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missmentelle · 4 years ago

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Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things

If you’ve been paying attention for the last couple of years, you might have noticed that the world has a bit of a misinformation problem.

The problem isn’t just with the recent election conspiracies, either. The last couple of years has brought us the rise (and occasionally fall) of misinformation-based movements like:

Sandy Hook conspiracies

Gamergate

Pizzagate

The MRA/incel/MGTOW movements

anti-vaxxers

flat-earthers

the birther movement

the Illuminati

climate change denial

Spygate

Holocaust denial

COVID-19 denial

5G panic

QAnon

But why do people believe this stuff?

It would be easy - too easy - to say that people fall for this stuff because they’re stupid. We all want to believe that smart people like us are immune from being taken in by deranged conspiracies. But it’s just not that simple. People from all walks of life are going down these rabbit holes - people with degrees and professional careers and rich lives have fallen for these theories, leaving their loved ones baffled. Decades-long relationships have splintered this year, as the number of people flocking to these conspiracies out of nowhere reaches a fever pitch.

So why do smart people start believing some incredibly stupid things? It’s because:

Our brains are built to identify patterns.

Our brains fucking love puzzles and patterns. This is a well-known phenomenon called apophenia, and at one point, it was probably helpful for our survival - the prehistoric human who noticed patterns in things like animal migration, plant life cycles and the movement of the stars was probably a lot more likely to survive than the human who couldn’t figure out how to use natural clues to navigate or find food.

The problem, though, is that we can’t really turn this off. Even when we’re presented with completely random data, we’ll see patterns. We see patterns in everything, even when there’s no pattern there. This is why people see Jesus in a burnt piece of toast or get superstitious about hockey playoffs or insist on always playing at a certain slot machine - our brains look for patterns in the constant barrage of random information in our daily lives, and insist that those patterns are really there, even when they’re completely imagined.

A lot of conspiracy theories have their roots in people making connections between things that aren’t really connected. The belief that “vaccines cause autism” was bolstered by the fact that the first recognizable symptoms of autism happen to appear at roughly the same time that children receive one of their rounds of childhood immunizations - the two things are completely unconnected, but our brains have a hard time letting go of the pattern they see there. Likewise, many people were quick to latch on to the fact that early maps of COVID infections were extremely similar to maps of 5G coverage - the fact that there’s a reasonable explanation for this (major cities are more likely to have both high COVID cases AND 5G networks) doesn’t change the fact that our brains just really, really want to see a connection there.

Our brains love proportionality.

Specifically, our brains like effects to be directly proportional to their causes - in other words, we like it when big events have big causes, and small causes only lead to small events. It’s uncomfortable for us when the reverse is true. And so anytime we feel like a “big” event (celebrity death, global pandemic, your precious child is diagnosed with autism) has a small or unsatisfying cause (car accident, pandemics just sort of happen every few decades, people just get autism sometimes), we sometimes feel the need to start looking around for the bigger, more sinister, “true” cause of that event.

Consider, for instance, the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. In 1981, Pope John Paul II was shot four times by a Turkish member of a known Italian paramilitary secret society who’d recently escaped from prison - on the surface, it seems like the sort of thing conspiracy theorists salivate over, seeing how it was an actual multinational conspiracy. But they never had much interest in the assassination attempt. Why? Because the Pope didn’t die. He recovered from his injuries and went right back to Pope-ing. The event didn’t have a serious outcome, and so people are content with the idea that one extremist carried it out. The death of Princess Diana, however, has been fertile ground for conspiracy theories; even though a woman dying in a car accident is less weird than a man being shot four times by a paid political assassin, her death has attracted more conspiracy theories because it had a bigger outcome. A princess dying in a car accident doesn’t feel big enough. It’s unsatisfying. We want such a monumentous moment in history to have a bigger, more interesting cause.

These theories prey on pre-existing fear and anger.

Are you a terrified new parent who wants the best for their child and feels anxious about having them injected with a substance you don’t totally understand? Congrats, you’re a prime target for the anti-vaccine movement. Are you a young white male who doesn’t like seeing more and more games aimed at women and minorities, and is worried that “your” gaming culture is being stolen from you? You might have been very interested in something called Gamergate. Are you a right-wing white person who worries that “your” country and way of life is being stolen by immigrants, non-Christians and coastal liberals? You’re going to love the “all left-wingers are Satantic pedo baby-eaters” messaging of QAnon.

Misinformation and conspiracy theories are often aimed strategically at the anxieties and fears that people are already experiencing. No one likes being told that their fears are insane or irrational; it’s not hard to see why people gravitate towards communities that say “yes, you were right all along, and everyone who told you that you were nuts to be worried about this is just a dumb sheep. We believe you, and we have evidence that you were right along, right here.” Fear is a powerful motivator, and you can make people believe and do some pretty extreme things if you just keep telling them “yes, that thing you’re afraid of is true, but also it’s way worse than you could have ever imagined.”

Real information is often complicated, hard to understand, and inherently unsatisfying.

The information that comes from the scientific community is often very frustrating for a layperson; we want science to have hard-and-fast answers, but it doesn’t. The closest you get to a straight answer is often “it depends” or “we don’t know, but we think X might be likely”. Understanding the results of a scientific study with any confidence requires knowing about sampling practices, error types, effect sizes, confidence intervals and publishing biases. Even asking a simple question like “is X bad for my child” will usually get you a complicated, uncertain answer - in most cases, it really just depends. Not understanding complex topics makes people afraid - it makes it hard to trust that they’re being given the right information, and that they’re making the right choices.

Conspiracy theories and misinformation, on the other hand, are often simple, and they are certain. Vaccines bad. Natural things good. 5G bad. Organic food good. The reason girls won’t date you isn’t a complex combination of your social skills, hygiene, appearance, projected values, personal circumstances, degree of extroversion, luck and life phase - girls won’t date you because feminism is bad, and if we got rid of feminism you’d have a girlfriend. The reason Donald Trump was an unpopular president wasn’t a complex combination of his public bigotry, lack of decorum, lack of qualifications, open incompetence, nepotism, corruption, loss of soft power, refusal to uphold the basic responsibilities of his position or his constant lying - they hated him because he was fighting a secret sex cult and they’re all in it.

Instead of making you feel stupid because you’re overwhelmed with complex information, expert opinions and uncertain advice, conspiracy theories make you feel smart - smarter, in fact, than everyone who doesn’t believe in them. And that’s a powerful thing for people living in a credential-heavy world.

Many conspiracy theories are unfalsifiable.

It is very difficult to prove a negative. If I tell you, for instance, that there’s no such thing as a purple swan, it would be very difficult for me to actually prove that to you - I could spend the rest of my life photographing swans and looking for swans and talking to people who know a lot about swans, and yet the slim possibility would still exist that there was a purple swan out there somewhere that I just hadn’t found yet. That’s why, in most circumstances, the burden of proof lies with the person making the extraordinary claim - if you tell me that purple swans exist, we should continue to assume that they don’t until you actually produce a purple swan.

Conspiracy theories, however, are built so that it’s nearly impossible to “prove” them wrong. Is there any proof that the world’s top-ranking politicians and celebrities are all in a giant child sex trafficking cult? No. But can you prove that they aren’t in a child sex-trafficking cult? No, not really. Even if I, again, spent the rest of my life investigating celebrities and following celebrities and talking to people who know celebrities, I still couldn’t definitely prove that this cult doesn’t exist - there’s always a chance that the specific celebrities I’ve investigated just aren’t in the cult (but other ones are!) or that they’re hiding evidence of the cult even better than we think. Lack of evidence for a conspiracy theory is always treated as more evidence for the theory - we can’t find anything because this goes even higher up than we think! They’re even more sophisticated at hiding this than we thought! People deeply entrenched in these theories don’t even realize that they are stuck in a circular loop where everything seems to prove their theory right - they just see a mountain of “evidence” for their side.

Our brains are very attached to information that we “learned” by ourselves.

Learning accurate information is not a particularly interactive or exciting experience. An expert or reliable source just presents the information to you in its entirety, you read or watch the information, and that’s the end of it. You can look for more information or look for clarification of something, but it’s a one-way street - the information is just laid out for you, you take what you need, end of story.

Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, almost never show their hand all at once. They drop little breadcrumbs of information that slowly lead you where they want you to go. This is why conspiracy theorists are forever telling you to “do your research” - they know that if they tell you everything at once, you won’t believe them. Instead, they want you to indoctrinate yourself slowly over time, by taking the little hints they give you and running off to find or invent evidence that matches that clue. If I tell you that celebrities often wear symbols that identify them as part of a cult and that you should “do your research” about it, you can absolutely find evidence that substantiates my claim - there are literally millions of photos of celebrities out there, and anyone who looks hard enough is guaranteed to find common shapes, poses and themes that might just mean something (they don’t - eyes and triangles are incredibly common design elements, and if I took enough pictures of you, I could also “prove” that you also clearly display symbols that signal you’re in the cult).

The fact that you “found” the evidence on your own, however, makes it more meaningful to you. We trust ourselves, and we trust that the patterns we uncover by ourselves are true. It doesn’t feel like you’re being fed misinformation - it feels like you’ve discovered an important truth that “they” didn’t want you to find, and you’ll hang onto that for dear life.

Older people have not learned to be media-literate in a digital world.

Fifty years ago, not just anyone could access popular media. All of this stuff had a huge barrier to entry - if you wanted to be on TV or be in the papers or have a radio show, you had to be a professional affiliated with a major media brand. Consumers didn’t have easy access to niche communities or alternative information - your sources of information were basically your local paper, the nightly news, and your morning radio show, and they all more or less agreed on the same set of facts. For decades, if it looked official and it appeared in print, you could probably trust that it was true.

Of course, we live in a very different world today - today, any asshole can accumulate an audience of millions, even if they have no credentials and nothing they say is actually true (like “The Food Babe”, a blogger with no credentials in medicine, nutrition, health sciences, biology or chemistry who peddles health misinformation to the 3 million people who visit her blog every month). It’s very tough for older people (and some younger people) to get their heads around the fact that it’s very easy to create an “official-looking” news source, and that they can’t necessarily trust everything they find on the internet. When you combine that with a tendency toward “clickbait headlines” that often misrepresent the information in the article, you have a generation struggling to determine who they can trust in a media landscape that doesn’t at all resemble the media landscape they once knew.

These beliefs become a part of someone’s identity.

A person doesn’t tell you that they believe in anti-vaxx information - they tell you that they ARE an anti-vaxxer. Likewise, people will tell you that they ARE a flat-earther, a birther, or a Gamergater. By design, these beliefs are not meant to be something you have a casual relationship with, like your opinion of pizza toppings or how much you trust local weather forecasts - they are meant to form a core part of your identity.

And once something becomes a core part of your identity, trying to make you stop believing it becomes almost impossible. Once we’ve formed an initial impression of something, facts just don’t change our minds. If you identify as an antivaxxer and I present evidence that disproves your beliefs, in your mind, I’m not correcting inaccurate information - I am launching a very personal attack against a core part of who you are. In fact, the more evidence I present, the more you will burrow down into your antivaxx beliefs, more confident than ever that you are right. Admitting that you are wrong about something that is important to you is painful, and your brain would prefer to simply deflect conflicting information rather than subject you to that pain.

We can see this at work with something called the confirmation bias. Simply put, once we believe something, our brains hold on to all evidence that that belief is true, and ignore evidence that it’s false. If I show you 100 articles that disprove your pet theory and 3 articles that confirm it, you’ll cling to those 3 articles and forget about the rest. Even if I show you nothing but articles that disprove your theory, you’ll likely go through them and pick out any ambiguous or conflicting information as evidence for “your side”, even if the conclusion of the article shows that you are wrong - our brains simply care about feeling right more than they care about what is actually true.

There is a strong community aspect to these theories.

There is no one quite as supportive or as understanding as a conspiracy theorist - provided, of course, that you believe in the same conspiracy theories that they do. People who start looking into these conspiracy theories are told that they aren’t crazy, and that their fears are totally valid. They’re told that the people in their lives who doubted them were just brainwashed sheep, but that they’ve finally found a community of people who get where they’re coming from. Whenever they report back to the group with the “evidence” they’ve found or the new elaborations on the conspiracy theory that they’ve been thinking of (“what if it’s even worse than we thought??”), they are given praise for their valuable contributions. These conspiracy groups often become important parts of people’s social networks - they can spend hours every day talking with like-minded people from these communities and sharing their ideas.

Of course, the flipside of this is that anyone who starts to doubt or move away from the conspiracy immediately loses that community and social support. People who have broken away from antivaxx and QAnon often say that the hardest part of leaving was losing the community and friendships they’d built - not necessarily giving up on the theory itself. Many people are rejected by their real-life friends and family once they start to get entrenched in conspiracy theories; the friendships they build online in the course of researching these theories often become the only social supports they have left, and losing those supports means having no one to turn to at all. This is by design - the threat of losing your community has kept people trapped in abusive religious sects and cults for as long as those things have existed.

#missmentelle #askmissmentelle #conspiracy theories #cults #psychology #science #neuroscience

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katsidhe · 3 years ago

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Hello as a long time silent lurker with post notifications on, and someone who has been very into the minecraft roleplay for about 9 months, I am oh so incredibly intrigued on your thoughts! I hope you don't mind if I ramble a little. Sam (both minecraft and spn, but in this context the minecraft one) is one of my favourite characters because he's so incredibly complex. The prison story has sparked so much discussion and conflict in this fandom, so I would love to hear your thoughts if you want to share!

oh noooooooooooo don’t enable me. (Jk <3)

I’m putting this under a read more for those of you who don’t want to be inflicted with my minecraft roleplay brain worms. I would apologize but I think we’re well past that.

So, like, full disclosure that I am pretty new to dsmp and am surely missing out on big ol swathes of Essential Character Content, etc etc. But I do know the basics, and I’ve (naturally) watched all the Torture Box Content, because I mean come on, that’s my brand.

k so First of all, THE most essential part of any media: x-coded y girl. Dream is a textbook Cas-coded Sam girl. Sam (Minecraft) is a Cas-coded Dean girl. Quackity is a Dean-coded Sam girl. I’d say Tommy is Dean-Dean. Techno is, hmm, Cas-Cas. Okay, important part done.

Minecraft Sam is very fun! I find it absolutely delightful that he clings to moral high ground while torturing and starving a prisoner. And at least from what I’ve seen, there’s a lot of room for interpretation as to the level of guilt and involvement he actually feels about what’s being done to Dream. He goes back and forth between justifying the treatment as something Dream categorically deserves, and justifying it as a means to an end. Whether that end is the book itself, or whether it’s Quackity’s cooperation/satisfaction, or whether it’s some twisted and bloody sense of justice and duty, seems to vary wildly. On top of that, of course, is the irony that Dream was the one to give him this commission and this job in the first place: in every respect, it’s a duty to Dream (to punish him; to secure him; to uphold his rules) that Sam’s fulfilling. Dream isn’t the only one to suffer from Sam’s inflexibility surrounding the entire concept of Dream: Tommy and Ponk do too.

And yet it’s not the inflexibility that ends up hurting Dream the worst: it’s the gaps in that rigidity. If Sam had kept the prison operating as apparently originally commissioned, it would be inhumane but just about bearable: hardly the level of absurd, over-the-top war crime that it’s reached by now. His choice to begin starving Dream in earnest seems to have been mostly an emotional reaction, after Tommy’s death. (Ironic, too, that Tommy also suffered the result of this choice.) And this is fine, because it’s not active: it’s passive, something that’s happening by inaction. Same with giving Quackity specially made weapons and total carte blanche.

The level of trust that Dream has in Sam’s sense of duty is also fascinating. Even as late as the most recent stream, after the guy’s been permitting him to be tortured for months, Dream appeals to Sam’s need to keep Dream static, in one place as his prisoner, in order to save his life. Incidentally, I do think that convincing Sam to keep Quackity from straight-up murdering him is the only concession Dream was actually hoping to win with that conversation. because like, food and a courtyard visit? after a jail break? Like hell is Sam going to grant that, even before the stunt he and Techno pulled, and Dream knows it. I think that the rest of that conversation was just to deflect, and keep Sam from questioning Dream more sharply about whatever he and Techno have planned. Bringing up Tommy and letting Sam go off on his predictable diatribe about morality and just desserts seemed similarly strategic: Dream knows what Sam thinks about what kind of treatment he deserves. He’s had months to figure it out, and it wasn’t exactly rocket science to begin with.

Anyway, that trust is the same reason Dream appealed (unsuccessfully) to Sam when Quackity first showed up: it devastated him to realize that he’d miscalculated the degree of Sam’s willingness to set aside his duty in this one particular way. Quackity in general represents a HUGE blind spot in Sam’s otherwise completely rigid inflexibility: so huge it’s almost baffling, given what Sam was ready to do to Tommy and Ponk and Ghostbur. But Quackity represents a loophole Sam badly wants. He badly, badly wants some good old-fashioned vengeance, without dressing it up with any pretensions of procedure or justice, but he can’t allow himself to actively act on those impulses—or else he would be Bad, and he can’t have that. He has to believe himself to be Good, and he wants to indulge himself with Dream’s suffering anyway. So he explains that, actually, Dream’s treatment is Dream’s own fault. It’s hilariously deluded.

Which brings me to Quackity, because what makes Quackity fun is that he’s actually NOT hilariously deluded—not about this, at least. Unlike Sam, he’s not laboring under the insane mental acrobatics necessary to convince himself that torture is Good Actually. He knows that what he’s doing is terrible, but he owns it: he’s fine admitting that he enjoys it, that he’s doing this for personal gain and personal vengeance and not for reasons of high-minded civic duty. He’s justifying the torture with brutal simplicity: Dream has hurt him and Dream has something he needs, done and done. He seems to be a firm believer in vengeful and disproportionate retribution, just as with his whole Butcher Army thing. To which I say, neat and fun! I also really really enjoy the power dynamic between him and Dream. Dream is someone who commands respect and fear and power, who could murder Quackity with one hand tied behind his back if they were on equal footing, and who probably barely spared him a thought as a threat. Quackity lives in terror of the thought of Dream escaping and wreaking his vengeance. And Quackity is trying his very best to wrestle that power away from him.

He seems to be pretty unpracticed and ineffective at torture, too—like, yeah, I get this is Minecraft and props are limited, but torturing someone long-term with an ax and a sword is going to be more than a bit unwieldy. and did he even bring in health potions his first day? It’s pretty telling and hilarious that Sam is the one who offers the shears, a far more practical choice of tool. Not to mention that the entire premise of his interrogation gives Dream massive, massive incentive to never give Quackity anything. Quackity straight up admits to Dream that the information he wants is the only reason he’s letting Dream live, which is utterly counterproductive if he wants the book sometime this year. Functionally, he needs to torture Dream not merely into admission, but into suicide. And as the days and weeks and months pass, he’s still got nothing to show for it but growing vindictiveness, paranoia, and frustration. By the time of the latest stream, he’s completely lost the plot—his threats don’t even make sense, his violence is ineffective and unhinged and indiscriminate. He’s lost all leverage and he’s needlessly (re)made a powerful enemy in Technoblade.

So, like, characters like Lucifer are fun because they’re good at torture. Characters like Quackity are fun because they’re bad at torture. But that doesn’t much matter. He doesn’t need to be particularly talented, or strong, or skilled to make Dream’s existence hell: the bare facts of the situation are more than enough for that. What does he learn, over the course of these visits—what skills does he hone, what kinds of violence does he discover that he can stomach? What depths of ruthlessness and creativity and hatred does he discover within himself? What threats does he make that he finds himself following through on before he’s even thought through the implications? It’s a learning curve, for him and Dream both. They’re learning each other, they’re learning the corners of this little hell together. Dream wasn’t expecting him to be capable of this degree of hostility or violence. Quackity is sick of being underestimated.

Which brings me finally to Dream. My general and hastily-gleaned impression of the fandom gives me the distinct impression that there is somehow a school of thought convinced Dream’s earned this treatment? Which baffles me. not only in how its absurd extremity (daily torture in a tiny box for literal months, jesus fucking christ) isn’t something even the most terrible villain could earn, but also in how Dream himself strikes me more as a morally gray fallen/falling antihero type than anything else. I was honestly completely prepared to find him to be a straightforward Bad Guy pre-prison, but that’s not at all my impression. He’s clearly got people and things he cares about and wants to protect, and big picture goals he’ll ruthlessly sacrifice anything to advance (ahem Cas-coded Sam girl). Really, it’s more that roleplays don’t tend to lend themselves easily to those types of narrative classification: nearly every character is a POV character; consuming the content from every perspective is nearly impossible. There aren’t super neat ways to sort antagonists and protagonists in essential terms, only in their relationships to one another. In terms of manipulation, war crimes, power-grabbing, and general destruction, practically everyone on the server is guilty to some degree or another. Dream’s treated Tommy pretty damn terribly, but that hardly makes him unique. What does make Dream unique is that he’s been singled out for near-universally-agreed-upon confinement (which oh so conveniently aligns with him being held as a tool, for information). And that’s neat!

…Look, tldr I just like it when people are in torture boxes. more media should have torture boxes, they are good and fun.

#not spn #anyway nonny I would LOVE to chat more about this tbh #suicide mention #torture #dsmp for ts

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ihatetosayitoldyouso · 4 years ago

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august

masterlist

content warnings: some cursing? mentions of alcohol and drinking

word count: 5,189

Chapter 1

I’ve never been a natural, all I do is try, try, try.

He was the most handsome man I had ever laid eyes on. And I know that’s a cliche statement, but in this case, it was one hundred percent true. He walked past me with a gait that both intimidated and intrigued me. He walked as though he knew he would never falter, never trip, and never fall. He had a jawline that looked as if it were chiseled by Zeus himself. His curly brown hair fell right above his eyes, not completely masking his bold eyebrows. And his eyes. Oh my god, his eyes. The more I looked at them, the more I got lost. They were a deep hazel, with specks of green and gold, that could surely be seen from space. His hands were encapsulating, as if they had a magnetic force emitting from them, pulling me towards him. The way he briefly touched his beautiful lips with the tips of his fingertips did something to me I couldn’t explain.

I realized I was staring and quickly tried to pull my attention back to the book I was reading, but I continued to glance up at him. He walked by me, close enough that I could feel the slight breeze he caused to blow past me. It vaguely smelled like cedar, cotton, and- was that vanilla? I looked at him briefly before he walked completely out of my eyesight and let myself dream for a second. Who was that? And why have I never seen him before? Okay sure, campus is about 40,000 people large, but still. He was in my vicinity now, so surely he had a class around here.

Okay, that was enough daydreaming. I tried to inhale his scent once more before checking the time. My watch said 12:36 pm which meant that my next class was in twenty-four minutes. I spread myself out on the ground by the tree I was at and continued to read. Today was the first day of my Criminology class, so I wasn’t too nervous about getting any studying in beforehand. Plus, the class was huge, so I didn’t need to worry about getting called on to answer a question if I didn’t want to. I checked my phone before getting up and making my way to class. It was a beautiful day out, as if that boy- excuse me, man, I saw earlier created the perfect environment for him to walk in. The sun was shining but there were just enough clouds speckling the deep blue sky. The trees were a vibrant green, going perfectly with the freshly cut grass. It felt impossibly perfect, considering it was the middle of August. Shouldn’t it be excruciatingly hot? But no, the breeze felt perfect on my warm skin and didn’t cause a chill as I picked up the pace into the Behavioral Sciences Building.

As I walked through the glass door, I felt the chill of the AC hit me as soon as my foot graced the tile floor. It immediately sent a shiver down my spine, similar to the one I felt earlier when that immortal in human form glided past me. I felt myself lose focus and completely miss the elevator I planned on using. I shook it off and pretended like walking to the stairs was what I had intended all along. I opened the door to the corridor and began ascending the stairs that seemed to never end. I checked my watch one more time, to assure that I was still on time, and I was actually ahead of my own extremely strict schedule. As I reached the floor I needed, I took out my phone to scroll mindlessly while I waited for my professor. Of course, I was here before anyone else. My mom always told me “on time is late and early is on time,” so I always made sure to be early by her standards: at least fifteen minutes before any event was supposed to start. But not for parties. I promise I’m not that much of a nerd. Maybe.

Anyways, I took a seat in the third row, close enough that I could see the front without straining my eyes, but not so close that I would be able to eyefuck my professor throughout the lecture. Not that I would. But I’ve seen some try. I don’t understand why people have a professor kink, but to each their own I guess. I stuck my nose into my twitter feed and waited for time to pass. About thirty seconds later, I heard the door open. I expected to see another student, but instead I saw the God that had graced my presence earlier. I tried to stop my jaw from flying open, but I failed miserably. Trying to play it cool, I tucked my hair behind my ear and started to organize my things for class. I looked up at him, seeing that he was already, was he? Staring at me? But I managed a meek smile and basically whispered the word “Hi.” His mouth moved and he spoke the word “Hello” before taking a seat at the front of the class. This kid was the professor? What was I supposed to do? Not stare at him the whole class? I just decided to keep my head down and try to focus solely on moving around my things, whether purposeful or not.

About fifteen minutes passed and as more students strolled into the lecture hall, the man I am definitely not staring at, began to write his name on the large whiteboard at the front of the class. “Dr. Reid.” Hmm. Sounds pretty formal. I instantly began to wonder if he was going to be a hardass and to dread the drudgery that I may encounter throughout this semester. I was taking six classes with a course load that could make a grown man cry. Or in my case, a 19-year-old girl. I do my best to pay attention throughout the lecture, rather than staring at the beautiful man in front of me. The class’s material genuinely interested me, but I couldn’t get over the fact that this man, who I thought was a (gorgeous) student, was my professor. He looked too young to be a professor. Far too young to be a Doctor. How quickly was he able to get his degree? Or maybe I’m just terrible at guessing ages, which I usually am.

Before I got too lost in thought, I heard a firm voice come from the top of the room. “Hello everyone. My name is Dr. Spencer Reid and I will be your Criminology professor this semester. You can call me Spencer, Professor Reid, or Dr. Reid, I really don’t mind. Before we get started today, I want to tell you all a little bit about me.” He clears his throat and leans back on his desk, laid in perfectly in the center of the room, and I see his dress pants crease slightly. I shake myself in desperate need to pay attention to the words he was saying, rather than his legs, which I could only assume were as perfect as the rest of him. I tried not to aim my gaze around his waist but it seemed to land there all on its own.

“I have a full-time position at the FBI with the Behavioral Analysis Unit. They allow me time off on Mondays and Wednesdays to teach, which is how I’m here today” He chuckles lightly. “We work on serial cases and the occasional kidnapping case across the country. We use our knowledge of human behavior to analyze the serial killers we chase down. It helps us understand why they do what they do and what their next move might be. I’ve always found human behavior extremely interesting, which is what brought you all here today I hope.”

He walks around his desk and gathers a large stack of papers in his hands. Oh god, those hands. His fingers were long and slender, and his veins were so prominent, it should be illegal to have hands that attractive. I, once again, caught myself before he made his way down the middle of the row of seats, handing a small section of the papers to the student sitting at the end of each row. He made his way to the third row and handed me a portion of the papers. I took the stack from his hands and briefly looked up and found him looking right into my eyes. My breath hitched as I tried to focus myself and not fumble the papers everywhere. I collected myself and took a syllabus for myself and passed them down my row. Soon enough, I found myself looking back at him as he handed the rest of the syllabi out, hopefully not drawing attention to myself. He walked back down the steps and placed himself at the front of the lecture hall. “I understand that the majority of you will find it strange that I am handing out physical copies of the syllabus, but I have always preferred hard copies to digital ones, and I believe that should apply to students as well. In fact, direct mail requires twenty-one percent less cognitive effort to process than digital media, suggesting that it is both easier to understand and more memorable. Post-exposure memory tests validated what a cognitive load test revealed about direct mail’s memory encoding capabilities. When asked to cite the brand of an advertisement they had just seen, recall was seventy percent higher among participants who were exposed to a direct mail piece than a digital ad. Long story short, handwrite your notes.” A small wave of laughter settled over the class. I found myself smiling like a giddy schoolgirl, staring at Dr. Spencer Reid. How am I supposed to focus when he looks like that? I guess I’ll have to figure it out.

The rest of the class went smoothly. The handsome professor went over the syllabus and his expectations for us in his class. The clock struck 2 pm and I found myself writing down the reading assigned for tonight. Reading? Who assigns reading on the first day of classes? No matter, I read the beginning of our textbook ahead of time, so I didn’t find myself too worried. I stuffed my papers and my journal into my bookbag and tried not to stumble as I gathered my things to walk out of class. I walked past the man I had been trying, and failing, not to stare at for the entirety of the class period. I smiled a small smile and softly said “Thank you” as I walked out the door. He smiled back and waved softly as I melted into the hallway.

I had three classes on Mondays and I always tried to end my day as early as possible, so I walked back to my on-campus apartment; Criminology was my last class of the day. Yes, I start my day earlier than 8 am and I can probably be classified as certifiably insane. At least, according to my roommate’s standards. As I entered the cramped apartment, I found my roommate, Amber, asleep on the couch, a tv show playing softly on her laptop. I laughed at the sight of her, limbs everywhere and mouth agape, wondering how she could sleep like that in the middle of the day. It didn’t matter, she knew what worked best for her. She was one of the most accomplished people in our class. She majored in Political Science and International Studies and she seemed to ace every class with ease. I was in awe of her in that regard, as well as her ability to nap at any time and anywhere. We met each other last year in our Freshman Honors lecture and we had been attached at the hip ever since. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as close and safe with a person as I did Amber. I trusted her with all of my secrets and she trusted me with hers. I was extremely grateful to have her in my life.

Scoffing at Amber, I made my way to my bedroom and sat my stuff down in the corner of the room. I jumped onto my bed and began to scroll mindlessly on my phone. About fifteen minutes passed before Amber barged into my room. “Amber!” I jumped, embarrassingly startled by her entrance, “Jesus Christ, you scared the fuck out of me, I thought you were asleep.”

“I was,” she started, “but now I’m not. Funny how sleeping works like that.” I roll my eyes at her. “Anyways,” she continues, “I heard there was gonna be a big party tonight in honor of the first week of classes and I was thinking we would go!” She bounces on the balls of her feet, smiling innocently at me.

“Amber, you know I don’t really party” I say.

“I knowwwww but… I thought I could drag you out tonight?” She clasps her hands dramatically. “Please? I just want to have some fun with you before we’re both consumed by homework. Please? I’ll never ask you for anything ever again.” She smiles her stupid smile again.

“Okay fine, I give in.” I say and she jumps up and down.

“Thank you Y/N!! You won’t regret this!” She says as she exits my room. I sure hope not, I think to myself as she closes the door. I go back to scrolling on my phone before setting it down to take a nap before getting ready to go out tonight. I never stay up late so I needed to prepare myself if I was going to stay out all night. I know Amber will want to get drunk and party until at least 5 am, and I wasn’t about to abandon her just to get a good night’s sleep. This could be fun, right?

---

I stare at myself in the mirror as I put on my tightest fitting dress. It was a red bodycon dress that I never felt especially confident in, but tonight I felt pretty good! I put on a pair of simple black heels to go with it. Normally I would wear something more practical, like shorts and a crop top, or something a little more moveable, but Amber insisted we go all out. “If this is the only party you’re going to this semester, you need to look your best! Why not?!” I couldn’t argue with her, she was right. I might as well look good, who knows, maybe I’ll meet someone tonight. I hadn’t had a real relationship since, well, ever. I was never one to put myself out there. I always focused on my studies and I worked part-time jobs whenever I could. Relationships and romance were never a top priority for me. Sure, it would be nice, but I could live without it. I had much more important things to tend to. Amber was helping me forget about all of those responsibilities tonight, which I admit, was a nice feeling. I sat down at my desk to finish my makeup and touch up my hair before I presented my look to Amber. I stood up, smoothed out my dress, and walked out of my bedroom, doing a dramatic twirl for her. “Ooooh, GIRL! You look hot!!!” She squealed and I smiled wide as I bounced over to her.

“So do you!! Bitch you always look good, how DARE you!” I said teasingly as I dramatically fawned over her. We grabbed our phones with our ID’s (real and fake) and some money tucked in the cases of them, not wanting to carry much else with us. I double-checked to make sure I had everything put away and everything with me that I needed. Amber stood in the doorway, checking her wrist as though she was checking the time, silently telling me to hurry up and that I was worrying over nothing. I sighed, “Okay, okay!” and ran out the door behind her. I triple-checked that we locked the door and followed Amber down the stairs of the apartment complex.

We made our way down to the lobby and out of the building’s front doors, the temperate climate and humid breeze hitting us as we walked to the edge of the street. Amber and I turned our heads to see our Uber approaching from the left and I double-checked to make sure that the car was definitely ours and that the driver inside matched the picture from the app. Amber always told me that I was too skeptical and cautious, but I don’t think that’s even possible, being a woman in the twenty-first century. An Uber driver could be a kidnapper or a serial killer, who knows! As soon as I verified the Uber’s identity, Amber climbed over to the far side of the car as I trailed behind her. I sat down on the covered seat and looked over as Amber gave the driver the location of the bar we were headed to. A feeling in my gut started to arise but I wasn’t sure what it was. Probably just nerves, I told myself as I took a few deep breaths and looked out the window. I tend to get nervous about almost any event, regardless of the severity of the situation. Amber asked the man sitting in front of us if she could play some music from her phone and he obliged. She proceeded to put on “Party in the U.S.A” by Miley Cyrus and I looked at her and grinned. This was always our going out song. We danced in the back of the car and sang obnoxiously loud in preparation for the night.

We finally arrived at the bar in which one of the biggest parties in the school was happening. Honestly, I’m more into house parties, but the only house parties here are the ones happening in frat houses and I am not down for getting drugged and harassed by rich, white, republican frat guys. We paid (and tipped) the Uber driver and made our way into the club. The line wasn’t long at all, considering most people had gotten there as early as socially acceptable to maximize their partying time. The bouncer let us through (thank GOD because I spent enough money on that fake ID) and we danced our way through the crowd and to the bar. We met up with a group of friends from our shared freshman year English 101 class and proceeded to get a round of tequila shots. One round turned into four and into ten. One could say I was officially wasted. I don’t normally party, but when I do, I party hard. Go hard or go home, right? Thanks to my not-completely-ruined inhibitions, I made my way to the bartender and asked for a large glass of water. “Party-pooper!” Amber slurred as she grabbed my shoulder for leverage.

“Hey! I just don’t wanna be super hungover tomorrow. It’s literally-” I hiccupped and giggled as I stared into Amber’s eyes, trying to gain some semblance of solidity in my footing, “It’s literally only Monday. I have three classes tomorrow and I always start my days earlier, you know this! I don’t wanna be drunk at my 8 am lecture!” I basically yelled at Amber’s face because the music and bass were so loud, I couldn’t hear my own thoughts.

“Okay, okay!” Amber shouted back at me, “Take a seat at the bar lame-o! I am gonna dance with that cute guy over there and maybeee you and I won’t be leaving together.” She pointed to a tall, blonde-haired man who was smiling and staring at Amber. She waved a flirty hand at him and started to walk away but her hand lingered on my shoulder.

“Amber!” I grabbed her wrist before she walked away, because I was not standing up right now. “Just… Be careful, okay? Text me if you do leave with him because I do not want anything happening to you. And I expect you to update me with texts with your location when you leave and if anything else happens okay? I love you, you know that right?” My fears were sobering me up quicker than the water was.

“I know! I love you too, silly. I promise I will be careful. I’ll make sure I know he is who he says he is before we leave and I won’t let him drive, we’ll take an Uber or something, okay? I don’t even know if I will leave with him, I was just thinking about it.” She paused for a second. “Thank you for caring about me, Y/N. I really do love you.” She smiled at me and I smiled back as she walked away to go dance with the handsome stranger across the floor.

My happy feelings dwindled for a moment as I sobered up and realized I was no longer a part of any group. Mine and Amber’s friend group had dispersed across the bar and the dancefloor, all trying to go home with someone. I would make that my mission too but frankly, I was too drunk to be completely aware of the goings on around me. I took out my phone and pulled up the Uber app, ready to go home. My plans changed when I looked around me and saw a familiar face at the very end of the bar. Dr. Reid? Why is he here? This bar is mainly occupied by college students, plus today was a huge party day, it didn’t make sense. Against my better judgement, I found myself standing up and walking towards him. I tried my hardest to walk straight and keep my eyes focused. I didn’t want to make my first real impression with him, one of me being blackout drunk. I downed the rest of my water before making my way to him. “Professor?” I questioned as he stared off into the distance.

“Oh! Hi. I’m sorry, what was your name again?” He asked nervously. Why did he seem nervous? I don’t think I ever told him my name. In fact, I barely think I even said hello.

“Oh, it’s Y/N.” I smiled at him. Normally, I would extend a hand to greet someone of authority, like him, but my hands were clammy and probably dirty from being in a bar like this. I hope he doesn’t think I’m weird. He looked down, expecting me to extend a hand as well, I assume. He looks back up and meets my eyes.

“It’s nice to officially meet you.” He says.

“You too.” I say and smile. We’re both quiet for a moment and I look around, trying to think of something to say. I’m so awkward. I take a deep breath, in hopes that it would spur a thought or initiate something to come out of my mouth, but it doesn’t.

“You look very nice.” He says and I come short of shaking my head in surprise.

“Thank you! My friend insisted we dress up tonight.” I laugh softly and smooth my dress down with my hands. Should I compliment him too? Would that be weird? “Um, if you don’t mind me asking,” I continue, “why are you out at a student bar tonight? I assume you knew about the party happening?” I don’t know where the confidence came from for me to ask him a question, but I was curious nonetheless.

“Um,” He chuckles and looks at the ground for a moment. “My friend and I were out with our coworkers and he insisted on coming here afterwards. I mentioned the parties that are thrown during the first week of classes and he couldn’t resist, I guess.” He nodded his head to point me in the direction of a very handsome man, dancing with a woman who couldn’t be much older than me.

I laugh and turn back to him. “Are you not the partying type, Dr. Reid?” I don’t know where these conversational skills were coming from. I had a hard time opening up to people my own age, much less authority figures.

“Not really. I mostly teach, work, and go home, to be quite honest.” He rubs the back of his neck. “Please, sit down, you don’t have to stand. I’m sure those shoes aren’t really meant for standing.”

“Thank you.” I laugh at his comment about my shoes. “Yeah, I wouldn’t say they’re the most comfortable pair I own.” I take the seat next to my professor. “And me too, for the most part. My friend kinda dragged me out here tonight.”

“And where’s your friend now?” He questions. I point to the far corner of the club, where Amber was grinding on the man she was telling me about earlier.

“She’s a little more outgoing than me.” I laugh and ask the bartender for another glass of water. I can tell he’s looking at me from the corner of my eye. Why does that make me so nervous? I instinctually start to bite the nails on my left hand. I barely noticed I had started doing that, so I didn’t expect my professor to notice it at all.

“Are you nervous?” He asks and I pull my nails away from my mouth.

“Um, I guess so? I don’t go out too often and new places and people tend to make me anxious, I guess.” I look down at the bar and the glass in my hands.

“I get that.” He says.

“Um, do you mind if I ask how old you are? I’m sorry if that’s a little bit out of nowhere, I just remember you introduced yourself as Doctor this morning in class, and I initially thought you couldn’t be much older than me.” My curiosity got the best of me, I suppose.

“Uh, I’m 28. I have three PhDs in chemistry, mathematics, and engineering.” He rattles the list off as if he says it every day.

“Woah, what are you, like a genius or something? How the hell did you get three PhDs before 28?” I cover my mouth almost immediately. “I’m sorry for cursing, I don’t know, is that not appropriate?” I blush and look down again.

He chuckles, “No, it’s fine, don’t worry about it. And I have an IQ of 187, an eidetic memory, and I can read 20,000 words per minute so, yes, I guess technically, I am a genius.” He smiles at me and- is that a smirk I see?

My jaw practically flies open. “Wow, I guess I’ll have to try extra hard in class to impress you.” I find my courage again and look into his eyes. I almost immediately get lost in the swirls of gold and green. I find myself blushing again and somehow more words leave my mouth. “Would you, um, like to go talk outside? It’s really loud in here and my throat is getting sore.” I begin to stand up after he nods. I look for Amber and as soon as I make eye contact with her across the room, I mime typing on my phone as a signal for her to text me and that I’ll text her with whatever I’m doing. What am I doing? Am I going to talk to my professor and leave? Or am I going to leave with him? No, I can’t even think about that, that’s ridiculous. Whatever, Y/N, just worry about getting outside of the bar.

I push the heavy wooden door of the club open, exiting while Dr. Reid follows. I make my way towards the edge of the building, the music muffled by the walls. I lean up against the stone wall of the building and fiddle with my phone in my hands.

“Is this weird? I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be blunt but, you’re my professor. Do you normally talk to students at bars or was this just a weird coincidence? Or is this not weird, considering we’re not too far apart in age, I guess, and I mean, we’re both adults, right? I’m sorry I’m rambling I just feel awkward I guess I’m not sure what to say, um…” I cut myself off and look away, trying to find solace in the air around me.

He laughs again. Why is his laugh so attractive? “No, I don’t think it’s weird. It’s nice to have a conversation every once in a while, even if it’s with a student. Even if it’s outside a college bar. I don’t find much time to talk about topics that aren’t serial killers or behavioral analysis.” I jump as he uses his hand to bring my face and my eyes back to his. What was that? “I’m sorry,” he says, “I didn’t mean to startle you. I just don’t want you to feel nervous or like you can’t talk to me. I really do enjoy talking to students, and just other people in general. Most people don’t enjoy talking to me so it’s nice when I find someone that does.” He blushes. Wait, he blushed? Why are his cheeks turning red?

“Well, I enjoy a good conversation too. And it’s okay, I just didn’t expect you to touch me, I guess.” I pause for a second. “Why wouldn’t someone want to talk to you? You must have so much knowledge to share, being a genius and all.”

“I guess that’s why,” he begins, “people find my rambling to be annoying. I want to share the knowledge I have, but that’s not always what constitutes a good conversation in some people’s opinion.”

“Well, not in my opinion.” I say boldly. I feel sober but drunk at the same time. Sober me would definitely not be having this conversation in the first place. But I don’t feel drunk, I feel… grounded. And focused. But I feel tipsy, like this conversation is affecting me the same way as alcohol. Maybe I shouldn’t think too much about it. You’re blowing it, Y/N. Blowing what?

He smiles and looks down at the ground. I find myself reaching my arm out and placing a finger below his chin, gently nudging his head back up to look at me. He looks surprised. I quickly pull away and begin to play with my hands again. I check the time on my phone: 5 am. Has it really been four hours? It barely felt like fifteen minutes. “I should probably get going soon, I have class in, holy shit, three hours, and I would like to get at least a little sleep before then. It was really nice officially meeting you, Dr. Reid.” I begin to make my way back to the entrance of the bar to find Amber and get us both home.

“Please, call me Spencer.” He says and turns as I start walking away. I pause my movements.

“Okay. Spencer.” I smile and disappear into the bar.

#m #mari writes #spencer reid #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid x you #spencer reid fanfiction #criminal minds fanfiction #criminal minds #cm #august

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flameontheotherside · 4 years ago

Text

Life As An Intuitive AND Mentally Ill

I come from a family of intuitives and most of us are well-rounded or are seen normal. I think out of all of us, it's just me and my mother deal with mental illness.

Life is easy at first.

As a kid growing up, I dealt with a learning disability. Back then girls weren't diagnosed with things like autism. But I saw and spoke to dead animals and dead people. They looked like you and I and when I heard them it was like a thought that wasn't mine. It didn't bother me and when I told my mother of these things she wouldn't disbelieve me. She would casually tell me who I was talking to or seeing and we'd move on. I would get feelings about things that would happen enough to not call it all just coincidence and I believe in coincidences, and science so imagine the struggle.

I begun getting bullied.

This happened when I was 8. I wasn't really effected or bothered by it until we moved from CT. I was socially awkward and when I learned what I saw and heard wasn't real, I didn't want it to happen anymore. I was being bullied for so many reasons, I didn't want to further my reputation as a circus act.

So my abilities became dormant for a few short years.

I began having mood swings but I was mostly depressed. My intuition made me anxious. Mostly about finding some guy who I knew didn't live out of the country but within it and not living in Florida. I at first thought I had to go back to Connecticut but I felt it was wrong. It had to be south. I aimed south even though I wanted to go back to CT so very bad. Started with NJ and all the way across to Southern California by the time I was 20.

Every once in a while I would see things and they happened. I couldn't find answers that made any sense to me. So again I got so scared and it would go away for another while. I was in high school when I started looking into esoteric and tarot cards to find out what was happening to me.

I gave up esoterics and took antidepressants.

Deep in my heart I believed in my experiences. However I made myself think it was all hallucinations and saw a dr. I was eventually put on trazadone, zoloft, Prozac and Depakote. My experiences still happened. I knew that it was over between me and Erik but I didn't want to believe he died. I rather have thought maybe the link was finally cut so that I could be happy but I was just as miserable and the meds helped as a bandaid for bipolar type 2 symptoms.

From time to time I'd notice that feeling of needing to find Erik was gone since his death. It felt nice. I didn't feel nervous or hurried to plow through online communities. I was a member of so many clubs and forums. I didn't feel the need to return to them either. Slowly I deleted my profiles and tried to keep with the appesrence of "growing up".

Without my meds, I'm not intuitive.

Reading through my journals, I noticed where I reported or recalled supernatural things happening, it was only while I was medicated. Actually just almost a year ago, I was without my meds for about a month and I reported here also that I can see a huge difference. I have no concentration, I can't sit still or think straight so even work was very difficult. By now I've been on nearly 20 different medications at varying doses. It was strange to feel "normal" not hearing my guides from not being medicated but feel like I'm insane being off it at the same time. If that makes any sense.

Not being on my meds is a special kind of hell;

I can't control my body with the involuntary jerking and dropping things (I'm already clumsy), memory goes to shit, I studder, I get extremely tired, forget how to speak English and failing to remember everyday words. I talk very slow and even if I was excited, you couldn't tell. Can't tolerate light and any kind of scraping sound and more sensitive to smells.

Here, we got all kinds of oils and incense to burn because I need plant-based smells like flowers and kinds of wood. I like fruits and laundry scents but they aren't my favorite. I don't like candles that smell like food because I'm a stoner and that's just wrong. That's a different kind of hell and self punishment.

For many of us who are intuitive and dealing with mental health issues...

Its very hard. I have to learn not to overanalyze or try so hard to understand what doesn't have a scientific explanation. I mean, I still can't understand how a random object flew across me in my room straight to my door. I can't explain how I can see or sense the future and it happens. I can easily say they are hallucinations but they came true. So calling them all coincidental hallucinations sounds more ridiculous than it already sounds.

I have to balance what I feel in my heart with my head and moreover I really need to feel my heart more and stop trying to logic every single thing and have faith!

To a degree I may be mentally ill but I know exactly what the fuck I see, I don't bullshit. I realize that people will use my illnesses against me. Well Jesus was prosecuted by his own people. Not claiming to be Jesus but just saying. Who wants to be Jesus anyway? That's way too much work. I ain't got to time for that, I need to keep my nails and hair good. Lol 😆😆 Getting in the hot sun, get awkward tans and skin cancer, no thank you!

My flowery ass is inside enjoying the a/c and my weed

--Thank you very much!

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apprenticenerd · 4 years ago

Note

"Anyone can send me an ask with one of the titles and I’ll post a snippet or talk about that WIP!" The Acropolis, Tacet, Checklist, A Tiny Galaxy, Hearsay, Going Back, Ella Disenchanted, Making Peace, The Slashed Circle, Wake Up, Tenno, Midnight, Heliotropism, Arrhythmia, the one about Among Us, the one about Library of Ruina, the one that’s a D&D world concept. Yes, all of them. I know you wanna talk about all of them. So go, go forth and do it!

Hoooo boy, this is gonna be a long post. Lots and lots of writing snippets under the cut to avoid dash stretch!

The Acropolis - original - length uncertain - 1.4k and counting

im not ready for this im not i thought it would be yrs i thought id at least get an english degree first

omg sal whats goin on

fuckin hell whyd it have to be now i have a chem lab tomorrow

sally-tate macpherson. u never swear. ever. wtf is goin on.

ok. jess. i need u to listen really really carefully. understand?

answer the goddamn question ur scarin me

shut up and listen and this will go a lot better

fine but u need to tell me wtf is happnenig

ok. im going to tell you a bunch of stuff. not giving u advice, thats not allowed, but im gonna tell u stuff it seems like itd be impossible for me to know.

?????????????

i said shut up this is really important dont question how i know it. just go with it and figure out what to do. and dont die. bc no matter how crazy stuff seems, if u die, ur dead. here and everywhere. ok?

This is an original story coming straight from a @/writing-prompt-s prompt about a crack in a kid’s hardwood floor that they fantasized was a portal actually being one. I originally intended to write the entire thing like this, as a conversation over text, but that may not be feasible given a certain world-building detail at the other end of the portal (and the limits of my creativity lmao).

---

Tacet - The Blackout Club - one-shot - 3.2k and counting

She closed her eyes again, and there it was. Hallucination? Some new science trick with electromagnetic radiation off the visible spectrum? Evidence that she was actually going insane? Whatever it was, it burned behind her eyelids in bright, incontrovertible red - and was completely invisible when she opened her eyes again. There was just the usual mess of club posters and one big one about someone’s exceedingly dumb-looking lost cat.

Eyes open, there was only Sargent Snuggles. Eyes closed, there was the normal darkness and then three lines of text where the poster had been, wavering like scarlet fire:

JOIN TBC JOIN TBC JOIN TBC

TBC? What the fuck was that? She’d never heard of any group with that acronym before. Hardly aware of the flurry of weird looks from half the other people in the hallway, she crossed the hall to examine the lost cat poster more closely. It felt like perfectly normal paper when she touched it, and there wasn’t even a hint of red with her eyes open, unless you counted the cat’s tacky pink sweater. How the hell was this even possible?

“You’re finally cracking, Bri,” she groaned under her breath, then headed for her locker. She did have to get home. Add another big fat entry to the weird shit list.

A backstory one-shot for my Blackout Club OC Briar, telling the story of how she got into the club in the first place. I’ve been stuck in the same spot for a while now, after Briar’s friend Dani explains the club to her, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the scene’s over as is. Of course, writing the next one is the tough part.

---

Checklist - The Blackout Club - one-shot - 1.7k and counting

8. You still have a headache. Shouldn’t you go back to sleep and try to do this in the morning?

9. (wake up)

10. Nah, you’ve always been a night owl, and school starts criminally early, too early to get much done beforehand. It’s quiet, except for Dad snoring. Your parents are asleep already. You can stay up until this is done, and they’ll be none the wiser.

11. Your head hurts worse. It’s getting harder to think. At only 9 pm? 9:30? Whatever. You should sleep.

12. (wake UP)

13. What are you thinking? You have to read at least a little of this chapter, or there’s no way you’ll be able to bullshit your way through class tomorrow. Besides, all of a sudden, the silence feels...strange. Heavier? You can’t describe it.

14. You need to sleep. You need a drink of water or something. You need to finish this damn homework. You need to sleep. You need to sleep.

15. Stare at The Great Gatsby. It doesn’t make sense. Nothing makes sense.

16. Realize what’s up with the silence. Dad’s not snoring anymore. You aren’t feeling like yourself. You need to sleep.

17. Something’s weird.

18. (WAKE UP)

19. ...No. Something’s wrong.

Another Blackout Club story and another Interface Screw, as it were, this time in the form of a (very long) checklist. None of the characters have names (yet). It describes another way a kid could find themself running around at night with the Blackout Club, this time by fighting off the Song just enough to run into a club member who could wake them up the rest of the way. As with Tacet, I still need to write the suspenseful part.

---

A Tiny Galaxy - Warframe - 4 chapters planned, 1 complete, 1 in progress - 7.8k and counting

Try it if you don’t believe me, the kid in the vent had said.

It was impossible. It was physically impossible. All of this was impossible. Had the Void...? Could the Void...?

The ship was at a standstill. Her mother had tried to kill her, and something had happened. She’d made something happen. There had been no holoprojector in that kid’s hand. Nothing was impossible anymore.

Jhia took a deep breath. How the heck was she supposed to do this? Was she supposed to feel something, some internal guide? Blue Hair hadn’t said. Feeling incredibly stupid, she did a quick mental checkup on herself. Nothing felt wrong, or different - but now that she thought about it…

Afterward, she would try many times to explain it, and fail every time. The best she could come up with was that once she found the Void, calling on it was as easy and as natural as breathing. She opened her hands in front of her, concentrated on that force like an extension of herself, reopened her eyes, and there it was: a riotous little ball of energy, wisps and motes of light and not-quite-light like a tiny galaxy, the Tau system in the palm of her hand, raging.

More OC backstory time! This one’s for my Tenno, a nerdy fourteen-year-old (at the time of this story, anyway) by the name of Jhia, going through the hell that is the Zariman Ten-Zero and what happened on it. This is possibly the first part of the story I actually wrote: the roll-credits moment when Jhia realizes the Void’s changed her more already than she thought.

---

Hearsay - Lobotomy Corporation/Library of Ruina - one-shot - 1k and counting

"Oh? Did they investigate further?"

"They tried. Found a few fingerprints, but they didn't match anyone in the database."

"What's the update, then?"

"Reports from elsewhere in the district of someone not in uniform carrying a Zwei sword. They're slippery, good at avoiding us, which would suggest Syndicate operative to me and HQ. Except that in every one of the descriptions we managed to get, our sword thief is a child."

"What? How?!"

"You tell me, Iona. You're the one who went to the crime scene."

"Right... Jeez, if it's a kid, I guess that'd explain why Petrov thought they weren't a threat..."

"My thoughts exactly. HQ has a fair amount of hearsay to go on, but nobody can quite agree on how old the child is, or whether or not she's with a Syndicate. Most agree that she appears to be a girl, tall for a child, auburn hair, clothes and demeanor typical of a Backstreets native."

"We got a name?"

"They've heard Yeri, Kali, Redbird, Suma, Aelfin... No one knows which is her real one, or if it's even any of them at all."

"Damn. ...Say, are you going to drink that entire pot of coffee?"

"Help yourself."

This is one of those stories that turned into an accidental AU when more of canon came out. The idea behind it is that it’s Kali’s backstory told entirely in conversations in which she did not participate, showcasing the fact that a Fixer’s fame is their livelihood and Kali was about as famous as they come, before the whole L Corp thing happened. Of course, the vast majority of the headcanons here got invalidated with a certain Ruina update, so my motivation’s kinda down on this one.

---

Going Back has already been talked about here!

---

Ella Disenchanted - The Blackout Club - one-shot (maybe two-shot??) - 1.4k and counting

She woke. Her stomach went through a series of panicked flip-flops as she thought something strange had done it, Dad or a little-kid-nightmares shadow beast had made noise, but no - why had she fallen asleep in the first place? Her butt and shoulder were sore where they’d been leaning on the bottom and side of the windowsill, presumably all night, since the sun was full up over the trees on Old Growth Hill.

All night. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t fall asleep, but she did anyway. God dammit.

As she unfolded herself from her cramped ball, though, she froze. Under the comforter she’d pulled around her shoulders for warmth, she was wearing her gray jacket, a T-shirt, jeans, sneakers getting dried mud all over the carpet.

Last she remembered, she’d been in her pajamas.

In which a Blackout Club kid’s little sister wonders where he’s gone when he runs away to the boxcar, and tries to get to the bottom of the mystery herself. Usually she’d be too young for the club to recruit, but her investigations and an incident involving SAO are more than enough extenuating circumstance. Unlike most of my other WIPs, there’s a whole outline at the end of my doc for this one.

---

Making Peace - Warframe - multi-chapter - 1.5k and counting

“I…” Iksoh finally said. “Sorna, I hope you realize. I’m not into this. I never - I’m not doing this. Whatever you’re doing, I can’t.”

“I know,” Sorna said softly. The decision tore at her heart again and she almost backed out of the vent, but no. She had to go. She wouldn’t see another innocent crumple in her rifle sights. “I hope you realize. I’m not coming back.”

Behind her, Iksoh let out a long, shaky breath. “It’s taking all I’ve got not to report you right now. Sorna… the Queens’ll have my head for this. Please, please, let it be worth it. Go. Don’t let them take yours.”

“I won’t,” Sorna promised, and meant it.

Later, after her last fight for her freedom was done, on the Steel Meridian ship headed for Kronia Relay, Sorna looked out at the planet retreating behind her and thought of Iksoh. She’d just learned a new word from a Meridian soldier: vaykor tal, the defector’s spirit. Iksoh had let her go, at risk of their own life. They’d had a bit of the vaykor tal themself, even if they hadn’t known it, even if they’d thought it was just some weakness that was bound to get them killed.

“Ranre treri, duf krun,” she whispered into space, a Grineer well-wishing passed down from sergeant to tube-fresh lancer since time immemorial. May your hands be steady, and may life be kind.

This is an AU born of me and some friends wondering why in the heck Perrin and the Meridian hate each other so much in game. It’s about a group of Kavor - Grineer defectors distinguished from other Meridian members by their pacifism - who get to a Relay and start wondering the same thing. Besides Sorna (and, later in the story, Iksoh as well), there would have been Chakh, Beket, and Sydon, plus at least four of the syndicate leaders and a bunch of side-character OCs, all caught up somehow in what turns out to be a surprisingly far-reaching web of intrigue.

The Slashed Circle - Warframe - one-shot, probably - 429 and counting

In addition to their written and spoken language, the Grineer have a full language of hand signs. It has its quirks, as all languages do - be careful of confusing it with the Corpus sign language, in which the sign for “to pay” roughly approximates the Grineer sign for...a certain portion of the male anatomy. Among these is the common Grineer sentiment against those who defect from their ranks, baked into the sign just as much as their spoken words.

The sign of the slashed circle, the sedashkur - a finger drawn in a circle on the chest, followed by a diagonal line - is the highest of taboos to any loyal Grineer. It shows support for such scum as the Kavor and Steel Meridian, enough so that it forms the basis for the Meridian’s battle standard. To sign the sedashkur is to betray your siblings, commit a grave insult to your superiors, paint a near-indelible target on your back. It is an object of hatred and fear throughout the ranks.

She fears it, yes, but she does not hate it, for all her life and into her death as well. It shouldn’t trouble her now, though. It is easy to hide a language, and she burned her journals before she was called to the fortress.

This is a fic about Jhia and her one (1) converted Kuva Lich, namely about the process of said Lich’s defeat and defection, that kinda never got off the ground. Contrary to this snippet, I think most of it would have been written in what are essentially space emails back and forth between Lich and Tenno? I definitely got as far as Jhia sending an audio recording of a bass-boosted dog fart, anyhow.

---

Wake Up, Tenno - Warframe - one-shot - 950 and counting

“Wake up, Tenno.”

She wakes. She is - she is Tenno, right? She is a Tenno? Her mind is confused, so full of fog and dead ends - how long was she asleep?

The voice that woke her seems familiar. She might have loved the speaker, in her scrambled past life, the woman in the purple helmet, the one called Lotus in her HUD vision. Her surroundings are a ruin of some sort. Her body is—

...what?

She can move just fine. Her fingers and arms and legs respond with suspicious ease, given how long she must have slept to be this scattered upon waking up, and yet there’s some fundamental disconnect. This is her Warframe, her body, but it’s not her body somehow.

...wait, where did the term “Warframe” come from?

A Tenno, unnamed but intended to be Jhia on my end, wakes up on Earth at the very beginning of the in-game storyline. Since the tutorial has gotten an overhaul in recent months, I may have to modify even what little I have on this a lot.

---

Midnight - Iconoclasts - poem - 280 and counting

been anything smaller than been anything

never been anything smaller than

“good morning, how’s miss grump doing today? i heard about that last mission...if you didn’t sleep well i can call you in sick, it’s alright-” “oh, shut up, grey”

there has never been anything

“oh, shut up, grey” “love you too”

smaller

“love you too”

than

A very fragmented, stream-of-consciousness-y poem meant to represent Agent Black’s failing sanity near the end of the game. The words of her famous one-liner (“there has never been anything smaller than me”) are interspersed, out of order until the end, with poetic descriptions of other characters and bits and pieces of a flashback involving Agent Grey.

---

Heliotropism - Iconoclasts - one-shot - 1.1k and counting

Lily, though she’s superstitious, will have none of these self-important truths, none of these semblances of certainty when really all it is is wishing on Ivory and hoping for the best. She calls for Miss Andress instead.

A stout but severe woman with ten grandchildren and a great-grandchild on the way, Miss Andress is perhaps the quintessential matriarch: nurturing, selfless, brutally honest. She is the one the people of 17 trust when they feel they can trust no one else. Lily needs the kind of reassurance only she can give, with the authority of ninety-one years and the wisdom of two sons, one daughter, and some five dogs raised under her care.

When Miss Andress visits House 4, she asks Polro and Lily to each bring an object they cherish the most. For Polro it’s his largest wrench, pitted with use but still polished to a brassy shine; Lily surprises everyone by pulling out a tiny, unloaded stun-gun, and surprises them more by not explaining it at all. Miss Andress doesn’t question it. She just turns the two tools over and over in her hands, head bowed, squinting at them as if trying to read the secrets of the universe in the scratches carved into them by time.

Finally she straightens up and sighs, pushing a strand of silver hair behind her ear. Her forehead is slick with sweat, though the night is cool outside. “I don’t know what she’ll do,” the wise woman says, heavily, as if delivering bad news. “I just know she’ll change the world.”

Can you tell I like backstory fic? This one is for Robin, with one short anecdote for each year of her life, up to age 17 and the events of the game. It’s also an excuse to world-build a bunch, lol.

---

Arrhythmia - Crypt of the NecroDancer - one-shot(?) - 4k and counting

The creature didn’t say anything, just beckoned to the shadows. Before I could move, two other creatures came for me, sending the other humans - former humans? - scrambling away in panic. One landed a hard blow on the back of my head that sent me to my hands and knees, seeing sparks; the other said “Freeze!” and I could only watch as ice sprouted from the leaf litter, cementing me to the ground.

The one who’d hit me produced a dagger from the inside of its cloak. I tried to pull myself up, to do anything at all to keep myself from getting shanked, but it was no good. There must have been a secondary effect on that spell; my limbs wouldn’t respond. I felt the dagger tear cloth in the region of my back, and prepared for the pain.

It didn’t come. The creature cut a slit in the back of my tunic, then another. Neither one touched the skin at all. I can’t really describe what happened next - my brain was having trouble computing how my arms were in front of me, visible, unable to move, but it felt like the creature was pulling them through the gashes in my tunic, but that was wrong, they didn’t feel like arms at all.

“Holy fuck,” I heard someone say.

The ice holding me down melted into nothing as the spell wore off. I jumped back up, head spinning a little, ready for another fight, only to spot two flicks of scarlet in my peripheral vision. I spun around, but they moved with me.

I think I already knew what they were. I just couldn’t admit it to myself.

You’ve already seen this one, Nick, though I’m pretty sure it was well over two years ago. It’s a pile of old headcanons, some of them now outdated I’m pretty sure, about how Nocturna ended up a vampire in the first place and a little bit about how vampire society works. According to Google Docs, I’ve been stuck on this one since March 2018. Whoops.

---

untitled (working title “adult citra meets an impostor bc what is self-control”) - Among Us - one-shot - 572 and counting

“I know. You’re stuck, aren’t you?” Having well and truly gotten their full attention, Citra continues, “God, I can barely imagine. Having to take a weird-ass host whose biology might even be toxic to you, I don’t know. Needing to get to a whole other galaxy, feeling like the only way to do that is by deception and death.” “How…?”

She sighs. “I told you, this isn’t my first rodeo. One of your kind saved my life when I was a kid. Since he’d killed Mom and Dad had been out of the picture long before, he stayed here and helped raise me afterward. It’s how I learned to pronounce...a few of your words, at least.”

“You missed the ‘H’ sound.”

“Isn’t that the one that’s literally impossible to do right with Terran anatomy?”

“Maybe. You think I know Terran anatomy all that well?”

Citra chuckles. “Fair point. You let us find your buddy and fix the ship, I’ll raise Xai when we get comms back and he can try and help you get home. Deal?”

I found an Among Us comic on Tumblr, absolutely ran into left field with it to make a couple of OCs, and then made AUs of those OCs because of course I did. This one is from a future scenario in which Citra (typically orange) meets someone rather familiar on a mission with the crew of the Skeld.

---

untitled (working title “library of ruina but they adopt half the guests”) - Library of Ruina - length uncertain - 1k and counting

“And what happened to not caring about others because it’s a waste of time and heartache?”

Now it’s Roland’s turn to sigh. “I don’t care about him. I just don’t want the guilt of killing - look at him, he can’t be older than eighteen or nineteen!”

Raised eyebrow. “Finn will be twenty years old in fifteen days’ time. He is a legal adult. I fail to see why this should matter to either of us.”

“He’s fresh off his first Fixer license! I have years of experience! He had no idea what he was getting into when he signed that invitation and you know it!”

Angela fixes him with a glare that turns his stomach, his freshly remade body reacting to the memory of its sudden, and extremely painful, dismemberment. “I could quite literally hold your soul in my hands if I wanted,” she reminds him in an undertone of steel. “I must do the same for him, following the invitation’s guidance, or my entire plan will be lost, my coworkers’ sacrifices all for naught. Do not disappoint me or ask any more impertinent questions. You know what to do, and what will happen if you do not.”

Look, some of the people you fight in this game deserved so much better, okay? I came up with an AU concept where if a guest willingly concedes the fight and agrees to stick around, you can get their book without killing them. Finn doesn’t die; neither do Tomerry or Shi Association; all the former employees realize exactly what’s going on with Philip after the Wedge Office fight and manage to calm him down, avoiding the whole Crying Children situation. (And then Gebura makes him collect his jaw off the floor by revealing herself as the Red Mist.)

---

The one that’s a D&D world concept doesn’t have anything concrete written for it yet. (Don’t read this bit if you might want to play in my campaign at some point!) Instead of your typical Forgotten Realms planar setup, the world at large would be called the Seven Spheres, each of them different in terms of climate, geography, native species and magic, etc. The First Sphere would be the most “generic” one (to our way of thinking) and the main setting of the campaign; it would also be the smallest of the Seven, its primary continent home to a former empire of dragons that spanned most of the Sphere until its mysterious fall a thousand years ago.

Now, since the empire fell, the dragons and their children have slowly been dying out. Best estimates are that there’s only a thousand or two left in the entire First Sphere, with fewer eggs hatched every decade. The player characters enter a world with pretty typical low-level quests to start with, but every so often, especially if they engage with optional story stuff (this would be a more roleplay-focused than combat-focused campaign), they get wind of changes in the air - a failed harvest here, an unusually hot and stormy summer there, a trade war once they start hitting mid-levels.

It mimics real-world climate change in all but cause. As coastal cities struggle to contend with rising seas and, more alarmingly, wizards all over the Sphere start to notice their magic falter and wane, the PCs’ goal becomes getting to the bottom of this. And what’s at the bottom is...your typical Nerd fusion of science with fantasy settings.

The Seven Spheres are not planes of existence in the normal D&D sense, but seven planets in the same solar system, each with its own ancient god far more powerful than any god in any mortal pantheon; the First Sphere is so named because it’s closest to the sun. These planetary gods are incredibly large and incredibly alien, thinking in geologic time and concepts far too broad and slow for most sapient beings to comprehend. A thousand years ago, the fall of the dragon empire was caused by an ill-advised ritual meddling with the god of the First Sphere’s natural process of rebirth, causing said god to die without a replacement.

It’s taken this long for the First Sphere to feel the effects because, again, geologic time - a thousand years is a blink of an eye in this kind of time scale. But now the ancient earth-magic that had kept the Sphere’s climate temperate and its magicians in business is failing. The dragons, as beings of magic intrinsically, have been failing all along. And now it’s up to the PCs, up at level 17-20 if not higher by that point, to figure out how to fix the situation and find a new planetary god for the First Sphere before the whole Sphere burns to death.

#bulletnick #wow this got long #you're right i did want to talk about all of them though

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sleepless-in-starbucks · 5 years ago

Text

Suspend Your Disbelief

Note: Does this make sense? Unlikely. I wrote it instead of doing prep work for my finals. But I’m still posting it. Summary: Logan just wanted to eat lunch, not have some crazy hotshot sit down and start pushing the magic agenda on him. Good thing he was never going to see him ever again. Right? Warning: Non-consensual kissing (they both end up fine with it but it does happen), a few swear words

Logan hated him. Utterly despised the smug bastard that was Roman whatever-his-last-name-was. Logan didn’t catch it and he currently didn’t care.

“You have absolutely no proof of anything you’re saying.” Logan said angrily, gesturing around him. “I, on the other hand, have a plethora!” “You only think you do.” The cocky arse replied with what Logan refused to describe as a winning smile. “But I can explain everything with one word.”

“Don’t you dare.”

“Magic.” Roman said with jazz hands, as if he were offering a movie option and not attempting to drive Logan mad.

“Gravity?” “Magic.” “Plant growth?”

“I’mma have to say magic.”

“Rainbows?” “Gay magic.”

“Atoms!?”

“You won’t believe me… but… magic.”

Logan slid his seat back to faceplant in the table. Three science degrees, for this? To fight with some hotshot who recognized his face from his lectures and decided to ruin his lunch with this nonsense?

“If you’re going to tell me you honestly, seriously believe this, this, insanity then why, pray tell, did you come over to talk to me?” Logan tilted his head to glare at Roman. “I’m a scientist. I actually use my brain.”

“Not properly, clearly.” Roman replied, infuriatingly. Logan couldn’t even tell if he was joking or not.

“I-” “Oh, sorry Microsoft Nerd, but my ride’s here.” Roman interrupted, picking up his phone as it dinged. He patted Logan’s elbow with a smile. “Think about what I’ve said, would you?”

“You’ve spoken only gibberish about magic.”

“Only gibberish to some.” Roman replied while he got up, pulling a twenty out of his wallet and throwing it on the table. “Whatever you’re getting’s on me.” And with that, he twirled away from the table and headed off towards the parking lot.

Logan resisted the unprofessional urge to growl as the near stranger wandered off. Sitting up in his seat, he crumpled the twenty in his hand. He hadn’t ordered anything yet, and after that conversation, he decided he’d prefer to eat at home. At least there was someone rational there.

As he pulled out his own wallet to put the money in, he stopped when he found a white note coupled with the cash. He squinted at the excessively swirly writing.

If you ever care to free yourself from the lies of big science, give me a call; xxx-xxxx

Prince of Magic, Gay, and Truth- Roman

Logan frowned at the note as if it was Roman’s face and he was still blabbering about the world all being run by magic and nothing else. He was sorely tempted to rip it to shreds and let it blow away in the breeze.

“Sir, are you ready to order?”

Logan stuffed the twenty and the note into his wallet instantly, looking up to answer the waitress, “I’m just going, thanks.”

Slipping his wallet back into his pocket, he headed in the opposite direction of the parking lot, trying not to think about the stupid note from the stupid man in his pocket.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“And you know what he said?”

“Lemme guess.” Virgil deadpanned from where he was lounging on his bed, swiping through his phone. “Magic?”

“Magic!” Logan rubbed his forehead. “Honestly, Virgil, he was the most infuriating person I’ve ever met! You two would get along splendidly, I’m sure.”

“I’m insulted, Logan. I’m supposed to be the most infuriating person you’ve ever met.”

“He’s an extremely strong contender.” Logan huffed. “Besides, you’re annoying simply because you’re annoying.”

“Aw, thanks, Lo. I didn’t realize I meant that much to you.” Virgil cooed.

“Just like that.” Logan said. “But Roman? He’s just wrong. Or pulling my leg. Or perhaps both. And he’s so cocky about it, like he knows everything, smiling the entire time, stupid winning smile and bright teeth he doesn’t deserve to have-”

“Lo, have you considered you have a crush?”

Logan jerked out of his position of existential crisis on the floor to face Virgil. “Are you mad?!”

Virgil rolled his eyes. “God, Logan, you gay disaster, when’s the last time you had a crush that you can’t recognize one?”

“I’ve not had a crush since first grade.” Logan responded. “And even then, really, he was just very good at drawing scales. Even with crayon, really, it was masterful-” “I thought CIL-D (Classmate of Interest Letter- D) was just a good artist?” Virgil said with a shit-eating grin.

Logan glared at him. “Shut up.”

Virgil looked like he would not be shutting up about this for the foreseeable future. “Sure. That aside, I hate to break it to you, Logan, but you’re totally head-over-heels for this ‘prince.’”

“I despise him with every fiber of my being.” Logan responded.

“And yet, you still have his number.” Logan scowled at the white scrap Virgil was toying with in his hands. Showing him that was a mistake, apparently. “And despite the fact that he is, allegedly, an absolute fool, you won’t stop talking about him. Or thinking about what he said, even though it’s bullshit. And you just spent like a solid minute describing his smile.”

“It’s a stupid smile.”

“You called it winning and his teeth bright.” Virgil responded, flopping over on the bed to look at Logan while he taunted him. “You’re gay for him, Lo.”

“Even if you’re right- and I am admitting on zero levels that you are- what does it matter?” Logan asked. “He just wanted to taunt me with his silly ideas. I highly doubt he’s interested.”

“I’d say he’s super interested.”

Logan leaned back on the nearest wall, which wasn’t very near, leaving him with just his head propped up as he met Virgil’s eyes and said, “Really? Virge, buddy, I know it’s hard living with a genius when all you do is dance-”

“Now is not the time to mock my job and you’re just trying to avoid the real topic at hand.”

“-but this is just getting to be a bit too far of a reach, don’t you think?” Logan finished, ignoring the interruption.

Virgil rolled his eyes. “Logan, you’re one of the top scientists in the country, and yet, you refuse to talk to practically anyone.”

“I speak with those who can stimulate my intellect.” Logan responded. “And you.”

“Ha ha. Logan, those who stimulate your intellect are down to about five other scientists and people who ask super weird questions to frustrate you.” Virgil waved the phone number. “This Roman guy probably thought you looked cute and knew the only way to catch your interest was to be so incredibly stupid you couldn’t let the matter drop.”

“I disagree entirely.” Logan replied, offended. “I don’t continue interactions with crazy fools for the sake that they’re incredibly foolish.”

Virgil raised an eyebrow. “The concept of the sun is just a lie that the government uses to convince us that the ‘sun’ warms us, and not the radiation they leak into the atmosphere.” “...There are so many things wrong with that, just to start with ancient peoples beliefs and sun gods before the government could exist to do anything about it,”

Logan went on for a good three minutes before he recognized the grin on Virgil’s face. “I’ve been played.” He said immediately, cutting off a rant about how does one even fake the sun.

“Yep.”

“I hate you.”

“Sureeee.” Virgil replied, swinging his feet off the bed and dropping the number on Logan’s lap. “Listen, Rem and me’s dance number starts in fifteen, so I’ve gotta go, but you should call the cute idiot while I’m gone.” Virgil winked as he reached the doorway. “Who knows. Maybe I’ll be the right one for once.”

And with that comment, Virgil was out of the apartment. Logan frowned, turning back to look at the paper.

He did not have a crush. Roman was infuriating. He didn’t have a nice smile, he didn’t look cute when he mocked Logan, he didn’t walk with a perfectly exaggerated swagger, and he wasn’t at all deserving of the princely title he had given himself.

But it was Logan’s duty to at least and try to crush ignorance. And if Roman was going to be the most ignorant fool of them all, than Logan was practically legally responsible to properly correct him.

With a deep sigh, he picked up his phone.

~~~~~~~~~

Logan kicked another pebble. He was slightly (read: extremely) early for his meetup with Roman. Only because it worked better for him to take the earlier bus. Not because he was nervous. As he had pointedly told Roman multiple times via text, this was an informational conference to discuss his awfully flawed view of science and the natural world.

Roman had eloquently responded with, “So, a nerd date?”

Logan told him to come to the park if he cared or not before promptly turning off his phone. He felt foolish immediately afterwards, and turned it back on to check Roman had confirmed he’d be coming.

Not that Logan cared if he came or not. He just didn’t have that much time in his life to waste.

Logan realized he had been glaring at the poor kicked pebble for a few minutes at the same time he realized a car was entering the parking lot. It was a bright blue minivan. Logan wasn’t one hundred percent it was Roman’s style, per say (not that he cared what Roman’s style was), but when the idiot himself bounded out of the passenger side, he was forced to accept this was his ride.

Out of the driver’s side came an equally energetic person wearing an oversized sweater and a ridiculously large smile.

“See, Pat, I told you he’d beat us here.” Roman said while looking at Logan. Logan rolled his eyes.

“I like to be punctual.”

“If you say so.” Roman said, same stupidly egotistical etched on his face. “See you in a bit, Patton!”

Patton waved at both of them. “Okay, Ro! Have fun on your date!”

“It’s not a date!” Logan protested immediately.

Patton giggled. “My mistake. Bye you two!”

Logan turned his glare upon Roman while Patton drove off. “A date? Really? I thought we went over this.”

Roman shrugged. “Patton gets the most absurd ideas in his head.”

“Why do I have a sneaking suspicion you’re the reason he had that idea in his head?”

“No clue, I’m sure.” Roman replied. “Now, shall we stroll gayily through the park and discuss matters of magic and fake science?”

“Gayily?”

“You know, happily?” Roman said, arching an eyebrow smugly. “What? Haven’t heard the definition?”

“You’re a twat.”

“So I’ve been told.” Roman started heading into the park. “Onwards!”

Logan huffed before hurrying to catch up with him. As they walked past the flower beds that were planted at the park’s entrance, Logan took in disdainfully the casual dress Roman was wearing. Not that there was anything wrong with dresses, but the light pink-and-white colours with golden crown designs splattered across it were about as professional as a picnic.

Roman apparently caught him staring, smirking at Logan as he said, “See something you like?”

Logan immediately fixed his gaze forward, replying, “You’re dressed quite casually.”

“It’s a walk in the park, literally.” Roman replied. “Unlike someone here, I don’t enjoy taking those in pressed slacks and ties.”

“I had a meeting before this.” Logan lied. He didn’t have a meeting beforehand, he just refused to in any way, shape, or form play into Roman or Virgil’s fantasy that this was a date. “We don’t all have time on our hands.”

“I’m insulted.” Roman said with an exaggerated gasp. “Us actors as very busy.” “You’re an actor?” Logan said before mumbling to himself, “That explains a lot.”

Roman caught the whisper. “Does it?”

“I see now your imagination has run away from you, as I’m sure it’s prone to do living in the land of make-believe, and has given you the foolish idea that magic rules the world.” Logan explained.

Roman rolled his eyes as he moved off the path to stand on the small observation deck sticking out of the park land and over the little lake that bordered it. “You know, I’m not the only one with these ideas.”

“The world is sadly filled with a lot of weirdos.” Logan said, not minding the stop on the deck. It was slightly humid and he was starting to regret the slacks, anyways.

“Well not everyone who believes it is a weirdo.” Roman responded. “Ever heard of Dr. Emile Picani?”

Logan waved a hand. “Pretty top notch psychologist, yeah. Don’t tell me you think he believes this nonsense.”

“No, I don’t think so. I do know so, however.” Roman grinned as if he had won the whole argument. “Talked to him a few days ago.”

“Listen, I respect Emile. The fact that he’s so heavily incorporated Disney into everything he does is great. But it only stands that if he’s willing to be so deeply invested in such silly tales, then he might be swayed to believe in a world of magic.”

“Silly tales? I’m sorry, are you insulting Disney?”

Logan raised an eyebrow. “What? Irked they’ve yet to pick you up for roll of Evil Stepmother, Princess?”

“An insult and a complimentary nickname?” Roman winked. “Careful, Teach, I might start thinking you’re flirting.”

“That wouldn’t be very professional.”

“That was a weak excuse.”

“It’s not an excuse.” Logan corrected. “It’s the reason why I cannot currently be flirting with you. That’s not even getting into the fact you’re a self-centered, egotistical, half-brained fool who thinks he can prove any stupid idea with a nice smile and confident attitude-”

Virgil had always said Logan ranted enough the only way anyone would ever be able to shut him up was by kissing him, teasing that would be his first kiss. Logan would roll his eyes and point out that no one these days had that type of confidence or desire to kiss a talkative nerd. Besides, slapping people was much more fun.

Apparently, Roman whatever-his-last-name-was was part of the small percentage of people who had that confidence and possibly the only person who wanted to kiss a talkative nerd.

Logan had just barely became aware of the fact that lips were pressed to his when Roman pulled back, lacking, for the first time around Logan, confidence.

“I shouldn’t have done that.” Roman all but stuttered, blushing as he apologized. “God, I’m such a-”

Logan wasn’t completely processing everything at this point but he had figured out not kissing Roman had left him feeling very put out and, hey, turnabout’s fair play, right? Roman seemed just as surprised as Logan was but neither of them pulled away before they needed to take a breath.

Logan had instantly turned crimson before he turned to face the lake. Roman was the first to speak, with a light chuckle, saying, “Not flirting with me, eh?”

“You kissed me first.” Logan responded, still not facing him.

A beat of silence before, “Want to do it again?”

Logan faced him once more, the front of his dress crumpled from where Logan only realized now he must have pulled him down to kiss him back (it wasn’t fair, really, Roman being a head taller than him) and that smug smirk back on his face.

“You really are insufferable.”

“You realize I did make up the whole ‘everything is just magic’ thing, right?”

Logan pulled Roman down by his dress again, stopping right before the third inevitable kiss to ask,

“Then what do you call this?”

Roman’s mouth was immediately too preoccupied to answer this question, but to Logan, this time magic might have been the only realistic answer.

#Suspend Your Disbelief #Logince #Roman x Logan #sander sides #fanfiction #swearing

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wallbrat · 4 years ago

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Felicia

I Intro I read a lot. I research. I pay attention to the news. I do a lot of fact checking. I have 10 to 15 news sources and the news I pay attention to is domestic and international. I spend hours fact checking because people lie. I also make mistakes. If you can prove to me, logically, that I’m wrong, I’ll admit it, apologize and write a retraction. Keep all of this in mind as you continue. II History I’m a student of history. My favorite periods are Ancient and Medieval, however, I’ll read about any period. I spent a few years digging into WWII because my Grandfathers served then. For the last few months I’ve been focused on WWI and the Spanish Flu. The H1N1 virus got it’s nickname not because of where it originated. Spain was neutral and wasn’t under media censorship like the countries fighting the war. Anything detracting from the war effort was not allowed so the news you saw then was not impartial. Spain, however, reported on a disease that was killing people. While H1N1 impacted us in 1918 and 1919, there were reports of it back in 1915. Yes, our government knew about it and restricted the information because of the war effort. The H1N1 virus hit America in three waves, the second wave being the worst. A deadlier strain of H1N1 surfaced and was spread by the massive troop movements of the war. It’s been said that the dropping of the quarantine restrictions are what caused the second wave and that’s incorrect. While it was a small factor, the troop movements are what spread the new strain. The cramped conditions and the malnutrition among the soldiers hastened the spread. It’s estimated that 500 million people died from H1N1. While that doesn’t sound devastating today, in 1918 that was about one third of the world population. The transmission vectors for H1N1 and Covid-19 are similar and a century of time doesn’t tend to change that. While we lack the troop movements and the conditions of WWII, we more than make up for that with our transportation technology. If that technology had been present in 1918, the death toll would have been much higher. We’ve been extremely lucky so far, yet stupidity is attempting to alter that. III Rampant Stupidity Why do we refuse to learn from the mistakes of the past? We have people protesting, with loaded guns, because they want a hair cut. Instead of throwing these morons in jail, they are allowed to continue in their stupidity. I have a few questions for these paragons of questionable intelligence. Where did you get your medical degrees? What? You don’t have medical degrees? OK. Then your Google Fu must be strong. What? You didn’t use Google? Where are you getting your information then? Ahh, I see. It all becomes clear to me now. This is not about politics and it never has been. These shining examples of American arrogance are simply angry because they’re being told what to do. They think they know more than the experts and they rage against any kind of restriction. Instead of doing what they need to do to protect their families and themselves, they prove their stupidity by endangering everyone around them. If people are still wondering why I view humanity as a failed experiment, this is a perfect example. IV The CDC I'm not a doctor and I don't play one on TV. They have advanced degrees that qualify them to advise us on disease, contrary to what some might choose to believe. Science is fact. Disbelief of science does not invalidate it. In the middle of a pandemic, these are the people I'm going to listen to. Our politicians have no more training in this than I do and out President is less than worthless. To the idiots protesting: No. Your Google Fu is not strong. You're not a scientist or a doctor of anything. If you won't protect others by doing what you're told then stay away from me an mine. I'm 54 years old with a stressed immune system. I follow what's been laid down because I refuse to put you at risk. I could be asymptomatic, meaning I could have the virus and have no symptoms. Having no symptoms does not entitle me to disregard the advice of the experts. Your Pastor or Priest is no more an expert than you are. Some churches ignored the restrictions and what happened to them? Many got sick and others died that may not have if they had done what they were told. V Trumpus Defectus To be clear, our president is neither insane or damaged. He simply doesn't care about you. As long as you vote for him, you could die immediately after casting that vote. He's a billionaire and you're not therefore you're beneath his notice. You don't care about the feelings of a bug when you step on it and that's all you are to him. He's been trained that way since birth. Most of the other billionaires are just like him, he's simply in the public spotlight. Most of the older politicians are no better than he is. They've been bought and paid for decades ago. The sooner we realize that we're nothing more than voting numbers to them, the sooner we can actually make our votes mean something. VI The Economy Money is nothing but ones and zeros in a computer. The dollar is worth what those computers say it is. The economy should have been shut down completely, No money, no revenue, no bills yet everything continues. We could have stayed home, ordered what we needed until this virus burns itself out. Afterwards we could have restarted things, there would have been no penalties and everyone would have been fine. If we had done that it would have restructured the economy, which is exactly why it wasn't done. Another option would have been to turn all of the billionaires into millionaires. Take everything that the filthy rich have, above $500 million, and use it to pay the American people to stay home. We don't need billionaires or the class distinctions they create. It's obvious why this wasn't done. VII Mental Restructuring Since I can't give our country the mental ass kicking it so desperately needs I have to focus inwards. While I'd like to say that this is by choice, it was forced by recent events. Few things are more painful than discovering, or feeling, that you're insignificant in the scheme of things. During a pandemic, our focus should, understandably, on our families and ourselves. Survival is paramount. Understanding that, with the exception of two people, I've done all of the reaching out to make sure that people are OK. These are the same two people that poke ate me if I've been quiet for too long so I wasn't surprised that they reached out first. I'm not a needy, whiny bastard. I'm fairly self-sufficient, I can order what I need and I'm a fairly good cook. Pumpkin, Onyx and I are fine alone, especially since I'm not a big fan of humanity in general. I love certain people but humanity, as a whole, is a lost cause. I didn't reach out for personal connection. I did it see how my friends were doing mentally. The Covid-19 situation has been tough on everyone, especially those of us with mental illnesses. I'm 54 years old with ADHD, Anxiety, Depression and three hernias requiring surgery, which explains the stressed immune system. If it wasn't for the fact that my meds had been increased a month or two before this happened, this situation would have broken me. Two people checking up on me would not have been enough to stop me from imploding. I would have been reduced to a gibbering mess because of the stress or I'd be dead. I'm fine because I noticed a couple of things about five months ago and I consulted my doctor about it. Most people in this situation aren't as lucky as I am, which is why I reach out. Having only two people that bothered to make sure I was OK was eye opening. I'm forced to reevaluate why certain people are in my life and who remains. VIII Bye, Felicia This has honestly been coming for a long time. There are people that only contact me when they want something, usually money. There are others that don't do anything. It's past time to do some pruning. I don't like giving up on people which is why I've avoided this for so long. There are some that are immune to this. My three adoptive sisters in my local area and the ones I love who are out of state. CA, WA, CO, UT, WI, WY, LA, TN, TX, GA, NJ, NY, NH and MD. Wow. Apparently I love more people than I thought I did. They know who they are. If not then they aren't paying attention. If I contact you or interact with you, in any fashion other than work, then I probably love you. Toxic people are leaving as I can't afford to keep them around. Stupidity is also making an exit. Stupidity is Willful Ignorance so why would I want them around to begin with? I have a perfect example of both. There's a post circulating on Facecrack. This one states that the plight of the jews in the Nazi concentration camps is comparable to the Covid-19 quarantine. An old friend shared that on my timeline. If he had been anyone else, I would have deleted and blocked him without hesitation. The only reason he remains is that I've known him for 38 years. I'm waiting to see what he does next. Student of history, remember? I studied WWII in depth so that means that I know more about the concentration camps than most people. The jews were herded there a variety of ways, primarily by train. They were tortured, experimented on, starved, brutalized, a huge number of them were gassed to death and those are actually the high points. It was much worse than I'll ever be able to properly describe and in no way is it even remotely similar to our quarantine. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequence. We're all free to say anything that we want to. We just need to be prepared for the repercussions that arise. If anyone else is stupid enough to share something like that on my timeline, or share it any other place that I can see, they are gone. No questions asked. All anyone needs to do to understand the difference between the two situations is to read a US history book that covers WWII. Posting crap like means that you're choosing to ignore basic evidence. I have no room for anyone like that so Bye, Felicia. IX Best vs Worst This situation can bring out the best or worst in people. You can rise to the occasion or you can sink into depravity. There are plenty of example of both around us. I'm working from home. My bills remain paid. My cats and I are fed and safe. I choose to help where I can. While it's true that I have little faith in humanity, that doesn't mean that I have to circle the drain with the rest of them. I will always try to help those around me. I've been extremely fortunate during this and that should be shared with those that are struggling. This is going to get worse before it gets better. I hope I'm wrong yet there are reports of increases in the infection rate where businesses are being reopened. The last thing we need is a second wave but I'm afraid it may happen. X Dystopia I look around and I have to wonder if we're ever going to grow up as a species. We keep making the same mistakes decade after decade. It's a wonder that we haven't blown ourselves off of the planet. The truth is that this is already a Dystopian society. It's not as bad as the examples we see in movies and on TV yet we are moving towards that. Compared to 20 years ago, we have less privileges now than we did then. We gave them away in exchange for the illusion of safety. We have privileges, not rights. Rights don't exist and are simply an invention to make us feel superior. If it can be taken away, it's a privilege. XI Conclusion While that last part was a little darker than I intended, it is true. I write, primarily, to relieve stress and to clear out my head. It gets pretty cramped in there otherwise. While this won't win me any friends, I may actually post this. My life needs some simplifying anyway. Namaste

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jgroffdaily · 5 years ago

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[This story contains spoilers for season two of Mindhunter on Netflix.]

If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you: That well-worn Nietzsche quote might be the best explanation for what happened to Holden Ford, the impetuous FBI wunderkind played by Jonathan Groff, in the season one finale of Mindhunter. Holden, alongside his partner Bill Tench (Holt McCallany), had spent months interviewing incarcerated serial killers in order to glean insight into their mind-set, pioneering the science of criminal profiling.

Having demonstrated an uncanny knack for getting truths out of monsters, Holden started to ride way too high on his own brilliance, alienating his colleagues and jeopardizing the already uncertain future of the fledgling Behavioral Science Unit. In the season finale he paid an ill-advised solo visit to the serial killer Ed Kemper (Cameron Britton), who responded by giving him the most menacing hug ever committed to film. The season closes with Holden in the grips of a long-overdue panic attack after escaping Kemper, the darkness of his work and the recklessness of his approach finally catching up to him.

Season two, which picks up directly after the finale, sees Holden continuing to struggle with panic attacks in private, while still letting his ego run away with him at work. “Though Holden is still engaged with doing interviews with serial killers, now he's getting a little snobby about it,” Groff tells The Hollywood Reporter. “He only wants to interview the killers that he personally deems worthy.” That new attitude, combined with his mental fragility, seems like a recipe for disaster — particularly once Holden travels to Atlanta to tackle the most difficult case of his career to date.

Groff spoke to THR about depicting Holden’s mental breakdown, what’s different about season two’s interrogation scenes and how the Atlanta child murders case unfolds onscreen.

At the end of season one, it feels like Holden has the air punctured out of him by Kemper. He goes from incredibly cocky to total psychological collapse. What was it like to play that very dramatic shift in the new season?

I was so interested to see how the writers were going to pick Holden up off the floor after the finale. In terms of the continuity between his panic attack in the hospital [after seeing Kemper] and his panic attack at the end of episode one after Shepard [Cotter Smith] talks to him, I realized that any time there's a mirror held up to Holden and he can sort of have a moment of self-awareness and really look at himself, it sends him into panic mode. That’s what Ed Kemper did at the end of the first season, he was turning the mirror back on Holden, and I think that’s also what Shepard does at the end of the season two premiere.

He’s in his element when he’s probing into other people’s psychology, but when it’s turned on him he can’t handle it.

Yeah, and when he’s in work mode, and he's a dog with a bone, it sort of evaporates and he's fine. It's just these little moments when his blinders are removed that he sinks into panic. The minute he pulls his shit together for the [David] Berkowitz interview, and Tench says “I think he’s back,” I love it because it adds a layer of drama to every scene moving forward. We’ve logged this information as something that can happen to Holden, and now that factors into every interview, knowing that potential is there.

What goes into depicting a panic attack onscreen?

I’d forgotten about this until just now, but when we were filming the season one finale, in the moment right before Kemper hugs me, David [Fincher] had me do this (inhales and exhales rapidly), just a lot of breaths really quick in and out, I think just to get all of the blood out of my face. I did almost pass out. That was the scene right before I run out of the room. The panic attack scene in the season two premiere was sort of the same thing — we did it at varying levels, and I started out by overdoing it. I think I was making noises, it was a lot, and David was like, “OK, Groff, take it down a notch.” I love working with him because he can say something like, “Take it down 50 percent from that,” and I’ll know what he’s talking about. I tend to just throw it out there, and then he shades and shapes the level of explosion.

The Atlanta child murders is the most contentious case that the show has tackled so far. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about the case itself, and the FBI’s role in it was specifically controversial. How does the show approach the case?

I listened to [podcast] Atlanta Monster and read James Baldwin’s book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen. And Courtenay Miles — who was our first AD in season one and one of our head writers on season two — could have a degree on the subject of Atlanta between 1978 and 1982. She did so much research, she spoke to police officials that were there during that time, and tried to really get all the conflicting opinions and ideas about what happened. They really try to lay out in the scripts the political atmosphere of what was going on at that time in Atlanta — the first black mayor had just been elected, “white flight” was happening in the city center, the new Atlanta airport that we now know as this giant hub was about to open in 1980.

It was just a huge moment of change in Atlanta, and the last thing that the city needed — in some people’s minds — was a lot of publicity about these children being murdered. On top of which you have the FBI coming in there and trying to prove this core theory of the Behavioral Science Unit, that you can actually take this psychological work and these interviews, and make a profile of someone and use that to catch an active criminal while it's happening.

Why is Holden so stubbornly determined that his theory of the case is correct?

One of the conclusions the BSU has drawn is that serial killers rarely cross racial lines, and so Holden firmly believes that this killer is black. A lot of other people think it’s the Ku Klux Klan, some people think it's a child pornography ring, there’s a bunch of different theories. But Holden is there to help catch what he believes is a serial killer, in order to help the city of Atlanta and also to prove his theory right, to prove that this method of profiling works.

Season two brings back Jim Barney (Albert Jones), the African-American agent Bill wanted to hire in season one. What’s the dynamic when Holden is doing interviews with Jim versus Bill, whom he’s used to working with?

I love Albert, he's a phenomenal actor, and they knew in the first season when they cast him that he was going to come back to play this bigger part. What’s interesting in those interview scenes is that this season, though Holden is still engaged with doing interviews with serial killers, now he's getting a little snobby about it. He only wants to interview the serial killers that he personally deems worthy, which is a stark contrast from the first season where he's like, “Feed me, I want everything, I want all the information! I want to meet everyone!” Now he’s a little more picky about who he’s gonna spend his very valuable time with.

So in episode three, he sort of begrudgingly agrees to go to Atlanta to meet with these killers who he deems unintelligent, and Barney ends up being sort of the Holden in those interviews, in that he's the one that's actually engaging with the person in a deep way, and ends up gleaning the information that Holden would normally glean. I loved reading that when I got the scripts, because there’s a clear evolution of these interviews in the second season, now that Holden kind of thinks he’s above it to a certain extent. Obviously not Charles Manson or David Berkowitz, but he maybe feels he’s outgrowing the interviews a little bit, and the character of Jim becomes my foil in that regard.

John Douglas, the real-life inspiration for the show, eventually moved away from FBI work and became more of an author and consultant. Holden is only loosely based on Douglas, but do you think he could take a similar path?

Well, I don't know this for sure and I'd have to ask John, but my feeling from meeting him and reading his stuff is that he didn’t move away from the FBI because of disinterest. He had a total mental and physical breakdown from how intense the work was. He was, I think for his whole career, a very obsessive worker. His breakdown happened much later [than Holden’s], when he was a little bit older and had been in the thick of it for much longer, so I think Holden’s panic attacks are kind of a nod to that. We deviate a lot in terms of the characters’ personal lives.

When Holden is hospitalized he calls Bill — who’s not thrilled about having to fly across the country to get him — and says he didn’t have anyone else to call. That line was interesting. Does he not have family?

I think at the end of the first season, we saw him kind of shut everybody out and go off on his own, so in my mind when I was reading that, when he says, “I didn’t have anyone else I could call," it was a moment of self-awareness. He realizes that he has put himself on an island. I mean, the only person he could turn to at the end of season one was Ed Kemper! But when he calls Bill, I thought it was kind of a beautiful nod to the fact that at the end of it all, the person I'm gonna call, for better or for worse, is the guy that I've been through all this shit with. Sometimes we have those people where we experience something insane, and the only person who gets it is the one who was in the room too. I think that line from Holden is a reminder, at the top of the season, that these two are kind of bonded forever, in a way. As different as they are, they have this very specific fucked up world that will bind them together for the rest of their lives.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

#jonathan groff #mindhunter #press #interview

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transwitchwannabe · 5 years ago

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I have no idea what I want to do with my life. I'm 32 this year. I've been working in tech when all it does is suck my soul out through a straw. I don't have a degree in it, I just have worked entry level tech for so long that I can't get out of it.

I have been really depressed and unmotivated lately. For kind of a long time but right now it's the worst I think it's ever been. I feel like I'm in a quagmire that I just can't get out of.

I want to have a goal to work towards but I have no idea what goal I want that to be. When I was a kid the first thing I ever wanted to be was a Paleontologist because I LOVED DINOSAURS. I mean, they're still rad as fuck, but I don't get a lot of time for dino thoughts anymore. Then I oscillated between wanting to be a Paleontologist and a Veterinarian. But I realized pretty quick that math and science weren't important to me like they'd need to be for both of those careers.

Then I went to a Bible College for a year, thinking I wanted to be a missionary (I hadn't realized I was trans at this point). Got there and met some very nice people who were actually passionate about it and realized that I didn't want to take away the culture and beliefs of others which is what I saw on my "missions trip" prior to this year of college. Turns out I just wanted to get away from my overbearing mother. Go figure.

After that I didn't know what I wanted. I know that when I was there the linguistics courses were INSANELY interesting to me. I took 2 years of just working, made some dumb decisions, moved across the country for a relationship that was toxic (on both sides) because I was stupid. Moved back 2 months later. Started college again, this time I decided to get a degree in Linguistics.

Now I wanted to be a Linguist, but what the fuck does that mean when you go to a college which doesn't have a Linguistics major program? It means you cobble together a degree based on what is available but then you don't follow through on it afterwards.

I took 2 years of Japanese, but I wasn't fluent. I didn't take Latin or any other languages that could be useful and I didn't develop fluency so I basically didn't have what I needed to get into the field at an entry level.

The primary form of entry level position for Linguistics is translation and most of those jobs are working for the government in some form or another. I don't have fluency in anything, I kinda just generally know about language, not that I've kept up with it since then. Otherwise if I wanted to do something more I would've needed to get a Master's or PhD. I dunno about you, but I don't have that kind of money. I'm still paying off something like a 30k student loan debt and the only reason it's so low is because the college I went to was in a part of the country where the cost of living is dirt.

But you know what I figured out I wanted to do back then? Language revitalization. I wanted to go into communities like Ireland or Native American areas and help them devise plans to help bring their language back from the brink of death. I don’t want to be a white savior, I just want to empower them and help them however they think I could be most useful. There are places in the world where there are less than 100 speakers of their language. If they're not actively teaching the language or if another more dominant language takes over then we lose all of that linguistic history and culture that comes with the language.

To me language carries an insane amount of information with it, and I don't just mean words and meanings. I mean the implied information. I mean the way of thinking and expressing yourself that only that language gives you. The world is becoming too linguistically homogenous. Why would anyone want that?

I dunno. I don't want to help anyone that doesn't want my help, but I do want to help and language is the thing that really always makes me excited.

Maybe I do know what I want to be when I grow up. I just don't know how to get there.

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behardonyourself · 5 years ago

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I AM AN IRONMAN...

I don’t even know how long I have been waiting to write this post. I think I launched my website in March or so, and I remember thinking how cool it will be if I get to write this post a few days after Ironman Arizona.

The journey is well documented on my blog and my Facebook page. I think everyone gets it - I was in the worst shape of my life. A lot of people that haven’t seen me since I left San Antonio in 2013 may not get that, but I hadn’t touched a weight since October of that year. To be honest, I hadn’t done much of anything since then.

First off, I’m not completely crazy. I’m ultimately just some dude. Completely human. I’ve told my story about running in December and not being able to go 1/4 of a mile. That’s completely real. Now, I kept this one quiet, but it’s important to understand that I thought about making a change in October of 2018. I took off running and cramped IMMEDIATELY. It wasn’t 500 feet. It hurt so bad. I then started to convincing myself that “I’m not a runner”, that maybe I was too heavy, running wasn’t healthy, the injuries over the years have taken their toll, etc, excuse after excuse. This journey that happened almost never got started. I was ashamed and embarrassed, but still felt comfort in the idea that I’d figure another way out “to get back in shape”.

I mention that fateful five hundred feet because I know a few of my friends have decided that they wanted to run and felt that exact same feeling of excruciating agony and walked away from any idea that they would eventually find comfort in the most basic exercise that we do as humans.

Many of you are familiar with the struggles in my personal life - 10 days into me actually being committed, my wife fell off of a ladder and absolutely destroyed her tibia, fibula, and just about every other part of her leg. At that time, our daughter Ava was only 5 months old. A lot of people use kids as an excuse not to workout, and trust me, it was tempting. Lisa was immobile. Ava was a handful (all 5 months olds are). Peyton had to be driven to school 30 minutes away (and picked up). So finding time wasn’t an option - the only way to do what I needed to do was to make time. Again, all of these things are on my blog but I think they are important for context.

So my story isn’t that of a runner or a cyclist that had dabbled in a few triathlons and decided to take the next step. Actually, it’s the opposite. I had NEVER ridden a road bike until April. I hadn’t run since 2004. I hadn’t swam a lap in a pool since 1995.

I simply knew I had to do something that scared me and motivated me enough to make me change.

You know what? I did that - in December I signed up for a 5k Spartan race. Really. That was in June and I signed up for it thinking it was going to take me every damn bit of that 6 months to get ready. I’ve called it the race that changed my life. I started training like an actual Spartan. Funny thing is that the body responded quickly, and a few weeks later, I realized that I’d probably be ok to do Spartan by June. So I went absolutely insane, and in January, decided that I wanted something bigger. I was standing in the Bahamas with several co-workers, and they hadn’t seen me in a couple of months due to Lisa’s injury. Juan asked me “what are you training for” and I told him either an ultra marathon, or an Ironman, or “something”. I think he though I was crazy.

Yep, Ironman it is.

Now, if 6 months was plenty of time to get me ready for a 5k race, there’s no one in the world that would’ve believed that I could possibly do an Ironman by the end of 2019. Until about 9pm on November 24, I wasn’t sure that I could do it. I didn’t know the first thing about triathlons, much less Ironman.

Obviously, I did that tiny sprint tri in Denton - and with a 200 yard swim, I hesitate to even refer to it as a triathlon, but it was a “race” and it was a great experience and I met some awesome people - Jeff, Brad, Michael, and a few other people that I’ve actually become crazy close with.

In true Boyd fashion, I never hired a coach. Now, I had 400 people telling me how important it was to hire a coach and I had to hire a coach, and there’s no way to do it without a coach, and you are 10x more likely to succeed with a coach, and a coach, a coach, a coach, a coach, a coach. Every fucking day someone told me how important it was. And you know what? It probably was. So I chatted with people from every sport and talked to triathletes. Lisa was who I talked to about swimming. A guy I grew up with in the mountains of Harlan County, Jon Carroll - was my go-to for running. I discussed bike stuff with many different people. I was fortunate enough to have a few former Tri pros be willing to answer questions for me, but typically they told me that I was doing way too much, that I am hard headed, that I’d end up injured, that they’d suggest something different, etc. One told me to stop asking him for advice because I wasn’t following it. Hell, I even had a sherpa - my buddy Bart always offered to come pick me up when I broke down on my bike. Luckily, I figured out how to fix most things, but he always checked on me, always listened to my boring training stories, always encouraged me and he and his wife even prepared my food the night before I left because I SUCK at cooking.

So who attacks something like Ironman totally blind and without a clear cut plan? Yeah, I’m totally that guy.

But this was never about training my body - Ironman was my way to make my mind as hard as steel and I knew that if I put my body through it every single day and just refused to quit, that finishing Ironman would just be a formality. While other triathletes are worried about all of these stats and protocols, I was just worried about getting up and getting the fuck after it every single day. Completely pushing myself to the limit as many times as possible hoping to do my best to replicate what it would be like on that training course.

Was it the perfect way to train? No. Of course not. I wouldn’t suggest it, and most people would probably do better by paying someone with experience.

For me though? I wanted to shoulder every single bit. I wanted to risk the blame if I failed for the treasure when I crossed the line. I am a self-taught guy. I taught myself to bench press 600lbs. I didn’t pay someone else a dime to get my dead lift to 800lbs when that was my focus. I just went in every single day and spent hours upon hours of forcing myself to become strong. This was no difference. I ran until I couldn’t, and then ran some more. I just didn’t stop swimming. No distance was too far on my bike, and I always pushed harder and harder.

The funny shit is that I completely understand and am educated in the science behind the training. I completely get it. But I also knew that my body would follow my mind into the depths of hell if it was strong enough to go there.

In December, Ironman seemed ridiculous. That guy was 270lbs (I was 201 the day I left for Arizona). That guy was not doing an Ironman, but he had to become someone that could bare the crucible of 140.6 miles.

Whenever you’re putting yourself through the pressure cooker of a long ass training cycle, you’ll have distinct moments that will ultimately make you or break you. I remember mine vividly. Running was rarely “fun” or “easy” for me. It was “more fun than other times” and “easier”, but never EASY. I can think of times I would come to the intersection of where I could come to my house or I could go out for another lap and add another 1.5 to 2 miles if I turned left. I always turned away from my house when I had to make that decision. I can’t count how many times I decided “one more lap” in the pool and it turned into 1000 more yards. I’d cramp and keep swimming. I knew that something shitty could happen in Town Lake in Tempe so I wanted to be prepared. Something shitty did happen, and I conquered it. The bike? I fell in love with it immediately. It was never a task or a chore. It is my love and it’s something I’ll stick with for the rest of my life.

Now it’s time to be completely transparent here. I was totally overwhelmed with the idea of the swim. On the day before the race, we did our practice swim and I freaked the fuck out. I panicked. Now, I swam at a decent pace, but I knew that if I didn’t calm my mind, that shit would break me and I’d have to live with knowing I didn’t get through the first part of the race. Getting kicked in the face did not help. I was terrified all day Saturday and all morning Sunday. But I had to attack it - fear grows when you give it time and I knew that if I didn’t conquer that swim it would haunt me for the rest of my life.

On race day, I felt pretty good. I was nervous about the swim - not the distance. I had swam the distance a few times. Never in open water, and never with 3000 other people, but I knew I had the endurance.

Racing is a lot like life. You can be doing everything right and shit will happen. You can use it as an excuse and convince yourself that is why you didn’t succeed or you can use it for energy. I was given a gift of an excuse just a few minutes into the race when another racer and I were tangled up, and he completely pulled my goggles off. I remember thinking “you have got to be kidding me”. Of anything that could happen, I would’ve ranked this the absolute worst thing. I swam to a support canoe and told the guy “I’m not quitting, just calming my mind”. Again, I was freaked the fuck out but I knew that if I was going to swim this 2.4 mile race in 63 degree water, it was going to be without goggles - so I put my face in the water, and started banging the fuck out of that stuff.

My eyes were killing me - probably from the toxic waste that is Tempe Town Lake, and a bit from the cold water, but I kept trucking on. For much of the race, I had to utilize my backstroke out of necessity - not from an oxidative standpoint, but to give my eyes a break. Once my eyes cleared and I was able to see my Garmin, I realized that I was easily going to make time. Not the 1 hour 25 minutes I had expected, but under the 2 hour 20 minutes that are allowed from the time you entered the water - once my goggles came off, that was the target. Nothing else matters - survive the water, get to the bike.

The funny thing is that at one point in the lake, I just laughed. I thought “who the fuck loses their goggles that early and keeps going?” Me, motherfucker. I sang, smiled, and just kept moving forward.

The best story of the day came after the final turn. I had someone frantically yelling or grunting. Now, I had ear plugs in, so I wasn’t sure where it was coming from, so my first thought was that I had somehow missed a buoy and the support crew was going to send me back. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case. Someone had actually caught my goggles and he recognized that they must be mine since I didn’t have any, and he gave them to me. Yes, they were my actual ROKAS. Kind of disoriented, I put them on my head. Funny thing is I actually pulled them over my eyes when I got out of the lake (the swim was over).

After that, I just savored the day. The bike course was great and I was very fast. I smiled, chatted with other riders, pounded the fuck out of the hills and cruised down them. At no point on that bike did I feel tired, dehydrated, or in any kind of pain or danger. Maintenance was always on my mind, but I didn’t focus on what I feared - I focused on what I wanted. And what I wanted was to become and Ironman on this day.

The run was much the same. I kept waiting to hurt or feel pain, but I didn’t. I was in great spirits. I met a guy Mike on the run course after he and I kept passing each other, and at one point, we just stayed together and talked the whole way. Funny that he is from San Antonio and we have a mutual friend on Facebook. My goal was finishing - I felt great, but at about the 13 mile mark, I caught a little twitch in my calf. I did not want that to become a cramp that could shut me down, so I went conservative, ignored time, and we just kept a simple, easy pace to get across the finish line. It was a great time, and I was excited to see that his fiancee also crossed the finish line to complete her first Ironman as well.

In the military, we used to say that you don’t rise to the level of your expectations, you fall to the level of your training. My training was the crucible that hardened me for that race. Race day was legitimately a formality that was standing between me and reaching a bucket list goal of becoming an Ironman.

Disclaimer, I hate stupid positive sayings that people that have never accomplished shit come up with. Laws of attraction bullshit, eat an elephant one bite at a time, etc. Motherfucker, thinking about being an Ironnman would’ve kept me fat and depressed. It took me breaking myself down and looking in the mirror and accepting that I had become a fat piece of shit to get this done. Man, fuck all of that happy thought nonsense. Attack, attack, attack. Figure out the bullshit details later. You tear 10 bites off that motherfucker if you are fortunate enough to get to that beast. Doing that shit on social media isn’t the same thing as kicking ass in real life. That “rise and grind” post at 4am doesn’t mean shit if you pull the covers back over your head. You have to go out and suffer. Your body will react to that invigorating workout on a machine in a nice gym, but your mind will only respond to going into the darkest cave that you can find. Calories burned doesn’t always mean that you’ve hardened the mind enough to make sure that you’re actually ready for what may come at you.

Race day was simply amazing. I took it in. I smiled. I thanked people. I encouraged people. I didn’t let one second pass me by. I was actually sad when I hit that red carpet, but to hear Mike Reilly say “Boyd Myers, you are an Ironman” was completely surreal. I can’t put it into words.

The crazy thing is that I don’t feel like I’ve arrived or that I’ve made it to anything. Hell, part of me thinks “Why have you squandered to much time? What else am I capable of?”

My official finish time was 15 hours and 3 minutes. Finishing under 17 hours is all that mattered to me - to become and Ironman.

What’s next? Haha, well, that’s where it gets fun. I’m looking at Ultraman. In short, it’s a 3 day race: -Day 1: 6.2 mile swim and 90 mile bike ride -Day 2: 170 mile bike ride -Day 3: 52.4 mile run

I am going to take a few days to weigh options and look at timing. I am considering taking a real season of training and prep, but I do know me, and I’ll just get back the fuck after it. No, don’t advise me on what I “should” do, because that’s not really how I’ve lived my life. I won’t listen.

Look, there is not a fucking thing in the world standing between you and your goals except the excuses that you keep selling yourself on as to why you can’t reach them. That’s it - we are capable of so much more than we know. People label me as uber-driven, obsessed, crazy, and a lot of other things, but I don’t have anything in me that isn’t in anyone else in the world. Whatever you’ve been thinking about, attack it. It doesn’t have to be Ironman. It doesn’t have to be fitness related. All that I know that is if I didn’t take those first steps, I would’ve never crossed that finish line. Fuck, in December of 2018, a 140.6 mile race was all but impossible. But now, I just know I can do so much more.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask!

#ironman #ironmanarizona #iamanironman #triathlete #swimbikerun #ultraendurance #motivation #goals #transformation #mybattles #xl

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theartofbeinganerd · 6 years ago

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can’t have you (but oh, how I want to) - Chapter Six

In this chapter, Fitzsimmons slowly get to know each other, and I slowly go insane from how IN LOVE these two already are without even realizing it. It’s fun, really.

(Ao3)

Though she could scarcely believe it, Jemma had just spent the past fifteen minutes talking to Fitz of all people, who had apparently decided to stop hating her and competing with her (for today, at least), and instead actually talk to her – and it had been wonderful.

Jemma had never had such an intelligent conversation before, let alone one with someone her age, and she had never before felt that someone was truly understanding what she was speaking about, or had them actually be excited about it in return. It was everything that she had so desperately wanted when she’d first glimpsed Fitz in class weeks ago, and it was everything that she’d thought that she would never find in him once she’d realized that he didn’t want to be her friend.

Now, she could hardly believe that she’d been waiting impatiently for class to be over not long ago, because as the bell gave a sharp ring that echoed throughout their chemistry classroom, she felt that it was simply far too soon. She didn’t want the class period to be over yet; she didn’t want to have to stop talking to Fitz.

They were both lingering by their lab table longer than strictly necessary, slowly gathering their things as they continued their conversation about the other classes that they were taking (Jemma had found out about ten minutes ago that he was an engineering major, which she found terribly interesting).

“The only one that I could go without is History of SHIELD,” Fitz was saying as he stuffed his books back into his backpack, “it’s too bad that it’s required to graduate.” Then, he smiled slightly and shrugged, going on, “Ah, well, at least it’s nice to have some time to nap.”

Jemma rolled her eyes at him as she gathered her own books and placed them in her backpack, making sure that they were in the correct order, corresponding with her classes that day. “Well, I happen to find it interesting.” When he arched an eyebrow at her in clear disbelief, she elaborated, “The subject matter, that is. The class would be far better if it wasn’t for Professor Vaughn’s droning voice.”

Fitz burst into laughter at that, and Jemma couldn’t help but join him, feeling warmth spreading through her chest at having made him laugh – it was a sound she hadn’t heard in the time that they’d been classmates, but it was one that she was quite sure she’d like to hear again. He slung his backpack over his shoulder then, following her as she led the way out of the classroom.

Pausing just outside the door, they hovered in the hallway, their laughter fading as they began to shift a bit awkwardly, not quite meeting the other’s eyes. Clearing her throat lightly, Jemma asked him, “So…what class do you have next?”

“Oh, uh, physics,” Fitz answered, thumbing over his shoulder at the classroom that they’d just exited, “s’why I was doing my homework. How, um…how about you?”

Jemma bit back her instinctive reprimand about leaving his homework until the day of, not wanting to scare him off now that he was actually acknowledging that she existed. Instead, she simply told him, “I have molecular biology.”

He nodded in understanding, then glanced up and down the rapidly emptying hall around them and started, “Well, um…”

Afraid that he was just going to leave, and things would go back to how they had been before that day, Jemma quickly blurted out, “Will I see you at lunch?”

Fitz looked slightly startled at the question, and she began to fear that she’d pushed too far, but then he blinked and said softly, a strange, almost…breathless quality to his voice, “Yeah, um, yeah…you will.”

“Good,” she replied, offering him a warm smile before she took a half-step back, in the direction of her molecular bio classroom. Though, for the first time, she found that she wasn’t eager to get to a class, and instead, simply wanted to stay there, talking to Fitz all day. But, she forced herself to say, “See you then,” waiting for his confirmation before she turned and hurried off to class before the period began.

It wasn’t until she was sitting in her seat and waiting for the professor to begin the day’s lesson, and she noticed one of the other cadets giving her a strange look, that she realized that there was a huge smile plastered on her face, large enough that her cheeks were aching with it.

But, strangely, she just couldn’t seem to wipe it from her face.

Fitz spent most of his next period in a daze, unable to believe that he’d finally talked to Jemma Simmons, and that it had gone so…successfully. He still didn’t know quite how he’d managed it, and was still somewhat surprised that the answer to the seemingly impossible question of what would impress her had always been his physics homework – but, he wasn’t about to complain.

They’d talked for a little while about his homework specifically, then she’d asked him about his major, and he’d asked her what hers was (even though he’d already known – he hadn’t been about to tell her that), and then they’d started talking about their other classes.

It had been all that they’d had time for unfortunately, though it hadn’t felt nearly long enough to Fitz, but then she’d asked him about having lunch together, much to his complete shock. After all, that meant that she wanted to keep talking to him, by choice.

Now, he was watching the clock, waiting until the bell rang to announce the end of the period, and so that the lunch period would begin. And, so that he could talk to Simmons some more.

Though he’d heard her answering questioning and talking in class, it didn’t really compare to actually having a conversation with her, he’d come to realize; somehow, she was even more brilliant and…and vibrant in a one-on-one conversation. He found absolutely everything about her fascinating, and he could only hope to have the privilege to find out more and more, to be able to get to know her better.

Finally, after what like ages, the bell rang, and Fitz had to force himself not to run to the cafeteria – though, he still ended up struggling not to appear as if his trousers were on fire or something. The building that his physics class was in was a bit of a walk from the cafeteria, but once he arrived there, he got his lunch and paused at the front of the expansive room.

It was crowded, as it usually was at this time of the day, but Fitz finally spotted Simmons when she waved a hand at him from one of the smaller tables toward the back of the cafeteria. He immediately made a beeline toward her, setting his tray down on the table and taking the seat across from her.

Dropping his backpack onto the floor by his feet, he was taken aback by how nice it felt to actually have someone to sit with at lunch, having spent every other lunch period just sitting by himself, usually doing homework or catching up on recent science journals.

“Hey,” he greeted her a bit shyly, offering her a small smile.

Simmons’s answering smile was wide, and it had his own growing in response. “Hi Fitz,” she replied. “How was your class?”

He didn’t exactly want to admit to her that he hadn’t really been paying attention because he’d been thinking about her, so he simply said, “Um…good. Yours?”

“Oh, really good!” she answered, her eyes lighting up with excitement as she set her fork down, as though preparing herself for a long story. She began explaining to him about how they’d talking about a subject in class that she’d studied in one of her bio courses back at Oxford, so she’d been able to contribute quite a bit to the discussion. “And,” she added, “Professor Valdez appeared to be rather impressed with my knowledge on the subject.”

“Oh, so you went to Oxford, then?” Fitz asked, desperately curious to know more about her. Other than the fact that she was an English biochem major that could show just about anyone there up with her intelligence, she was a complete blank to him.

Simmons nodded, furrowing her brow as she asked curiously, “I didn’t mention that?” When he shook his head in response, she went on, “Well then, yes, I got my degrees at Oxford.”

Fitz felt his eyebrows dart up his forehead at the same moment that he nearly choked on his sandwich. Simmons looked startled as he began coughing, but he quickly waved away her concern, taking a sip of from his bottle of water before he repeated in disbelief, “Degrees? As in plural?”

She flushed a bit, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear as she nodded, explaining, “I’ve always been a bit of an overachiever, and when I wasn’t able to decide between biology and chemistry, I ended up just going for one in each field.” She paused, then asked, “Where did you go to school?”

Not answering her question at first, and taking a moment to compose himself enough to actually be able to answer, Fitz suddenly came to the realization that Simmons was even more of a force of nature than he’d previously thought.

And, he found that equal parts terrifying and incredible.

Jemma watched curiously as Fitz stared silently down at the table, furrowing her brow in bemusement as she took a couple bites of her salad while she was waiting. For a moment, she was concerned that she’d made him feel bad about the fact that she had two degrees, given his obvious shock, and she had the sinking feeling that she’d pushed someone else away with her vast intellect and thirst for knowledge.

But, then, Fitz cleared his throat and glanced up to meet her gaze, finally answering, “I, um, I went to MIT,” and he didn’t seem upset with or wary of her, much to Jemma’s relief.

“Oh! That’s wonderful!” she told him, her eyes widening in excitement, both at the mention of his alma mater, and at the fact that he didn’t seem to be shying away from her. “I’d actually looked into going to MIT and taking some extra courses at Harvard, but Oxford won out for me in the end.”

“Yeah, well, Oxford’s pretty great too,” he replied with a nod. As he then took a bite of his sandwich, Jemma eyed him for a moment, wondering if she could finally ask him something that she’d been desperate to since that first day. She wondered if she could finally found out if he was one of the few people in the world that could truly understand what she’d been through.

Making a decision, she then asked, trying to keep most of the overwhelming curiosity from her voice, “Did everyone there look at you strangely too? For being so young?”

Much to her utter relief, Fitz immediately nodded emphatically, replying, “Like I was some sort of unknown species that they were studying or something.”

“Yes, exactly!” Jemma let out an incredulous little laugh, unable to believe that he understood so effortlessly, that he’d experienced the same thing that she had, and that they could relate to each other about it.

“Didn’t help too that I was a skinny, knobby-kneed kid in a classroom filled with a bunch of adults,” he added, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling and making a face.

“I completely understand,” Jemma assured him, nodding firmly. “It was the absolute worst, not having anyone else around that was my age. Everybody else at Oxford was always off partying on the weekends, or going off campus to bars and clubs. I ended up spending most of my time in the library, or the lab.”

Fitz smiled wryly and told her, “I spent most of my time hiding myself away in the mechanics lab until they closed for the night, then I’d go straight back to my dorm room.”

“That’s why I was so looking forward to coming to the Academy,” she explained, “I was hoping to find more people around my age, but, well…you’re the only one here.” She paused, briefly, then asked something else that had been on her mind since she’d first laid eyes on him, “How, um, how old are you, exactly?”

Fitz shrugged his shoulders until they were up by his ears, answering lowly, “I, uh…turned sixteen back in August.”

Jemma was quite sure that her eyes lit up then, as she felt excitement burst inside of her, and it was all that she could do to stop herself from jumping straight out of her chair. “I turned sixteen in September!”

He was obviously caught off-guard by this, glancing up at her with wide, startled eyes, his mouth dropping open slightly. “You…really? You’re sixteen?”

She nodded eagerly, feeling that bright, beaming smile spreading across her face for the second time that day. “Yes! Oh Fitz, this is so exciting! Can you imagine, two people of the same age with the same experiences and passions in life, meeting each other by pure circumstance? I mean, of all the people for SHIELD to recruit this year, they recruited us.”

Jemma wasn’t a strong believer in anything resembling fate, but this situation sure tested that; after all, what else could’ve put her and Fitz, one of the few people in the world who could truly relate to her, in the same place at the same time?

Fitz tried his very best not to, but he ended up staring at Simmons in open-mouthed astonishment for an uncomfortably long moment. She just seemed so happy to find out that he was the same age as her, to be talking to him, and he…well, he felt as though he had to be the luckiest person at the Academy, possibly even in the world.

Jemma Simmons, holder of two degrees and the smartest person that he’d ever met, was delighted to be speaking to him? It was practically unbelievable, and Fitz was half-convinced that he’d just dreamed this whole day up, and was going to go to chem class tomorrow to find that he hadn’t actually spoken to her at all yet.

But, this all felt far too real to be a dream, his awe at everything about her too poignant, and his embarrassment at realizing that he was still staring at her far too sharp to be anything but reality.

Finally, after spending what had to have been an inordinate amount of time just gaping at her, Fitz managed to compose himself enough to reply, “Yeah, it’s…pretty incredible.”

Simmons was still gazing at him with that same, slightly disbelieving smile that she’d been wearing for the past few minutes. He was also able to pick out the wonder and excitement in her expression, and it had the oddest effect on his chest, tightening it until it felt as though his lungs didn’t quite have the room to expand far enough anymore.

“Fitz…” she started then, her voice soft, and Fitz leaned in a bit in response, nodding to tell her wordlessly to go on.

But, then the shrill cry of the bell ringing cut through the room, causing them both to jump in surprise. Fitz threw a glance down at the watch on his wrist, unable to believe that a whole half an hour had passed already; it felt as though time went by so quickly when he was in her presence, when he was speaking to her.

Truthfully, though, he was beginning to think that he could never spend enough time with Simmons, that it would never be enough to know everything that he wanted to about her, to soak up her brilliance, to just simply talk to her.

“Oh!” Simmons hastily stood from her chair, grabbing her backpack and picking up her half-emptied tray from the table. “I hadn’t even realized it was so late!”

“Neither did I,” Fitz admitted, throwing his backpack over his shoulders and grabbing his tray to follow her to the front of the room to drop them back off at the kitchen. She then led the way out of the cafeteria, and as they stepped into the late November chill, they paused just outside the door.

He wanted to ask if they could have lunch together again tomorrow, he wanted to ask if they could study together, or just…spend more time together, but he didn’t want to push his already amazing success for the day, so he kept the words to himself.

However, Simmons, who was now hugging her arms around herself to keep out the cold, her breath leaving her lips in a little cloud, asked hesitantly, “Would you…that is, what, um, about tomorrow? For lunch?”

Fitz’s eyebrows rose, and he gestured to himself rather dumbly, asking, “With me?”

A little smile curved her lips, and she nodded, murmuring, “Yes Fitz, with you.”

“Yeah, um, that would – great,” he said, his words becoming horribly jumbled and awkward in his surprise.

“Alright, then…good,” Simmons replied, briefly biting her bottom lip as she reached up to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, something that Fitz had noticed that she did rather often, as though she wasn’t sure what else to do with her hands. “I’ll…see you then, I guess?”

Fitz nodded quickly, agreeing, “Yeah. See you then, Simmons.”

She hesitated, but then she gave him one last smile and turned on her heel, heading back toward the building that their chemistry class was in, and that most of her other classes were no doubt in as well. As Fitz watched her walk away, he let out a long breath that came out in a light wisp in the cold that he no longer felt, warmth spreading throughout his entire body instead.

Briefly, he dropped back against the brick wall of the cafeteria building, simultaneously unable to believe that he’d spent so much time that day talking to Simmons without somehow making a fool of himself (or, well, too much of a fool of himself, at least), and unable to believe that he wouldn’t be able to see her again until tomorrow.

What he did fully believe, however, was that his time at the Academy was suddenly really looking up.

#shayna writes #fsfic #fitzsimmons #can't have you (but oh how I want to)#chapter six #academy era #academy au #these bEANS #that's all i have to say about that

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4626songs · 7 years ago

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Everyone deserves a great love story. This one is mine.

So. Here’s the thing.

Is it even appropriate for a 38-year-old guy to obsess over a major studio teenage rom-com flick? People my age who saw it usually say they wish they had something like that when they were that age – like, 20 years ago? I probably should behave like a proper adult, too: just love the movie and wish I had it back then when I was seventeen.

The problem is that after watching the movie and reading the original book, I feel seventeen once again. In all the right and wrong ways.

The case in point: Love, Simon.

I mean, yes. I’m done keeping my story straight.

When it comes to the emotional intellect – i.e., empathy and ability to recognize others’ as well as my own emotions – I am a certified piece of dumb and voiceless deadwood. I mean, I even officially have it in my DNA. But it also did not help that I grew up with emotionally detached parents and had very few friends during childhood. I’ve been struggling with the lack of emotional intellect all my life.

But when I hit adolescence and started to feel something big, it was the worst. I could not recognize and understand what the fuck was going on. And definitely I could not talk about it with anyone. Not even because I was scared. Simply because I literally did not have the words to describe it.

Eventually, it was music, movies and, ahem, slash fanfics that helped me find those right words that explained me to me. That big thing was me being helplessly and hopelessly in love with my best friend.

Curiously, I did not have any struggles with my sexuality or identity after this revelation. I sort of accepted me being gay as a matter of fact and moved on.

Telling anyone – and especially my best friend – about this was a completely different matter. Obviously, I was scared. As Simon says in the movie, announcing who you are to the world is pretty terrifying. But it was not just this fear. Once again, I did not have the words to tell my story. My go to sources of emotional cognition – music, movies and books – were failing me. You know, there was not a lot of coming-out, coming-of-age films or songs or books quarter of a century ago. Except maybe for Smalltown Boy. The most beautiful song. But do you remember the video? One more reason to be terrified and NOT come out.

So, I was silent. It also did not help that I knew for sure from our conversations that if I told my friend about me being gay and my feelings for him, pretty much everything good in my life would end.

I was correct. After suffering for several long years feeling increasingly cold inside from not being able to speak up and express what I feel, I finally managed to confess to him somehow. And yes, it went almost as bad as I expected. I was told that I was a misguided fool, and that I should never speak up about it again. Never speak up.

See. My first coming out experience was pretty bad. But not something objectively bad. I was not beaten up or bullied or outed, thank god. That was out of question, I knew him too well for that. But still. Somehow I was left even more dead and frozen on the inside than I was before. Not something to look for in the future.

But eventually, things got better. I found new funny and geeky hobbies, through which I met great new friends-for-life. I got three university degrees, including a PhD, and became a scientist. I started a music blog, and eventually freelanced as a music journalist. Finally being able to talk about what music meant for me was a liberation.

On a personal front, things were also moving somewhere somehow. There were other unrequited loves. Deeply engaging epistolary relationships with anonymous penpals. (Hi, Blue!) Casual sex. Proper offline boyfriends, and even serious long-term relationships. Some drama along the way, of course. But, until recently, no great love stories coming along with that. Somehow, deep inside, I ached for a great love story to happen in my life.

And then there were those other coming outs. Nothing objectively bad. Always insanely awkward. When I told my mother, she said that I had an irrevocable right to ruin my life and do whatever I want, and we hadn’t talked about me being gay for the next twelve years. A roommate did not believe I was gay at first, and then, when I insisted that I was not joking, he cussed and stopped talking to me for two weeks. A girl who had a crush on me laughed with relief that there’s something wrong with me and not her as I didn’t return her feelings. But there were other friends, who accepted me unconditionally, sometimes even without fully understanding what I was talking about and what it meant for me. I am so grateful to them. But in the end, it was not enough for me to shake that feeling of permanent awkwardness and fear of being me. I chose to remain in the closet for the rest of the world.

But you know what’s (not really) funny? That the same happened with all other important things in my life. It’s like I was permanently living in a giant ball of awkwardness. I had to keep mostly silent about my geeky hobbies at my wonderful science job, even though these hobbies were the main source of my creativity and inspiration. In turn, my wonderful geek friends could not care less about my music tastes. My music friends kind of respected me as a science guy, but I could never talk with them about actual science. And beneath all of that was this big-ass gay secret. It’s like I was living at least four parallel lives, but never a complete one.

I guess once you decide to remain in the closet about one thing, you cannot fully be yourself about other stuff. I became so used to self-editing. Self-censorship. Strategic omissions. And, worst of all, being mute about most important things with most important people.

There are all those reasons why you should continue doing so. It’s dangerous to come out in my home country. It could harm me. It could cause collateral damage to my colleagues, students, professional networks, projects I worked on. It could hurt my family.

But the truth is, people can get no less hurt when you choose to be mute. I know I hurt people by not speaking up about something important to them and choosing silence instead. But there is even a bigger danger. Once you start to pile up silences, little white lies, and strategic omissions, they may grow up to the size of a mountain, and one day simply crumble under their own weight. There will be a lot of pain and harm involved. And I wonder: what if there was no mountain from the very beginning?

Still, the worst is what you are doing to yourself. When you cannot make yourself talk about things that are important to you, you either become a pressure cooker and explode one day – or they slowly die within you, freezing you in the process. And these may be too precious things to lose.

I have thought that eventually, I became better at talking. I have a group of wonderful friends with whom, I thought, I could be more or less myself in every sense, including gay stuff. But somehow, even after all these years, I still cannot do it all, even with them. I cannot even reply to a Facebook challenge about 10 favorite albums, because, like, at least 3 of them would be too gay. I cannot make myself talk about my favorite movies that made an impact on me, because, again: gay. I mumble something unintelligible about my career goals in science, because, in truth, what I mostly care about is how to solve not a grand scientific challenge, but a classic academic “two-body problem” further complicated by a gay twist.

Then one day I saw Love, Simon. That same night, I immediately bought Simon vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda, devoured it in two sleepless nights, and re-read it twice since then. I went to see the movie, like, another seven times. And have listened to the wonderful soundtrack and the score, like, a hundred times already, and don’t plan on stopping any time soon. I simply cannot get enough of this movie and of the Simonverse. And all the time I’ve been trying to sort out why did it hit me so hard and sweet? Why have I suddenly turned into an obsessed teenage fanboy?

Then I realized, I am just so fucking sick and tired of not speaking. I simply cannot stand it anymore. I need to speak. I have to speak. I must speak. Somehow, Simon and his story made it so obvious. Why I was so stupid not realizing it before?

But there’s another twist to that. Everyone deserves a great love story.

I’ve never seen a movie in my life to which I could relate so strongly. Yes, I was that “just like you” kid back then. Living a normal life without any really big problems. Obsessed with music and friendships. Awkward and unable to speak about important things. Alone.

(Oh god. Do you even realize how lonely Simon should have felt if his favorite song is Waltz #2??)

Unfortunately, my great first love story never happened. Instead, I shut myself up for decades to come. But somehow, Love, Simon movie and incredible writing by Becky Albertalli put me right there, back into my seventeen year old me, and finally showed how that first love story could have happened differently, retroactively replacing those long-buried feelings of sadness and despair with joy about the things to come.

And, boy, they did come. Who knew that you can finally get your own very personal great love story when you are at 34, almost ready to give up on happiness? It was wild, it was unpredictable, it was fateful, it was insane, it was unbearably romantic. It was – and, four years later, still is – love.

This story also physically moved me across oceans and continents to, out of all places, the city of Atlanta, Georgia. So, imagine this extra little level of relatability in Love, Simon / Simon vs. (That damn Radiohead, April 2 concert that I did not get to! That gay bar scene!) And now I’m dying to tell my story. Because that’s the most important and amazing thing that happened in my life. Because it is about hope. Because it is about breaking through. Because it is about believing that you deserve everything you want. Because love is a game we deserve to play out loud.

The problem is that I still haven’t quite figured out how to tell my story. Old habits die hard. But I will try. As I said, I cannot stay silent anymore. I need to come out. And I’ll start here.

#love simon #simon vs #svthsa #coming out #coming of age #lgbt

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hellsbells-love · 7 years ago

Text

College Essay I wrote that just made me cry

"Motherhood is more than an experience. It is a miracle. It can motivate even the worst people to live a better life just so the ones they love will have it even better still."

Two Pink Lines

I am 20 and on the horizon my 21st birthday looms. It is a day I have been waiting for. My boyfriend is 22, already old enough to drink and I am happily anticipating a night out with him where we are both legal to drink.

A month to the day before said day, I find myself discussing with my best friend, my upcoming birthday but also: my late period.

“Maybe you should take a test?” my friend suggests.

I shrug. I’m not concerned. Her eyebrows knit together and she purses her lips, clearly annoyed with my response. She insists I purchase a test. The idea of urinating on a stick does not appeal to me.

“Come on! It might be positive.”

It won’t, I think. She pesters me more. I am finally convinced to walk with her to the dollar store and purchase a test. As we are checking out, I frown, thinking of the money wasted.

Once at home, I immediately go into the restroom to use the test. The instructions say to leave it on a flat surface and wait five minutes. I go and sit with my friend.

“What are you going to do if it says positive?” she asks me conversationally, though her eyes tell me she is concerned.

I roll my eyes responding, “It won’t. I’ve taken so many tests over the years. This one won’t be any different.”

Silences reigns over the next few minutes. Finally, I can’t take it anymore and I abruptly stand, surprising my friend who says nothing, only watches me march into the bathroom. I am determined to prove this was all for naught.

The two pink lines glare at me. My brain temporarily shuts down and I am confused. What does two lines mean? The answer pops in and just like that, the word ‘pregnant’ flashes in my mind.

I turn around and cover my mouth with one hand.

“Well,” she demands, “What does it say?”

I can only nod my head in disbelief and for some reason, all I can think is, ‘But, I was going to be 21 in a month….’

Twenty-Four Weeks

Due to insurance concerns, my 20 week scan is a month late. No matter, I think, rubbing the small swell of my belly as I sit in the hospital. An ultrasound tech is supposed to be coming out to get me and my now ex-boyfriend. We sit awkwardly in the waiting room. Neither of us know how to act around the other. It is an unpleasant and suffocating time, as we acknowledge to some degree the other is there, but we attempt to avoid each other. It is only a slight convenience to pretend we forgot to have come together.

“Brittney Hirst?” I jump as my name is called. They do not allow my ex to come into the room. I am perplexed, but I am too shy to say anything. I turn to glance at him before I follow the tech down the hall. My last image is of him sitting with his arms crossed, his brows drawn together in a hard line while his mouth is pulled into a grimace. It isn’t rocket science to realize he is angry; if he had his way he wouldn’t be here at all. He only came because he wanted to be present for the ultrasound.

Trying to brush the tendrils of doubt curling in my stomach away, I follow the tech into a very small room. She instructs me to lay on the bed. From there she prepares her machine before moving on to my stomach. There is no mercy when she squirts cold gel onto my stomach. She painfully digs into my stomach until I cannot breathe. No words are exchanged between us and as the time goes by, I grow increasingly worried. Her mouth is shut in a harsh line and she sighs many times. I have no idea how much time passes before she stands, shocking me.

“I have to go get a doctor. Follow me.” The tendrils grow stronger, lurching in my stomach. My mind is fuzzy as I stumble after her. My ex is waiting by the door and I do not know how he got there, but I am appreciative as he steadies me by the elbow. He nods in acknowledgement of my grateful smile.

We follow the tech down a hallway until we are in a section of the hospital I immediately recognize. It is where all the patients are kept. I know a part of me has a clue as to what is happening but a stronger part shuts down any negative thoughts right away. Denial.

We are left in a hospital room for only a few moments. A doctor I recognize from prior appointments greets me. Her face shows crease lines and I can tell she is stressed.

“The ultrasound technician had some concerns and had me look at them. There were some concerning things we saw. The fetus has a cleft lip; it looks to be bilateral.” Here, she indicates what bilateral means by using two of her fingers. I can only listen and watch. “There is also fluid in the stomach and we don’t know why. We also discovered only one kidney.”

Fear so strong has gripped my entire body until I am shrinking into myself. I vaguely wonder where the tears are as my ex grips my hand. I am happy to be currently sitting. As happy as I can get anyway. The doctor goes on and on, about what to do and all I can think is how much I want her to go away and let me process what I’ve heard.

“I don’t believe the baby will make it through the weekend,” she advises me softly, gently. The words are hard and cold, stunning me further.

Not make it? I can only nod. My mouth is full of cotton and the doctor looks at me with pity. I don’t want her pity, I think spitefully.

“I will leave you two alone so you can talk.” Again, I nod. But I don’t want to say anything, I don’t want to do anything, except wake up from this hellish nightmare.

My ex kisses my forehead, whispering, “It’s going to be ok.”

I want to scream at him, punch him, kick him. I unfairly blame him but all I can think is how I might lose my child. How she might still in my belly and I will never get the chance to see her alive. The fear consumes me entirely. I am sick to my stomach and I start to shake.

In a moment of clarity, I realize not once did the doctor refer to my daughter, my baby, as a girl. Later, I am told it was to help me not be as attached in case I did lose her.

The weekend I am terrified. I constantly check for movement and I panic when none comes immediately. I sleep very little. The days, hours, minutes tick by so slowly. It drives me insane. Waiting, waiting.

The Monday after, I see a high risk specialist. I can feel the strong kicks and punches of my daughter. Determination steels through me and for the first time, I smile. Hope blossoms inside of me, so strong I feel as if I am shining.

32 Weeks and 6 Days

At four AM, my water breaks. I am terrified and run through the house like a banshee. My mother drives me to the hospital where I am told I simply peed myself.

Two hours after being in the hospital and no monitoring, I am told I have dilated too quickly and am in active labor. The baby is breech and I must go in for a c-section. At 8:00AM I receive my spinal block that will allow doctors to cut my belly open and remove my daughter without me feeling it. At 8:57AM, my daughter is born.

Immediately. she is intubated and taken to the Children’s Hospital. I get a glance of her as they take her away. My heart breaks but I realize I can be strong, for her.

The next day, I walk into the hospital with the NICU my daughter is in. I am still, technically admitted to the hospital myself, but I have been allowed three hours to visit my daughter. Anxiety sweeps through me, and I am nervous. I do not feel like a Mother. I feel empty. The moment I step into her room, a flurry of activity happens. Twelve doctors in total come in.

“We have to take her into surgery,” they say, handing me paperwork to sign. I am overwhelmed.

Once all the proper paperwork is signed, I am allowed to see my daughter.

Tentatively, I step up to her bed. She is very dark and I realize she has jaundice. The bilirubin light is very bright and her face is covered in cloth. Her hair is thick and dark. Above her bed is a name plate, "Baby girl Hirst." Her name isn't legal yet. The nurse hands me piece of paper and a pen, to write her name. I scribble "Arabella Kay" and I adore her I realize, as a smile of relief crosses my face. Against all odds, she is still here and even though they have told me with only one kidney she may not make it out of surgery, I am thrilled to be standing here, with her. I know in my heart, we will both make it.

Five hours later, I receive a call that she has made it successfully through surgery. I am overjoyed and my ambition to leave the hospital a day early is reinforced. And I do.

NICU Graduate:

"And what might seem like a series of unfortunate events may, in fact, be the first steps of a journey."

- Lemony Snicket

It is 48 days of learning before she is released. Learning so very much. I learn I am a mother, a different type of Mother. From the very beginning our life is filled with the smell of antiseptic and doctors appointments.

Ten days into our jouney, when she is still too small, still too early, we learn her diagnosis. VATER. An acronym, one that can have a million different paths. It is special and individualized. We will spend the rest of our lives, battling this diagnosis but it is not a death sentence. It is simply a journey.

Against all the odds given to her, Arabella has survived and not only has she survived, she thrives. Wonderfully, beautifully, and joyfully.

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