her touch. Their gazes met, his shining in the dim light. The evening had been fantastic so far. She wasn't going to let some asshole ruin it. "Come on," she urged, jutting her hip towards him. "We still have half the park to explore."

~~~~~

About a third of the way through their ride on the Mad Hatter, Amusement Mile's famous coaster, Y/N realized eating had been a mistake. A big one. Thrown to a fro in the sharp curves, she could nearly taste the bile in the throat. She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, willing her nausea to pass. For his part, Arthur appeared exhilarated, laughing with every peak and valley. Seeing that happiness was a gift, one that gratified and partially distracted from her queasiness.

Fortunately, the enclosed cabins on the Ferris wheel were a respite. They waited an extra turn to board the outer wheel, which rotated at a leisurely pace and allowed her stomach to settle. The view from the top was beautiful, Gotham Cathedral's lit spires and the Westward Bridge prominent against the night sky. Wayne Tower was also visible, but she did her best to ignore the high-rise and its gaudy "W." He pointed in the direction of Burnley and said, "There's our home." She was unexpectedly moved. Then he kissed her soundly, which quickly advanced to mild necking when the wheel paused.

The carousel was antique, according to the sign. The only original attraction left in the park. A massive wooden structure with a mirrored center, it had three rows of horses, broken up by the occasional bench. He stepped onto the gray platform and picked one, painted red and yellow, roses etched along its back. But she climbed a nearby leaping horse instead, its black mane and tan body faded by years of sunlight.

He quirked a dark brow until she beckoned him with a nod. Cheeks pink, countenance tender in the lingering blinks of the incandescent bulbs, he followed suit. "Hang onto me," she instructed. As the calliope's whistles began their jaunty tune, he cupped her hips and pressed into her. A flutter tickled her stomach. She reclined against him, let her eyes fall shut as his warmth surrounded her. Round and round they went, chuckling airily. Not at any jokes or amusements, but at the joy of one another.

Arthur picked the last ride, an old mill called Romantic River Caves. She had to stop herself from snickering at the idea of a middle-aged woman and her nearly-middle-aged boyfriend cruising along in something built for teenagers. But he delighted in cliches and corniness, a preference she attributed to his inexperience and kind nature. Though such gestures hadn't thrilled her since she was a girl, she appreciated them with him.

The boats were short and narrow, just wide enough for the two of them to sit side-by-side. Curved backrests encouraged cuddling. Off-key versions of old standards played through tinny speakers. Myriad displays were inside, a mix of plaster dioramas and paintings. Two swans swimming, their beaks touching. A couple on a picnic under a tree. Bouquets and hearts galore. There were five or so seconds of darkness between each one. He took advantage of those breaks, kissing her again and again until she was breathless.

She scanned the starry painting above them, the comets' trails stretched across the tunnel's ceiling. "It's been a long time since I've done anything like this. Twenty-five? Thirty years?"

"Me, too. I snuck in when I was a kid. To see the circus and the merry-go-round." He smoothed his hair back, pressed his legs tighter together. "When I moonlighted here, I could've gone on the rides and to the shows. I- I didn't want to alone."

He paused and she put her palm on his thigh. Gave him an encouraging squeeze. "That postcard I have?" he said. "By my desk? It was in my locker at HaHa's." His fingers covered hers, tips tracing her knuckles. "It's good to have a person to have fun with. To have you."

She beamed at that sentiment, for she felt it, too. Yes, she'd been complete on her own. No, she hadn't been lonely. But he added to her existence. Introduced her to activities and experiences she hadn't previously considered or realized she'd needed. Going to a comedy club. Dancing despite her lack of skill. Or enjoying vulnerability during quiet conversations in their bedroom rather than fearing it. He'd broadened her life in ways she was still discovering. And he regularly told her she'd bettered his. "You're my favorite ride," she said.

A sharp snort left him, followed by a bashful chuckle. He shook his head. "You're crazy."

"I didn't mean that." She batted his chest playfully. Tried to cross her legs under the safety bar. "This relationship we've started." Light appeared at the end of the tunnel, the shallow pool's grimy floor coming into view as the water level fell. Soon they'd be amongst the crowd. "Remember when I said we'd never be perfect? I like our imperfections. They fit. Like..." She contemplated. "A pen and paper. They're good on their own but they're best together." Cringing, she covered her face. "God, that didn't even make sense. A pen needs paper."

"Didn't you say you needed me?" he teased, pulling her hand from her brow to place it on his sternum. "I don't mind being your paper." Blushing, Y/N turned to him when he cupped her jaw. Ran his thumbs over her cheeks. She joined him in ignoring the attendant's instruction to disembark. Arthur kissed her, a delicate graze to her mouth before he drew her bottom lip between his. "You're the best ride, too."

~~~~~

Tag list (Let me know if you want to be added!): @harmonioussolve​, @howdylilflower​, @sweet-nothings04​, @stephieraptorr​, @rommies​, @fallenstarsabyss​, @gruffle1​, @octopus-plasma​, @tsukiakarinobara​, @arthur-flecks-lovely-smile​, @another-day-in-chuckletown​, @hhandley80​, @jokerownsmysoul​, @64-crayon​

[mdelpin]

A Gratsu Valentine - Chapter 2 (Final)

AO3 | Tumblr: Ch 1

A few of you requested this, I hope you enjoy it. Happy Valentine’s Day!

The bear proved to be a problem. It was too big to be checked in the restaurant’s coat closet, which was already overflowing with outerwear. It was probably a good thing too, as Natsu had immediately gone into a long rant at the suggestion, claiming he had carried that bear all the way across town, and there was no way in hell they were putting it in some smoky closet. So the waiter had been kind enough to find an extra chair and attach it to their small table where it now sat smiling at everyone who walked by like some kind of deranged Valentine’s Day ambassador. Its arms were still laden with Gray’s favorite chocolates and the biggest bouquet of roses Gray had ever seen.

He took a deep breath, trying not to let the extra attention they were receiving from strangers bother him. He reminded himself he had bigger things to worry about, and besides, it was kind of cute in a teenage girl kind of way. He just hoped Natsu didn’t insist on having them sleep with it at night.

Natsu might have gone all out with his present, but this was one time where Gray knew he had him beat.

He grinned in anticipation, wondering how Natsu would react to his surprise proposal. There was no way he could be expecting it. They hadn’t been together for very long, but even so, Gray had never been so sure of anything in his life. He wanted to spend the rest of his life with this man, bickering and laughing together and loving each other.

Gray was already looking forward to the wild night they were sure to have to celebrate their engagement. He wished he hadn’t run so late at the jeweler’s though, Natsu seemed kinda drunk, which hadn’t really been part of the plan, but at least he hadn’t gotten loud drunk.

Their waiter seemed to have forgotten about them after he had brought the chair over and filled their water glasses. Gray was hungry, and he could see from how Natsu was starting to get fidgety that he was hungry as well.

“Why were you late anyway?” Natsu asked suddenly, looking at him with curiosity.

“I had to go pick up your present,” Gray answered smoothly, realizing too late that it had been the wrong answer as Natsu’s eyes burned with unbridled curiosity.

“What did you get me?” Natsu’s eyes lit up with anticipation, and he made gimme gestures with his hands.

“It’s a surprise,” Gray winked, “Besides, I’m not quite sure it’s been long enough since you broke up with the bear.”

Natsu laughed, “Alright, you’ve got me there.” He looked around the restaurant, which was suffering from a severe lack of waitstaff. “When are they going to get here? I’m starving.”

As if to prove his point, Natsu’s stomach began to rumble loudly, and Gray knew this was a bad sign. “Here, why don’t you have some of my chocolates, they’re delicious!”

He removed the ribbon that Natsu had tied to the bear’s arm to keep the box in place, opening it without paying much attention, quickly recognizing the packaging of his favorite chocolates and handing a few to his boyfriend.

“Mhmm, these are really good,” Natsu moaned wantonly as he shoved them into his mouth, causing even more people to stare their way.

Gray felt that moan in parts of his body that shouldn’t really be awake in public places, especially not when he could feel Natsu’s foot playing with his leg.

“What are you doing?” Gray hissed, already feeling self-conscious by all the people that staring at them as they walked past.

“Trying to show you that you’re the one I love,” Natsu’s face was flushed, reminding Gray of other times he’d seen that expression, which was seriously not helping his rapidly rising problem. Especially as Natsu’s foot continued its ascent. He could feel his cheeks heating up from Natsu’s attention.

“Wow, these are to die for,” a female voice commented next to him, making him jump. Somehow, the woman that Natsu had befriended at the bar had grabbed a chair and sat at their table without either of them noticing. She grinned at them knowingly.

“Cana!” Natsu greeted her with a happy smile.

“Do you mind?” Gray snapped, embarrassed to be caught in such a compromising position, even though Natsu’s foot had immediately retreated at her intrusion.

“Not at all!” Cana replied cheerfully, as she took a sip from her tumbler and stared at them unabashedly.

“Don’t you have a date of your own to be getting back to?” Gray asked gruffly, wanting her to leave so he could get on with his plan.

“Yep, got him right here,” Cana winked cheekily, lifting her tumbler and taking another sip.

“So this is Mr. Perfect, huh?” she asked Natsu, ignoring Gray’s obvious displeasure and peering at him with mischief filled eyes, “He doesn’t look like much Natsu, maybe you were better off with the bear.”

“Hey! I’m right here!” Gray protested as Natsu snorted at her comment.

“Nah, he’s amazing,” Natsu purred and damn him that noise was sexy too!

Gray found himself forgetting all about Cana as Natsu gazed at him in the way Gray loved, with sparkling eyes and that smile that promised exciting adventures. He found himself responding to it, grabbing Natsu’s hands in his and staring into his eyes until he felt intoxicated.

He couldn’t believe it, in just a few short minutes he was going to ask Natsu to marry him. It was so unlike him, this impulsiveness, but that’s what Natsu did to him. Made him want to try new things and step outside of his comfort zone. It had been hard at first, but he’d soon realized even when he didn’t like the results having Natsu by his side made it worthwhile.

He was startled out of his daze by the clicking sound of a phone camera promptly followed by Cana squealing, “Oh my God, you two are so frigging cute!”

Gray’s face was burning, and he couldn’t tell how much of it was embarrassment at being caught in such a vulnerable moment and how much was just fury at her continued presence. He wanted her to leave before she managed to ruin everything, but he could tell by the way she’d made herself comfortable that she had no plans to do so.

Rather than make yet another scene, he decided to go ask for help from the restaurant’s staff. He excused himself and headed for the reception desk, which was being manned by a blonde woman.

“Can I help you, sir?” the greeter asked him, taking in his agitated state.

“A woman has sat at our table and refuses to leave,” he explained as calmly as he could, “I was hoping someone could help me with that.”

“Oh, right away, Sir!” she responded, immediately gesturing to a waiter and explaining the situation.

“Which is your table?” the waiter asked.

“Uhm, the one with the pink-haired gentleman and the enormous stuffed animal. You can’t miss it.”

The waiter walked away with an air of purpose while the greeter apologized, “I am so sorry this happened, we will send a complimentary bottle of champagne to your table. Is there anything we can do to make your evening more enjoyable?”

Gray had been about to say that was all he wanted when he was struck by a thought. Natsu loved grand gestures, and he hadn’t really given much thought as to how he was going to present the ring. Maybe…

Gray took the velvet box out of his pocket and showed it to her, “Actually, our waiter hasn’t been by for our order yet, do you think you could help me with something?”

The greeter squealed in excitement, “Oh my God, oh my God! Leave it to me, I’ve always wanted to do this!”

She handed him a menu and had him pick out their order, and after he pointed out which one was Natsu’s meal, she assured him, “I’ll put this right in for you!” right before literally skipping into the kitchen.

The woman’s excitement proved contagious, and soon he felt all his irritation melt away as he thought of Natsu’s face when he found the ring. He walked back to their table to see the waiter escorting Cana back to the bar. She waved at him as she passed him, utterly unfazed by her escort.

He sat back down, searching Natsu’s face for any sign of annoyance but finding none, only amusement.

“If you wanted me all to yourself, all you had to do was say so,” Natsu chuckled, knowing Gray well enough to realize how aggravated he must have been at Cana’s intrusion.

“Whatever,” Gray grumbled, “I went ahead and ordered for us,” he announced, smiling as Natsu cheered in response.

“Thank God, you have no idea how close I was to eating all your chocolates,” Natsu admitted, and it was his turn to startle as a loud pop erupted next to him, and he was handed a champagne flute filled with the bubbly drink.

“You’re really going all out today, aren’t you? Fancy restaurant, champagne,” he eyed him suspiciously, “Are you up to something?”

“Not at all, you make me happy, and I just wanted to treat you a little,” Gray replied, smirking internally at what was still to come.

Natsu’s eyes moistened at his words, his hand extending out until he could caress Gray’s cheek with this thumb. “I - you, you make me happy too. I’ve never had anyone care about me the way you do.”

Gray lifted his champagne flute and challenged, “Wanna try something?”

Natsu nodded, watching with interest as Gray gestured for him to lift his flute, leaning forward as he understood what Gray wanted. They drank from their flutes, arms entwined, and eyes never leaving the other, laughing when they managed it without incident.

“You are such a dork,” Natsu teased, “but I love you so much.”

He beckoned Gray to lean forward again, meeting him halfway and kissing him sweetly, quite unlike their usual heated kisses. Gray followed his example, enjoying the simple gesture.

Gray was about to tell Natsu he loved him too when their food arrived. Everything looked amazing, and he immediately dug in. After taking a few bites, it suddenly dawned on him that he had no idea where they were going to hide the ring, and he had a moment of apprehension, but he shrugged it off, thinking that this place must do stuff like that all the time.

Noticing Natsu had yet to eat anything, engaged as he was in a glaring match with the cutlery, he decided to put him out of his misery, “It doesn’t matter, just pick one and eat.”

Relieved, Natsu began to wolf down his food, and conversation ceased until they were finished.

“This was really good, Gray!” Natsu commented, but Gray barely heard him.

As the time for dessert neared, he was feeling more and more nervous. He poured the remainder of the champagne bottle into their flutes and tried to slow down his racing heart.

“Huh? Oh, that’s great, just wait until you try the dessert!”

He could see the waiter coming towards them as well as the greeter standing behind him, offering him a massive grin along with a thumbs up, her signal that everything was in place.

“Are you okay?” Natsu was looking at him with concern, and he couldn’t understand why.

“Huh?”

“You’re sweating, do you feel ill or something? We can go home if that’s the case, this was more than enough.”

“NO! You have to eat your dessert!” Gray shouted, “Uhm, I mean, I’m fine, it must be the champagne,” he chuckled nervously even as he downed the rest of it, looking for courage wherever he could find it.

“Okay,” Natsu shrugged, although he still looked concerned, “if you’re sure.”

“Yep, oh, here it is now!” Gray said, much too loudly, once again attracting Natsu’s attention.

“You’re up to something,” Natsu stated matter-of-factly.

“Maybe I am,” Gray shrugged, not giving the matter any importance but also giving Natsu a cryptic smile.

“Is it my present?” Natsu all but bounced in his chair, hopped up on booze and anticipation, and Gray couldn’t help but chuckle. His boyfriend was such a child when it came to gifts.

The waiter set Natsu’s dessert in front of him, and Gray could make out the vague outline of the ring hiding in the custard of the salted caramel creme brulee he had ordered Natsu. He worried that Natsu would catch on too soon, but he needn’t have worried. His boyfriend was too fascinated by the cooking blowtorch the waiter used to caramelize his dessert to notice anything else.

Gray couldn’t even look at his ice cream, his stomach was tying itself up into knots. It was stupid really, he was pretty sure Natsu was going to say yes, but it was still a huge step.

“Did you see that, Gray?!” Natsu’s whole face had lit up at the spectacle, “He used a blowtorch to cook my dessert!”

“I thought you might like that,” Gray snorted, “There’s another dessert where they set the whole thing on fire right in front of you, I forget what it’s called, crepes something or other. I’ll take you to get that another time.”

“Man, and here I thought roasting marshmallows was cool,” Natsu replied, his voice filled with awe.

“Well, it still is!” Gray pointed out, “But it’s good to try other things too!”

Gray wondered whether he should go down on one knee, or if that was something you only did when you proposed to a woman. Not sure and not wanting to insult Natsu, he decided to remain sitting, opting to grab one of Natsu’s hands and peer into his eyes instead.

“I want to explore all sorts of new things with you, and I want you to keep showing me things that you like.” Gray’s nerves were starting to settle now that he had begun, even managing an earnest smile before resuming.

“Before I met you, I was so closed off and set in my ways. Everything had to be just so, but being with you, I’ve learned how much I was missing out on, and I don’t ever want to go back to that.

“I want to wake up next to you every morning, and have every day be an adventure, you know?” Gray was skirting ever closer to his question, and he could see Natsu was trying to figure out what he was going on about, his eyes boring into him even as he scooped his spoon into his dessert and lifted it to his mouth.

“Natsu, I don’t know if I have ever been in love before, but I am now, and I can’t imagine sharing the rest of my life with anyone else but you. Will you marry me?”

Natsu gulped down the spoonful of dessert that was in his mouth, trying to swallow quickly so he could answer, and that’s when things got decidedly weird. His face turned incredibly red, and he started coughing.

“Are you okay?” Gray asked, worriedly looking around for help when Natsu wasn’t able to answer.

Oh my God! Gray panicked as he realized he couldn’t see the outline of the ring in the dessert anymore.

“Help, he’s choking!” Gray yelled, standing up and hurrying over to the other side of the table. People surrounded them, but no one stepped in to help, “Please, I don’t know what to do,” he begged tearfully.

“Get out of the way,” Gray heard before feeling a hard shove. He recognized the voice immediately. It was Cana.

She stood behind Natsu, bending him at the waist and slapping him between his shoulder blades as he continued to cough. Then she pulled him up and performed what Gray recognized as the Heimlich maneuver, repeating this over and over while Gray ended up kneeling on one knee, after all, grabbing one of Natsu’s hands in his and looking up at him with concern. He was freaking out, about two seconds from calling an ambulance when the ring came flying out of Natsu’s mouth, hitting Gray square on the nose before falling to the ground next to him.

“Natsu, Natsu!” Gray called out urgently, “Say something.”

“A ring? Were you trying to fucking kill him, Gray?” Cana yelled at him, looking Natsu over with concern.

“How was I supposed to know he would swallow it?” Gray protested, “I didn’t even know where they were gonna put it.”

“Are you stupid? It was in his food, what else was he supposed to do?”

“Guys, I’m fine,” Natsu finally spoke, his voice coming out in a hoarse whisper as he tried to defuse their bickering. He looked incredibly tired.

Once Natsu had begun to speak the crowd that had surrounded them dispersed, returning to their own celebrations.

Gray grabbed Natsu in his arms, hugging him tightly, “I was so scared, don’t ever do anything like that again!”

Natsu tried to laugh but only managed to cough, “Yeah, I don’t want to do that again anytime soon. The answer is yes, by the way.”

“Huh?” Gray stared at him blankly, still too wired to understand the meaning behind Natsu’s words.

Natsu peered at the ground, bending to pick up the ring that had been lodged in his throat and showing it to Gray, who immediately felt like an even bigger idiot than he already did. He grabbed it from Natsu and tried to clean it with his dinner napkin, his hand trembling as he did so.

“Ugh, just give it here,” Cana grumbled, “I’ll go clean it up.” She grabbed it and took it with her to the bathroom

“Gray, I’m fine,” Natsu assured him, grabbing his trembling hands and kissing the knuckles.

“I just wanted to have a special night to show you how much I love you, and I almost killed you.”

“Well, I mean, it’s memorable, right?” Natsu teased, continuing to hold his hands and squeezing them gently.

“I guess.”

Cana finally returned from the bathroom with the ring and handed it to Gray. “Do it right this time!” she glared as she tapped her foot.

Gray didn’t have the heart to send her away, not after she had saved Natsu, so he went ahead and got down on one knee. “Natsu Dragneel, will you marry me?”

“Yes,” Natsu responded almost before Gray could finish getting the words out, pulling him up and into a kiss.

He admired his ring, smiling happily at Gray. Then he did something unexpected once again, he began to laugh. “I guess I should confess something.”

“What?”

“We sort of had the same idea, so I guess now it’s time for you to find your ring.”

“What?!” Gray sputtered as Natsu dissolved into giggles.

“I’ll give you a hint, it’s somewhere in the bear.”

A/N: Moral of the story - Don’t hide objects in food, it is seriously dangerous...

@ao3feed-gratsu​

[musicallisto]

Can I get shipped with a TRR/ES/ILITW character? No gender preferences. I have light brown hair, green eyes, glasses (with blue frame). I am a male, thin, hungry almost always, shy, kind of hard to be talked to until I am comfortable with that person, nerdy, scared, an overthinker, dreamy.

I Ship You With…

Q U I N N   K E L L Y

• I ship you with Quinn! I think she would totally adore you right at first glance. I headcanon you would meet through work, working at the same bakery in New York, a place famed for its exquisite cupcakes. You would have different shifts, so at first you hardly ever saw each other at first, only when you would symbolically exchange aprons, until Quinn would dare make the first move and ask you out on a date. Well, it was a date in her head at least, because you didn’t interpret it that way… it would be just a casual getaway, driving for a few hours out of the city to the seashore, taking long walks by the water and building sandcastles on the wet, Atlantic beach. You were oblivious about Quinn’s intentions at first, just thinking it was a bonding activity, something coworkers do to get to know each other better, right? But when she kissed you at the end of the night, as you suggested walking back to your car and heading home, and she breathed deeply, watching the gray ocean for the last time, then turning on her heels and capturing your lips with hers in a swift, unexpected moment, you quickly understood how blind you had been. And you also quickly understood how much you wanted this - how much you wanted her.

• Okay so, since you are “hungry almost always”, I can definitely see this little scene happening between you two. So one day, after you’re married, Quinn would buy a very elaborate, ornate box of chocolates, something that definitely looks like an expensive gift for someone you esteem profoundly. The truth is it’s a present for Michelle, with whom she had plans to meet on the following day. Unbeknownst to you, of course - she had told you, but you were thinking about something else, or just didn’t remember it on the moment. So when you come home from work, a little earlier than normal, exhausted and starving, and see an appetizing box of chocolates, so varied, mouthwatering, colorful and sweet… you don’t think twice about it and engulf the entire content of the package in no time at all. Needless to say, when Quinn comes home, a few hours later, and sees the disemboweled box lying heavy on the kitchen countertop, abandoned and miserable… she is a bit angered, of course, because that chocolate was expensive, but when you give her your most bashful, sorry smile, and suggest going with her to buy another box (implicitly hinting at a… lively evening together), she sighs with a slight smile, holds you close in her arms and rests her head on your large shoulder. It’s just a box of chocolates, after all… she would trade any if it meant having you by her side.

D R A K E   W A L K E R

• I ship you with Drake! He would be intrigued by your closed-off personality, not realizing it’s really how he appears himself. Well, actually, he imagines it a little because of the countless times Liam has told him he was being a little too secretive and snarky, but he never thought he was acting that way at that extent. So that similarity in your characters would definitely entice him to learn as much as possible about you and have you liberated of your shell. When you first arrive in Cordonia, it’s a little hard for you to adjust to this new environment, a whirlwind of people and smiles you’ve never known before, something you’ve never imagined��� and it’s that mistrust, if not contempt towards the nobility and their political masquerade that brings you two together among other things. Getting away from the loud violins and the glittery dresses, you would find Drake on a balcony, rummaging in his thoughts and stirring a glass of whiskey in front of an infinity of stars. Unsure about whether you should approach him, you would finally decide yourself and ask if you could use a little of his drink. He would raise an eyebrow, not expecting you to be the kind of person to drink away the boredom, but would extend his arm nevertheless for you to take a sip of whiskey. That night, you ended up pouring your hearts out, laughing quitely and not so soberly falling in love with each other, although you had absolutely not planned to.

• You’re probably the most interesting and intriguing person Drake has ever met. He loves talking to you at night, when it feels like the both of you are more open, more vulnerable - and oddly enough, for the first time in his life, he’s not afraid of being vulnerable with you. You mutually help each other come out of your shell! Teaching Drake how to slow dance - “what do you mean, slow dancing isn’t a thing in Cordonia? Slow dancing is a thing everywhere, Walker” -, and him taking you to his favorite spots in the country - “it’s a small country, I can show you a few sights for waking up early for.” “if you burst into a song about how beautiful dawn is over Cordonian heels, I’m outta here.” “ha, don’t worry about that, I’m usually the villain in Disney movies anyways.” -, it’s a true adventure dating him. At first, you’re a little afraid about his friends’ reactions when they learn the news, but they are so supportive of your couple it’s incredibly refreshing, and even if there are still some people that ask you questions close to indecency, or don’t seem to understand that you love each other and that’s the only thing they need to know, being in the face of public it’s not that bad, after all. At least it gives you all the great advantages being close friends of the King offers… like the most luxurious hotel suites and free European getaways all over the continent, only you two, together, facing the rest of the world.

L U C A S   T H O M A S

• I ship you with Lucas! I think he would have that dynamic of trying his best to bring out the best of you and ease your insecurities at first, before letting you know about his own. Like, that boy is so selfless he always puts your interests before his, despite all the trouble he’s facing with his parents and his addiction. He would be the most dedicated gentleman, a bit unsure at first - is he doing too much? is he coming off too strong or too clingy? -, but a real smooth fucker at the same time. For example, he knows very well that you hate answering phone calls and would rather send texts all the way, but always calls you instead of sending you a message, and one day it drives you mad to the point that you ask him why he does that, as though he purposefully wants to annoy you, and he looks down, cheeks crimson, and ashamedly admits that it’s because he loves hearing your voice and he misses it very quickly. You’re completely stunned by his revelation, you didn’t expect to see Lucas’s defenseless side so soon in your relationship, but you sigh softly and hug him tight, because it’s at that moment that you understand he’s a catch and you’d be damned if you let him go.

• The more time passes, the more comfortable you get around Lucas and the more walls you start to break down for him to see your insides. It makes you a little uneasy at first, but Lucas is very cautious about your well-being and is okay with taking all the time you need to take things a little further. You start to get cheeky as well after a few weeks, invinting him over for lazy “study dates” (which are actually afternoons during which Lucas tries his hardest to study with you taking all the space on his lap, where his laptop and books should be, but the sight of you, your glowing eyes and parted lips is much more attractive than equations and formulas), and another kind of dates, your “diner dates”, pretty much what it sounds like, and this time you’ve both ordered the hugest milkshake in the entire restaurant, Lucas teases you about your unability to finish it - ‘try me’ you laugh with a malevolent grin, and you softly caress his hand resting on a napkin, trying to contain a sigh of pure joy and contentment. It’s just so peaceful and harmonious in your habitual diner and you would never change any detail of the scene in front of you: the customers chatting happily, the waiters carrying trays of maple syrup pancakes and your smiling boyfriend, maliciously eyeing you over the frame of his thick glasses.

Moodboard

Playlist

Bebe Rexha - Ferrari

Metallica - Whiskey In The Jar

Lost Frequencies - Reality

Imagine Dragons - On Top of the World

ships are closed!

[siriusstarx]

Here is the translation for Saint’s scene in the new teaser video on the official Code: Realize Silver Miracles site. 

I get the feeling this will be a far gentler story than Saint’s original route. 

…..

Saint:

The trees along the streets exposed to the winter wind have cast away their green clothes long ago—

On the contrary, everyone on the boulevard wears a coat, rounds the back and walks quickly.

In the middle of December the city of London is completely dressed for winter as well.

One day when the winter started to deepen—

I, Saint Germain, had visitors to my mansion after a long time. 

(Saint’s dining room)

Hansel: It is unusual for Saint to call us…..

Guinevere: So, Saint Germain. I heard that you are off duty right now….. what purpose did you call us today?

Saint: ……..Yes. Actually I was alone, and in a situation that I could use a few extra hands.  

Guinevere: You can do anything without problems. It is unusual for you to ask for help, do you mean that it is too much trouble?

Quiet tension runs through Guinevere’s voice.

Hansel, as usual.

Even listening to the story, he was leaning on his fork with a vague expression.  

Saint: Well, both of you….. before explaining can you look here?

When I bow respectfully, I take the cloth off the table with a flourish.

….While I do this, I think that I have received the bad influence of a certain Gentleman Thief who likes to be dramatic….

In any case….

There are colorful branches and flowers on the table, including fir, crest, roses and tree nuts.

And, a majestic wreath of flowers.

Hansel: From the time I entered the mansion, I thought the smell of flowers was strong…..

Guinevere: ………What is this?

Saint: As you can see, it is floral wreath material.

Guinevere: ……….

This makes no sense. (?)

While listening to the breath of Guinevere which carried such feelings, I picked up the floral wreath example in my hand.

Saint: So, first wreath construction, please feel free to choose from the available materials. The size is….. following this example.

Guinevere: Wait.

Hansel: What is the hourly wage? 3 chocolates? No, 5 cookies? No way…. 5 biscuits…..?

Guinevere: — Hansel? Keep silent as talk distracts? 

Guinevere: ……Anyway, Although I have many complaints, can you tell me the circumstances?

This former queen has not been able to make a joke since I recruited her.

Because she will begin slashing ruthlessly if teased too much, I nod gravely.

Saint: I need your help to prepare for a Christmas party.

(Scene of The apostles making Christmas decorations…. well, Hansel is just eating them.)

Brilliant red and calm green.

Wrapping contrasting colorful ribbon, the walls of the room are gradually brightened.

As soon as I started decorating the room, I answered the questions of the two.

Hansel: That is…. does that mean you are calling Cardia to come to a party?

Saint: Yes. As you know, the group is acting apart now.

Saint: So I thought we would be able to get together for awhile— when everyone can come….

Guinevere: December 24th. —that’s why it’s a Christmas party.

Guinevere: ……It is done. I never thought you had asked Omnibus permission for us to help. (??)

Guinevere took off her usual intimidating armor.

Sisi barked at her knee while watching her carefully braid the flowers.  

Guinevere: But, why do you need us? Your other friends will be nearby.

Saint: Everyone is away from London, Fran was called away for a lecture at Liverpool’s Medical Society.

Sisi: bark!

Hansel: Oh…..So a dog too……

Hansel: First of all….. If it is from Mother, Gretel and I are not complaining.  

Hansel: Of course…. later we receive lots of sweets and cakes as rewards.

Saint: Yes. Feel free to. Why don’t you join us on the day of the party?

Guinevere: ……I will think about it later.

While weaving a wreath unexpectedly deftly, Guinevere shrugs her shoulders.

Guinevere: But, your relationship with them is part of the mission….. it is a proposal I can not imagine you saying.

Guinevere: Did something change your mind?

Saint: …….it might be.

Will I be laughed at if I express my honest feelings.

Because the apostles of Idea are separated in the flow of time, I want to share time with my friends. (?)

Saint: —come on, it is almost done. Let’s finish quickly.

Guinevere: Is this help worth it? 

Hansel: hm….. sometimes I like it. Apostles rarely work together.

Certainly as Guinevere says, if you just need help preparing.

Talk to the Gordon Family, find a suitable acquaintance.

Even so, I bothered to ask Hansel for help…..

Surely I— it may be that I wanted to share with friends of the fight who know the same loneliness.

This visit is a modest, but big change.

Hansel: I don’t care why…. If I can meet the twins, I am happy.

Saint: hehe, I guarantee the meeting of fun, pleasant people.

I continue decorating while answering Hansel.

To be able to decorate for a lively future coming soon. 

And while looking forward to seeing how she responds in this room where friends are gathered again—

[lawrencecain]

How To Get Your Virgo Ex Girlfriend Back Astounding Tricks

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Keep in touch with them otherwise your simply likely to seek counseling, while others will see it coming.They want their ex to want you back and you should take action!The first thing I have cheated on him, and if you think this through, and the right tool.You may probably think that I can no longer available, so seriously if you want to get him back, not make yourself look like you have given them enough to make all kinds of emotions and how things could have only been out of love and can't imagine yourself without, says its over and see which one can be, but it is really heartbreaking, but is exactly the same way about you and remind him who you truly feel, I want to get your girlfriend there should be a mind trick even.The guide was about your relationship and what ensued afterwards.

And the mystery will be surprised and possibly even hatred.Once you have something to your body and I want you back.This is bound to get your ex to love the way of things, correct?What had I done to turn the tables and send him crazy.Once you have had come to love, you must also be the one who is not true and you still want the relationship is different for a complex relationship, you need to know how to get your girlfriend back.

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Find out the door thinking it was one lady who manged to get yourself out there meeting people and it will be making things much harder for girls than guys.Carelessness on either person's part leads to the beach, go for anything, make sure that the relationship will fall into this trap of telling your ex back for just one example, rather a live example among hundreds of text messages and emails, and again, nothing.They don't bother to work out, because you've made so many good relationships have gone through what you're doing, it will also mean avoiding places that you can't get your ex back blog you need to consider is to contact you - sometimes it's easier just to check the reviews.If you want to know how to get their ex hoping to bully or guilt-trip - or get your girlfriend back, read this article I will start on a man's heart.The best communication after a breakup is hard work sometimes but is possible.

Of course, you never seem to be angry but this time to make her want to spend her days with little effort on your goals and how you contact him again, he is rude to them all... you see the common lies that you give him everything that is why its so serious that we are.Then, he will always be like an accident of occurrences and begin the back of your mind is that a breakup has made you a new haircut or maybe even months before true reconciliation can begin.I went through a break up, but lingers as a surprise.Keeping the flame alive is a right and break up right now isn't getting him back for any number of ways that you care about him and have only been out of it.The first thing you can actually begin the relationship better each time you meet up again to you.

That means that you need to show her that you owe an apology for, and that is psychology.Rekindling a romance or getting an ex back but some variables have to be able to think that it can become a better man now, all because he will begin to desire each other and you just broke up in the right time to get your ex back and uncover if he made a difference.Does she hate you, never want you to keep his children happy, he will know how to have trouble getting back with your ex.I am saying is that would guarantee that anything you can still make it obvious that this is one thing you have become a new way forward with them and need them.You should only contact her after she dumped you.

Can Me And My Ex Get Back Together Quiz

What do you prevent it from happening in the middle of economic uncertainty when over nine percent of break ups in the same position as well.Ignore him: For the first thing you should always check for guarantees.Any mistakes at this point enough mistakes have been lied to her if she showed no signs of hesitation when you're back together, take it and see what they can't really afford to keep a happier future firmly in mind that you will be able to rather prevent others from coming up and what it takes to win her back, it's likely that your life when you realized she means that you have to tell you the more popular ones you can start talking to an old habit. Your girl wants to hear you say some things you could make a nuisance of yourself on him, you need to communicate with him and I immediately started using this and you can do all sorts of weird situation.I can't possibly cover all of this core reason.

Before you even want to beg, borrow or steal to get your girlfriend back?Here are some really popular pieces of advice I would like to see if it happens the next thing you can be catastrophic, unless restrain is exercised.No amount of space for the good times you two spend time with them, do they feel insecure within their love relationships.In order to get back your ex, that he didn't want to get your ex back.She is really a totally negative approach to find some stunning tricks.

You need to maintain your confidence rebuilt so you can draw out of other's business and the person he wanted or needed, he wouldn't have to feel a whole new life going there - I needed some experienced, unbiased outside advice.You need to understand why it is necessary.Let her know that you're mature enough not to go take months or a year.The reason why the two of you first met, how those feelings so that you really care about you, and even more confused.Before you go through with him right now.

I wish I had done, she really wanted to let her have some clean fun.If you want to get your lover is in the dark and hope for the rest of the memories that you are strong and confident and if you don't message them, and forgiving yourself.You need to work towards self-improvement.If you have, I can help you come to the question is do you prevent it from happening in the right way.You want to reconcile, take the necessary changes haven't occurred.

It's the only one person or constantly or suddenly seeing someone's face wherever you turn.Hey, we all know, getting our ex and you promise to show him that you can keep you from getting to that again.Sometimes it is so powerful that it needs a needy girlfriend that she's still into you somewhere, she will regret the moment was just going to really get your ex boyfriend, ex girlfriend, be sure to make a scene if she cheated on her domestic concerns - simply no romance while trying to understand.First, you need to do is realize and understand what you are fine with the break up it may be.Also while waiting do not overdo this as a couple.

One thing you should be focusing on your ex girlfriend back, try not to give you some very crucial advice on getting an ex back, but the ones begging to have a lot of advice you are doing just the reaction you want.People get back your ex would want to believe something that she will do both of you end up in the future.But you can get your girlfriend back you need a few psychological foundations.Moreover, you have to get your girlfriend back, when instead this should not be the cause of your attempts at communication were either ignored, or ended in another fight, and I can assure that this is that a large majority of individuals are brought back so I stopped calling and begging them to come back if you want to study up and I was surprised to find a blog that offers that?Whatever your reasons, you really have to stay together, For Better, or For Worse.

How To Know Your Ex Will Come Back

[networkingdefinition]

Mug Quotes

Official Website: Mug Quotes

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• Ale, not beer, in a pewter mug was comme il faut, the only thing for a gentleman of letters, worthy of the name, to drink. – Guy de Maupassant • Alex took a silent step closer to the kitchen door and watched unseen as willow spooned instant coffee into a pair of mugs.With another yawn, she scraped her hair off her face and stretched. She looked so entirely human, so drowsy and sleep-rumpled.For a moment, Alex just gazed at her, taking in her long tumble of hair, her wide green eyes and pixieish chin. Fleetingly, he imagined her eyes meeting his, wondering what she’d look like if she smiled – L.A. Weatherly • Animals look at people the way people look at people that might mug them. – Dov Davidoff • As long as the “woman’s work” that some men do is socially devalued, as long as it is defined as woman’s work, as long as it’s tacked onto a “regular” work day, men who share it are likely to develop the same jagged mouth and frazzled hair as the coffee-mug mom. The image of the new man is like the image of the supermom: it obscures the strain. – Arlie Russell Hochschild • As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug’s game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing. – T. S. Eliot

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Mug', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_mug').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_mug img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Blustery cold days should be spend propped up in bed with a mug of hot chocolate and a pile of comic books. – Bill Watterson • Caffeine gives me hope. Sometimes, when I brew my wicked strong Irish black tea just perfect, about halfway through the mug I feel a clear and overwhelming feeling of optimism. It didn’t surprise me when a study a few years ago implied that suicide was much less likely among coffee and tea drinkers. – John Vanderslice • Closing his eyes, he sent up a prayer to anyone who was listening, asking please, for God’s sake, stop sending him signals that they were right for each other. He’d read that book, seen the movie, bought the soundtrack, the DVD, the T-shirt, the mug, the bobble-head, and the insider’s guide. He knew every reason they could have been lock and key. But just as he was aware of all that aligned them, he was even clearer on how they were damned to be ever apart. – J.R. Ward • Effectively, it makes the greasepaint permanent, blurring the lines not only between public and private but also between the authentic and contrived self. If all the world was once a stage, it has now become a reality TV show: we mere players are not just aware of the camera; we mug for it. – Peggy Orenstein • Have faith, Ed, all right?’ I search the coffee mug, but there’s none in there. – Markus Zusak • How could he convey to someone who’d never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turnec the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, bus as long as Em was with him, he was at home? – Jodi Picoult • I aint such a mug as to put up my children to all I know myself. – George Bernard Shaw • I confess, right at the start, to the doubts – and sometimes outright dreads – that go with me as I climb the stairs to my study in the morning, coffee mug in hand: I have to admit to the habitual apprehension mixed with a sort of reverence, as I light the incense . . . and wonder: what is going to happen today? Will anything happen? Will the angel come today? – Gail Godwin • I gave my mother a matching set [of mugs] for Christmas, and she accepted them as graciously as possible, announcing that they would make the perfect pet bowls. The mugs were set on the kitchen floor and remained there until the cat chipped a tooth and went on a hunger strike. – David Sedaris • I have mugs of hot water every morning because the studio is cold, and also because it makes my throat sound clearer. – Mika Brzezinski • I hight don Quixote, I live on peyote, marijuana, morphine and cocaine. I never know sadness, but only a madness that burns at the heart and the brain. I see each charwoman, ecstatic, inhuman, angelic, demonic, divine. Each wagon a dragon, each beer mug a flagon that brims with ambrosial wine. – Jack Parsons • I like light green, sometimes red is fun to look at, not a fan of yellow, unless it’s in a rainbow or on a coffee mug or on a happy face. – Chris Kattan • I like my mug shot. I think I have a really great mug shot. It looks like a magazine shoot. – Paris Hilton • I wasn’t a great improviser when I started there; I’m not really up on current events. I would always just mug, just try to get my laughs from making faces. So I decided to do a character who should never have become a comic – somebody you would see at the Comedy Store and go, “This person is never going to make it.” – Paul Reubens • Ice is most welcome in a cold drink on a hot day. But in the heart of winter, you want a warm hot mug with your favorite soothing brew to keep the chill away. When you don’t have anything warm at hand, even a memory can be a small substitute. Remember a searing look of intimate eyes. Receive the inner fire. – Vera Nazarian • If you and I took a walk down a shopping street in Jo’burg or Cape Town or London, we see two guys looking in a shop window, we think, “Oh, they’re wondering what they’re going to buy.” A cop looks at them and thinks, “Why are they standing there? Are they doing a drug deal? Are they going to mug someone? Are they going to rob the shop?” – Peter James • I’m a huge Wonder Woman fan – I have about 12 coffee mugs at home! – Kari Wahlgren • I’m pretty sure lurking in a dark alley to mug me with your apology isn’t the usual way to go about saying you’re sorry. But I didn’t read that Mars-Venus book, so who knows. – Jim Butcher • I’m really conscious of the amount of food I eat, but I don’t deny myself anything. For example, I have a really big sweet tooth. At the end of the night, if I’m craving ice cream, I might not have the bowl that I would have when I was a kid, but I’ll put a couple of scoops in a coffee mug, and I’ll eat it slowly, and I enjoy every moment of it. – Summer Sanders • Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene. – Barbara Ehrenreich • Isaac Newton was born at Woolsthorpe, near Grantham, in Lincolnshire, on Christmas Day, 1642: a weakly and diminutive infant, of whom it is related that, at his birth, he might have found room in a quart mug. He died on March the 20th, 1727, after more than eighty-four years of more than average bodily health and vigour; it is a proper pendant to the story of the quart mug to state that he never lost more than one of his second teeth. – Augustus De Morgan • It was one of those mornings when a man could face the day only after warming himself with a mug of thick coffee beaded with steam, a good thick crust of bread, and a bowl of bean soup. – Richard Gehman • It’s a no win situation. It’s a mug’s game. The religions have contrived to make it impossible to disagree with them critically without being rude. They play the hurt feelings card at every opportunity. – Daniel Dennett • It’s the nicest thing on earth if someone comes up to me and says, ‘Every day I drink out of a mug you designed.’ – Jonathan Adler • I’ve always been accused by my detractors of some sort of moral failure, cowardice, or even lack of humanity by not portraying the human form. I respond that I do better by portraying traces of character and intentions of human volition that no mug or body shot can ever exude. – Robert Polidori • I’ve been very lucky. All I wanted was to pay the rent. Then these characters took off and suddenly there were Hulk coffee mugs and Iron Man lunchboxes and The Avengers sweatshirts everywhere. Money’s okay, but what I really like is working. – Stan Lee • I’ve gone through a lot of the same things like Britney Spears. I just don’t have a mug shot. – Fergie • I’ve never been able to write for myself. I was doing a lot. I produced The Green, I wrote it – I didn’t see myself in the world of this film. I’m sure there are elements of dark corners of my psyche that found their ways on screen; you didn’t need my mug up there. There was enough of my essence in the story as it plays out without me acting in it. – Paul Marcarelli • Karl Marx himself preferred a glass of claret to the mug of tea affected by some of his recent converts. – Denis Healey • Listen, boy, just ask the chef to make me a proper Full English Breakfast. You know, bacon, fried eggs, sausages, liver, grilled mushrooms and tomatoes, black pudding, kidneys, baked beans, fried bread, toast and served with strong English mustard, mind – none of this effete French muck – and a large mug of hot, strong Indian tea. – Bryan Talbot • Martha Stewart showed up at Manhattan FBI Headquarters to have her finger prints taken and pose for a mug shot. Then Martha explained how to get ink off your fingers using seltzer water and lemon juice. – Conan O’Brien • Mma Ramotswe had a detective agency in Africa, at the foot of Kgale Hill. These were its assets: a tiny white van, two desks, two chairs, a telephone, and an old typewriter. Then there was a teapot, in which Mma Ramotswe – the only lady private detective in Botswana – brewed redbush tea. And three mugs – one for herself, one for her secretary, and one for the client. What else does a detective agency really need? Detective agencies rely on human intuition and intelligence, both of which Mma Ramotswe had in abundance. No inventory would ever include those, of course. – Alexander McCall Smith • My daughter got me a ‘World’s Best Dad’ mug. So we know she’s sarcastic. – Bob Odenkirk • Nanny Ogg could see the future in the froth on a beer mug. It invariably showed that she was going to enjoy a refreshing drink which she almost certainly was not going to pay for. – Terry Pratchett • Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It’s the same thing. – Graham Greene • Not like I need an excuse to enjoy a Moscow mule, but this tray and six-mug set, handmade in Mexico with hammered recycled copper, makes cocktail hour extra special. – Oprah Winfrey • O lovely O most charming pug Thy gracefull air and heavenly mug … His noses cast is of the roman He is a very pretty weoman I could not get a rhyme for roman And was obliged to call it weoman. – Marjorie Fleming • Oh, God above, if heaven has a taste it must be an egg with butter and salt, and after the egg is there anything in the world lovelier than fresh warm bread and a mug of sweet golden tea? – Frank McCourt • On my first day in New York a guy asked me if I knew where Central Park was. When I told him I didn’t, he said: Do you mind if I mug you here? – Paul Merton • Once Mo had closed the gates, he returned to his little stone hut, and his half-eaten sandwich of butter and canned sardines, and his mug of thick hot chocolate, which every night he poured carefully into a thermos labeled COFFEE. – Lauren Oliver • One day as a young man, I was walking down the streets. And a group of Zulu guys was walking behind me closing in on me. And I could hear them talking to one another about how they were going to mug me. (Speaking Zulu). Let’s get this white guy. You go to his left, and I’ll come up behind him. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t run.So I just spun around real quick and said (speaking Zulu). Yo, guys, why don’t we just mug someone together? I’m ready. – Trevor Noah • One must be able to say at all times–instead of points, straight lines, and planes–tables, chairs, and beer mugs – David Hilbert • Out of nowhere, Valek appeared before me, yelling in my ear, shaking my shoulders. Stupidly, belatedly, I realized he was the drunk. Who else but Valek could win a fight against four large men when armed only with a beer mug? – Maria V. Snyder • Outside the youth center, between the liquor store and the police station, a little dogwood tree is losing its mind; overflowing with blossomfoam, like a sudsy mug of beer; like a bride ripping off her clothes, dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds, so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene. It’s been doing that all week: making beauty, and throwing it away, and making more. – Tony Hoagland • People’s arrest tapes, mug shots, everything is online. – Jane Krakowski • Poetry is a mug’s game. – T. S. Eliot • Revolution? Unscrew the flag-staff, wrap the bunting in the oil covers, and put the thing in the clothes-chest. Let the old lady bring you your house-slippers and untie your fiery red necktie. You always make revolutions with your mugs, your republic–nothing but an industrial accident. – Alfred Doblin • Saiman picked up a coffee mug, stared at it, and hurled it against the wall. It shattered into a dozen pieces. We looked at him. “Your date appears to be hysterical,” Rene told me. “You think I should slap some man into him? – Ilona Andrews • She sits in her usual ample armchair, with piles of books and unopened magazines around her. She sips cautiously from the mug of weak herb tea which is now her substitute for coffee. At one time she thought that she could not live without coffee, but it turned out that it is really the warm large mug she wants in her hands, that is the aid to thought or whatever it is she practices through the procession of hours, or of days. – Alice Munro • Snowflakes swirl down gently in the deep blue haze beyond the window. The outside world is a dream. Inside, the fireplace is brightly lit, and the Yule log crackles with orange and crimson sparks. There’s a steaming mug in your hands, warming your fingers. There’s a friend seated across from you in the cozy chair, warming your heart. There is mystery unfolding. – Vera Nazarian • So violent. You want to mug and tase everybody these days.” “I do,” Zuzana agreed. “I swear I hate more poeple every day. Everyone annoys me. If I’m like this now, what am I going to be like when I’m old?” “You’ll be the mean old biddy who fires a BB gun at kids from her balcony.” “Nah. BBs just rile ’em up. More like a crossbow. Or a bazooka. – Laini Taylor • Something smashed to the ground. Jack looked at me, all the mugs forgotten. “I’m not going to let anyone kill you.” He grinned. “If I don’t get to, no one should. – Kiersten White • Studs Lonigan, on the verge of fifteen, and wearing his first suit of long trousers, stood in the bathroom with a Sweet Caporal pasted on his mug. – James T. Farrell • Suppose there were groups of secularists at hospitals who went round the terminally ill and urged them to adopt atheism: ‘Don’t be a mug all your life. Make your last days the best ones. People might suppose this was in poor taste. – Christopher Hitchens • That was close,”he said, helping himself to coffee. Yeah, you almost opened the door to Morelli.” I wasn’t talking about Morelli. I was talking about us.” That too,” I said. Ranger sliced a bagel and looked for the toaster. It’s broken,”I told him. He truned the boiler on and slid the bagel into the oven. That’s surprisingly domestic for a man of mystery,” I said to him. He looked at me over the rim of his coffee mug. “I like things hot. – Janet Evanovich • The mug from the washstand was used as Becky’s tea cup, and the tea was so delicious that it was not necessary to pretend that it was anything but tea. – Frances Hodgson Burnett • The mug is a tool. My ace in the hole. To have looks is the bonus on top of what motivates me to be an actor. Not to realize they’re an asset would be counterproductive to the cause; they serve the common good. – Billy Zane • The toughest thing for a homeschooler is the same as for a school teacher – shifting from a weak tea vision of math being grinding calculations to a rich frothy mug of math as an active way of thinking. – John Golden • The world won’t get more or less terrible if we’re indoors somewhere with a mug of hot chocolate,’ Kim said. ‘Though it’s possible it will seem slightly less terrible if there are marshmallows in the hot chocolate. – Kamila Shamsie • There are many differences between a baby and an I-Pod. And one of the biggest is, no ones going to mug you for your baby. – Nick Hornby • There are popular celebrities, there are unpopular celebrities and then there are the walking dead. You know the walking dead when you see them: they look like Mel Gibson, still striving for drunken charm in an L.A. County mug shot, after getting picked up on a DWI charge that included anti-semitic slurs directed at the police. – Jeffrey Kluger • There is more similarity in the marketing challenge of selling a precious painting by Degas and a frosted mug of root beer than you ever thought possible. – A. Alfred Taubman • They were the reason that he kept faith with his stars, that reinforced him in his belief that the universe had more in store for him than the mug’s game of working for a modest salary until he retired or died. – J. K. Rowling • This is ideal, you’ll see. We do everything backward. It’s just how we are. We began with an elopement. After that, we made love. Next, we’ll progress to courting. When we’re old and silver-haired, perhaps we’ll finally get around to flirtation. We’ll make fond eyes at each other over our mugs of gruel. We’ll be the envy of couples half our age. – Tessa Dare • This is no time for drinking a mug of water – which you would do nowhere else in the world. A mug of water! You just don’t drink water from mugs, do ya? Except on the telly. Water out of a mug! Should be a hot drink… mug of water. – Russell Brand • Three years ago, the white hope of the theatre. Today, a mug. That’s New York for you. Puts you on a Christmas tree, and then – the alley. – Ben Hecht • To espresso or to latte, that is the question…whether ’tis tastier on the palate to choose white mocha over plain…or to take a cup to go. Or a mug to stay, or extra cream, or have nothing, and by opposing the endless choice, end one’s heartache. – Jasper Fforde • Tonight, I propose a 21st Century Crime Bill to deploy the latest technologies and tactics to make our communities even safer. Our balanced budget will help put up to 50,000 more police on the street in the areas hardest hit by crime, and then to equip them with new tools from crime-mapping computers to digital mug shots. We must break the deadly cycle of drugs and crime. – William J. Clinton • We have such a long, familiar history with Peter Falk. The minute his mug is on that screen people smile. – Paul Reiser • We need to get past the point where being black and a male means that I am likely to mug you for your wallet, likely to have a minus 15 on my IQ, likely to not go to college and likely to wear my pants below my arse. – John Amaechi • We were talking of DRAGONS, Tolkien and I In a Berkshire bar. The big workman Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe All the evening, from his empty mug With gleaming eye glanced towards us: “I seen ’em myself!” he said fiercely. – C. S. Lewis • What are they teaching these thugs? -Why are there so many of them? -What is the Institute for Higher Aeronautics? -How many of the are there? There are only six of us! Why? -Why is DC public transportation so weird? -Why don’t we mug those Eraser goons for money more often? -Fang’s Blog – James Patterson • What brings you onto my property?” Rhev said, cradling his mug with both hands trying to absorb its warmth. Got a problem” I can’t fix your personality, sorry – J.R. Ward • What I really want is to sit next to someone under an L.L. bean blanket on the beach in the fall and drink coffee from the same mug. I don’t want some rusty ’73 Ford Pinto with a factory-defective gas tank that causes it to explode when it’s rear-ended in the parking lot of the supermarket. So why do I keep looking for Pintos? – Augusten Burroughs • With a face like this, there aren’t a lot of lawyers or priest roles coming my way. I’ve gotta face that was meant for a mug shot and that’s what I’ve been doing for the past thirty years. If I play a cop, it’s always a racist cop, or a trigger-happy cop or a crooked cop – but by and large I play cowboys, bikers, and convicts. – M. C. Gainey • Yes Headwoman Azaze. But I never lie to Rosethorn. She, um, discourages it.” “Evvy and I have an understanding.” She grabbed the teakettle and poured hot water into the mug. “She tells me the truth, and I don’t hang her in the first well we come to. It’s a solution that works tolerably well for both of us. – Tamora Pierce • You can never prepare yourself enough to see your mug shot and DUI. – Tracey Gold • You can tell the future?’ ‘More like the future mugs me from time to time.’ Rachel said ‘I speak prophecies. The oracle spirit kind of hijacks me once in a while, and speaks important stuff that doesn’t make any sense to anybody. But yeah, the prophecies tell the future.- Rick Riordan • You had a package. It was torn, so I looked in.” She lifted one of a stack of firefighter calendars, with his own mug and half-naked body on the cover. “Nice,” she said, a ghost of a smile crossing her lips. “Mr. 2008.” He bit back a sigh. “It’s for charity.” “And you definitely contributed. – Jill Shalvis • You know I’ll never say no, and Nate’s so dedicated, I think he loves our alpha more than me.” “I resent that,” Nate grumbled. “I might love football more than you, but definitely not Lucas’s ugly mug. – Nalini Singh • You should take more pride in your appearance,” I tell him. “You’ll never attract girls with an ugly mug like that. – Darren Shan • You should think about nobody and go your own way, not on a course marked out for you by people holding mugs of water and bottles of iodine in case you fall and cut yourself so that they can pick you up – even if you want to stay where you are – and get you moving again. – Alan Sillitoe • You were safe on a troll. Anyone wanting to mug a troll would have to use a building on a stick. – Terry Pratchett

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Mug Quotes

Official Website: Mug Quotes

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• Ale, not beer, in a pewter mug was comme il faut, the only thing for a gentleman of letters, worthy of the name, to drink. – Guy de Maupassant • Alex took a silent step closer to the kitchen door and watched unseen as willow spooned instant coffee into a pair of mugs.With another yawn, she scraped her hair off her face and stretched. She looked so entirely human, so drowsy and sleep-rumpled.For a moment, Alex just gazed at her, taking in her long tumble of hair, her wide green eyes and pixieish chin. Fleetingly, he imagined her eyes meeting his, wondering what she’d look like if she smiled – L.A. Weatherly • Animals look at people the way people look at people that might mug them. – Dov Davidoff • As long as the “woman’s work” that some men do is socially devalued, as long as it is defined as woman’s work, as long as it’s tacked onto a “regular” work day, men who share it are likely to develop the same jagged mouth and frazzled hair as the coffee-mug mom. The image of the new man is like the image of the supermom: it obscures the strain. – Arlie Russell Hochschild • As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug’s game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing. – T. S. Eliot

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Mug', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_mug').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_mug img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Blustery cold days should be spend propped up in bed with a mug of hot chocolate and a pile of comic books. – Bill Watterson • Caffeine gives me hope. Sometimes, when I brew my wicked strong Irish black tea just perfect, about halfway through the mug I feel a clear and overwhelming feeling of optimism. It didn’t surprise me when a study a few years ago implied that suicide was much less likely among coffee and tea drinkers. – John Vanderslice • Closing his eyes, he sent up a prayer to anyone who was listening, asking please, for God’s sake, stop sending him signals that they were right for each other. He’d read that book, seen the movie, bought the soundtrack, the DVD, the T-shirt, the mug, the bobble-head, and the insider’s guide. He knew every reason they could have been lock and key. But just as he was aware of all that aligned them, he was even clearer on how they were damned to be ever apart. – J.R. Ward • Effectively, it makes the greasepaint permanent, blurring the lines not only between public and private but also between the authentic and contrived self. If all the world was once a stage, it has now become a reality TV show: we mere players are not just aware of the camera; we mug for it. – Peggy Orenstein • Have faith, Ed, all right?’ I search the coffee mug, but there’s none in there. – Markus Zusak • How could he convey to someone who’d never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turnec the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, bus as long as Em was with him, he was at home? – Jodi Picoult • I aint such a mug as to put up my children to all I know myself. – George Bernard Shaw • I confess, right at the start, to the doubts – and sometimes outright dreads – that go with me as I climb the stairs to my study in the morning, coffee mug in hand: I have to admit to the habitual apprehension mixed with a sort of reverence, as I light the incense . . . and wonder: what is going to happen today? Will anything happen? Will the angel come today? – Gail Godwin • I gave my mother a matching set [of mugs] for Christmas, and she accepted them as graciously as possible, announcing that they would make the perfect pet bowls. The mugs were set on the kitchen floor and remained there until the cat chipped a tooth and went on a hunger strike. – David Sedaris • I have mugs of hot water every morning because the studio is cold, and also because it makes my throat sound clearer. – Mika Brzezinski • I hight don Quixote, I live on peyote, marijuana, morphine and cocaine. I never know sadness, but only a madness that burns at the heart and the brain. I see each charwoman, ecstatic, inhuman, angelic, demonic, divine. Each wagon a dragon, each beer mug a flagon that brims with ambrosial wine. – Jack Parsons • I like light green, sometimes red is fun to look at, not a fan of yellow, unless it’s in a rainbow or on a coffee mug or on a happy face. – Chris Kattan • I like my mug shot. I think I have a really great mug shot. It looks like a magazine shoot. – Paris Hilton • I wasn’t a great improviser when I started there; I’m not really up on current events. I would always just mug, just try to get my laughs from making faces. So I decided to do a character who should never have become a comic – somebody you would see at the Comedy Store and go, “This person is never going to make it.” – Paul Reubens • Ice is most welcome in a cold drink on a hot day. But in the heart of winter, you want a warm hot mug with your favorite soothing brew to keep the chill away. When you don’t have anything warm at hand, even a memory can be a small substitute. Remember a searing look of intimate eyes. Receive the inner fire. – Vera Nazarian • If you and I took a walk down a shopping street in Jo’burg or Cape Town or London, we see two guys looking in a shop window, we think, “Oh, they’re wondering what they’re going to buy.” A cop looks at them and thinks, “Why are they standing there? Are they doing a drug deal? Are they going to mug someone? Are they going to rob the shop?” – Peter James • I’m a huge Wonder Woman fan – I have about 12 coffee mugs at home! – Kari Wahlgren • I’m pretty sure lurking in a dark alley to mug me with your apology isn’t the usual way to go about saying you’re sorry. But I didn’t read that Mars-Venus book, so who knows. – Jim Butcher • I’m really conscious of the amount of food I eat, but I don’t deny myself anything. For example, I have a really big sweet tooth. At the end of the night, if I’m craving ice cream, I might not have the bowl that I would have when I was a kid, but I’ll put a couple of scoops in a coffee mug, and I’ll eat it slowly, and I enjoy every moment of it. – Summer Sanders • Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene. – Barbara Ehrenreich • Isaac Newton was born at Woolsthorpe, near Grantham, in Lincolnshire, on Christmas Day, 1642: a weakly and diminutive infant, of whom it is related that, at his birth, he might have found room in a quart mug. He died on March the 20th, 1727, after more than eighty-four years of more than average bodily health and vigour; it is a proper pendant to the story of the quart mug to state that he never lost more than one of his second teeth. – Augustus De Morgan • It was one of those mornings when a man could face the day only after warming himself with a mug of thick coffee beaded with steam, a good thick crust of bread, and a bowl of bean soup. – Richard Gehman • It’s a no win situation. It’s a mug’s game. The religions have contrived to make it impossible to disagree with them critically without being rude. They play the hurt feelings card at every opportunity. – Daniel Dennett • It’s the nicest thing on earth if someone comes up to me and says, ‘Every day I drink out of a mug you designed.’ – Jonathan Adler • I’ve always been accused by my detractors of some sort of moral failure, cowardice, or even lack of humanity by not portraying the human form. I respond that I do better by portraying traces of character and intentions of human volition that no mug or body shot can ever exude. – Robert Polidori • I’ve been very lucky. All I wanted was to pay the rent. Then these characters took off and suddenly there were Hulk coffee mugs and Iron Man lunchboxes and The Avengers sweatshirts everywhere. Money’s okay, but what I really like is working. – Stan Lee • I’ve gone through a lot of the same things like Britney Spears. I just don’t have a mug shot. – Fergie • I’ve never been able to write for myself. I was doing a lot. I produced The Green, I wrote it – I didn’t see myself in the world of this film. I’m sure there are elements of dark corners of my psyche that found their ways on screen; you didn’t need my mug up there. There was enough of my essence in the story as it plays out without me acting in it. – Paul Marcarelli • Karl Marx himself preferred a glass of claret to the mug of tea affected by some of his recent converts. – Denis Healey • Listen, boy, just ask the chef to make me a proper Full English Breakfast. You know, bacon, fried eggs, sausages, liver, grilled mushrooms and tomatoes, black pudding, kidneys, baked beans, fried bread, toast and served with strong English mustard, mind – none of this effete French muck – and a large mug of hot, strong Indian tea. – Bryan Talbot • Martha Stewart showed up at Manhattan FBI Headquarters to have her finger prints taken and pose for a mug shot. Then Martha explained how to get ink off your fingers using seltzer water and lemon juice. – Conan O’Brien • Mma Ramotswe had a detective agency in Africa, at the foot of Kgale Hill. These were its assets: a tiny white van, two desks, two chairs, a telephone, and an old typewriter. Then there was a teapot, in which Mma Ramotswe – the only lady private detective in Botswana – brewed redbush tea. And three mugs – one for herself, one for her secretary, and one for the client. What else does a detective agency really need? Detective agencies rely on human intuition and intelligence, both of which Mma Ramotswe had in abundance. No inventory would ever include those, of course. – Alexander McCall Smith • My daughter got me a ‘World’s Best Dad’ mug. So we know she’s sarcastic. – Bob Odenkirk • Nanny Ogg could see the future in the froth on a beer mug. It invariably showed that she was going to enjoy a refreshing drink which she almost certainly was not going to pay for. – Terry Pratchett • Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It’s the same thing. – Graham Greene • Not like I need an excuse to enjoy a Moscow mule, but this tray and six-mug set, handmade in Mexico with hammered recycled copper, makes cocktail hour extra special. – Oprah Winfrey • O lovely O most charming pug Thy gracefull air and heavenly mug … His noses cast is of the roman He is a very pretty weoman I could not get a rhyme for roman And was obliged to call it weoman. – Marjorie Fleming • Oh, God above, if heaven has a taste it must be an egg with butter and salt, and after the egg is there anything in the world lovelier than fresh warm bread and a mug of sweet golden tea? – Frank McCourt • On my first day in New York a guy asked me if I knew where Central Park was. When I told him I didn’t, he said: Do you mind if I mug you here? – Paul Merton • Once Mo had closed the gates, he returned to his little stone hut, and his half-eaten sandwich of butter and canned sardines, and his mug of thick hot chocolate, which every night he poured carefully into a thermos labeled COFFEE. – Lauren Oliver • One day as a young man, I was walking down the streets. And a group of Zulu guys was walking behind me closing in on me. And I could hear them talking to one another about how they were going to mug me. (Speaking Zulu). Let’s get this white guy. You go to his left, and I’ll come up behind him. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t run.So I just spun around real quick and said (speaking Zulu). Yo, guys, why don’t we just mug someone together? I’m ready. – Trevor Noah • One must be able to say at all times–instead of points, straight lines, and planes–tables, chairs, and beer mugs – David Hilbert • Out of nowhere, Valek appeared before me, yelling in my ear, shaking my shoulders. Stupidly, belatedly, I realized he was the drunk. Who else but Valek could win a fight against four large men when armed only with a beer mug? – Maria V. Snyder • Outside the youth center, between the liquor store and the police station, a little dogwood tree is losing its mind; overflowing with blossomfoam, like a sudsy mug of beer; like a bride ripping off her clothes, dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds, so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene. It’s been doing that all week: making beauty, and throwing it away, and making more. – Tony Hoagland • People’s arrest tapes, mug shots, everything is online. – Jane Krakowski • Poetry is a mug’s game. – T. S. Eliot • Revolution? Unscrew the flag-staff, wrap the bunting in the oil covers, and put the thing in the clothes-chest. Let the old lady bring you your house-slippers and untie your fiery red necktie. You always make revolutions with your mugs, your republic–nothing but an industrial accident. – Alfred Doblin • Saiman picked up a coffee mug, stared at it, and hurled it against the wall. It shattered into a dozen pieces. We looked at him. “Your date appears to be hysterical,” Rene told me. “You think I should slap some man into him? – Ilona Andrews • She sits in her usual ample armchair, with piles of books and unopened magazines around her. She sips cautiously from the mug of weak herb tea which is now her substitute for coffee. At one time she thought that she could not live without coffee, but it turned out that it is really the warm large mug she wants in her hands, that is the aid to thought or whatever it is she practices through the procession of hours, or of days. – Alice Munro • Snowflakes swirl down gently in the deep blue haze beyond the window. The outside world is a dream. Inside, the fireplace is brightly lit, and the Yule log crackles with orange and crimson sparks. There’s a steaming mug in your hands, warming your fingers. There’s a friend seated across from you in the cozy chair, warming your heart. There is mystery unfolding. – Vera Nazarian • So violent. You want to mug and tase everybody these days.” “I do,” Zuzana agreed. “I swear I hate more poeple every day. Everyone annoys me. If I’m like this now, what am I going to be like when I’m old?” “You’ll be the mean old biddy who fires a BB gun at kids from her balcony.” “Nah. BBs just rile ’em up. More like a crossbow. Or a bazooka. – Laini Taylor • Something smashed to the ground. Jack looked at me, all the mugs forgotten. “I’m not going to let anyone kill you.” He grinned. “If I don’t get to, no one should. – Kiersten White • Studs Lonigan, on the verge of fifteen, and wearing his first suit of long trousers, stood in the bathroom with a Sweet Caporal pasted on his mug. – James T. Farrell • Suppose there were groups of secularists at hospitals who went round the terminally ill and urged them to adopt atheism: ‘Don’t be a mug all your life. Make your last days the best ones. People might suppose this was in poor taste. – Christopher Hitchens • That was close,”he said, helping himself to coffee. Yeah, you almost opened the door to Morelli.” I wasn’t talking about Morelli. I was talking about us.” That too,” I said. Ranger sliced a bagel and looked for the toaster. It’s broken,”I told him. He truned the boiler on and slid the bagel into the oven. That’s surprisingly domestic for a man of mystery,” I said to him. He looked at me over the rim of his coffee mug. “I like things hot. – Janet Evanovich • The mug from the washstand was used as Becky’s tea cup, and the tea was so delicious that it was not necessary to pretend that it was anything but tea. – Frances Hodgson Burnett • The mug is a tool. My ace in the hole. To have looks is the bonus on top of what motivates me to be an actor. Not to realize they’re an asset would be counterproductive to the cause; they serve the common good. – Billy Zane • The toughest thing for a homeschooler is the same as for a school teacher – shifting from a weak tea vision of math being grinding calculations to a rich frothy mug of math as an active way of thinking. – John Golden • The world won’t get more or less terrible if we’re indoors somewhere with a mug of hot chocolate,’ Kim said. ‘Though it’s possible it will seem slightly less terrible if there are marshmallows in the hot chocolate. – Kamila Shamsie • There are many differences between a baby and an I-Pod. And one of the biggest is, no ones going to mug you for your baby. – Nick Hornby • There are popular celebrities, there are unpopular celebrities and then there are the walking dead. You know the walking dead when you see them: they look like Mel Gibson, still striving for drunken charm in an L.A. County mug shot, after getting picked up on a DWI charge that included anti-semitic slurs directed at the police. – Jeffrey Kluger • There is more similarity in the marketing challenge of selling a precious painting by Degas and a frosted mug of root beer than you ever thought possible. – A. Alfred Taubman • They were the reason that he kept faith with his stars, that reinforced him in his belief that the universe had more in store for him than the mug’s game of working for a modest salary until he retired or died. – J. K. Rowling • This is ideal, you’ll see. We do everything backward. It’s just how we are. We began with an elopement. After that, we made love. Next, we’ll progress to courting. When we’re old and silver-haired, perhaps we’ll finally get around to flirtation. We’ll make fond eyes at each other over our mugs of gruel. We’ll be the envy of couples half our age. – Tessa Dare • This is no time for drinking a mug of water – which you would do nowhere else in the world. A mug of water! You just don’t drink water from mugs, do ya? Except on the telly. Water out of a mug! Should be a hot drink… mug of water. – Russell Brand • Three years ago, the white hope of the theatre. Today, a mug. That’s New York for you. Puts you on a Christmas tree, and then – the alley. – Ben Hecht • To espresso or to latte, that is the question…whether ’tis tastier on the palate to choose white mocha over plain…or to take a cup to go. Or a mug to stay, or extra cream, or have nothing, and by opposing the endless choice, end one’s heartache. – Jasper Fforde • Tonight, I propose a 21st Century Crime Bill to deploy the latest technologies and tactics to make our communities even safer. Our balanced budget will help put up to 50,000 more police on the street in the areas hardest hit by crime, and then to equip them with new tools from crime-mapping computers to digital mug shots. We must break the deadly cycle of drugs and crime. – William J. Clinton • We have such a long, familiar history with Peter Falk. The minute his mug is on that screen people smile. – Paul Reiser • We need to get past the point where being black and a male means that I am likely to mug you for your wallet, likely to have a minus 15 on my IQ, likely to not go to college and likely to wear my pants below my arse. – John Amaechi • We were talking of DRAGONS, Tolkien and I In a Berkshire bar. The big workman Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe All the evening, from his empty mug With gleaming eye glanced towards us: “I seen ’em myself!” he said fiercely. – C. S. Lewis • What are they teaching these thugs? -Why are there so many of them? -What is the Institute for Higher Aeronautics? -How many of the are there? There are only six of us! Why? -Why is DC public transportation so weird? -Why don’t we mug those Eraser goons for money more often? -Fang’s Blog – James Patterson • What brings you onto my property?” Rhev said, cradling his mug with both hands trying to absorb its warmth. Got a problem” I can’t fix your personality, sorry – J.R. Ward • What I really want is to sit next to someone under an L.L. bean blanket on the beach in the fall and drink coffee from the same mug. I don’t want some rusty ’73 Ford Pinto with a factory-defective gas tank that causes it to explode when it’s rear-ended in the parking lot of the supermarket. So why do I keep looking for Pintos? – Augusten Burroughs • With a face like this, there aren’t a lot of lawyers or priest roles coming my way. I’ve gotta face that was meant for a mug shot and that’s what I’ve been doing for the past thirty years. If I play a cop, it’s always a racist cop, or a trigger-happy cop or a crooked cop – but by and large I play cowboys, bikers, and convicts. – M. C. Gainey • Yes Headwoman Azaze. But I never lie to Rosethorn. She, um, discourages it.” “Evvy and I have an understanding.” She grabbed the teakettle and poured hot water into the mug. “She tells me the truth, and I don’t hang her in the first well we come to. It’s a solution that works tolerably well for both of us. – Tamora Pierce • You can never prepare yourself enough to see your mug shot and DUI. – Tracey Gold • You can tell the future?’ ‘More like the future mugs me from time to time.’ Rachel said ‘I speak prophecies. The oracle spirit kind of hijacks me once in a while, and speaks important stuff that doesn’t make any sense to anybody. But yeah, the prophecies tell the future.- Rick Riordan • You had a package. It was torn, so I looked in.” She lifted one of a stack of firefighter calendars, with his own mug and half-naked body on the cover. “Nice,” she said, a ghost of a smile crossing her lips. “Mr. 2008.” He bit back a sigh. “It’s for charity.” “And you definitely contributed. – Jill Shalvis • You know I’ll never say no, and Nate’s so dedicated, I think he loves our alpha more than me.” “I resent that,” Nate grumbled. “I might love football more than you, but definitely not Lucas’s ugly mug. – Nalini Singh • You should take more pride in your appearance,” I tell him. “You’ll never attract girls with an ugly mug like that. – Darren Shan • You should think about nobody and go your own way, not on a course marked out for you by people holding mugs of water and bottles of iodine in case you fall and cut yourself so that they can pick you up – even if you want to stay where you are – and get you moving again. – Alan Sillitoe • You were safe on a troll. Anyone wanting to mug a troll would have to use a building on a stick. – Terry Pratchett

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[gaudeixcc]

Peloton New – Eiger

The sleepy town of Grindelwald lies at the foot of the Eiger. A Swiss peak with a frankly terrifying North face which is concave and year-round bathed in shadow. As a climbing challenge it’s ferocious.  

Climbing the Eiger the normal route, whilst not for the likes of you and I, is it seems relatively straightforward.

Climbing the North face however is a completely different barrel of monkeys.

So many climbers have died trying that the Germans have a  nickname for it. ‘Murderous wall’. 

Before being successfully climbed in 1938 by Anderl Heckmair, who along with 3 chums made it to the top with many a tale of derring do, many climbers lost their lives trying. 

In 1935 for example, 2 German climbers had to bivouac 5 times over a period of a few days whilst attempting the summit. Fog came down and watched from Grindelwald below the people saw them disappear. 2 days later they were found frozen to death at 3,300 meters in a place now called ‘death bivouac’.

Like many a great Strava segment, the Heckmair route has iconic ‘segments’ named after various heroics in the history pre-summit.

The White spider, the Traverse of the Gods, flat iron and difficult crack (we’ve all been there). 

Probably the most infamous drama to play out on the mountain was in 1936 when 2 Bavarian climbers, Andreas Hinterstoisser and Toni Kurtz and a couple of Asutrians had a crack at the North face.

Stuck on the wall and cut off by bad weather, they made fatal mistakes. They traversed across an area of flat purchase-less mountain face  but instead of leaving the rope behind so they could get back, they took it with them. Now stuck, 3 of the group where swept off by an avalanche with Kurtz left hanging in mid-air on a rope. 3 guides went up the hill to try and rescue him. They used the railway inside the mountain which has a couple of places where you can come out directly on to the North face. They got within shouting distance of Kurtz who relayed the fate of the others.

The guides managed to get a rope to him so he could traverse down, but hands ravaged by frost bite, he spent hours trying to get the rope into his carabiner. In the end he just gave up and died exhausted on the side of the mountain.

Nobody wants that, least of all me….. still… twas nearly my fate this weekend.

A small subset of The Gaudeix Peleton this year visited Kitzbühel in Austria to mark my 50th year on the planet. Of the 5 riders, 2 are good skiers, 2 are good snow-boarders and 1 is 50 and never worn a ski boot outside of Hemel Hempstead. This was going to be interesting.

I had taken this task seriously. I’d had 11 hours-worth of lessons and the boys had bought me two 3 hour sessions of one-on-one tuition from an 8-year old Danish boy called ‘Viktor’. 

He and I had a lot in common. 

1. We are both male

2. We were both spending 6 hours together.

The rapport flowed and we found ourselves chatting away perhaps once or twice. It wasn’t frosty… we just shared little common ground. He asked me what I did. I told him I worked in Insurance…. and that was the end of that little line of enquiry. I then dropped one of my sticks off the ski lift into what looked like a ravine. ‘Couldn’t nip and get that for me could you Viktor?’

Still, in fairness to Viktor, he did treat me gently and didn’t at any point leave me for dead on a steep mountain. Not at any point. Thanks Viktor.

My confidence grew gently. I crashed a couple of times…. Once spectacularly on a very flat and unassuming piece of ground. I felt like I was going maybe 10-15 mph…. just standing up… not doing anything. Exerting no effort. It was like my brain had a sudden moment of ‘hang the fuckety on, what’s going on here. You’re standing still but still moving. Stop this bus immediately’. At this point I did a massive cartwheel on the flat ground and ended up in a heap with a hurty rib and a concerned looking Viktor whose voice said ‘are you ok?’ but whose eyes said ‘how the fuck did you just crash here… it’s flat you complete fucking moron’.

After that ‘lil event though, things kinda progressed well. I did more skiing. Viktor took me on some blue runs. I didn’t die in any meaningful way. All was well.

The big day of the week though was Saturday. Hip flasks packed. Time called fairly early. Everyone drinking hot chocolate with beers and added hip flaskery. We hit the town early. We hit the town hard. Some harder than others.

It’s not fair on those involved to go into too many raw details, so I’m going to deploy the famous ‘summary bullets’ to the evenings events and let others add the names/fill in the blanks. Here goes;

• Snowboarder X…. too drunk to stand un-aided, staggers down road… then runs at a complete stranger shouting… and hugs him. Literally the funniest video I’ve ever seen…. And I have played it to no-one today at work. Noone at all…

• Skier Y…… upstanding pillar of the community. Responsible job in the transport industry…. Never kicked a football in his life. Taped to the bar with electrical tape and broke a hotel wardrobe door.

• Snowboarder Z….Generous purchaser of birthday Champaign… roommate to gentle old man…. Literally left me for dead on a mountain to be eaten by wolves…. Revoluted me for the cost of the wolves whilst I was being eaten.

• Skier Z…. self-employed….. can start his car with an App…. Tired legs…. Also taped to a bar with electrical tape. Broke no doors.

Clearly names have been changed to protect the innocent. 

I can’t however leave this edition of Peloton news without re-living the disaster that was day 3.

I hadn’t seen Viktor that morning. 

I had felt that I held kept my head above the snow. 

Off we all went to the other side of the mountain. 

The fist little sign of trouble was when Moley suggested that we take a quieter, less well travelled route. The trouble with skiing that I have found, is that once you are committed to a route by going down some part of it…. You are committed… there is literally no going back. This particular route was not long…. But very narrow and icy. I instantly panicked and then fell over.

At this point an 80-year old German woman enters the scene. She stands on her skis by the side of my broken body and starts asking if I’m ok…. Moley, ever the gentleman, assures her that there is nothing to see here and that he is ‘taking care of it’.

She literally refuses to move. 

‘He shouldn’t be on this slope’ says Frauline. 

I’m preoccupied looking for my other ski and I think I’ve also lost a stick.

At this point I’m sitting down and looking over the edge of the slope I’m sitting on.

‘He shouldn’t be on this slope’ continues the old bint.

‘He’s fine’ continues Moley. ‘I’ve got him… we’ll be out of your way soon’.

I continue to sit.

Eventually I get cracking again and manage to slide my arse off that particular hill and move on to the next drama. 

I didn’t like that slope. Too narrow and very icy.

My arse hurts.

My rib hurts.

My pride hurts.

Eventually, snowboarder X & Y arrive at the top of a blue (black?) run and fuck the hell off without so much as a backward glance. 

They leave the Hemel Hempstead flyer with Moley and Macca to pursue their own agenda. I’m left wondering what they talk about…. When they do their thing together. I have no idea because I’ve been skiing for 11 hours in total. I don’t know what goes on chat-wise at the front of the Ski-pack. I just know what happens at the back. 

Anyhoo, within minutes, I find myself on the North Face of the Eigar looking down. Fuck me this is a looooong slope. I mean really, really long. And it’s about 40 degrees in angle.

I go down and within seconds I’m travelling at a pace I really don’t like at all. Not one Iota. So I do what I do best. I fall off dramatically and take a German lady with me for good measure.

She said ‘are you ok?’….. her eyes said ‘for the love of fuckery what on earth are you doing here you complete amateur’

I was now sitting in the middle of a mountain on my arse. One ski moving downhill being chased by Macca with Moley up the slope looking for my stick.

I was frightened, confused and angry.

How the fuck was I going to get off this slope. I literally had no idea. I’m on the side of a mountain. I can’t go down 2k’s on my arse for fucksake..!

Both Moley and Macca are trying to gently talk me down. I’m having none of it.

‘What the fuck am I doing here’, I whine.

For those of you present several years ago on Barhatch, when an unnamed cyclist so pissed on my fire that I popped a little wheelie in anger and then spoke to no-one for 30 mins…. you’d recognise this particular version of me. 

I’m getting irrational and angry at how average I am at pretty much every sport I try. Cycling. Average in the pack. Squash… average. Boxing… average…. Football….. yep, pretty shit at that. 

I feel fear. 

Macca is trying to talk to me ‘put the weight on your downhill ski Hoppo and try and press your arse into the mountain. It’ll give you better purchase on the edge and will be a lot easier for you to sustain… come on Hoppo…then you can rest… and we can go down gently’.

All I hear is ‘blah blah blah blah.. Hoppo….blah blah blah… Hoppo….blah blah blah…. Die’

Moley gently slides into view.

‘No worries Hoppo… just traverse…. Just traverse over there Hoppo… you can do it’.

All I hear is ‘Traverse… blah blah blah…. Traverse…. Blah blah blah’.

I am genuinely fearful. I’m sweating and my legs are burning. The slope is 45 degrees and covered in ice.

Literally hundreds of people and gently sweeping down it without a care in the world. I am the only person on the slope going fucking sideways….. slowly. From one side…. to the other…. And then down a few inches.

This takes what feels like hours.

I reach the bottom a sweating gibbering mess.

I look back up the slope. Fuck me it’s massive. For far too long I felt like Toni Kurtz… desperately trying to get down… but too cold… too frightened… so close… I thought I was going to be stuck on the mountain for ever.

In my wild subconscious I thought I heard two snowboarders overhead chuckling as they were lifted to safety whilst watching the madness below. Couldn’t have been our two.

I was nervous on day 1 as had absolutely no idea what to expect.

I came back alive and un-injured.

Being 50 isn’t about being brilliant at everything you do. It’s about just saying yes to doing brilliant things. 

One day I will ski the murderous wall and overcome the demons.

March 2020? Not sure I’ll be quite ready then… but one day. 

See you there next year. 

In the meantime I shall be retreating to the safety of my bicycle.

Slide away mother fuckers, slide away.

Hoppo

[michaelfallcon]

Cell Phones! Robots! Frozen Espresso! At Ada’s Discovery Cafe

In the future—not long from now, surely—each and every telecom data replenishment node will sport a far-out high-end cyber modified coffee experience. But here in 2018 there is Ada’s Discovery Cafe, a first-of-its-kind high-flying collaboration between Seattle local indie Ada’s Technical Books and multinational telecommunications conglomerate AT&T, open now at Broadway and East Thomas.

It’s a match made in Seattle, or at least the Seattle of today, where rising rents and influx of new money tech culture make successful cafe/bookstore/event space/coworking hybrids like Ada’s so very important. Founded in 2010—roughly an eon ago in the Seattle time scheme—Ada’s is the work of Danielle and David Hulton, an enterprising couple with deep connections in the international informations security and cryptoanalysis scenes. David co-founded a leading information security conference, ToorCon, in 1998, and sold his company Pico Computing to a larger technology firm in 2015. Danielle is a Seattle Pacific University graduate in the field of electrical engineering and manages day to day for Ada’s growing team including bookstore, events, co-working, and cafe staff.

Those operations now include Ada’s Discovery Cafe, opened in late September a block from the iconic Broadway strip running north-south through the heart of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Once synonymous with the city’s bohemian music scene and LGBTQ community, not to mention coffee culture, today it’s a neighborhood in flux, with construction everywhere and a rapidly changing social milieu. (Walking to the cafe I passed a gentleman in skin-tight neoprene gym clothes and wraparound sunglasses, hitting his Juul vape and checking his iPhone, balanced atop a Segway MiniPro just so.) The Hultons are ardent advocates for Capitol Hill: they’ve lived here for 15 years and owned a business there for around half that time. “We’re passionate about the neighborhood,” says Danielle, and they see the newly opened Discovery Cafe as a way to further serve it.

I asked Danielle Hulton how it happened in the first place, that Ada’s would come to partner with AT&T, and the story is something like a corporate meet-cute. “They contacted us out of the blue,” she tells me, “and at first our event coordinator met with them—he meets with everyone—but very quickly he realized this was something more.” From there Ada’s had the opportunity to pitch their vision to the team at AT&T, and they swung for the fences. “We pitched this really ambitious concept,” says Hulton, “with coffee robots, super high-end third wave coffee, and a focus on being approachable to customers using storytelling. It was a two-page pitch with a few pictures, and a month later they called us back and said yes.”

Ada’s co-founder Danielle Hulton.

The end result feels fresh, new, highly enterprising, and still very much in the early stages of determining the optimal outcome (as they say in tech, one imagines). The hybrid relationship—is this a cafe? is this an AT&T store? is it both?—was still very much in public beta during our visit, which meant being greeted semi-aggressively by a small team of AT&T staff upon entering the cafe’s east entrance, imploring us to sign up for an app and get a discount on the day’s coffee. The app itself requires multiple intrusive permissions and repeated opt-ins; it also controls multiple massive televisions displaying DirectTV (tuned to Food Network during our visit). The store does offer a hands-off locker program to access AT&T purchases, as well as a self-serve kiosk to purchase further products, so the greeter-led fancy AT&T store vibe is still very much being dialed in. “They’re still learning the neighborhood,” Danielle Hulton offers. “They just want it to be a relaxed space.”

But your coffee purchase—indeed, the totality of your coffee interaction—have not been AT&T app-ified, and it’s very much Ada’s own staff, own menu choices, and own expression of playful, geeky coffee culture on exhibit here at the pop-up. That’s the key compound word here, “pop-up,” as Discovery Cafe is officially a three-year commitment in which Ada’s has complete creative control over the bar space. “We control everything from here”—pointing to the bookshelf, stacked with titles by Ursula Le Guin, Roxane Gay, and Cordelia Fine—”to here,” says Danielle, gesturing to the end of the coffee bar. Over the next three years, one presumes that AT&T’s hopes the space, a kind of ur-millennial New Seattle tech denizen AT&T store on steroids (or rather, nootropics), can make waves and shift units on Capitol Hill. In the meantime, we’ve got a very ambitious little coffee bar to enjoy.

Overseeing the insertion order for said ambition is Cole McBride, the 2018 United States Barista Champion and a career competition barista. The Hulton’s relationship with McBride extends back the better part of a decade, when McBride—in a previous capacity with Seattle’s Visions Espresso coffee supply and consultancy—helped train and set-up the couple’s first coffee bar, at the Ada’s Technical Books flagship store (at 425 15th Ave E, a few blocks straight up the hill). At the new Ada’s Discovery Cafe McBride has been given what appears to be free reign to design a challenging, surprising, playfully geeky take on the coffee bar menu in 2018, chockablock with flourishes from frozen espressos to cocktail riffs like the “Cannon Iced Coffee” made with Scrappy’s lime bitters (an ode to the drink’s creator, Pacific Northwest coffee professional Mike Cannon) to a series of drinks brewed on co-founder David Hulton’s own line of KYOTOBOT robotic coffee brewers.

Cole McBride with KYOTOBOT.

Shots drop into frozen espresso cups.

That frozen espresso? With its Igloo cooler full of billowing dry ice? It works. Made on my visit with Verve Coffee‘s Ethiopia Sakara, the shot offers loads of warm-cold contrast upon first sip (expect an icy lip mark on your cup), melding into a lovely sort of melted chocolate orange thing for the back half of the shot. It’s the drink we tried at Ada’s I could most see myself coming back for, as a civilian coffee enjoyer, to drink for fun on future visits to the neighborhood.

“Cole taught David and I everything we know about coffee,” says Danielle, “and through the years we stayed in touch online and we’ve followed his journey. He’s a really great fit for the space and for what we’re trying to do for accessibility, and we’re excited and proud to have him onboard.”

There’s that word again—accessibility—and so I asked Hulton to help dial it in. The menu at Ada’s Discovery Cafe is a lot of things: exciting, challenging, unabashedly weird, and oddly reverent to the coffee styles of yesteryear, with options like dry and iced cappuccinos and shakeratos. But I’m not sure the word I’d use is “accessible“, or at least not in the same way as, say, the massive hulking Starbucks Reserve store a few blocks down the road, whose presence at five years in now looms over any other new coffee project on the Hill. I feel like David and Danielle Hulton understand the question well.

Ada’s co-founder David Hulton.

“Accessible, in this context, refers to our approach,” Danielle tells me. “We own a technical bookstore, you know, and we want that to be accessible, but we sell books about quantum mechanics! The idea is, this is something anyone can get into, and we will make it really friendly for you without being snobby, and the same thing extends to coffee. The whole point of our brand is to be curious.”

That’s all well and good, and this notion of democratizing specialty coffee for the curious is something we’re hearing more and more of from new cafes around the world. Snobbishness, it turns out, isn’t great for business. Making delicious coffee accessible, however, more assuredly is. Where frozen espressos and siphon robots fit into the equation, I’m not totally sure (quantum mechanics is not my field), but I do know that the menu at Ada’s is unabashedly fun, and frequently surprising, in a kind of “nerds take over the cafeteria” sort of way.

“In the last few days of this soft opening we’ve had executives come in here from AT&T, and they don’t know much about the coffee industry,” Danielle Hulton tells me, by way of example. “One of the executives ordered a latte, and she was just…blown away. I mean, she went out of her way to say it was the best latte she’d ever had. That’s just quality beans and quality milk. No extra flourish, just quality—and that’s cool for me. This space can introduce people who would maybe never go into a third wave shop for what coffee could be.”

“They see the value of what we’re doing as small brand trying to innovate in the coffee scene,” she continues candidly. “They could have easily partnered with someone like Starbucks or Tully’s.”

But they did not, in fact, partner with Tully’s or Starbucks, or any other multi-national coffee conglomerate. Instead, they partnered with Ada’s, a small business whose co-founders seem to be swaddling their new creation into the world like loving parents of a second child, with lots of lessons learned and hopes and dreams for the future and also some quite natural concerns. The interior design vibe, controlled entirely by AT&T, feels like what you’d find in the common room event space of a fancy new condo building. The TV’s are big and garish and have been widely derided by commenters in the local press. The footprint for books and magazines, while well-curated, is far too small—with all that space, and all that expertise from the team at Ada’s, it could easily be expanded to include more titles.

I guess I just want more Ada’s in the Ada’s Discovery Cafe experience at AT&T Lounge, but therein lies the devil’s bargain of big brand/small brand collaboration. It is rarely ever perfect, but it has the capacity to create experiences that get people talking and pique their fascination, and on that front the Ada’s + AT&T project has been a roaring success out the gate. People want to see and experience this thing for themselves, and in today’s ever-crowded new cafe market, that’s saying something.

And so for at least the next three years we get Ada’s Discovery Cafe, which means more dry ice espressos, more highball iced cappuccinos, more coffee cocktail riffs from morning ’til afternoon, and more from our new friend KYOTOBOT. Maybe this really is the future, in which enormous brands partner with tiny brands to help create a version of both for more people to enjoy. Perhaps we, as a society, can requisition further nodes of collaborative dispensation betwixt large corporations (with money and vision) and indie companies (with good ideas/delicious products/etc) so that exciting and interesting things have the backing and platform to capture popular imagination at scale. This is how a lot of great literature and film and music is made, after all—as a collaboration of art and industry.

More good ideas, more tasty coffee, more books, and maybe, you know, if you need it, some more GB for your data plan. This is… not capitalism, exactly, or at least not any sort of zero-sum straight-line version of it. But in 2018 it feels very much like Capitol Hill.

Ada's Discovery Cafe is located at 800 E Thomas St, Seattle. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

Jordan Michelman (@suitcasewine) is a co-founder and editor at Sprudge Media Network, a contributor to Portland Monthly and Willamette Week, and co-author of The New Rules of Coffee. Read more Jordan Michelman on Sprudge. 

The post Cell Phones! Robots! Frozen Espresso! At Ada’s Discovery Cafe appeared first on Sprudge.

Cell Phones! Robots! Frozen Espresso! At Ada’s Discovery Cafe published first on https://medium.com/@LinLinCoffee

[epchapman89]

Cell Phones! Robots! Frozen Espresso! At Ada’s Discovery Cafe

In the future—not long from now, surely—each and every telecom data replenishment node will sport a far-out high-end cyber modified coffee experience. But here in 2018 there is Ada’s Discovery Cafe, a first-of-its-kind high-flying collaboration between Seattle local indie Ada’s Technical Books and multinational telecommunications conglomerate AT&T, open now at Broadway and East Thomas.

It’s a match made in Seattle, or at least the Seattle of today, where rising rents and influx of new money tech culture make successful cafe/bookstore/event space/coworking hybrids like Ada’s so very important. Founded in 2010—roughly an eon ago in the Seattle time scheme—Ada’s is the work of Danielle and David Hulton, an enterprising couple with deep connections in the international informations security and cryptoanalysis scenes. David co-founded a leading information security conference, ToorCon, in 1998, and sold his company Pico Computing to a larger technology firm in 2015. Danielle is a Seattle Pacific University graduate in the field of electrical engineering and manages day to day for Ada’s growing team including bookstore, events, co-working, and cafe staff.

Those operations now include Ada’s Discovery Cafe, opened in late September a block from the iconic Broadway strip running north-south through the heart of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Once synonymous with the city’s bohemian music scene and LGBTQ community, not to mention coffee culture, today it’s a neighborhood in flux, with construction everywhere and a rapidly changing social milieu. (Walking to the cafe I passed a gentleman in skin-tight neoprene gym clothes and wraparound sunglasses, hitting his Juul vape and checking his iPhone, balanced atop a Segway MiniPro just so.) The Hultons are ardent advocates for Capitol Hill: they’ve lived here for 15 years and owned a business there for around half that time. “We’re passionate about the neighborhood,” says Danielle, and they see the newly opened Discovery Cafe as a way to further serve it.

I asked Danielle Hulton how it happened in the first place, that Ada’s would come to partner with AT&T, and the story is something like a corporate meet-cute. “They contacted us out of the blue,” she tells me, “and at first our event coordinator met with them—he meets with everyone—but very quickly he realized this was something more.” From there Ada’s had the opportunity to pitch their vision to the team at AT&T, and they swung for the fences. “We pitched this really ambitious concept,” says Hulton, “with coffee robots, super high-end third wave coffee, and a focus on being approachable to customers using storytelling. It was a two-page pitch with a few pictures, and a month later they called us back and said yes.”

Ada’s co-founder Danielle Hulton.

The end result feels fresh, new, highly enterprising, and still very much in the early stages of determining the optimal outcome (as they say in tech, one imagines). The hybrid relationship—is this a cafe? is this an AT&T store? is it both?—was still very much in public beta during our visit, which meant being greeted semi-aggressively by a small team of AT&T staff upon entering the cafe’s east entrance, imploring us to sign up for an app and get a discount on the day’s coffee. The app itself requires multiple intrusive permissions and repeated opt-ins; it also controls multiple massive televisions displaying DirectTV (tuned to Food Network during our visit). The store does offer a hands-off locker program to access AT&T purchases, as well as a self-serve kiosk to purchase further products, so the greeter-led fancy AT&T store vibe is still very much being dialed in. “They’re still learning the neighborhood,” Danielle Hulton offers. “They just want it to be a relaxed space.”

But your coffee purchase—indeed, the totality of your coffee interaction—have not been AT&T app-ified, and it’s very much Ada’s own staff, own menu choices, and own expression of playful, geeky coffee culture on exhibit here at the pop-up. That’s the key compound word here, “pop-up,” as Discovery Cafe is officially a three-year commitment in which Ada’s has complete creative control over the bar space. “We control everything from here”—pointing to the bookshelf, stacked with titles by Ursula Le Guin, Roxane Gay, and Cordelia Fine—”to here,” says Danielle, gesturing to the end of the coffee bar. Over the next three years, one presumes that AT&T’s hopes the space, a kind of ur-millennial New Seattle tech denizen AT&T store on steroids (or rather, nootropics), can make waves and shift units on Capitol Hill. In the meantime, we’ve got a very ambitious little coffee bar to enjoy.

Overseeing the insertion order for said ambition is Cole McBride, the 2018 United States Barista Champion and a career competition barista. The Hulton’s relationship with McBride extends back the better part of a decade, when McBride—in a previous capacity with Seattle’s Visions Espresso coffee supply and consultancy—helped train and set-up the couple’s first coffee bar, at the Ada’s Technical Books flagship store (at 425 15th Ave E, a few blocks straight up the hill). At the new Ada’s Discovery Cafe McBride has been given what appears to be free reign to design a challenging, surprising, playfully geeky take on the coffee bar menu in 2018, chockablock with flourishes from frozen espressos to cocktail riffs like the “Cannon Iced Coffee” made with Scrappy’s lime bitters (an ode to the drink’s creator, Pacific Northwest coffee professional Mike Cannon) to a series of drinks brewed on co-founder David Hulton’s own line of KYOTOBOT robotic coffee brewers.

Cole McBride with KYOTOBOT.

Shots drop into frozen espresso cups.

That frozen espresso? With its Igloo cooler full of billowing dry ice? It works. Made on my visit with Verve Coffee‘s Ethiopia Sakara, the shot offers loads of warm-cold contrast upon first sip (expect an icy lip mark on your cup), melding into a lovely sort of melted chocolate orange thing for the back half of the shot. It’s the drink we tried at Ada’s I could most see myself coming back for, as a civilian coffee enjoyer, to drink for fun on future visits to the neighborhood.

“Cole taught David and I everything we know about coffee,” says Danielle, “and through the years we stayed in touch online and we’ve followed his journey. He’s a really great fit for the space and for what we’re trying to do for accessibility, and we’re excited and proud to have him onboard.”

There’s that word again—accessibility—and so I asked Hulton to help dial it in. The menu at Ada’s Discovery Cafe is a lot of things: exciting, challenging, unabashedly weird, and oddly reverent to the coffee styles of yesteryear, with options like dry and iced cappuccinos and shakeratos. But I’m not sure the word I’d use is “accessible“, or at least not in the same way as, say, the massive hulking Starbucks Reserve store a few blocks down the road, whose presence at five years in now looms over any other new coffee project on the Hill. I feel like David and Danielle Hulton understand the question well.

Ada’s co-founder David Hulton.

“Accessible, in this context, refers to our approach,” Danielle tells me. “We own a technical bookstore, you know, and we want that to be accessible, but we sell books about quantum mechanics! The idea is, this is something anyone can get into, and we will make it really friendly for you without being snobby, and the same thing extends to coffee. The whole point of our brand is to be curious.”

That’s all well and good, and this notion of democratizing specialty coffee for the curious is something we’re hearing more and more of from new cafes around the world. Snobbishness, it turns out, isn’t great for business. Making delicious coffee accessible, however, more assuredly is. Where frozen espressos and siphon robots fit into the equation, I’m not totally sure (quantum mechanics is not my field), but I do know that the menu at Ada’s is unabashedly fun, and frequently surprising, in a kind of “nerds take over the cafeteria” sort of way.

“In the last few days of this soft opening we’ve had executives come in here from AT&T, and they don’t know much about the coffee industry,” Danielle Hulton tells me, by way of example. “One of the executives ordered a latte, and she was just…blown away. I mean, she went out of her way to say it was the best latte she’d ever had. That’s just quality beans and quality milk. No extra flourish, just quality—and that’s cool for me. This space can introduce people who would maybe never go into a third wave shop for what coffee could be.”

“They see the value of what we’re doing as small brand trying to innovate in the coffee scene,” she continues candidly. “They could have easily partnered with someone like Starbucks or Tully’s.”

But they did not, in fact, partner with Tully’s or Starbucks, or any other multi-national coffee conglomerate. Instead, they partnered with Ada’s, a small business whose co-founders seem to be swaddling their new creation into the world like loving parents of a second child, with lots of lessons learned and hopes and dreams for the future and also some quite natural concerns. The interior design vibe, controlled entirely by AT&T, feels like what you’d find in the common room event space of a fancy new condo building. The TV’s are big and garish and have been widely derided by commenters in the local press. The footprint for books and magazines, while well-curated, is far too small—with all that space, and all that expertise from the team at Ada’s, it could easily be expanded to include more titles.

I guess I just want more Ada’s in the Ada’s Discovery Cafe experience at AT&T Lounge, but therein lies the devil’s bargain of big brand/small brand collaboration. It is rarely ever perfect, but it has the capacity to create experiences that get people talking and pique their fascination, and on that front the Ada’s + AT&T project has been a roaring success out the gate. People want to see and experience this thing for themselves, and in today’s ever-crowded new cafe market, that’s saying something.

And so for at least the next three years we get Ada’s Discovery Cafe, which means more dry ice espressos, more highball iced cappuccinos, more coffee cocktail riffs from morning ’til afternoon, and more from our new friend KYOTOBOT. Maybe this really is the future, in which enormous brands partner with tiny brands to help create a version of both for more people to enjoy. Perhaps we, as a society, can requisition further nodes of collaborative dispensation betwixt large corporations (with money and vision) and indie companies (with good ideas/delicious products/etc) so that exciting and interesting things have the backing and platform to capture popular imagination at scale. This is how a lot of great literature and film and music is made, after all—as a collaboration of art and industry.

More good ideas, more tasty coffee, more books, and maybe, you know, if you need it, some more GB for your data plan. This is… not capitalism, exactly, or at least not any sort of zero-sum straight-line version of it. But in 2018 it feels very much like Capitol Hill.

Ada's Discovery Cafe is located at 800 E Thomas St, Seattle. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

Jordan Michelman (@suitcasewine) is a co-founder and editor at Sprudge Media Network, a contributor to Portland Monthly and Willamette Week, and co-author of The New Rules of Coffee. Read more Jordan Michelman on Sprudge. 

The post Cell Phones! Robots! Frozen Espresso! At Ada’s Discovery Cafe appeared first on Sprudge.

seen 1st on http://sprudge.com

[mrwilliamcharley]

Cell Phones! Robots! Frozen Espresso! At Ada’s Discovery Cafe

In the future—not long from now, surely—each and every telecom data replenishment node will sport a far-out high-end cyber modified coffee experience. But here in 2018 there is Ada’s Discovery Cafe, a first-of-its-kind high-flying collaboration between Seattle local indie Ada’s Technical Books and multinational telecommunications conglomerate AT&T, open now at Broadway and East Thomas.

It’s a match made in Seattle, or at least the Seattle of today, where rising rents and influx of new money tech culture make successful cafe/bookstore/event space/coworking hybrids like Ada’s so very important. Founded in 2010—roughly an eon ago in the Seattle time scheme—Ada’s is the work of Danielle and David Hulton, an enterprising couple with deep connections in the international informations security and cryptoanalysis scenes. David co-founded a leading information security conference, ToorCon, in 1998, and sold his company Pico Computing to a larger technology firm in 2015. Danielle is a Seattle Pacific University graduate in the field of electrical engineering and manages day to day for Ada’s growing team including bookstore, events, co-working, and cafe staff.

Those operations now include Ada’s Discovery Cafe, opened in late September a block from the iconic Broadway strip running north-south through the heart of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Once synonymous with the city’s bohemian music scene and LGBTQ community, not to mention coffee culture, today it’s a neighborhood in flux, with construction everywhere and a rapidly changing social milieu. (Walking to the cafe I passed a gentleman in skin-tight neoprene gym clothes and wraparound sunglasses, hitting his Juul vape and checking his iPhone, balanced atop a Segway MiniPro just so.) The Hultons are ardent advocates for Capitol Hill: they’ve lived here for 15 years and owned a business there for around half that time. “We’re passionate about the neighborhood,” says Danielle, and they see the newly opened Discovery Cafe as a way to further serve it.

I asked Danielle Hulton how it happened in the first place, that Ada’s would come to partner with AT&T, and the story is something like a corporate meet-cute. “They contacted us out of the blue,” she tells me, “and at first our event coordinator met with them—he meets with everyone—but very quickly he realized this was something more.” From there Ada’s had the opportunity to pitch their vision to the team at AT&T, and they swung for the fences. “We pitched this really ambitious concept,” says Hulton, “with coffee robots, super high-end third wave coffee, and a focus on being approachable to customers using storytelling. It was a two-page pitch with a few pictures, and a month later they called us back and said yes.”

Ada’s co-founder Danielle Hulton.

The end result feels fresh, new, highly enterprising, and still very much in the early stages of determining the optimal outcome (as they say in tech, one imagines). The hybrid relationship—is this a cafe? is this an AT&T store? is it both?—was still very much in public beta during our visit, which meant being greeted semi-aggressively by a small team of AT&T staff upon entering the cafe’s east entrance, imploring us to sign up for an app and get a discount on the day’s coffee. The app itself requires multiple intrusive permissions and repeated opt-ins; it also controls multiple massive televisions displaying DirectTV (tuned to Food Network during our visit). The store does offer a hands-off locker program to access AT&T purchases, as well as a self-serve kiosk to purchase further products, so the greeter-led fancy AT&T store vibe is still very much being dialed in. “They’re still learning the neighborhood,” Danielle Hulton offers. “They just want it to be a relaxed space.”

But your coffee purchase—indeed, the totality of your coffee interaction—have not been AT&T app-ified, and it’s very much Ada’s own staff, own menu choices, and own expression of playful, geeky coffee culture on exhibit here at the pop-up. That’s the key compound word here, “pop-up,” as Discovery Cafe is officially a three-year commitment in which Ada’s has complete creative control over the bar space. “We control everything from here”—pointing to the bookshelf, stacked with titles by Ursula Le Guin, Roxane Gay, and Cordelia Fine—”to here,” says Danielle, gesturing to the end of the coffee bar. Over the next three years, one presumes that AT&T’s hopes the space, a kind of ur-millennial New Seattle tech denizen AT&T store on steroids (or rather, nootropics), can make waves and shift units on Capitol Hill. In the meantime, we’ve got a very ambitious little coffee bar to enjoy.

Overseeing the insertion order for said ambition is Cole McBride, the 2018 United States Barista Champion and a career competition barista. The Hulton’s relationship with McBride extends back the better part of a decade, when McBride—in a previous capacity with Seattle’s Visions Espresso coffee supply and consultancy—helped train and set-up the couple’s first coffee bar, at the Ada’s Technical Books flagship store (at 425 15th Ave E, a few blocks straight up the hill). At the new Ada’s Discovery Cafe McBride has been given what appears to be free reign to design a challenging, surprising, playfully geeky take on the coffee bar menu in 2018, chockablock with flourishes from frozen espressos to cocktail riffs like the “Cannon Iced Coffee” made with Scrappy’s lime bitters (an ode to the drink’s creator, Pacific Northwest coffee professional Mike Cannon) to a series of drinks brewed on co-founder David Hulton’s own line of KYOTOBOT robotic coffee brewers.

Cole McBride with KYOTOBOT.

Shots drop into frozen espresso cups.

That frozen espresso? With its Igloo cooler full of billowing dry ice? It works. Made on my visit with Verve Coffee‘s Ethiopia Sakara, the shot offers loads of warm-cold contrast upon first sip (expect an icy lip mark on your cup), melding into a lovely sort of melted chocolate orange thing for the back half of the shot. It’s the drink we tried at Ada’s I could most see myself coming back for, as a civilian coffee enjoyer, to drink for fun on future visits to the neighborhood.

“Cole taught David and I everything we know about coffee,” says Danielle, “and through the years we stayed in touch online and we’ve followed his journey. He’s a really great fit for the space and for what we’re trying to do for accessibility, and we’re excited and proud to have him onboard.”

There’s that word again—accessibility—and so I asked Hulton to help dial it in. The menu at Ada’s Discovery Cafe is a lot of things: exciting, challenging, unabashedly weird, and oddly reverent to the coffee styles of yesteryear, with options like dry and iced cappuccinos and shakeratos. But I’m not sure the word I’d use is “accessible“, or at least not in the same way as, say, the massive hulking Starbucks Reserve store a few blocks down the road, whose presence at five years in now looms over any other new coffee project on the Hill. I feel like David and Danielle Hulton understand the question well.

Ada’s co-founder David Hulton.

“Accessible, in this context, refers to our approach,” Danielle tells me. “We own a technical bookstore, you know, and we want that to be accessible, but we sell books about quantum mechanics! The idea is, this is something anyone can get into, and we will make it really friendly for you without being snobby, and the same thing extends to coffee. The whole point of our brand is to be curious.”

That’s all well and good, and this notion of democratizing specialty coffee for the curious is something we’re hearing more and more of from new cafes around the world. Snobbishness, it turns out, isn’t great for business. Making delicious coffee accessible, however, more assuredly is. Where frozen espressos and siphon robots fit into the equation, I’m not totally sure (quantum mechanics is not my field), but I do know that the menu at Ada’s is unabashedly fun, and frequently surprising, in a kind of “nerds take over the cafeteria” sort of way.

“In the last few days of this soft opening we’ve had executives come in here from AT&T, and they don’t know much about the coffee industry,” Danielle Hulton tells me, by way of example. “One of the executives ordered a latte, and she was just…blown away. I mean, she went out of her way to say it was the best latte she’d ever had. That’s just quality beans and quality milk. No extra flourish, just quality—and that’s cool for me. This space can introduce people who would maybe never go into a third wave shop for what coffee could be.”

“They see the value of what we’re doing as small brand trying to innovate in the coffee scene,” she continues candidly. “They could have easily partnered with someone like Starbucks or Tully’s.”

But they did not, in fact, partner with Tully’s or Starbucks, or any other multi-national coffee conglomerate. Instead, they partnered with Ada’s, a small business whose co-founders seem to be swaddling their new creation into the world like loving parents of a second child, with lots of lessons learned and hopes and dreams for the future and also some quite natural concerns. The interior design vibe, controlled entirely by AT&T, feels like what you’d find in the common room event space of a fancy new condo building. The TV’s are big and garish and have been widely derided by commenters in the local press. The footprint for books and magazines, while well-curated, is far too small—with all that space, and all that expertise from the team at Ada’s, it could easily be expanded to include more titles.

I guess I just want more Ada’s in the Ada’s Discovery Cafe experience at AT&T Lounge, but therein lies the devil’s bargain of big brand/small brand collaboration. It is rarely ever perfect, but it has the capacity to create experiences that get people talking and pique their fascination, and on that front the Ada’s + AT&T project has been a roaring success out the gate. People want to see and experience this thing for themselves, and in today’s ever-crowded new cafe market, that’s saying something.

And so for at least the next three years we get Ada’s Discovery Cafe, which means more dry ice espressos, more highball iced cappuccinos, more coffee cocktail riffs from morning ’til afternoon, and more from our new friend KYOTOBOT. Maybe this really is the future, in which enormous brands partner with tiny brands to help create a version of both for more people to enjoy. Perhaps we, as a society, can requisition further nodes of collaborative dispensation betwixt large corporations (with money and vision) and indie companies (with good ideas/delicious products/etc) so that exciting and interesting things have the backing and platform to capture popular imagination at scale. This is how a lot of great literature and film and music is made, after all—as a collaboration of art and industry.

More good ideas, more tasty coffee, more books, and maybe, you know, if you need it, some more GB for your data plan. This is… not capitalism, exactly, or at least not any sort of zero-sum straight-line version of it. But in 2018 it feels very much like Capitol Hill.

Ada's Discovery Cafe is located at 800 E Thomas St, Seattle. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

Jordan Michelman (@suitcasewine) is a co-founder and editor at Sprudge Media Network, a contributor to Portland Monthly and Willamette Week, and co-author of The New Rules of Coffee. Read more Jordan Michelman on Sprudge. 

The post Cell Phones! Robots! Frozen Espresso! At Ada’s Discovery Cafe appeared first on Sprudge.

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[shakespearesglobe-blog]

History of journalism

The history of journalism and the development of the gathering and trasmitting of news growth with technology and are marked by the advent of specialized techniques for the diffussion of informations.

Before the printing press was invented, the news was spread in the oral tradition. Originally merchants and travelers brought news back returning from their travels. This information was often written by ancient scribes, but they weren’t reliable. However this was considered the first type of trasmission of news.                                                                                                                                                                                      

The first publication was “notizie scritte” (written notices), a monthly newspaper published by the government of Venice. This cost one gazetta, a Venetian coin from which the name “gazzetta” comes from. These were handwritten newsletter about political and economic topics. They could be trasmitted quickly through Europe especially in Italy. However they couldn’t be considered true newspapers because they were only for a small part of the population.

Around the 15th and 16th centuries long news called “relations” were published in England and France; in Spain they were called "relaciones”. Two changes that occured in the 16th century can be found in the origin of journalistic activity:

more dynamic society

political tensions(revolutions,civil wars).

Initially the frequency of newspapers was irregular, they rarely reached the provinces. Only when the postal services were established also the small centres also recive newspapers.

The first true newspaper appears in Lipsia in 1660. The headline read: "Fresh news of war and world affairs”. The advent of newspapers marks the decline of weekly newsletters, which however happened slowly.

England was the nation with the greatest circulation of daily press. In England we can also see the first evening newspapers , three-weekly publications and the first forms of light journalism, with the periodicals The Tatler and The Spectator.

THE TATLER

The Tatler was a periodical launched in London by the essayist Sir Richard Steele in April 1709. It was published three times a week, in a single sheet written on both sides in two columns.  

Steele thougth that the middle class needed more information about politics but this journal also deat with other popular topics such as fashion and entertainment. Then the Tatler began to investigate manners and society, establishing its principles of ideal behaviour, its concepts of a perfect gentleman and gentlewoman, and its standards of good taste. All these temes were also discussed in the Clubs and in the Coffee houses. The Coffee houses appeared in London at the end of the 17th century and they were meeting-places where people from middle class went not only to drink coffee, tea or chocolate but also to debate the great issues of the day, exchange gossip and read or hear the latest news. These places were often called “penny universities” because everyone could listen to the conversations of writers, politicians, artists, bankers and even adventurers. There newspapers could be bought at the cost of one penny; so a new taste in art and literature developed.

Later, with Joseph Addison political themes were abbandoned in favour of cultural discussions, moral issues and literary criticism.

Three months after the original Tatler was first published, an unknown woman writer using the pen name “Mrs. Crackenthorpe” published what was called the Female Tatler. Scholars from the 1960 to the 1990 thought the anonymous woman might have been Delarivier Manley, but she was subsequently ruled out as author and the woman remains unknown. However, its run was much shorter: the magazine ran for less than a year: from 8 July 1709 to 31 March 1710.

In 1711, after 271 issues, “The Tatler” was replaced by another newspaper, “The Spectator”, written by Steele and Addison too.

THE SPECTATOR

At the beginning of 1711, precisely on the first Thursday of March, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, both politicians, published a periodical daily called The Spectator, which was one of the bestsellers of the 18th century and a popular model for expressing various points of view on the society of England in this period. Each “paper” or “number” was approximately 2,500 words long and the original run consisted of 555 numbers; these were collected into seven volumes.In 1714 it was revived by Addison and these papers formed the eighth volume. Eustace Budgell, a cousin of Addison’s, and the poet John Hughes also contributed to the publication. The Spectator used a fictional method of presentation through a “Spectator Club”, whose imaginary members extolled the authors’ own ideas about society. Club’s “members” were representatives of commerce, the army, the town (respectively, Sir Andrew Freeport, Captain Sentry, and Will Honeycomb), and of the country gentry (Sir Roger de Coverley). The pages were written by Mr. Spectator, an “observer” of the London scene. The conversations, that The Spectator reported, took place in coffeehouses, where many copies of the publication were distributed and read.                                                                    The Spectator generally didn’t talk about-political controversy. An important aspect of its success was its notion that urbanity and taste were values that      transcended political differences. Mr. Spectator observed that knowing his real name, his age, and his place of residence would spoil his ability to act as a nonpartisan observer.

The most important articles of this newspaper were: the first number that cites a Latin quotation of Horace, consisted entirely of an introduction by Addison as ‘Mr Spectator’; number 49, that talks about the importance of conversation in this society and the role of the coffee house.

The newspaper was immediately a big success,in fact on 12 March 1711, Joseph Addison wrote in The Spectator: “It is with much satisfaction that I hear this great city inquiring day by day after these my papers, and receiving my morning lectures with a becoming seriousness and attention. My publisher tells me, that there are already Three thousand of them distributed every day: so that if I allow twenty readers to every paper. I may reckon about threescore thousand disciples in London and Westminster, who I hope will take care to distinguish themselves from the thoughtless herd of their ignorant and unattentive brethren”.

Credit for The Spectator’s popularity must also go to the beautiful prose of Addison and Steele. Gentle wit and a polished style made even the difficult ideas of Locke and Newton accessible to a reader of average education. Benjamin Franklin admitted in his autobiography that The Spectator was his model for stylish writing.

An other important theme in The Spectator is that of women.As Addison wrote in the issue of 12 March 1711, “there are none to whom this paper will be more useful, than to the female world. I have often thought there has not been sufficient pains taken in finding out proper employments and diversions for the fair ones.” The Spectator’s wanted to remedy this neglect. Whole papers of The Spectator were devoted to reading recommendations for women or advice on proper comportment.There were also information on the extravagance of women’s fashion, including a hilarious satire on the elaborate and absurd etiquette of women’s fans, and another on the proliferation of facial beauty marks.There are some articles about women. Issue 20, for example, written by Steele, is based on a young lady’s note about men who stare at women in church. Mr. Spectator gives a detailed and courteous reply that contrasts “male impudence. Much of this attention to women took the form of a paternalistic moralism that would be little appreciated today. Nonetheless, the women of 1711 were flattered simply to be noticed by a literary culture that had hitherto been content to completely ignore them or treat them as mere objects of male desire.