#the one i can remember was specifically about technology and our relationship w it.

[arlathen]

for whatever reason my high school did our yearbook on a flash drive one of the years i was there. junior i think? and while i was looking for my lil crossbody (to confirm that i still have it and do not need to order another one) i found my high school yearbook in the pocket of it and of course had to sink into the Nostalgia.

[hongism]

i just want you to know. that mists of celeste has been rotting my brain so hard i physically cannot stop thinking abt it like. the way you got my adhd ass hyperfixating on a Fanfic 😭😭😭 my poor bestie had to endure me rambling about it for a week straight as i read it. n now that im up to date part of me wants to go back and reread it now that i'll be able to pick up all the foreshadowing and details i mightve missed the first time in full. honestly still reeling from realising woosang knew mc as kids and still remember it and wooyo was the one who left the blood trail specifically for san to find like my mind is BLOWN. im usually pretty good at predicting plot twists but i never could've possibly saw that one coming till you started hand feeding us the hints. my god you are a mad genius.

anyway i have some questions!!! if you don't mind indulging me. im curious as to what technology is like in the moc universe like usually given the expanse of space travel across multiple galaxies and classes with different powers n such, you'd think they'd have some sort of phone/computer/internet system right?? i mean obviously we got the comms but it seems like that's just for calls and whatever can fit on the tiny screen of a wristband. this part really jumped out at me when mc was talking abt doing dishes but also when she was asking nightingale (or was it hongjoong?) to be able to at least communicate w soojin in the whorehouse somehow. like maybe they're just not allowed personal tech in the whorehouse that'd make sense but like mc also talks abt how there's nothing to do on the ship but spar n chat n play cards n read and im just here like... yall don't got video games?? HDJSHKF like surely if you can have the fastest spaceship in the galaxy yall can have a vr headset or something like. where is the enrichment in this enclosure. this is obviously not like a criticism im just curious and wondering if there's more to it or if it was just kinda like. tryna keep the feel of a good ol pirate au, but space.

my other question was what this universe thinks abt queerness. like is it just a normal thing that no one bats an eye at in comparison to het relationships or does homophobia exist somewhere. if it does, is it different from planet to planet or galaxy to galaxy or is there a general overarching theme like how in our society being cishet is still the "norm" even tho diff countries have varying degrees of acceptance. cause there's been some clear sexism at the start towards mc being a woman, so that implies that bigoted prejudice does exist, but to what extent?

if you can't tell im just. a really big fan of worldbuilding 🤪 feel free to ramble extensively i will read it all 👁👄👁 or don't if u can't be assed that's fine too LOL

YOU’RE TOO KIND PLS!!! im sorry for rotting your brain 😩 i understand the hyperfixation troubles far too well i put my bestie through the ringer when i get my grubby lil gremlin hands on fic ! honestly my fave bits are seeing people go back and be hit with that ‘oh!’ realization of all the pieces falling into place and making sense it’s so so rewarding as a writer and im so glad to see it every time 🤧 and im THRILLED that i was able to catch you by surprise with the plot twists <3

ofc i don’t mind indulging you, i always always ADORE answering questions and talking about the worldbuilding bc worldbuilding is my most favorite part about creating fics!!!

it’s hard to really describe the technology in moc well bc on one hand we have this futuristic reality and universe but there are lots of modern technologies that we have irl that moc doesn’t contain like cellphones. however, things are different from planet to planet. certain planets are more advanced in terms of technology, i think i’ve touched on it a bit but aurum is the most advanced system, and kebos is sorta this futuristic version of ancient rome so it doesn’t have the same kind of technology that eros and aera have. as far as the planets that the crew has visited, there have been only a few that they have really explored in depth so to speak. like where we’re at currently in the story, on garrifax, they’re in a very rural countryside almost so there’s not a ton of technology there. given that there are many planets and systems spread across this universe, some parts are obviously going to be more technologically advanced than others.

there aren’t really ‘cellphones’ or smartphones like we would have but the wristbands go in place of that. what a lot of the scenery and environment is meant to emulate is a sort of call back to past history and things of the past, or a clinging to this old tradition even if it’s not the more forward-thinking type of technology. in that sense, i would say that moc’s universe is certainly not the typical cyberpunk feeling bc in cyberpunk there tends to be this huge emphasis on tech and that’s the driving force behind a lot of the universes in cyberpunk spaces. moc is set in a futuristic space universe but i wanted to play with this idea of a futuristic space au that isn’t supposed focused on these incredible technologies, and rather focus on the people in it and how they make the universe what it is. rather than having this super advanced internet-spaceship system, they have a comms system. but also they’re pirates, criminals, fugitives of the law - if they get too advanced with an internet system, they could be tracked just like criminals in the real world. the idea that ‘big brother is always watching’ is very much present in the universe of moc, and so that’s sort of a subconscious awareness type of thing rather than something i feel i need to go into lots of detail about. 

for me personally when i think about the story and when i’m constructing the story, the idea of there being things like video games or vr headsets doesn’t feel like it necessarily fits with the idea and tone of the setting that’s already been constructed, and that was never something i thought i wanted to include from the very beginning of the idea. and that was a conscious decision just because from the start, i’ve wanted the story to be set in this fantastical universe of course but the plot and the characters are meant to be the focal point, and i didn’t feel a need to add all this fictional advanced technology into the mix on top of that. for things like dishwashers, yes those exist in the universe, but that was more of a personal experience thing - there are times where i was dishes by hand bc they can’t go in the washer or bc i feel like washing by hand so i wouldn’t put too much thought into those sorts of utilities!

as for queerness, i would say that aspect is a lot like the world we live in. in some places, it’s far more tolerated but in others it’s severely judged and looked down upon. in the scope of the main characters we have in our crew - i want the crew to feel like a safe space for not only the main character and the other crew members but also to the reader. they are a safe place and they offer understanding and warmth and comfort that’s completely separate from the parts of the universe that aren’t that accepting or understanding. it’s been addressed in the plot before with yeosang and wooyoung in particular, that they could never have been together even if wooyoung weren’t a slave because of gender and because of yeosang’s position as a prince. in the monarchies, there is very much that traditional old-school ancient mindset of a Cishet Male King and Cishet Female Queen. varying degrees of acceptance is the best way to put it, as with sexism, but again, i would say that the sexism is more heavily emphasized on the planets where we see clear regimens and almost archaic governments so to speak. 

i will say that we will see a lot more characters come into play, and we will see journeys with the characters we already know, and as it’s a story that’s very character based, those are aspects i love to focus on and so we’ll be getting into more of that and seeing things unfold and manifest over the course of the story as we’ve barely scratched the surface regarding the entirety of the universe and what it holds!

i hope this all makes sense and is more than just my ramblings bc my god did i ramble!

[ectonurites]

for the character headcannons ask game, jason and cass?

ALRIGHT ALRIGHT im putting this one under a cut because it got SUPER long bc i cant shut up ever

lets start w jason

A (realistic headcanon): 

ok using the ‘realistic’ category here loosely but GOD i love the idea of Damian & Jason having interacted while Jason was staying with the League before getting dunked in the Lazarus Pit. like. this obviously would need to be set more in preboot and following the Lost Days & Batman Annual 25 version of Jason’s resurrection, but god the idea of it just makes me scream in a good way. Like... these are things Jason likely doesn’t remember very clearly once he’s brought back to life more fully by the pit because he was uh pretty catatonic, but Damian being a little kid and knowing about the boy that his mother keeps around the base, that she’s trying to help bring back to health. Damian not even knowing that’s his big brother, just that he’s a presence that shares his mother’s attention. Jason again being unresponsive but like, ok god you know that part of lost days where Talia shows the others observing him that he only fights back at those he perceives as genuine threats trying to hurt him, 

Because Jason can perceive that she’s safe, she’s not actually trying to hurt him, he trusts her because she saved him? thinking about lil child Damian who is ya know already being trained in fighting stuff and like the idea of him trying to provoke Jason just to see what happens but Jason not fighting back because on some level be it his connection to Talia or even little baby Damian visually reminding him of Bruce, he knows that Damian is safe too 🥺 

and then when Jason and Damian meet again in Gotham as Red Hood & Robin respectively, Jason not really remembering because there was so much going on back then for him, but Damian realizing that oh... that was Him

B (hilarious): 

alright so if we are looking at comics currently, in modern stuff jason is what, like 22? hes old enough to drink in the US but still definitely early 20s so around my around my age, thats what im using as a basis here. if we adjust timeline and still consider his death having happened when he was 15, that puts it around 2013. and then coming back to like interacting with people about three years later if we still kinda base things off of the preboot timeframe (since we never got a super solid retelling of the timeline of death -> resurrection -> training -> tries to get revenge aside from knowing he went to the all-caste instead of the lost days version of the story) making him reenter the regular world and stuff around age 18 in 2016. meaning a solid three years of pop culture that he was entirely missing, and like im sorry but he really doesn’t strike me as the type to bother looking into what he missed, he’s kinda busy focusing on other stuff. lets take a quick look at some major things from those years. 2013 gave us ‘what does the fox say’ and ‘the harlem shake’ . 2014 had that time U2 just put a fuckin album on everyone’s phones, The Fault In Our Stars movie came out. 2015 introduced the phrase ‘Netflix and Chill’ and the whole blue & black vs gold & white dress debate happened. imagine any of the other batkids (or even arguably roy during rhato stuff) bringing these things up and jason’s ensuing confusion. thank you for your time

C (heart-crushing): 

so. there are two specific instances from rebirth era Jason i want to bring up here and much like a lot of these it’s less a headcanon and more of an inference based on observations, but i wanna take a sec to discuss Jason’s relationship with other people’s death. early in rebirth, Tim ‘dies’ from that whole thing in detective comics. he didn’t actually die, we as readers know, but in-universe they all very much so thought he was dead. frustratingly a lot of the batfam wasn’t really shown mourning him aside from in the Detective Comics Rebirth title itself (which just. when a major character dies even if its temporary- that should have a ripple effect) BUT an exception to that is in RHATO 2016, where we get this offhanded comment in Jason’s internal monologuing

similarly later when Roy, who like, had an incredibly close relationship w Jason that had just gotten mended before Heroes in Crisis, gets fuckin murdered in that whole thing... Jason doesn’t go to his funeral either. He leaves a dramatic voice mail and then visits the grave on his own later, choosing to instead keep working on the mission they’d started rather than going and taking the time to mourn properly.

Jason’s relationship with death is incredibly complicated, obviously. He has died, he has come back, and he now is willing to cross the line most other bats won’t and will kill people when he deems it necessary. I think thats something important though- he doesn’t just like... go around killing for fun (usually, some writers preboot made him a little murder happy but even then usually this still was vaguely followed) he kills people he thinks deserved it. Like, even looking back at the mess of Morrison’s Jason during Batman & Robin 2009, Jason was still trying to bring a sense of justice with who he was killing (”punishment that fits the crime”), it wasn’t killing for the sake of killing. He sees things in this kind of almost black and white ‘people who deserve it’ and ‘people who don’t’ way, and he has no problem dealing with death when it’s with the people he thinks deserve it. 

but when someone who doesn’t in his mind ‘deserve it’ gets killed? i think he just goes into total avoidance mode. throws himself into other things he’s doing, tries not to dwell on it too much no matter how much he still thinks about it (this is especially evident in him consistently telling people “i’m fine!” after what happened to Roy, despite bringing Roy up literally like every few issues for a WHILE after he died and very clearly still struggling with it, Artemis is the only one who gets through to him on it a little bit) 

but yeah, I just think that from Jason’s relatively unique situation of having been murdered, he knows what it’s like and he is perfectly fine wishing that on people he thinks are bad and deserve it, but it crushes him to imagine the people he loves and cares about having to experience something as painful as what he went through. not to mention the whole “I came back, why do I get a second chance at all this when they, who are a much better person than I am, probably won’t” mindset we get some implications of him having 

D (canon is a coward and won’t) 

hello DC i am once again insisting a batfam member is bisexual

CASS TIME

A (realistic headcanon): 

ok so we know cass likes ballet. thats canon. however i think we also should in general explore cass experiencing other types of dance/performance as well, be it herself as a performer or even just watching. like... god imagine her & like my brain just automatically for group activities puts her with tim steph and duke but also for this in particular I feel would be a Jason embraced activity, but like them going to see a broadway show or some other professional theatre or something, and her just being enthralled by the reading of body language of the performers! like again by any point in current stuff cass does have like, the ability to speak fine (reading still hard tho) but even so I think like. okay im a theatre kid if that’s not obvious from the Everything About Me but one thing I always do after seeing a show is ya know spend dinner afterwards discussing it with whoever i saw it with.

I just think that like, bringing those people i just mentioned to the table to discuss seeing a show after would be so FASCINATING because cass would bring this whole perspective of critiquing their acting on a whole different level- not based on how well they delivered lines out loud, but by what their body language was saying as they moved on stage. like im very amused by the idea of cass getting a totally different picture in her mind about what a character’s motivations were because she was paying way more attention to what their physicality was saying vs the words that were written and how they were delivered. i think the debates her and the others would have would be EPIC there. jason defending the text as it was written adamantly and cass being like ‘ok yeah sure but thats not what they did’

B (hilarious): 

cass having no concept of money because why would she bother? is SO funny to me. like it’s not that she couldn’t be reasonable if she wanted to, but like, she knows that the Waynes are well off so it’s not something she actually needs to be concerned about, so she just goes hog wild. takes steph out to fancy dinners and makes steph order for them since cass ya know doesn’t really read the menus, and steph’s like ‘jesus christ this costs-” “don’t worry about it” “but cass-” and she just holds up one of bruce’s credit cards and steph’s still like “but you don’t even know the range-” “it is fine”

bruce does not have the heart to tell her to stop

C (heart-crushing): 

i mean this is pretty much canon but especially now after death metal where she’s remembering, not just being told by a guy using weird alternate timeline technology, that she used to be an adopted member of the Wayne family... like that hurts so bad. To look at these people who have ya know been kind to her, Bruce has still been a father-like figure to her (i mean literally from the moment they met in New 52 canon during the flashback in Batman & Robin Eternal, where he’s telling her that she’s not a monster just because of what people forced her to do.... that she’s a hero... that hug.... dad behavior), and they do to some extent treat her as family... But to then really know, to feel and remember that she was actually adopted! She was a part of their family. To look at how she’s been calling herself Orphan while working with them this whole time... that’s so heartbreaking! I have cried about this idea so much! I want so badly a conversation between her and Bruce now where he offers to officially adopt her again, I need it so bad and if it doesn’t happen at some point in the next year or two I will be so distraught.

D (canon is a coward and won’t) 

i want an in-depth exploration of cass’ relationship to her own gender. being raised without language and you know with so much of her life being independent (remember: CASS RAN AWAY AROUND THE WORLD WITHOUT REALLY KNOWING ANY SPOKEN LANGUAGE) and outside of an organized society impressing too much of gender expectations on her, i feel like the way she experiences it would be very unique! like sure she’s so far been fine with being assigned ‘girl’ (ya know that comes with batgirl, and how people just automatically treated her based on how she looks) but in terms of gender expression and like her actual relationship with ‘traditional femininity’ etc like... because of how she was raised I just think she’d have a really different perspective on it that could be cool to explore, and I think she’d fall outside of the binary after she really thinks about how she identifies.

tldr on that: she/they nb cass is what i’m getting at here

[olivarryprompts]

Fanfic Friday #5

Welcome to Fanfic Friday! Each Friday I will post a new fanfic here and on A03. Enjoy x

Read/Save it on AO3 at https://archiveofourown.org/works/32197966

{crossover}

Ship: olivarry

Warnings: small amount of angst, swearing

Status: dating

Wc: 2,413

Once again, there were some sort of god-like presents threatening Central and Star city, hence it was up to everyone’s favorite superheroes, and their teams, to defeat the crisis and save the world.

I am said superhero, the fast one specifically. Oliver and I have been dating from around since I awoke from my coma. How did we get together? That’s a story for a different time. Oliver and I, throughout all of this, have been able to keep our relationship a secret. I know, huge shocker.

“Oliver, Cisco and Ray have made the tech, but it needs to be tested.”

“So,” he said, with his Oliver look, “Test it.”

“How are we supposed to test tech that should defeat Aliens without actual Aliens?”

“Kara.”

“Ollie! We can’t shoot at Kara.”

“You're so cute,” Oliver said, under his breath, “Sometimes I just want to cuddle you like a teddy bear, however out of character.”

I blushed deeply, “Stop it. We need to save the world.”

He leaned it, laying a careful kiss on my forehead, “And we will.”

“You’ve really helped on the ideas front,” I said, sarcastically.

“Let’s get the teams together and discuss what we know so far. We can think up our next moves.”

“Okay, yeah. I’ll get everyone to the hub.”

“Barry Allen do not speed m-”

I sped him to the hanger.

“I hate you,” he commented with an underlying smirk.

“I love you, too.”

I quickly sped everyone into the room before returning to Ollie’s side.

“Yes Barry?” Sara Lance, captain of the Waverider, said.

“Well, I-i,” I looked over at Oliver for help.

He whispered, “Thought as though we should call a team meeting.”

“Right, I thought we should call a team meeting to, to discuss, uh, um-”

He continued in a subdued voice, “what we know, our plan, and our next steps.”

“To discuss what we know about our big bad, what our plan is, and our next steps to ya know, save the world.”

“Are we meant to pretend we aren’t hearing the brooding man?” John Constantine, local warlock, said.

“I give up. Ollie, lead the team. You know what to do.”

“You tried,” he smiled, a little over fondly, “Right so, Nate, Iris what have we got on her?”

“Well, she seems to have no record of life until she popped up in our time and attacked Central city,” Nate explained.

“We wondered if there was a chance of her being from another Earth, and Cisco tracked her residual frequency from the attack, and the frequency matched one from this Earth.”

“So that leaves us nowhere, loves,” Constantine said, lighting a cigarette, which Sara promptly knocked out of his hand and stamped on.

“Well, not necessarily. We know that she just appeared which narrows down the search to anyone without a record, which is very few people,” Cisco explained.

“If we can just get a strand of her DNA, I could take a look into how to gain her powers and where they come from.”

“To get the ladies NDA we need to find her,” Mick grumbled.

“Thank you Mick,” Oliver said, rolling his eyes, “Dig, did Lyla get anything.”

“Argus satellites haven’t picked up anything. She said she’d call and let us know.”

Felicity entered, and Oliver raised an eyebrow at me.

“She told me to put her back,” I said lowly to Oliver.

“I-i told you not to PUT me.”

“She’s scary,” I defended further.

“Sorry I was not present, I mean I wasn’t here because I was well-that’s the point. I was hacking, obviously, that’s what I do, I hack, but you guys know that-”

“Felicity,” Ollie said, “The point.”

“Right. There was something on her arm, almost underneath her skin. I looked further into it and it seemed to be of a technological origin. I came back and instantly drew the “thing.” I think it might be some sort of microchip. After consulting Ray, I did some digging, and I came back with some interesting results,” she projected the images from her tablet, “This was a theoretical experiment planned in-you guessed it, Star City. it was, well, awful. It was talking about mutation and how technology had the power to change any and all humans for the better. It was called Project Mutant.

“Oh yes Felicity, I bring you, Mutant, our big bad.”

“Not your best work,” Caitlin commented.

“Offended,” Cisco replied with a grin. Oliver was clearly getting annoyed, so I touched his arm subtly. His demeanor began to soften.

“Right,” he cleared his throat, “Can we track this chip?”

“Well, yes and no. The chip is on a completely different server to any domain I’ve come across. I don’t even know what it is. It’s essentially in a different world. I’d need to get track of her personal server to begin the hack, which-”

“You obviously can’t do,” Ray said, “Can I see the server?”

Ray, Cisco, and Caitlin all looked at the server Felicity pulled up on her tablet.

“Does that look like a wave function to anyone else?” Cisco said.

“A what?” I said.

“Somehow, her DNA, it’s acting like a particle on the quantum level,” Caitlin further explained.

“So we need to treat her, in essence, as a quantum particle.”

“So that’s why everytime I try to hack into the database it moves. Why it acts like a domain I’ve never seen before.” Felicity said in some sort of revelation.

“So how do you track a particle?” Ray said, “You can’t, wave function collapses.”

“So we can’t track her in any way.”

“No, no we can. The art of quantum mechanics is tracking particles, that's the whole point.”

“So you “solve” quantum mechanics before this looney destroys a city. Hell no.”

“Right, moving on from the science, which I am sure you guys will figure out, let’s say we can track her and find her. If she’s like a particle then can’t she just pop in and out of anywhere at any time, ya know wave particle duality and all. Light goes so fast that it theoretically travels through time. “

“Oliver, are you in there? When did you learn quantum physics?” I said, shocked.

“Y-you pick up things here and there. That’s relevant anyway. How do we stop her.”

“Simple, what stops a particle?”

“Cold.” Caitlin said.

“So, we need to track her, build a weapon to slow her down on the sub-molecular level, and keep her in that state. Easy,” Ray summarized, looking defeated.

“Hold up, she came back to this time for a reason. She clearly has motive. If we know her motive, we can predict where she will attack next. She can’t just pop out of existence if she has a goal she needs to complete. She can go back to this time for a reason, out of all the times she could have existed,” Sara said, “She came back now. This timing, this place, it has to mean something to her. That could hold the key to stopping her.”

“You’re right,” Iris said, “She has a reason.”

“We could run some samples of history through Gideon to look for significance,” Nate suggested.

“There’s an idea,” Sara said.

“Right, looks like everyoens got work to do, let’s get this rolling.

I brought Oliver into flash time. He was stressed and uptight.

“Ollie?”

“Barry, what-what are you doing? They can all..”

“Flashtime, remember.”

“Why did you-”

“Sometimes you just need the world to stop for a moment. You know that better than anyone.”

He just wrapped his arms around me and kept me close.

“We’re going to win this. We’re going to be fine,” I told him.

He just hummed.

He leaned in for a kiss, which we both needed.

“Let’s do this,” Oliver said.

“Let’s.” I pulled away from him and smiled.

The fight was intense and it was Oliver and I left with the task of finishing her.

“Ollie, go, go please. I can do this, I’ll be able to.”

“It’s my bow that has the tech, no way in hell I leave you here.”

“Think Oliver! I am the only one fast enough to stop her.”

“Barry, don't. Don’t grab my bow and speed off. Please,” he was begging. Before I could think much more about what was on the line, I kissed Ollie, grabbed the arrow, and sped off towards her. With her caught off guard, I was able to plunge the arrow into her forearm. When I pulled the bow out, I saw that the world around me had changed.

Oliver’s POV

Just like that he vanished. First from my touch and then from this time. My bear, bazza, barry, just, gone. I ran at the spot where he’d disappeared from yelling, “BARRY! BARRY!”

“Oliver,” A voice said.

“H-he can’t be gone. I-i can’t do this, any of this, without him. Please I need him. GET HIM BACK!.”

I found myself slumped against a wall. I threw my bow across the room and chucked some arrows wherever I pleased. I waited a few moments before collecting my bow and getting on my motorbike. Tears threatened to fall. How could I lose the one person in the world that matters the most to me?

Once I arrived back at the hanger, I immediately went into the storage room. I grabbed my phone and unlocked it. My back screen was a picture of Barry cuddled into my chest. If anyone questioned it, I’d tell them I lost a dare to Barry and this was my forfeit. Obviously it was a huge lie as it was one of my favorite pictures of the two of us. His cute smirk is on show as well as his clingy nature. I missed his reassuring touches already. Angry, I threw some boxes around the place.

I instantly drew an arrow back at the tapping of someone's feet. Closer, closer, here. It was just Felicity.

“Hey,” She said in her sweet voice.

“Hey,” I said, monotone.

“We’re going to find Barry, wherever he is.”

“Don’t tell me that! Don’t tell me that when he could be anytime and anywhere,” I sneered through gritted teeth.

“Okay,” Felicity said in her felicity voice, “What is going on? Not keeping a level head is not helping Barry.”

“Felicity you don’t understand.”

“Then make me understand, Oliver.”

“It’s HARD TO KEEP A LEVEL HEAD WHEN IT'S THE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE!”

“Love of your life?” she questioned.

“Yes, love of my fucking life.”

“You and-”

“Me and Barry.”

“How long?”

“Long. Year and a half.”

“W-who knows?”

“No one does.”

“Oliver, look at me. We will find Barry, okay? We have all the best minds working in here, and we will get him. You have got to stay calm, though. We need you Oliver, okay? Do it for Barry.”

“Alright,” I said, sucking in a deep breath.

We entered the main portion of the hangar again, “Anyone got any ideas?”

“Ray thinks he can hack her biochip now that she is no longer in quantum flux,” Caitlin reported.

“Would that tell us the time or just the place?” Iris, equally as worried, inquired.

“Just a locational ping.”

I racked my brain, “When was she experimented on?”

“Around May 2012 they started.”

“Where?” I questioned again.

“Floy Woods Hospital, Central City. It had closed down by then but-”

Cisco took over from Cait, “It looks like their electricity was still on around that time.”

“Ollie, mind catching the rest of us up to speed?” Sara asked.

“Whenever I’m in a stressful or panicking situation, my mind always rolls onto Lian Yu. If she was in a similar state, surely she was thinking about where her trauma began. Or, if not that, a place that made her feel safe, her apartment, family home, ect. I’m hoping it's the former because the latter means she could be there at any point in time.”

“Right.”

“I’ll take Oliver and whoever needs to come on the waverider to check out his hunch. Hopefully we will find him then.”

“Let’s go! He hasn’t got time to waste,” I yelled.

“The rest of us will stay here and keep looking for clues,” Kara said.

I shot my way through the security detail in the building before carefully scouting out the rest. Heat signature saw three people in a singular room, one atypically warm. Barry. I bust my way through the door, easily taking out the two other people. I quickly cut off the restraints and picked off the metahuman dampeners.

“Ollie,’” Barry said, weak.

“Come on Bazza, let’s get you home,’ glad to have him back in my arms.

“What about her?”

“Sara should have taken care of her by now. She’ll be on the waverider, in cuffs.”

“G-good.”

“What did she do to you?”

“S-s-some s-s-s-”

Barry collapsed into Oliver, and Oliver cradled him in his arms. He carefully made it up to the roof where the waverider awaited. Barry needed treatment quickly.

They told the team to meet them back at star labs asap. Barry could be treated best there. I stepped off the waverider and quickly ran through star labs, trying to get to the cortex where the medbay was. Caitlin was already there, waiting to treat Barry.

I walked out of the lab, unable to see Barry like that. He’s going to be fine, I told myself. I went into the speed lab. I found some balls, and I began throwing them up and pinning them against the back wall with arrows.

Barry’s POV

My eyes fluttered open. I felt outstandingly weak.

“O-oliver? Where’s Oliver?”

“I’ll go get him,” Caitlin said.

“Gave us a real scare there Bear,” Joe said, concerned, “How are you feeling?”

“Weak, but I-i’ll be alright.”

“We got her by the way,” Cisco chimed in, “Locked away in iron heights.”

“Nice.”

“Barry,” Ollie said, making his entrance known.

“O-ollie?”

“Right here,” he said in his low, sugary voice.

“Thought you left,” I whispered lowly.

“Never, darling,” he said, equally as quietly.

“I’ll give you two a minute,” Joe said, leaving. Cisco and Caitlin followed.

Oliver wrapped his arms around me, “You idiot. My idiot.”

“I’m here, right? Nothing happened.”

“But it could have.”

“Hey, look at me. I’m fine, Ollie. We’re fine.” I leaned in for a kiss. He happily obliged.

“I just thought I lost you.”

“I thought I lost you, too.”

“Love you,” he smiled.

“Love you more.”

He let it slide. Just this once.

[sineala]

Hi! I really love your fic, and sorry if this is a bit of an awkward question, feel free to ignore it, but which comics would you recommend as ‘essential’ stony reading? You seem very knowledgeable about them :)

That’s not an awkward question at all! And thank you!

When people who haven’t really read comics ask me what comics they should read to get into Steve/Tony, I usually say that they should read Captain America: Man Out of Time – it’s short, it’s modern, it redoes Steve’s origin story in an interesting and approachable way. and it has some very sweet Steve & Tony moments. If you read it and like it, it’s probably worth seeking out other comics. But the thing is, I wouldn’t say it’s “essential” Steve/Tony reading, because it hasn’t really made an impact on fandom either in its plot events or its characterization of Steve & Tony. Like, if you go to AO3, you’re not going to find a lot of fic specifically about it. (Also it’s a retelling so it’s… not really canon in exactly the same way as the regular comics.)

So when you say you want “essential” comics, I am interpreting it as the comics that are basically the greatest hits of Steve/Tony fandom. Comics everyone is expected to know because they are featured again and again in fanfiction and because they have shaped our understanding of Steve and Tony’s characters. That’s what I would consider essential. I mean, much as I love, say, v3, you can probably get by without reading most of v3 because most of it doesn’t show up in fanfic (although you may eventually want to know who Rumiko and Tiberius are and what the deal is with the Sentient Armor).

I’m going to stick the list under a Read More.

Anyway, here’s a stab at making such a list for 616:

Avengers vol 1 #4: Necessary reading for any Steve/Tony fan. The Avengers find an iceberg, and there’s a body in the iceberg wearing red, white and blue, and… yeah, welcome to the future, Captain America. The first voice he hears is Tony’s!

Tales of Suspense vol 1 #58: Marvel had distribution agreements throughout most of the 1960s that limited the number of different comic titles they could sell; as a result, instead of solo books Marvel had a bunch of anthology titles (Tales to Astonish, Strange Tales, Journey into Mystery…) that became “split books” with solo tales of two different heroes. Tales of Suspense had up to this point featured Iron Man, but with this issue it became an Iron Man/Captain America split book, and in this issue Iron Man and Cap team up to fight the Chameleon, by which I mean that the Chameleon impersonates Captain America and Tony accidentally fights the real Cap. Whoops.

Nomad (Captain America vol 1 #180-183): You should probably start reading at about #176 for context. Anyway, Steve is disillusioned with the government after he discovers that Richard Nixon, who commits suicide in front of him, is the leader of the evil Secret Empire, and so he gives up being Captain America and decides to be Nomad. He’s only Nomad for about four issues, but what a glorious four issues it is.

Demon in a Bottle (Iron Man vol 1 #120-128): The original arc that established Tony’s alcoholism. If you see references in fanfic to an incident with the Carnelian ambassador, that’s this arc.

Avengers vol 1 #216: Steve finds out that Tony is Iron Man, because they’re on an Avengers mission and the villain magically strips Tony out of his armor, leaving him standing there wearing only his underwear.

The second drinking arc (Iron Man vol 1 #160-200): Tony starts drinking again and loses everything, to the point where he’s living on the streets in a cardboard box. Rhodey becomes Iron Man and Obadiah Stane takes over the company. This is the drinking arc you want to read. Highlights include #172, in which Steve bridal-carries Tony from a burning building, and #182, in which Tony nearly dies in a blizzard.

Armor Wars (Iron Man vol 1 #225-231): Tony tries to steal his technology back from everyone who has it; you will want to read #228, the issue where Steve tries to stop him. (Stories referencing an incident with the Guardsmen are talking about this.)

Operation Galactic Storm: This is a massive crossover from the early 90s where the Kree and Sh’iar have a fight and Steve and Tony disagree about whether to kill the Kree Supreme Intelligence. You don’t need to read the entire crossover; the part you do need to read is the issue afterwards, Captain America vol 1 #401, in which Steve and Tony make their apologies to each other.

Tales of Suspense vol 2 #1: This is a one-shot issue from the mid-90s in which Steve and Tony team up; its claim to fame is that it includes Tony thinking the following line about Steve: "Captain America. Steve. I look at your handsome face, into your clear azure eyes, and as ever, I feel the same guilty envy.“ (Steve also thinks similarly complimentary things about Tony – it’s very much mutual admiration society/mutual inferiority complex.)

Captain America/Iron Man 1998 Annual: Tony wipes Steve’s mind! Steve finds out and is mad! Then they fight MODOK, get lei’d, and make up at the end. It’s a lot of fun.

Red Zone (Avengers vol 3 #65-70): Tony exposes himself to a deadly disease because Steve is more important than he is and he has to give Steve mouth-to-mouth to save his life. Includes giant panels of their lips touching.

Civil War: You should really read Civil War and everything after.

Avengers Prime: This is a miniseries taking place after Steve comes back to life where Steve and Tony end up on an adventure in the Nine Realms together, Tony gets naked, and also they get some closure about Civil War. They hug it out at the end.

One Night in Madripoor (Captain America & Iron Man #633-635): Steve and Tony team up to fight Batroc, MODOK, and robot bees in Madripoor. There’s a lot of banter.

Avengers vol 5 & New Avengers vol 3: After Civil War, Hickman’s Avengers run is probably the second most popular canon setting for comics Steve/Tony. It’s controversial in fandom, and there’s no happy ending… but you can’t deny that it is absolutely about Steve & Tony’s relationship. A hundred issues of pain and betrayal!

Civil War II: The Oath: Okay, yeah, so, I think we can all agree that Secret Empire (the recent one, not the original one) was a terrible idea and it was a very bad decision to make Steve a fascist dictator – but “The Oath” did give us Steve canonically declaring his love for Tony, so, you know, it has that going for it.

The Cap-IM Tumblr maintains a list of Slashy Moments if you’d like to see panels from most of these (and more). Also, the 18+ 616 Steve/Tony Discord maintains a list of resources and summaries of these and more issues.

I also specifically want to say a little more about Civil War because I think of all the storylines you could read it is probably the most essential for Steve/Tony fans. CW is where the pairing really got its start and I think it’s the most popular setting for stories that engage with a particular era of canon. So if you are going to read one era, Civil War should probably be it.

I recommend starting with New Avengers vol 1, which as a bonus is very good for Steve & Tony up until about #20, when Civil War hits. The Cap and IM runs of the time are also generally viewed as very good and you should definitely read them – that would be Cap v5, by Brubaker, which has the Winter Soldier arc, and IM v4, which starts with Extremis and then continues on to Execute Program and then reaches Civil War.

You are going to want to read the main Civil War storyline but if you’re a Steve and Tony fan honestly most of the fun is in the tie-ins. My abbreviated Civil War reading list is as follows:

Civil War #1-7: You’re gonna need to read this.

Captain America vol 5 #22-24: Honestly I don’t remember most of this but you might as well.

Iron Man vol 4 #13-14: Tony’s motivations are explored, Steve and Tony attempt to come to an agreement during the war, and also Happy Hogan dies and it’s sad.

Captain America/Iron Man: Casualties of War: One of the two key issues you absolutely must read, in which Steve and Tony meet during the war and try to talk things out, and they also summarize what they’re doing and why and basically their entire friendship up to this point.

Civil War: Front Line #11: Toward the end of the war, reporters interview Steve and Tony. Tony lies on the floor and cries. I think I would summarize the post-CW era as a whole as “Tony cries a lot.”

Captain America vol 5 #25: The one where Steve dies.

Civil War: The Confession: READ THIS. If you read nothing else, read this. This is why we have a Steve/Tony ship. This is the essential issue.

Fallen Son: The Death of Captain America #1-5: Features Steve’s funeral. Well, both of Steve’s funerals. If you guessed that they also involve Tony crying a lot, you would be right.

What If? Fallen Son: Mostly worth it for the cover art.

What If? Civil War: After Steve’s funeral, a mysterious stranger shows Tony two worlds in the multiverse where the war could have gone differently. More tears for Tony!

After that, you probably also need to keep up with New Avengers/Mighty Avengers plus the major events up through Steve’s return to life – that would be Secret Invasion (the Skrulls invade), Dark Reign (Norman Osborn runs everything), and Siege (Osborn decides to invade Asgard; Steve comes back for this one). Steve’s return to life is in a miniseries called Captain America Reborn.

I would also recommend the rest of Iron Man vol 4 that takes place after Civil War – it’s renamed to Iron Man: Director of SHIELD because that’s the job Tony gets after Steve dies. Tony is basically a grieving mess. There’s also a miniseries called Avengers/Invaders in which Tony and the post-CW Avengers meet the WWII Invaders – including Steve – and it is a glorious pile of feelings and time travel and sadness.

So, uh, yeah, that’s a lot of issues but honestly I think if you get up to speed on Civil War and the couple years after you will be able to understand a lot of where fandom is coming from. (And then if you read Hickman’s run that’s basically the other run you are most likely to need to know.)

If you can find a copy of it – it’s out of print, alas – there’s a really great trade called Iron Man/Captain America (not Civil War: Captain America/Iron Man, that’s the one with the CW tie-ins, but you will probably want it too) that reprints several pre-Civil War issues focusing on Steve & Tony, including several of the ones mentioned above, like ToS 58, the 1998 annual, and the issues of Armor Wars and the second drinking arc that have Steve in them. Notably, I think it’s the only place that the ToS v2 one-shot (the “azure eyes” issue) has ever been reprinted. 

(I take that back, the ToS one-shot is now in a trade called Avengers: Tales to Astonish. And now that I’m looking, the ToS one-shot is now on Marvel Unlimited and comiXology. Sweet!)

I hope that helps!

[thequeenofcronuts]

Uncertainties - A Royal Romance AU Story Chapter 2 Gifts for Confidence

Uncertainties- AU The Royal Romance

Uncertainties main location Silicon Valley California.

AU Summary - Career life is busy for a group of six friends when they meet a captivating woman with a beautiful soul. New friendships are forged and new romances revealed. All the while hearts are torn and closets are cleared of skeletons. True love always wins in the end, right?

AU Warnings - This Stand Alone will include the following 18+ subjects: Language, NS*W, Verbal Abuse, and Abortion. If ANY of these subjects will cause pain or hardship in reading, please skip reading Uncertainties. That being said, each chapter will include its own specific warnings.

AU Uncertainties Pairings and Characters: Pairings and Characters: Drake x Riley / Liam x Riley / Liam x Olivia / Drake x Olivia / Maxwell x Savannah, including Hana, and Madeleine, and OCs **All characters from the Choices Book: The Royal Romance are owned by Pixelberry Studios (Any other characters are the product of my brain…I probably should apologize now. 🙃😉)

Chapter 2 Summary - Liam meets Riley and thinks she may be a great fit for a friend. Meanwhile Riley’s long time friend sees something different.

Chapter 2 Warnings - None

Chapter Word Count: 4,240-ish

Tags: @client-327 @dcbbw @carabeth @drakesensworld @purplegreyshrimp

 ----- The next day Riley receives the call from Liam’s assistant requesting a meeting to discuss a possible donation and also possible fundraising gala with the CEO of Innovative Toy Box. After the call ends she immediately starts a call with her long time friend and after two rings Kammie answers. “Kam, you are not going to believe this. I got a random call from a major company that might donate to Gifts for Confidence! For once I wasn’t making a cold call, they called me! Crazy exciting, right?!” “Riles, I have to say that is pretty wicked cool. So what’s the company?” “ Innovative Toy Box. It’s a technology company of some sort that makes futuristic toys, or something like that. I obviously have to really do my research. Which, my dear sweet friend, oh the lovely and kind Kammie, wou-“ Kammie finishes Riley’s question. “Would I help you mine information? Of course.” Kammie hears Riley exhale a deep breath. “Thanks! I mean this could let the charity partner with way more orphanages!”

“Riles, I can’t even begin to imagine what this will do for everyone’s dreams in your office.” “Except Kam, I can’t let myself get too excited yet, I don’t even know what’s really going to happen.” Kammie sighs at her friend’s ever present practical mind. “Well then, I’ll be excited for both of us, and you be the serious downer you’ve been since the first day we met.” Riley takes a playful tone, “You didn’t just go there Miss ‘I had planned on sending my four years of college into oblivion as I partied like no tomorrow.’ Heh, how does our friendship continue to survive since we were randomly thrown together freshman year as roommates?” Kammie scoffs in reply, “Simple Riles, I made you way more exciting and you made me-” “Kam if you say ‘way less exciting’ our friendship is done at this exact moment.” They both burst out laughing.

“Okay Miss ‘Operation Save the World’ I’ve got the About Us page up from the company’s site. What’s the plan here?” Kammie hears the frantic clicking of Riley’s fingers on her keyboard already. “You read me important information, and take notes, from the pages on the website while I find any public financial statements, board reports, etc.” “I like this Riles. My job is actually simple enough this time around. Okay. Here’s the beginning of what they say about themselves on the ‘About Us’ page.

‘The mission of Innovative Toy Box is to provide children, alongside their parents, ways to use technology for enhancing life skills and lessons needed while still having fun. We believe it’s important to harness the future of technology, today, while we encourage the “good old fashion get out and play” style many of us remember from our own youth. From our app games, one for example, focusing on preschoolers, alongside their parents, learning to speak fluently in multiple languages, to our programming kits for older children teaching the most current coding skills while building robots as individual as their designer, we provide a plethora of toys for your child’s own technology toy box. ……’

“Riles that’s impressive! I think I want to build my own personal programming robot while learning coding, and I have no idea how that even works! What have you found?” Riley doesn’t answer right away. Still silence. “Um, Riles…Riley…” Riley’s tone is one of wonder when she finally speaks. “Their publicly released financials are incredible! I can’t believe a company like this would even hear about us, let alone call us!” Kammie laughs, “Well my little unbeliever, get ready cause it’s happening. Hey, when is your meeting?” “Friday morning. So I’ve got a lot of research to do. I want to know this company inside and out so they know we’re serious about this relationship. My only problem is…” “I got Riles, I’ll help in anyway I can. I know you’ve gotta keep your main job to pay the bills.” “Yeah, well that’s the life of girl with a degree in human services. Social Worker by day and charity worker … still by day. Gotta have two jobs. Heh. I’m just living the dream, aren’t I?” Kammie’s tone gets serious. “Riley Grace Brooks, you are wicked remarkable! You are the most compassionate, giving person I have ever known. You work to make a real difference in this world while loving unabashedly. Since our freshman year at USC I’ve seen that this has always been your dream. So you are living the dream. Keep living your damn dream girl.”

— — — — — Friday Morning

Riley’s voice is shaky as she talks to the receptionist in the lobby of the Innovative Toy Box offices. “Welcome Ms. Brooks!” Riley sees the woman’s name tag and mentally notes her name is Kelly. Kelly beams at Riley as she says, “Please take a seat while I check you into the system and contact Mr. Rys’ assistant. If I don’t have a chance to see you again before you leave, I wish you a wonderful day!” “You do the same, Kelly.” Wow, super nice and friendly lady. Riley thinks as she sits taking in the massive pure white lobby decorated with touches of more colors in the spectrum than she has ever seen at once. This would be completely intimidating if it wasn’t so carefree and…. happy? She continues to look around in awe as she realizes it feels like she is lost in a child’s imagination. All of the sudden a kind looking gentleman greets her. “Ms. Brooks, Welcome! We are quite excited to have you here with us today.” Riley feels some of the nervous tension release as she takes in the gentlemen’s kind smile. “My name is Thomas and I’m Mr. Rys’ assistant.” He extends his hand and Riley accepts a firm hand shake. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, ma’am .” “Likewise Thomas.” Riley replies as she still glances at the magnificent lobby.

“Thomas, this lobby is almost indescribable. The only possible description I could come up with would be that I’m lost inside a child’s mind. A child that is still pure of from the worries of this world. A child that is just allowed to be a child.” Thomas looks at the lobby and nods appreciatively. “Exactly what Mr. Rys was going for while in the designing stages of the building. He’d be quite pleased to hear you say that. You’d be amazed at how many people don’t take the time to ‘get it’. Even more of our own employees than you’d probably expect don’t either.”

Thomas motions for Riley to follow him and they begin to walk out of the lobby. “Allow me to escort you Mr. Rys’ conference room.” As they walk to a bank of elevators Riley looks around stunned. Somehow what should be stark white and uninviting is warm and cheerful. The colors of the furniture against the white background makes it unlike any corporate office building she has ever been to. That’s including every single company for children she has visited. As she and Thomas pass employees they all nod or say hello to Riley in recognition of the their visitor. By the time they reach the elevators Riley’s nerves have calmed immensely.

Thomas presses a call button and soon elevator doors open with Riley in awe again. Even the elevator is decorated wonderfully within the theme. Who thinks to decorate something as mundane as elevator in such detail? This is a fabulous place. I do wonder what this Liam Rys is actually going to be like. I can’t imagine someone who cultivates this kind of atmos- Thomas pulls her from her thoughts. “Ms. Brooks, the entire top floor is Mr. Rys’ office and I’ll be escorting you directly to his conference room.” Riley nods and can’t help but respond with a smile as she sees Thomas’ genuine one.

The elevator doors open and Riley walks out seeing nothing but white. White modern furniture, white walls. Such a drastic look and feel from the rest of the building. Thomas gives her a small knowing look as if he can read her thoughts while leading her into the conference room. “Please take any seat you wish. May I offer you some water, coffee, tea…” Riley tries to clear her parched throat. “Water would be lovely.” Thomas retrieves a bottle of water from the bar fridge and hands it to Riley while telling her, “I’ll let Mr. Rys know you’re here.” Riley takes the bottle of water thanking him and turns to the huge conference table. It's…round. I’ve never seen a CEO conference table be round. No head seat at the table for the someone of importance to sit. Again this whole room is white as well. She pulls out her laptop, notes, and charts from her carrying bag, and opens the bottle of water bottle while her laptop powers on.

Soon there is a gentle knock from a door she hadn’t noticed almost in the back corner of the room. As it slowly opens a very handsome, tall, well built man with blonde hair and deep blue eyes takes a few steps while clearing his throat. “Ms. Brooks, it is a delight to meet you.” He closes the door and takes the few steps his long legs need to reach Riley and offers a firm but considerate handshake, “Liam Rys.” He says as he takes the seat next to her with a wide, warm smile. Did the CEO really just knock on his own conference room door? That’s a first. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Rys.” “Liam, please.” Riley nods, “Then Riley please.” Yep, he is easy on the eyes and charming. Soon Riley realizes she may have been gazing too long so she immediately says the first thing on her mind. “I have to say, Mr., er Liam, I have never seen the CEO of a company knock on his own conference room door before entering.” Meanwhile Liam sits back and is quite taken by Riley’s long raven hair, porcelain white skin, and bright blue eyes. Her eyes are in such contrast to her hair and skin. Hmmm, I think she is definitely Drake’s type…at least from what can be seen. I’ll have to make a point of describing her and telling him about her tonight. As he registers that she had mentioned him knocking before entering he realizes he may have been gazing too long. “Well Riley, I try not to be a ‘normal’ CEO. I feel it’s rather startling to be siting waiting for a meeting and have someone just barge through a door without warning.” Another wide smile is on his lips. “Shall we begin?”

Liam first gives Riley a slightly more detailed description of his company than the high level information that is on their website. Shes glad she completed the more in depth research herself, as understanding exactly what he is expressing helps her to relax even more. I’ve never felt more comfortable asking for money. She internally snickers. “So Riley, I’ve done a little bit of research on the charity you work with, but I’d like to hear about it from your view point first.” Huh, that’s a different and nice way to words, ‘tell me why I should give your charity a lot of money.’ Liam continues, “I also want to hear why you, Riley Brooks, chose to work for this particular one.”

Riley takes in a quiet breath as she realizes she’s not going to be giving her usual presentation to a large corporate donor, and begins like it’s just comfortable chatting. “Well, Gifts for Confidence works directly within a number of orphanages that our funds can sustain. No matter the age of a child when they enter an orphanage they have many different ranges of emotional needs, and while the orphanages do their best with the funding they receive, the obvious lack of funds do not allow for much more than the basic necessities. What our charity does is create and send a sort of…comfort ‘bundle’ that are age appropriate for new children entering the orphanage. The bundles include security blankets for little ones and popular character blankets for the older children. Also, they include age appropriate toys, books, coloring/school supplies, clothes, and some personal items which are given to the child so they have items that are ‘theirs’; belonging only to them. When you’re scared, alone, and confused receiving the comfort of these items that are specifically for ‘you’ makes a world of difference to these kids. It gives them confidence in the people taking care of them and in the new, scary place they’ve found themselves in through no doing of their own.”

Liam looks at Riley with amazing kindness. “This is a brilliant cause. I have to say I never thought of this kind of need specifically until my my best friend, Drake, and I found this charity online. To hear from someone so passionately explain it all, it truly makes me realize its importance. Now, if you wouldn’t mind, please tell me about why you have chosen to be involved in this particular area of need and this exact organization.” Liam notices Riley’s body slightly tense. “Please Riley, you don’t have to give any deeply private or personal information. I just want to understand this from another person’s perspective. While I have a passion for children too, my mind works with that passion in a completely different way.” His smile is so authentic and warm hearted Riley is certain he is definitely not the typical Silicon Valley quick dollar CEO.

With a sip of water Riley begins measuring her words, as there are multiple, very personal, reasons for who she is and the choices she makes in her life. “I have my bachelors degree in Human Services and my primary job is working with children coming into Hope Children’s Home from Child Endangerment situations. That work led me to hear about Gifts for Confidence, and I was soon volunteering at the charity until the need arose for a new Philanthropy Director and apparently they think I have the temperament for it, so here I am.” She shrugs her shoulders while grinning. The room is silent for a minute while there is a look of astonishment on Liam’s face. So giving, and a difference maker. Ok, so definitely Drake’s type with her beauty inside and out. “So you work two jobs with very emotionally situations? That sounds like a lot of stress. I’m sorry if that’s too personal.”

Riley smiles and shakes her head no. “Not at all. I love and believe in what I do. For as long as I can remember I’ve always wanted to make a difference and do something worthwhile. Yes, working at two organizations of this type does take an emotional toll, but to be frank, I also need to have more than one job. These kind of organizations pay as much as they can with the limited funds they have for operational and employee costs. Donors, and also our staff members, want as much of the money to go to the cause, the children who are the whole reason. It’s just that people forget it does cost money to run a charity. I’ve always believed that one of the most important factors in understanding the true measure of a charity is to understand their breakdown of funds. It’s sad that in a lot of organizations too much of the funding goes to fancy operating expenses and top employee salaries. But, enough about all that.” Riley looks at her charts and financial breakdowns she brought for her presentation.

“Liam, I do have our finical breakdowns and breakdowns of areas where funding is needed most. I can show you anything you might want to know or answer any questions you have.” Liam shakes his head as he tells Riley, “No, that won’t be necessary. I think we’re good. Is there someone I need to direct my staff to for contacting the charity so our organizations can begin working together?” Is he saying ‘yes’ with just this one conversation and not look at any of our numbers? “Well, when you’re ready to decide I’m the contact…for all of it actually.” She laughs. “Philanthropy ‘Director’ may sound like I’m over a department or something, it really just means that me, myself, and I direct the entire process.” Her laugh is harmonious, and her eyes are brilliant. Drake would be enthralled by her. “Riley I’ve already decided. This charity is amazing and if those working at it have the same passion I can’t wait to put this in motion. I’ll get my contact here in touch with you soon so we can start working on the donation, and the fundraising gala.” Riley’s head is spinning. “I’m sorry, but I am understanding correctly. You’re really serious about going all in, after just this conversation? What about your board of directors? I don’t mean to sound ungrateful…” He flashes her a bright smile. “The answer is yes, from just this conversation you have this company’s support, it’s my decision alone. When it comes down to the board, numbers are all that matter. Do you have any questions for me right now?”

Riley contemplates. Do I ask him my completely non-related question I’ve been curious about since walking out of the elevator? Why not, he seems nice enough. “Well I do have a question but it’s not about the funding it’s about this building.” Liam raises an eyebrow with an encouraging smile. “By all means Riley, ask away.” “I was telling Thomas as he escorted me up here that being in this building feels like you’re in a child’s imagination.” “That was my goal, Riley. Not many notice. You must be kind, caring, and smart.” Riley feels a blush to her cheeks. “So, when we reached your floor and I stepped off the elevator seeing all the plain whi-“ Liam interrupts. “Why is it so different up here? So, plain? I have two reasons. First, everyday it reminds me that I have a fresh canvas for this company in creating the forward thinking toys and programs we want to create. Second, the stark difference reminds me to never let my imagination go. To never let my ideas lose the magic.” Wow. Quite the cerebral thought process. “I understand. Everyone I’ve seen around here today seems to show that those sentiments trickle down from the top.”

Liam smiles and sighs. “Not every place is perfect, as I’m certain you know that well Riley, but we do our best.” He looks at his phone. “Well, I’m sorry to have to go-“ Riley stands up for a handshake. “Don’t apologize, you only have all this,” she gestures in the air around the building “to run and manage.” She lets out a short laugh. There’s that smile and laugh again of hers. She could be great for Drake. “Liam, I’m so thankful that our organizations will be working together. Have a great rest of your Friday.” “Thank you Riley. Enjoy your Friday as well. I couldn’t be happier that our company will be supporting such an amazing charity.” And woman. As Liam leaves the room Riley packs up her things with a large smile on her face.

Leaving the conference room Thomas asks if she would like to be escorted down to the lobby. “I appreciate it Thomas, but I’ll be able to find my way out. Have a great Friday and weekend.” Thomas returns the well wishes as Riley steps into the colorful elevator thrilled with the way things turned out today. The elevator stops on the next floor down to let a blonde woman with piercing green eyes enter. As the woman pushes the button for her desired floor Riley gives her a warm smile and says hello. The blonde just stares at the doors tapping her foot with her arms crossed. As the doors open she looks Riley over and obviously isn’t threatened. “Coming from Mr. Rys’ floor I see. Whatever for I wonder.” She walks out of the elevator without another word. Riley knew it wasn’t a question just a statement, and from the blonde’s tone she obviously didn’t appreciate her being on Liam’s floor. Like Liam said. “Not every place is perfect…but we do our best. She shakes her head on the rest of the ride down to the lobby.

*** Friday Night - Riley and Kammie

Riley is waiting for Kammie at their favorite dive bar for their end of the week tradition when she hears a friend from behind the bar, “Hey Riles. Celebrating making it through another week? How many fingers of whiskey are we needing tonight?” Jeff teases. “I’ll decide that when, and if, my partner in crime shows up.” Just then Riley feels a playful slap on the shoulder. “Speak of the devil.” Jeff chuckles while he ducks under the bar before Kammie can reach him. “Kam you’ll never get me.” He sticks out his tongue. “Oh sweet, naive Jeff,” Kammie cackles, “one of these days you won’t be fast enough, or won’t have this bar to hide behind. Then you’ll be oh so sorry.” Riley gives Jeff a feigned look of worry. “Kam may look sweet Jeff, but damn the girl can pack a punch.” Riley raises her hands as if leaving the conversation completely. “But hey, it’s your life Jeff, not mine.” She and Kammie chortle together.

The ladies order and head to their usual table sipping their drinks for a minute. Finally Kammie gives Riley a devious look. “Sooooo, Riles. I confirmed something today that you didn’t even know you wanted confirmed. You can thank me later.” Riley eyes Kammie suspiciously. “I know that look Kam, and whatever it is you ‘confirmed’ I most certainly haven’t had enough to drink yet to find it out.” Kammie smacks Riley on the shoulder. “So first, about today. Do you think you’ll lock in the donation?” She notices the telltale smile forming on Riley’s face. “Actually Kam, he committed to it today.” “Great! But ok Riles, I know that smile. Spill, because I’m sure it’s about a certain CEO!” “Fine. Liam is incredibly kind, and smart, and -“ Kammie interjects. “Ohhhh, first name basis. Nice! I like it.” Riley rolls her eyes. “He also is easy on the eyes. Blonde hair, blue eyes, tall,-“ “Ok, Riles, that leads me to the information that I confirmed today, because I love you. So maaayyybee after searching images of Mr. Rys, anndddd you’re correct, oh so gorgeous by the way, and a possible lengthy afternoon spent on a search engine, I can say, Riles he is most certainly single.” Riley raises an eyebrow. “So what I’m saying is, Riles, Liam Rys is quite the catch, and you, my dear, just stumbled into his life.”

*** Friday Night - Liam and Drake

Drake is sitting on Liam’s couch waiting for him to get home with a drink already in his hand. Not too long after he settles in he hears Liam come in the door making his way around the corner while concentrating on his phone screen. When Liam catches movement out of the corner of his eye, he about jumps out of his skin. “Drake! What the hell?!” He lets his breathing slow. “Why the hell did I ever give you a key?!” Drake tries to talk though his fits of laughter, “You should have seen your face, man. Priceless, and I wasn’t even trying.” Liam plops down on the couch as he finally laughs along with Drake. “And you gave me the key because I’m your best friend.” Drake shrugs. “So then, Drake, why don’t I have a key to your place, best friend?” Drake looks around the penthouse. “With this, why the hell would you want one?” Liam nods and stifles a chuckle. “Point taken.” Drake tries to look mad but can’t pull it off. “Anyway, drinks and tell me about the charity thing. From what we read, the charity sounded pretty great.” Drake says after taking a pull of his drink.

Liam gets up and pours himself a scotch, returning to the couch. They clink glasses and Liam starts talking. “Oh yeah, the charity is fabulous and I’ll tell you all about that later. I’ve already decided it’s the one we’re going with.” Liam pauses for just a beat. “But what I really want to talk to you about is Riley.” “The charity worker?” Drake quirks an eyebrow. “Don’t look so confused Drake. Sip your whiskey and listen. Riley is kind, generous, smart, and definitely has a sweet soul. She is a dedicated to her causes and loves working to make a difference. In fact wanting to make a difference for others seems to be what drives her. Are those values sounding a bit familiar, Drake?” Drake puts up a hand. “What does this have to do with anything, and why do I feel like your pitching an idea to me?” Drake takes a sip of whiskey and Liam rolls his eyes. “Just let me finish. She is absolutely stunning with raven black hair, porcelain skin, and these compelling blue eyes that brightly stand out against her other features.” Drake sits further back into the couch looking quizzically at his friend. “I mean she sounds great and all, Liam, but you’re not really a dark hair, blue eyes kinda guy.” Liam gives him a devilish smirk. “Precisely brother, but you are.”

[meggannn]

(based on your previous ask) do you mind if I ask how you feel about lok? is there a general consensus if it's good or bad? youre really insightful and just wanted to know if there were any major issues you had with it

yeah sure, i’ll do my best. if you want a quick answer to your question, here is a link to some of my other korra posts where i say pretty much the same thing as i do here, just in fewer words. cause this post will be mostly an unhappy summary of my experience watching the show. this post will contain spoilers, and disclaimer, i am a really biased, disappointed asshole, so i’ll just admit that now. 

short answer: i liked the concept of lok more than the product we got. a lot of that is because you had a physically buff brown wlw protagonist written mostly by cishet white men and, as you can imagine, it wasn’t handled great. when i think of lok now i tend to fluctuate between bittersweet nostalgia and quiet, simmering rage.

if you don’t care about the show summary, skip at the middle paragraph break down to my tldr.

so for those who don’t know, LOK was really my first “big” fandom on tumblr. when it was announced, a bunch of ATLA purists were already hating on it because 1) brown woman, 2) it was unrealistic to go from ATLA’s technology to streampunk in 70 years, and 3) it wasn’t ATLA, basically. it was my first big interest that i got to participate in as it was airing, and i was really excited about it. i defended it, i wrote meta, i liveblogged, i wrote tons of fic and spammed theories/wants before the damn show even had a release date. all that is to say, i was Invested, and i believed in it before i even saw it. people called me a bnf, i’m not sure if that’s true, but i did gain a lot my followers in my first few years on tumblr by posting korra stuff. a lot of them – hello – i think are still around today (i’m not certain how all the video games hasn’t scared them off yet)

i should say at this point that my opinion of LOK the show has been really wrapped up in the ugly stain left by the fanbase. korra the character has been the subject of tons of racist, misogynistic criticism since the moment we saw her back; when she showed up on screen as a proud young woman who fought with authority and stood up for herself, that was the nail in the coffin for her reputation. i agreed that she had a bit of growing up to do, because ATLA/LOK have always been stories about coming of age and maturing, but i disagreed strongly with this notion that she deserved to be “humbled,” which is what a lot of fans were looking for.

the overall consensus on if it’s “good” depends on who you ask. most people agree that ATLA is better overall: it was better plotted because it benefited from more writers in the room and more episodes to flesh out the world. opinions on LOK specifically range based a lot on their opinions of the K/orra/sami pairing, if they were involved in or what side they were on in any of the fandom wank, and also just complete random chance.

i’ll go more in depth into my ‘history’ with the show below, but i just wanted to mention that all the while the show was airing, korra was being hit with waves of criticism by so-called fans for basically being a confident brown woman who were calling for her to learn her place, respect her elders, etc. another common theme was fandom’s brilliant fucking idea that asami, a light-skinned feminine non-bending woman who was more polite and reserved than korra, would’ve made a better avatar. because you know why. (korra was often described as brutal, rough, unsophisticated, next to pretty, perfect asami. and asami is a fine character, to be clear, but that’s what she was – fine. nothing really stands out about her, which is a fault of the writing, because she had a lot of potential too.) so anyway all of this did sour my mood toward engaging with other fans outside my friend circle.

–

it was around maybe the middle of book 1 that i realized the writing for the show was simpler than what i was expecting – not that it was childish, which it was (because it was written for children, i understood that), but i felt like the plot meandered and the twists came out of nowhere. it felt like they were making it up as they were going, and it opened threads it didn’t answer. one of the biggest threads was the equalist revolution, which was a very sensitive topic that got jettisoned when the leader was revealed to be a fraud, and that devalued the entire movement in an instant. really disappointing, because i was looking forward to seeing that addressed. for a lot of people, this was a dealbreaker, and they started walking. i stuck with it, but loosely.

book 2 aired, focusing on the spiritual world and some really cool history. it still suffered a lot from awkward b-plots and loose threads it didn’t know how to tackle. korra lost her memory and then regained it 2 episodes later with no consequences, mako flip-flopped between korra and asami because bryke don’t know how to write teenage romances without making it a love triangle, and at some point bolin kissed a girl against her will and they didnt acknowledge that at all? i honestly don’t remember. anyway at the end of book 2, even though korra saves the day and prevents the world from descending into darkness for ten thousand years, due to events beyond her control, korra loses the spiritual connection that ties her to all of the previous avatars – aang, roku, kyoshi, wan, everyone. and people hit the fucking ceiling. “korra’s not a real avatar if she lost her connection to the old ones! that’s the entire point of the cycle! this show is bullshit, it’s not canon anymore!” (the entire point that finale demonstrated that korra’s power alone was enough to save the world and she didn’t need anyone else. but people found that ~unrealistic~ i guess). as you can imagine, being a fan of LOK is starting to get a little tiring by now.

books 3-4 is where the korra haters got to love the show again, because they were both straight-up torture porn. after everything she did saving the world, this is the arc where korra got beat down, tortured, dragged into the dirt, swallowed and spat back out. book 3 is a lot of people’s favorites because it was the first book that felt fully plotted out before it was put on air, which is why i enjoyed it too. but for me it was difficult to see a girl, whose identity revolved around being the avatar after being raised and sheltered to think it was all she was good for, effectively abandon her life and even her name by the beginning of book 4 because the events of book 3 were that traumatizing for her. somehow this was character development. we were encouraged to stick with it because we hoped korra would find herself again. and she did, sorta.

but it makes me furious that people who had quit in books 1-2 came back during 3 because they heard these books were better – aka book 3, the book that featured korra the least, and books 3-4 in which korra got her ass handed to her in some of the hardest fights vs some of the cruelest villains of the series. (nevermind that the book 3 villains suffer from the anime villain curse: they quickly went from “cool character design” to “wait, how does this rando group of villains show up with powers literally no one in the universe has ever heard before?” – questions no one ever answers)

anyway book 4 is a mish-mash of… i’m not sure. i’ve rewatched all the books but i don’t know if i’ll ever touch this one again. the culturally appropriating airbender wannabe, zaheer (a complete rando who somehow masters airbending enough to fly, which was a huge middle finger to airbending masters aang and tenzin for no reason) a guy who literally tortured korra one season before and put her in a wheelchair, is the one who the writers send korra to for her spiritual awakening that lets her save the day. not tenzin or jinora, her spiritual teachers with whom she has positive, healthy relationships – they send her back to her abuser who terrifies and degrades her a bit more before deciding to help. this was a pattern: the writers made both korra and asami face their abusers (in asami’s case, her father) for catharsis instead of gaining peace over their trauma another, healthier way because…. i’m not sure why. there is no reason why. and then there’s the guilt tripping nonsense of asami feeling as if she had to forgive her father, who tried to kill her, because he said he was sorry and sacrificed himself for her in the finale. it’s angst galore, if you like that kind of thing, which i normally do, except this is less angst and more just the writers trying to hammer in torture porn, grimdark, and poor attempts at morally gray nonsense into their finale season.

anyway at the end of her journey, korra, our buff brown woc, learns that she had to suffer to learn how to be compassionate and relate to her enemy. i’m not exaggerating, she literally says that. which is lovely.

–

tldr: i wasted a lot of emotional time and energy into this show and was extremely disappointed when some of the ending’s notes were “you had to suffer to become a better person” and “forgive your abusers/villains because aren’t we all the same in the end?”

but also on a strictly narrative level, LOK also bit off way more than it could chew both emotionally and thematically. it had an amazing premise, but it was not committed to

utilizing the steampunk genre to its best potential in the bending world (after the creativity in the rest of the worldbuilding, the LOK series finale was literally fighting a giant robot – seriously?)

giving its hero the respect and character arc she deserved. and i don’t say that because i think korra had no growing up to do in b1, she did, but she didn’t deserve for it to happen like that.

so basically i realized that a lot of the writers that made ATLA great weren’t brought back for LOK, and it showed. i realized that the LOK writers, when they listened to fans, were listening to the fans that whined the loudest, or (more likely, since they plan seasons years before we see them) they thought from the beginning that it was a good idea for korra to go through years’ worth of pain just to be spat out a humbler, “better” person

the reason i told you all that about me defending LOK in the beginning is because i need you to understand that i believed in LOK longer than i probably should’ve. i wanted it to be everything i was expecting in a diverse children’s show with an unorthodox female protaganist. but just because they had a brown wlw heroine doesn’t mean that they deserved to be praised for it when they treated her like garbage.

and korra and asami walk into a beam of light together in the last second of the show and i’m supposed to applaud the writers for their bravery or something

[creativeculturesandcontext]

WEEK 4

Independent

Understanding media - MARSHALL McCLUHAN

Hey if you do read these notes would like to add that this writing reminded me of that They Live by ray Nelson. Is the media we see the true message? Sorry I didn’t add this in class

A lightbulb is not a lightbulb. There is no media in a lightbuld but say if it lights up a message then there is a media.

But… The medium is the message and so the lightbulb is the medium because without it our culture would be very different.

Shakespeare is hard to understand, maybe that’s why he seems so deep..

In other words, cubism, by giving the inside and outside, the top, bottom, back, and front and the rest, in two dimensions, drops the illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole. Cubism, by seizing on instant total awareness, suddenly announced that the medium is the message.

 Cardinal Newman said of Napoleon, “He understood the grammar of gunpow-der.” Napoleon had paid some attention to other media as well, especially the semaphore telegraph that gave him a great advantage over his enemies. He is on record for saying that “Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thou-sand bayonets.”

Media has power, propaganda and nzi Germany used media to outcast jews.

 kind of massacre of the innocents. Instagram?

 “Their I.Q.’s were much higher than usual among political bosses. Why were they such a disaster?” The view of Rowse, Snow approves: “They would not listen to warnings because they did not wish to hear.” Being anti-Red made it impossible for them to read the mes-sage of Hitler. But their failure was as nothing compared to our present one. The American stake in literacy as a technology or uniformity applied to every level of education, government, industry, and social life is totally threatened by the electric technology. The threat of Stalin or Hitler was external. The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind, and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology, on and through which the American way of life was formed. It is, however, no time to suggest strategies when the threat has not even been acknowledged to exist.

Uhh ohhh……

The “content” of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech.

I experience this whenever a story is on even if it’s a kids one  I zone in on it and forget about world, I don’t notice any media w words and stuff

 Subliminal and docile acceptance of media impact has made them prisons without walls for their human users. As A. J. Liebling remarked in his book The Press, a man is not free if he cannot see where he is going

 The medium is the message

Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of greattechnological and cultural transitions. Our "Age of.Anxiety" is, in great part, the result of trying todo today's job with yesterday's tools-with yester-day's concepts.

 10" In the study of ideas, it is necessary to rememberthat insistence on hard-headed clarity issues fromsentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking theperplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at allcosts is based on sheer s u p e r s t i t i on as to t he modein which human intelligence functions. Our reason-ings grasp at straws for premises and float ongossamers for deductions."—A. N. Whitehead, "Adventures in Ideas."

The "child" was an invention of theseventeenth century; he did not existin, say, Shakespeare's day. He had, upuntil that time, been merged in theadult world and there was nothing thatcould be called childhood in our sense.

This feels v wrong to say how would they know???

Media, by altering the environment, evoke in usunique ratios of sense perceptions. The extensionof any one sense alters the way we think and act—the way we perceive the world.Whentheseratioschange,men change this be deep stuff kindda facts tho

 The discovery of the alphabet will create forget-fulness in the learners' souls, because they will notuse their memories; they will trust to the externalwritten characters and not remember of them-selves . .. Y ou give your disciples not truth but onlythe semblance of truth; they will be heroes of manythings, and will have learned nothing; they willappear to be omniscient and will generally knownothing."-Socrates, "Phaedrus"

Socrates was boss and there are some weird as images in this book..

  Ways of seeing John Berger

 Women troug the lens of dudes w the male gaze is next level. Its everywhere. I mean strip clubs exist. “offereing up her feminity as the surveyed..”

 Im glad there was example of legitimate nude painting where the female was naked and not nude. Nakedness being the natural state and nude being sexualised.

 Good docco made me question everything especially the lst bit..

Draft work:

Design for the Real World

Victor Papanek

  INTRO

Design for the real world is a book written by Victor Papanek about industrial design. In the book Victor Papanek calls out the design establishment for mass negligence and designing for the minority.

 The book is split into two parts the first titled “Like it is” which focuses on the at the time current design world of 1972 highlighting the inadequacies with business as usual. The second Part is titled “How it could be” and digs into specific design examples of what designing for the world instead of profit looks like and finishes with a projection of what the world could look like if designers starting practicing social design for the betterment of humanity.

 Victor Papanek, although a designer himself did not make it a secret that he did not think highly of the design world, especially industrial design as it was in the 1970’s.  He used the book to call out designers who are partaking in “Kleenex Culture” and had a “preoccupation with making things pretty”. This is very clear in chapter 8 after highlighting five myths that underly the current design profession as it was. Followed by 6 areas where design has not yet been focused and where social good would be inherent in the work of the designer. He then ends the chapter with “These are six possible directions in which the design profession not only can but must go if it is to do a worthwhile job. So far the designers have neither realised the challenge nor responded to it. So far the action of the profession has been comparable to what would happen if all medical doctors were to forsake general practice and surgery, and concentrate exclusively on dermatology and cosmetics.” (pg. 184) Sentences like this that very bluntly called out bad behaviours and sometimes even naming specific industry leaders who were promoting profit seeking design for the privileged are throughout the book. What effect this has on book

Modernism

  Sustainability and social responsibility Mana Toanga.

—the book joined a groundswell of important critiques of modernism and postwar excess in architecture, design, industry, and corporate America. https://www.metropolismag.com/ideas/rereading-design-for-the-real-world/

  Looked at the design world and didn’t really like what he saw.

“has been comparable to what would happen if all medical doctors were to forsake general practice and surgery, and concentrate exclusively on dermatology and cosmetics.” Before tree of knowledge

  How the design wrld reacted.

“Form follows function,” Louis Sullivan’s battle cry of the 1880’s and 1890’s, was followed by Frank Lloyd wright’s “form and function are one.” But semantically all the statements from horatio Greenough to the germn Bauhaus are meaningless. The concept that what works well will of necessity look well, has been a lame excuse for all the sterile, operating room like furniture and implements  of the twenties and thirties. A dining table of the period might have a top, well proportioned in glistening white marble, the legs carefully nurtured for maximum strength with minimum materials in gleaming stainless steel. And the first reaction on encountering such a table is to lie down on it and have your appendix extracted.

The function complex is introduced showing the dynamic actions and relationships that make up design.

[backtothestart02]

Wet Dream | Chapter 1 - Pilot

A/N: Alright, y’all, it’s finally here!!! My smut-by-ep fic has begun.

As previously decided on, this fic will detail a wet dream by either Barry or Iris from every episode of the series. The title of each episode is meant to dictate/guide the content of each chapter, however I completely forgot that for this first one, so I’m just going to go with ‘pilot’ being a default name for the first episode of every show and so this is the default chapter of this fic. I’m showing you how all future chaps will look - as wet dreams w/in the episodes - but it is different in that the word ‘pilot’ does not involve itself in this chapter at all, whereas all the other episode titles actually created for this specific show will. I hope you don’t mind! I didn’t want to do a rewrite, and I really like how this one turned out, so I’m keeping it as is. :P

*This chapter is dedicated to the dirty-minded ladies who initially inspired me to write this fic:  @kyannaj @megananomous @estherpixs  @westallen4everlove @pattongirl. I hope you guys like it!

*Many thanks to my awesome beta, @valeriemperez, for looking this over last minute. <3

Chapter 1 - Pilot (1x01)

He’d gotten on the earliest train he could from Starling City, which as luck would have it was the last possible train he could have taken to get back to Central City without Captain Singh calling to give him an earful. Just as he’d gotten off the train at the station, Joe texted – WHERE ARE YOU? Alarmed, he’d skimmed through any missed calls, of which there were seven. All from Joe. All telling him there was a crime scene to be at, and he couldn’t afford to be late again.

Not trusting any vehicle transportation to get him there faster than his own feet could, Barry ran to the scene of the crime, bumping into several people along the way and no doubt hitting them with the CSI briefcase he’d had to quickly grab at CCPD before heading over to where he’d been expected to be likely fifteen minutes prior.

And with no good excuse at that.

After some awkward bumbling and decisive reasoning though, his work there was done. The detectives could take over from there. His only task was to process some tests, form some logical reasoning, and then he’d be home free, ready to collect his things, meet up with Iris, and embark on the greatest journey of his life: his trip to STAR Labs to see the greatest mind in the 21st Century ignite the city with his particle accelerator firsthand.

But the tests were taking longer than expected, and he worried the ‘greatest journey of his life’ would have to be abandoned in favor of watching it all unfold as a news report from the protestors’ point of view on the ground.

He was supposed to have met Iris for lunch. He hadn’t seen her in several days – not since he left for Starling City – and he was aching to. There was something he wanted to tell her, and ask her too. Tonight wasn’t just going to be about seeing the greatest technology come to life right here in Central City, it would be about changing the course of his relationship with his best friend, Iris West.

It was a huge decision on his part, and one that was in the process of turning him into nothing but a bundle of nerves. But it was time. It had been fifteen years, and he hadn’t said a word. He’d justified why time and again, but he knew it had to be said. Iris had never been in a serious relationship in all their twenty-five years – he hadn’t either. That had to be a deliberate choice on her end, just like it had been on his. Maybe. Hopefully.

But as one hour turned into two, then three, as the computer tests struggled to get past 1% to three and then five, as the diagrams he drew and the pictures he pinned to the board gathered up, it became obvious his plan to meet up with Iris for lunch to discuss their evening activities – regarding both the particle accelerator and them – were going to have to be pushed aside until later.

His one attempt to sneak out of the lab to go see her had Joe shoving a bag of Big Belly Burger takeout food at his chest with a knowing look just before he turned back around to return to his desk on the first floor of the precinct. With a deep sigh, Barry held the delivery to his chest, set it down near the slow-running computer, and barely finished half his burger before starting to sulk again.

With greasy fingers, he texted Iris to tell her that he wouldn’t be able to meet for lunch, to which she responded with a sad face emoticon followed by a cheerful message indicating how just fine that would be, since her co-worker Stacy wanted to leave early and couldn’t find anyone to cover her shift.

Convenient, Barry thought to himself, wondering if she would have cancelled on him with this excuse if he hadn’t said anything anyway.

No, Barry, he scolded himself. She’s your best friend. She wouldn’t do that.

He sighed. “If she had no other choice, she would.” Just like he had no other choice now.

But just as he was about to succumb to full on negativity, to wonder if he was cursed somehow by today’s events, and that not seeing modern mankind’s greatest invention come to life was somehow proof that things were about to go even more downhill, the sound of clacking heels could be heard down the hall. The particular strut that accompanied them told him loud and clear who it was. Not Joe. Not Singh. Not an assistant to someone else giving him more paperwork to do. Iris.

His heart raced faster and he clumsily sat up in his chair, waiting for her arrival.

“You didn’t really think I’d let you skip out on our lunch date, did you?” She grinned as she walked into the room.

His heart skipped a beat. Butterflies fluttered wildly in his stomach. He smiled so wide it hurt, but he couldn’t help it, and he didn’t try to suppress it. He was used to that reaction when it came to seeing her – especially since it had been days, not hours, since their last interaction.

“I thought you were covering someone else’s shift.”

She stopped halfway to him abruptly and frowned. “I was. I am.”

The question lingered in his eyes.

She dropped her purse where she stood, closed the distance between them, and pulled him up out of his chair, keeping their fingers intertwined as she stared up into his eyes.

He was still semi-confused, but a smile twitched at the corner his lips. Confusion never stopped him from being happy with her, especially not when she was bubbling with happiness just being in the same room with him.

She rolled her eyes as his speechlessness continued.

“An eight-hour shift equals a lunch break, Barry.” She shook her head at him when he still said nothing. “So, I can afford to be here, even if my dad won’t let you leave.”

“Ah.” He nodded and smiled.

“I missed you,” she confided and took a step closer.

They were really close now. So much so that the lack of air between them stole his breath. And was it just him or was she…staring at his lips? And did she just…lick her lips as she stared? He licked his own lips – quickly, so as not to be noticed. His mouth was getting dry. The oxygen was being sucked out of the room. He was sure of it. There was no other explanation.

He thought of opening a window, but suddenly couldn’t remember if that was even possible. It had always felt at least mildly stuffy in this room for a reason.

“Aren’t you going to tell me you missed me, Barry?” she asked, setting her hands on his waist, still staring at his lips, sultry seduction in her eyes as they finally met his again.

“Iris?” he squeaked, tripping over his own feet as he backed away two steps.

She grabbed onto the collar of his shirt and pulled him to her, his lips now mere inches above hers.

He could barely breathe now, but he knew he was breathing because it was the only thing he could hear while being so close to her. He felt sweat on his forehead, on the back of his neck, and worried that it would drip onto her, and wow, wouldn’t that just add to his streak of bad luck today – but it didn’t, and he couldn’t look away.

“Tell me you missed me,” she whispered, her breath hot against his lips.

“I…”

And then she kissed him. A real kiss, full-on. Not gentle – fierce, passionate, intense. Iris knew what she wanted, and it was him. Despite the inevitability of it, it still took him by surprise, but he didn’t pull away. This could be a dream for all he knew. He’d had ones like it before. No way was he interrupting this one, especially if it happened to be real.

“God, I missed you, Barry,” she murmured, detaching her lips from his to kiss down his throat, winding her arms around his neck as she did.

He groaned, not needing the request again. “I missed you, too.”

His arms fell to her waist where they lightly rested until Iris’s complaint that his sweater was in the way made him pull back to rid himself of it. She peeled off her jacket and slid out of her skirt and shirt mere moments after so she was in front of him in only her bra and underwear.

His eyes widened, and he couldn’t look away. The sweat dripping down his neck was a reminder though that if this wasn’t a dream, someone could walk in at any moment. He licked his lips as he stared at her, trying to find his voice again, but it was nearly impossible.

“What – What if someone –” he squeaked and then broke off, heat consuming his face. He knew he had to be blushing.

But Iris only giggled and went to shut the door and lock it, giving him a full view of her barely covered ass swaying from side to side as she did so. By the time she’d turned around and was halfway to him, he’d almost fallen to the floor – Iris unhooking her bra and sliding it off her shoulders likely being the reason for that.

His hand reached around the nearby vicinity searching for a chair – any chair – but he could feel nothing but air. Iris laughed and pulled the very close by chair near them, but when he tried to sit on it, she wouldn’t let him.

“Iris,” he said in a strangled breath. There was hardly a scrap of clothes on her, and he reeeeally wanted to touch her. But he didn’t trust himself to. Not until he was sitting.

Iris went straight for his belt, unbuckling it and pulling it from the belt loops and dropping it without precedence on the floor. He gulped – loudly to his own ears, hopefully not to hers.

The sound of her unbuttoning his pants and lowering his zipper made him hiss softly. His fingers were tingling. He really needed his shirt off. Like, now. It was long-sleeved and it was gathering sweat and he was so much more dressed than she was. For some reason in this moment, he wasn���t insecure at all that she would find him so much less attractive than he found her. She wasn’t giving him even the slightest indication that was a possibility.

She started to tug his pants down, and he could’ve sworn her own hands were shaking a bit.

“You better be hard for me, Barry Allen, or I swear—”

She stopped and grinned slowly as her hand wrapped around the bulge in his boxers.

He groaned loudly, a sharp intake of breath the only sound accompanying her slowly, torturously, dragging his underwear to his feet on the floor. Her raven hair brushed his thighs – and his hard, very prominent member – as she did so.

“Oh my God, Iris.”

“Barry,” she said, her breath on his dick, forcing his eyes back on her because it was happening. She was doing it. His eyes stayed glued to hers. He couldn’t speak, wasn’t sure he was breathing, but then her lips closed over his tip, her mouth moved up the length of him, and he knew right there, right then, that he needed a chair.

His hands fisted in her hair, guiding her – though she hardly needed it – and also trying to slow her down.

“I need – I need – ”

She pulled her head back, saliva dripping from her lips that she quickly wiped away with the back of her hand.

“You better not be coming already, Barry.”

He shook his head quickly. “No – No – Not.”

“Good.” She smiled and started to lower her head again.

“Chair,” he squeezed out with stifled breath just before her tongue touched his skin.

She halted her descent, looked up at him and smiled, her eyes twinkling.

“Going to fall over, Bear?”

He exhaled loudly in relief. Yes. Finally, she had gotten the message.

“Uh-huh.” He nodded quickly so there’d be no miscommunication.

Still grinning, Iris got to her feet, picked up the nearby chair and set it just behind him and then forced him down into it. She bent over and kissed his lips again, all passion and no hesitation, just like before. She unbuttoned his shirt as she did so and stripped him of it as soon as she had reached the hem.

Then she straddled his lap and kissed him again, delving her tongue into his mouth as she wound her fingers through his hair, driving him crazy with lust and desire and urgency.

“Irisss,” he slurred, needing more of her, needing everything.

His hand settled on her ass, the sole part of her that was covered, and in response she ground herself against his dick, making them both cry out in pleasure.

This was so surreal – too surreal? He thought for a moment and then dismissed it. No way. This was too good, felt too real to be a dream. He couldn’t remember a dream ever being this good.

“You feel so damn good, Barry,” she moaned as she ground harder, gasping when his hand squeezed her ass and forced her to move faster.

He could do nothing but breathe and wait for her to initiate the final step.

“I want you to cum inside me,” she said, her lips brushing his sweaty neck.

He halted his movements, and so did she.

“What?” he asked – no squeak, just genuine uncertainty.

“I’m on the pill,” she said, pulling back just a little to look at him. “Don’t worry.”

His brain started to short circuit. She was on the pill? Did that mean she was seeing someone? Sleeping with someone? Was she cheating on that person with him now? Shouldn’t he feel much more concerned about that? That was a bad thing. It was bad – right?

But Iris didn’t let him come to any solid conclusions. Instead, she set her feet on the floor, got back up and backed away enough to slip her fingers beneath her waistband and drag her silky underwear to the floor.

Then she came back to him and held herself in mid-air, just above where his erection stood at attention, waiting for her.

“Don’t worry, Barry,” she whispered, her lips inches from his mouth. “You won’t get me pregnant.”

And then she was lowering herself onto him, and they were both groaning until the moment he reached the very hilt of her core.

Then they waited, adjusting – which was not something that was necessary in a dream, right?

And then she moved.

She raised herself up and then down again. She alternated between the rise and fall and the grinding against him. Her moist forehead pressed to his, her murmurs of his name, the heavy breathing between both of them, Barry couldn’t remember feeling more alive or more totally and completely so overwhelmed.

Her skin was soft and slick. Her ass felt good in his hands and her breasts tasted amazing in his mouth. Her hair brushing his skin both tickled and caressed. Her thighs gripping his nearly sent him into oblivion every time they squeezed with her rise and fall. The pressure was amazing.

And then he heard it – ding!

The first time it was just background noise, drowned out by the essence of Iris and what they were doing.

The second and third time nearly came in unison.

By time number four through ten, Barry had to force his eyes open because it was loud and annoying, and in the back of his mind it alerted him to danger.

He wished he hadn’t. More than anything on this earth, he wished he hadn’t.

Because when his eyes opened he found himself sitting on the chair at his desk, the only proof of his encounter with Iris the uncomfortable bulge in his pants and the sweat dripping down the back of his neck and forming on his forehead.

His arm – the source of the sound – had been pressed hard into the keyboard and had been starting and stopping the tests he’d been waiting on to finish for nearly an hour now. He lifted it quickly, but the damage had been done. Too many commands had been accidentally entered. The computer froze, not answering to any keyboard or mouse functions he tried.

It was no use. He had to reboot the computer and start over.

In the minute or two it took to reboot the system and re-start the tests, Barry heard a ping from his phone. A text.

From Iris.

Forcing himself to think past the wet dream he’d just had of her, he opened the message.

Turns out a full shift equals a lunch break! Want me to come by?

He laughed and groaned simultaneously, dragging a hand down his face before responding.

Nah, that’s okay. Come by later.

Her sad face emoticon, followed by a you sure? was almost enough to change his mind, but one glance back to the bulge in his pants firmly kept his decision grounded.

Yep. I’ll see you later.

It was a full minute until she responded again, and he worried he’d hurt her feelings.

He needn’t have worried.

Can’t wait! :D

He draped a hand over his eyes and leaned back in his chair, deciding to respond to that later, if at all.

“Me either,” he grumbled, his mind on the question of whether he could successfully make it to the bathroom to rid himself of blue balls without anyone seeing him.

She didn’t tell you how she felt, he realized, thinking back to the beginning of his dream. She would’ve told you that.

He glanced over at his turned over phone and reached for it. After a moment’s hesitation, he responded.

Me either. :)

Missed you came after he’d barely pressed send. He ignored the flashes of what had followed that sentiment in his dream.

Missed you too.

She sent a picture of her blowing a kiss to him from where she stood behind the counter at CC Jitters, a curious co-worker photobombing in the back.

His heart skipped a beat as it had earlier, a smile helplessly spreading across his face.

I love you.

*Also posted on AO3 and FFnet.

[maritzaerwin]

14 Common Interview Questions with Actionable Answers

While you can never guarantee what questions you are going to get at an interview, there is a number that you are most likely to turn up. Preparing yourself to answer these questions will also inspire you for similar questions but be ready for the outside-the-box strange question that many businesses now use!

Don’t feel like reading? Listen to the article instead!

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The key to nailing the popular interview questions is pretty simple: understand the intention behind them. Every question the interviewer poses is aimed at yanking some key information from you regarding your personality, cultural fit, skills, and career progression. Your goal is to serve them just that, plus use your answer to tout some more curious bits of your professional life.

PRO TIP:

The interviewer will want to get to know all they can about you during the interview, so prepare a summary about yourself and why you have chosen this career and be prepared to back up your answers with solid examples.

Melony Botha HR Consultant London, United Kingdom

  Now, keeping that in mind, let’s move on to the list of common interview questions, paired with sharp and on-point tips for answering them!

1. Please, Tell Me About Yourself

This is one of those interview questions you’ll get 99 out 100 times. Considering its popularity, we even wrote an entirely separate post on how to answer the “tell me about yourself” question.

Here’s a quick recap:

Start with a quick, professional summary — a one-liner summarizing your key ‘selling points’ and background.

Highlight your core technical skills and areas of expertise.

Wrap it up by saying why you are interested in this new position/company.

Here’s a sample answer to the “tell me about yourself” question:

“I’m an experienced Regional Sales Manager with 6 years of experience in CRM software sales to Fortune 500 companies. I have deep familiarity with lead scoring and Salesforce software and strong people’s skills that helped me close over $1.5 million in sales last year and win the Top Regional Manager award. Although I love my current position, I feel ready for another challenge and would love to apply my skills in the new market that your company’s pursuing.”

If the interviewer then asks “to tell some more about yourself”, bring up some more details that are relevant, but didn’t make it to the final cut of your resume. Because your resume only contains the basics, add in more information about a skill or some situation that may demonstrate your expertise in the area.

2. What Is Your Experience In This Field?

Talk about the jobs you have held but also elements within it – tools or software used, industry events you’ve attended, as well as some specific projects that you have worked on. Mention some of your key accomplishments, backed by data if possible, to further demonstrate your industry knowledge.

Career changers and recent graduates are the most likely to receive this question. If that’s your case, keep the focus on your education and passion for the field, rather than past work expertise. Mention the courses you’ve taken or brought up some recent commentary on the industry events, demonstrating that you are aware of how things work in the field.

3. Why Do You Want to Work Here?

Focus on the main aspects of the job and why this appeals to you. It might be a chance to learn new technology, work in a new environment, or work on a specific type of project. Or focus on that it is a natural extension of your skills or experience and the best step on your career path.

Read more about how to answer the ‘why do you want to work here’ interview question using our 5-step formula.

4. What are Your Reasons for Leaving a Job?

Be positive and be honest when talking about your reasons for leaving your last job. Focus on the positive reasons for changing jobs such as looking for a new challenge or a lack of career growth in your old job. Perhaps you were a victim of restructuring or the company has relocated, these are also legitimate reasons.

However, at all costs avoid badmouthing your former employer, boss, or colleagues! Even if you still have some hard feelings towards either of these people, don’t show them to the interviewer.

Also, try to turn the negative part of your leaving into a positive one. Reference the good parts of your former job and address any potential shortcomings at your end. For instance, if you were terminated due to the lack of some essential skills, mention that while the company didn’t provide any on-the-job training, you later mastered this skill on your own.

5. Why Were You Fired?

This question may seem scary, but don’t fret too much over it. The intention behind it is to learn where the problem was and if you contributed to it in some way.

So again, be honest and forthcoming. Shortly explain the reason for being fired, address your shortcomings (if there were any), and move on to talking about what you’ve learned from this experience.

6. Why Are You Interested in This Position?

This question is your prime opportunity to showcase your enthusiasm and showcase how your skills and experience can positively contribute to the organization.

The easiest way to answer this question is to use the following three-step framework:

Demonstrate your eagerness for the job

Indicate how your experience and skills match the role

Make a connection with your desired career trajectory.

Here’s a sample answer:

“Your company places a great emphasis on user experience and that can be seen in every aspect of your web app and website. I know that the company’s mission is to create more responsive and inclusive web and that is something I care about too. In your job description, you’ve mentioned that you encourage your team members to contribute wherever the interests take them and I’d be really interested in combing my branding knowledge and UX skills to create a more unified experience for users across all digital channels, and my knack for writing could be further applied towards building a more intentional UX writing process. Starting this practice in my last position has reduced our design timeline by 15%. In fact, I’d be really interested in further growing professionally in UX writing and scaling this practice in your organization — something that works well in SaaS, but unfortunately isn’t a priority for most financial companies.” 

Last tip: focus on the career benefits of the job rather than financial aspects or benefits.

7. What Do You Know About This Company?

This question is similar to the previous one, but in this case, you have to place a greater focus on why this industry and employer interests you that much.

Do a little research into the company beforehand so you know its background, its core values, mission, current focus, or general direction. Then incorporate some of the points into your answer. Again, try to ‘connect the dots’ and show how your skills and experiences align with this particular company and role.

8. What Challenges Are You Looking For From This Job?

Remember the job description and the key duties/requirements of the candidates. Then pick one specific point and explain what exactly you’d like to achieve.

For example, the job description says that “you’ll need strong organizational skills to manage multi-million dollar budgets for marketing projects”. 

You can take that part and mention that for a long time you’ve been seeking extra leadership opportunities and would love to work more as a team to realize your past successes at a larger scale.

In essence, this question prompts you to discuss your career goals so that the employer could understand your expectations, ambitions, and desired career trajectory.

9. What Kind Of Goals And Objectives Do You Have For Your Career?

This interview question is similar to number 6 on this list and you should approach it in a similar fashion. Your answer should be orientated towards the employer, what benefits them, and how you can be instrumental in achieving those goals.

10. Would You Relocate Or Be Willing To Travel?

The point of asking this interview question is to gauge your flexibility, but also practicality. Some jobs may require extended periods of on-site work at customers’ locations – something that may interfere with your work-life balance or family relationships.

Relocation is a major move that not every person is ready to take. After all, your spouse may be happy with their current position and refuse the move. Anyhow, be honest and mention your availability for travel and feelings toward full relocation.

11. What Salary Are You Seeking?

Ah, the money talks. Money-related interview questions are always tricky. On one hand, you don’t want to lowball your offer. On the other, you don’t want to appear as someone with unrealistic expectations.

When asking this question during the interview (not the job offer part), most HRs just want to make sure that you understand the potential compensation range.  Negotiating the salary package happens after the job is offered so simply state a salary range within what is mentioned in the job advert.

If there was none, do some research for similar roles on Glassdoor and PayScale to get a good median range estimate.

12. What’s The Most Difficult Situation You Have Faced And How Did You Handle It?

This is one of the most common behavioral interview questions you can get. The interviewer’s goal here is to assess your personality traits and interpersonal skills. The best way to answer this is to provide a quick example from your job.

Tell a quick story showing how you were in a stressful situation but managed to recover quickly, identify the problem, take the right course of action, and succeed. For example:

“Once, our baggage was delayed when we were traveling to the trade show. Our booth decor, posters, and corporate swag were scheduled to arrive a day after the show began. Since it was a crucial event for our company, I contacted the organizers immediately and negotiated that they provided us with another flat screen. Also, I asked the junior manager to purchase a projector, while the rest of the team, including myself, worked overnight to create a new digital presentation of our products and a set of downloadable promo materials that could be downloaded via a QR code scan.  Despite the setback, we still managed to attract good traffic to our booth and sign up 20% more leads than usual”.  

13. What Are Your Strengths and Weaknesses?

This tricky question goes as number thirteen deliberately as it’s the one place where a lot of candidates chock. Some downplay their strengths. Others get too hung up on appearing all flawless.

When posting this question the recruiter wants to accomplish several things:

Assess your levels of self-awareness

Check your honesty

Verify for any major red flags

Use this question as an opportunity to highlight what you’ve learned and addressed some of the challenges (your weaknesses) that you had to overcome in the past or things that you are proactively working on right now.

P.S. Read more tips for answering “What Are Your Weaknesses And Strengths?” interview question.

14. Why Should We Hire You?

The inevitable pinnacle to all the interview questions is why should we hire you. Don’t get intimidated by it. Instead, use it as a welcome opportunity to deliver a winning sales pitch to the hiring manager.

To deliver the best answer, focus on the next three things:

Your ability to get the work done thanks to your skills

The great successes you’ve had in the past and can replicate at the new company

Your cultural fit and enthusiasm

Here’s how all of the above can be framed in a quick answer:

“In my last position as a restaurant manager, I managed to reduce the budget waste by 25% while also raising the customer’s rating of the venue thanks to proactive mentorship work with the staff. Thanks to the exceptional levels of service, the venue received a 5-star rating from Culinary Escapades magazine and I still keep close contact with the restaurant critic, so I’d be happy to invite them over to your venue, too. Lastly, I know that organic, fair-trade ingredients are a major selling point of your restaurant, as a vegan myself, I’m always on the lookout for new  suppliers and would be happy to share my contacts.”

PRO TIP:

Prepare answers to the Interview questions listed on the site to help you feel prepared and will help the interview conversation flow at a nice pace. If the interviewer asks a question you aren’t prepared for, ask for a couple minutes to gather your thoughts by stating “That’s a great question. Let me give it some thought for a moment.

Brenda S. Meyer Certified Senior HR Consultant Arizona, United States

  Every job interview can go one way or another. But no matter which questions you get asked, remember this: be honest, polite and keep your answer on-point. Talk more about what you can do for the employer and how you can be of help, rather than merely reciting all the things you know how to do.

Lastly, remember: you’ve got it!

This article has been originally published on Nov 9, 2016 and has been extensively revised and updated on July 30, 2020.

The post 14 Common Interview Questions with Actionable Answers appeared first on Freesumes.com.

14 Common Interview Questions with Actionable Answers published first on https://skillsireweb.tumblr.com/

[neuelib]

MAY DAY POETRY PICKS

From the confines of a cramped rented room along the rhythms of machines growling. As statistics, as slaves, as ants, as lazy sloths. Our May Day Poetry Picks: poetry by and about the working class.

1. Ruminating life and death from a cramped rented room

Walking along the thin line separating life from death is Xu Lizhi’s poem titled “Rented Room”. Xu worked for Foxconn, a technology company based in Shezhen, China, one of the major producers of Apple’s iPhone. In 2014, the migrant worker took his life jumping out of his dorm window, one of the numerous suicide attempts by Chinese factory workers struggling with harsh workplace conditions while barely making ends meet. 

The poem below was among those collected by his friends and published in the Shenzhen Evening News posthumously. It was translated through the Nào project.

出租屋 Rented Room

by Xu Lizhi

十平米左右的空间 A space of ten square meters

局促，潮湿，终年不见天日 Cramped and damp, no sunlight all year

我在这里吃饭，睡觉，拉屎，思考 Here I eat, sleep, shit, and think

咳嗽，偏头痛，生老，病不死 Cough, get headaches, grow old, get sick but still fail to die

昏黄的灯光下我一再发呆，傻笑 Under the dull yellow light again I stare blankly, chuckling like an idiot

来回踱步，低声唱歌，阅读，写诗 I pace back and forth, singing softly, reading, writing poems

每当我打开窗户或者柴门 Every time I open the window or the wicker gate

我都像一位死者 I seem like a dead man

把棺材盖，缓缓推开 Slowly pushing open the lid of a coffin.

2. Cutting the bullshit 

Capturing the essential bullshit of all tedious, repetitive work, Jim Waters’ nihilistic take on the mundanity of work contains more numbness than anger. Statistics was originally published in Poems for Workers, an anthology showcasing poems for working class readers.

Statistics

by Jim Waters

I'm tired of listening to sun-shine talk, This pie-in-the-sky stuff, This travesty on patient toil;

Let the Jesus-screamers, The open-shop artists, And their ilk. . . Hook their fat necks over a flying emery wheel For. . . . eight. . . . long. . . . hours; And to the beat and whir of machinery,

                            Chant this:

"I work to get money to buy food to get strong, So I can work to get money to buy food and get strong.". . . Then, maybe, they will understand Why the church pews are empty,  And men die for unionism.

3. Commuting from work in the rough hours

Ratri Ninditya’s poem “Ursula” is a raw, candid sensory journal of a coming-home-from-work trip any "poor, unfortunate soul” from and around Jakarta would deem familiar. We can almost feel the sweat dripping.

Read more from Ninin in her 2019 poetry book, Rusunothing.

Ursula

by Ratri Ninditya

di pinggir sudirman kau punguti kecoa-kecoa setengah matang. koyo berlubang sudah menempel di lehermu 1 minggu, dan kamu selalu tertidur di 76 dengan kepala tertempel di dada.

mau pergi ke mana, bu?

jalan raya beraroma minyak goreng, hujan asam, keringat sales unicef pantang menyerah. pernahkah tusuk gigi bekas siomay nyangkut di rambutmu karena dilempar orang dari atas jembatan? aku pernah. selokan itu tak pernah melaju lebih cepat. semacet malam jumat. mengalir di dalamnya wajah-wajah yang terlupakan, belum sempat diterimakasihkan.

mereka yang reyot sebelum kehidupannya sendiri dimulai. those poor unfortunate souls. this poor unfortunate soul. kita jadi tikus-tikus yang malu dengan jembrewi sendiri. makan, olah raga, makan lagi, lalu mati.

tubuhmu terbungkus botol plastik. transparan dan statik.

4. Marking inequalities and stark contrasts—with dignity

Contrasting one worker-related experience to another with prowess, Ernest Jones points at how workers are considered fitting for growing food and undeserving to eat them, how it is acceptable for them to make clothes and to not afford wearing them. This work is powerful as it captures Jones standing on his dignity through a declaration of his principles—”too low to vote the tax, too low to touch the spoil, but not to pay and kill the foe.” “The Song of the Classes” sings like a chant, emphasising on the burdens and expectations put upon workers with so much taken away from them to the point that they appear to deserve nothing. 

Jones was a working-class male suffrage leader who was imprisoned in 1848 for his seditious speeches. This poem is also available in the Poems for Workers anthology. 

The Song of the Classes

by Ernest Jones

We plough and sow—we're so very, very low        That we delve in the dirty clay, Till we bless the plain—with the golden grain,        And the vale with the fragrant hay. Our place we know—we're so very low.         'Tis down at the landlord's feet: We're not too low—the bread to grow,         But too low the bread to eat.

Down, down we go—we're so very, very low,         To the hell of the deep sunk mines, But we gather the proudest gems that glow         Where the crown of a despot shines. And whenever he lacks,—upon our backs         Fresh loads he deigns to lay: We're far too low to vote the tax,         But not too low to pay.

We're low—we're low—mere rabble, we know,       But at our plastic power The mould at the lordlings’ feet will grow       Into palace and church and tower Then prostrate fall—in the rich man's hall,        And cringe at the rich man's door: We're not too low to build the wall,         But too low to tread the floor.

We're low—we're low—we're very, very low,      Yet from our fingers glide The silken flow—and the robes that glow       Round the limbs of the sons of pride. And what we get—and what we give—      We know, and we know our share: We're not too low the cloth to weave,        But too low the cloth to wear.

We're low—we're low—we're very, very low,     And yet when the trumpets ring, The thrust of a poor man's arm will go      Through the heart of the proudest king. We're low—we're low—our place we know     We're only the rank and file, We're not too low to kill the foe,        But too low to touch the spoil.

5. Confronting the pains of physical work in the intimate exchange between humans and machines

The ramifications of capitalist exploitation are real and most of the time physical. Through this poem, Xu Lizhi creates a narrative on work using the body—both workers’ and machines’—as a starting point. 

On each line, as machines go to sleep, emotions disappear into dust, stomachs turn hard as iron, ore separating machines peel the skin, we witness a total, brutal, industrialist catastrophe involving the human body and machines, where it becomes hard to tell which from which.

最后的墓地 The Last Graveyard

by Xu Lizhi

机台的鸣叫也打着瞌睡 Even the machine is nodding off

密封的车间贮藏疾病的铁 Sealed workshops store diseased iron

薪资隐藏在窗帘后面 Wages concealed behind curtains

仿似年轻打工者深埋于心底的爱情 Like the love that young workers bury at the bottom of their hearts

没有时间开口，情感徒留灰尘 With no time for expression, emotion crumbles into dust

他们有着铁打的胃 They have stomachs forged of iron

盛满浓稠的硫酸，硝酸 Full of thick acid, sulfuric and nitric

工业向他们收缴来不及流出的泪 Industry captures their tears before they have the chance to fall

时辰走过，他们清醒全无 Time flows by, their heads lost in fog

产量压低了年龄，疼痛在日夜加班 Output weighs down their age, pain works overtime day and night

还未老去的头晕潜伏���命 In their lives, dizziness before their time is latent

皮肤被治具强迫褪去 The jig forces the skin to peel

顺手镀上一层铝合金 And while it's at it, plates on a layer of aluminum alloy

有人还在坚持着，有人含病离去 Some still endure, while others are taken by illness

我在他们中间打盹，留守青春的 I am dozing between them, guarding

最后一块墓地 The last graveyard of our youth.

6. Exploring surrealist cities (and selves)

Originally appeared in Subbed In, Bullen’s "City Exchange” set in Birraranga (Melbourne, Australia) is a surreal encounter with the city, without the self. 

City Exchange

by Brianna Bullen

I order my eyes off Amazon, my spine off eBay and a cochlear implant straight from Coles. Falling apart in reverse has never been so seamless. We talk about moving to the city (permanently, in parenthesis: city as a homogenous w/hole because we can’t see the specific suburbs yet) but it’s crumbling in its own catharsis, a release from structure and history. I’m nostalgic, neurotic and in the process of learning semiotics, signifying nothing and searching for home and meaning in a postcard, the latest neurochemical upgrade and failed relationship. The advertisement on the high-rise for GMHBA glitches to a teaser trailer flickers to Coca-Cola: the duality of (hu)man. I take The Frankston line between Southern Cross and Flinders train rides my liminal stage where I can watch people yawn in the latest fashion and flick through a book page or two on the commute which won’t be remembered. I turn twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five Body machine the old biological clock running in analogue and cellular death. Not a teenager, or a young adult: am I a human yet? I now feel the cynicism I only used to perform now too apathetic to bother expressing the dissatisfaction in vogue. I flicker in industrial space, vague.

7.  Condemning dreadful nine-to-five jobs

Disclaimer: It is never 9 to 5.

Letter to John Martin (1986)

by Charles Bukowski

August 12, 1986

Hello John:

Thanks for the good letter. I don’t think it hurts, sometimes, to remember where you came from. You know the places where I came from. Even the people who try to write about that or make films about it, they don’t get it right. They call it “9 to 5.” It’s never 9 to 5, there’s no free lunch break at those places, in fact, at many of them in order to keep your job you don’t take lunch. Then there’sovertime and the books never seem to get the overtime right and if you complain about that, there’s another sucker to take your place.

You know my old saying, “Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.”

And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don’t want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.

As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can’t believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did?

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: “Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?”

They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.

Now in industry, there are vast layoffs (steel mills dead, technical changes in other factors of the work place). They are layed off by the hundreds of thousands and their faces are stunned:

“I put in 35 years…”

“It ain’t right…”

“I don’t know what to do…”

They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn’t they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait?

I just wrote in disgust against it all, it was a relief to get the shit out of my system. And now that I’m here, a so-called professional writer, after giving the first 50 years away, I’ve found out that there are other disgusts beyond the system.

I remember once, working as a packer in this lighting fixture company, one of the packers suddenly said: “I’ll never be free!”

One of the bosses was walking by (his name was Morrie) and he let out this delicious cackle of a laugh, enjoying the fact that this fellow was trapped for life.

So, the luck I finally had in getting out of those places, no matter how long it took, has given me a kind of joy, the jolly joy of the miracle. I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I can no longer tell a bluebird from a paperclip, I still feel that something in me is going to remember (no matter how far I’m gone) how I’ve come through the murder and the mess and the moil, to at least a generous way to die.

To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.

yr boy,

Hank

An audio version is available here.

8. Asking difficult working class questions

From one of our favorite poets Gratiagusti Chananya Rompas is this poem asking difficult, working class questions. Set at a metropolitan mall, Anya describes the whole consumerist brouhaha as she verbalises the personal terror of discomfort lurking in the everyday.

Berada di Sebuah Mall Pada Suatu Akhir Pekan

by Gratiagusti Chananya Rompas

kadang aku perlu beberapa detik untuk memutuskan eskalator berjalan atau berhenti aku tak mengerti orang orang di depan dan di belakangku ingin pergi ke mana mereka berbaris berseliweran mendorong bayi bayi mereka di dalam stroller atau mengejar anak anak mereka yang sudah pandai berlari aku menggandeng anakku tangannya kecil dan lembut menuntunku membelah lautan orang orang yang tak kukenal itu

kadang orang orang diam tetapi suara mereka tumpang tindih dengan suaraku sendiri kadang orang orang begitu banyak bicara tapi aku tak mengerti apa yang mereka katakan beli selusin donat dapat potongan setengah harga kalau beli selusin donat? siapa yang akan makan begitu banyak donat di rumah? beli satu set alat masak dapat diskon 25% kalau punya kartu kredit dari sebuah bank tapi aku hanya perlu centong? beli semangkuk nasi daging lengkap dengan minum bisa beli boneka seharga 75 ribu? apa hubungan antara makan siang dan boneka? beli frozen yogurt small dapat 1 topping, medium dapat 3 topping, tapi large dapat 3 topping juga? beli makanan dengan kartu anggota bisa dapat satu makanan gratis tapi harus top up dulu tidak bisa pisah bill? yang gratis bisa yang paling mahal mbak?

anakku sayang, tolong antar mama keluar dari sini

dan di dalam mobil dalam perjalanan pulang mobil ini bergabung dengan mobil mobil lain seperti gorong gorong yang mampat

aku harus berkedip dua kali karena aku merasa permukaan jalan di jalur sebelah yang masih kosong terlihat mengalir seperti sungai yang airnya hitam.

9. At last—embracing rage

What’s a May Day poetry list without the angry verses? In “Canned”, Jim Waters exclaims in great fury a slogan we can all relate with—to hell with you!

Canned

by Jim Waters

          To hell with you!

          You ain't the whole earth, 

          Not by a damn sight!

You sneak around shaking your fat paunch shouting: "I'm losing money . . . hurry-up . . . pull-out. . . "Step-on-it!" . . , and you "can" anybody that talks back. I've seen your kind before—always losing money—Riding in limousines, showing off on the golf links, And talking open shop at the Union Club.

On Sunday you go to church and tell everybody What a nice employer you are. . . On Monday you go blue in the face cursing your men.

          You can't bull-doze me!

          To hell with youl

          You ain't the whole earth, Not by a damn sight!

Bonus poems

We’ve added four poems to this post that were not included on our Instagram version of May Day Poetry Picks. “Self Inquiry before the Job Interview” by Gary Soto, “Coal Deliveryman” by Ramón Cote Baraibar, and ultimately another work from Xu Lizhi, “I Swallowed An Iron Moon”, just because.

10. Self-Inquiry before the Job Interview

by Gary Soto

Did you sneeze? Yes, I rid myself of the imposter inside me. Did you iron your shirt? Yes, I used the steam of mother's hate. Did you wash your hands? Yes, I learned my hygiene from a raccoon. I prayed on my knees, and my knees answered with pain. I gargled. I polished my shoes until I saw who I was. I inflated my résumé by employing my middle name. I walked to my interview, early, The sun like a ring on an electric stove. I patted my hair when I entered the wind of a revolving door. The guard said, For a guy like you, it's the 19th floor. The economy was up. Flags whipped in every city plaza In America. This I saw for myself as I rode the elevator, Empty because everyone had a job but me. Did you clean your ears? Yes, I heard my fate in the drinking fountain's idiotic drivel. Did you slice a banana into your daily mush? I added a pinch of salt, two raisins to sweeten my breath. Did you remember your pen? I remembered my fingers when the elevator opened. I shook hands that dripped like a dirty sea. I found a chair and desk. My name tag said my name. Through the glass ceiling, I saw the heavy rumps of CEOs. Outside my window, the sun was a burning stove, All of us pushing papers To keep it going.

11. Coal Deliveryman

by Ramón Cote Baraibar

translated by Craig Arnold

Like finding a bar of aluminum wedged in a bull’s jaw. Like discovering in a sea chest a short obsidian head. Like looking through a padlock   and seeing an undeserved dawn. As impossible as all these, as melancholy and lonely, was it to see the green truck that with the punctuality   of a sacrament delivered the coal each month. On the slope its strained   heart would announce itself vociferously, at the brink of death, and it   would stop in front of the house as if to deliver the agonizing news of   the fall of Troy. And then a man, wrapped in sacking, would pitch   his cargo, resonant and angular, into an orange-painted crate.

Like opening a Bible and finding three leaves of laurel. Like lifting   a stone and remembering someone’s name. Like finding the same   snail again a hundred miles away. As impossible as all these, as melancholy and lonely, would it be to find, fifteen years later, the same coal    deliveryman carrying on his trade, bent from the strain, determined   to show the heavens that a man might do that job his entire life, that   he scraped in the mines, that he stole thread from his wife to sew his   sacking, that he dreamed of infinite excavations, of tunnels, and that   they might forgive him for not having done more than that.

12. I Swallowed An Iron Moon

by Xu Lizhi

I swallowed an iron moon

they called it a screw

I swallowed industrial wastewater and unemployment forms

bent over machines, our youth died young

I swallowed labour, I swallowed poverty

swallowed pedestrian bridges, swallowed this rusted-out life

I can’t swallow any more

everything I’ve swallowed roils up in my throat

I spread across my country

a poem of shame

[aiethflx-blog]

We are in the generation where childrens are more smarter in terms of using gadgets or technology.

1970's is the start of computer age, digital age or new media age. Technology helps people to search, ascertain things which leads to development of someone's ability, skills, talents, mind through different social media platforms or apps for different technologies. There is youtube, in which there are free tutorial of anything you wanted to know since then and building your self confidence through making vlogs. There is google, if you want to know something even the symptomps of diseases and etc. in text version. There is messenger & facebook for practicing your social skills. Technology helps in making arduous tasks effortless and smooth, in just one click of your finger you can get what you want without having sweat all over your body. Technology has helped create the information revolution. On the other hand, it is also bad for the health of humans because some, don't eat for games. They forgot to eat and intentionally didn't ate because gadgets has their focus and attention. Also radiation that can be get from it which can cause cancer to humans.

As the quote says, all excess is bad.

So, is technology bad? Go on and read 'til the end.

This generation is so tech-savvy. It is nice knowing that people do know what gadgets are and how to use it but the matter is, even though a child is 4-5 year old, he knows or even masters using it. Children supposed to or should enjoy their childhood playing hide and seek/ice water/jump over the cow and other street games, playing with their friends, spending time with their family which makes kids genuinely happy but sadly, some are eaten by technology. When a baby shed tears, activated their built-in microphones in their mouth, throwing things because they don't want it, parents grabs slippers, hanger, belts, hard wood sticks and anything that they first see as a substitute for whip but now, parents hands cellphone to them for the sake of quietness and peace. Teachers are not comfortable or habituated in using powerpoints & other teacher aids using technology. They even ask students about it, in the end they use ordinary type of teaching wherein the tools are manila paper, marker, board and chalk. Elders, before, used to talk to each other more often and spend their time talking to one another face to face and not only face timing. Humans used to drink coffee while reading a newspaper or listening to radios. Humans now, can't live without cellphone. Even in the comfort room, even when eating, even in serious moments or worse is using gadgets 24/7. Simply, technology and gadgets are indispensable in human life. All I can ask is when will things go back to its origin?

When...

When was the last time you wrote a letter for your love?

When was the last time writers wrote using type writers?

When was the last time you spend your time eating with your family with the cold wind without using gadgets?

When was the last time children used to play outdoor games?

When was the last time entertainment comes from sports, boardgames, watching movies?

When was the last time you had your life simple yet genuinely happy?

W h e n ?

As the technology evolve, the way of living evolves too.

Life is two faced. If you have seen the other side & judged it quickly, you are doing it wrong. Let us peel the cover of technology. I have mentioned the effects of overusing technology in everyday basis of human life but I also did said the good effects of technology. Come with me as we continuously discovering each and every side of technology.

Technology makes life easier.

One example of that is the computer itself. Computer back then was named as ENIAC and was done on 1946. We can say that ENIAC is part of technology because basically it is computer but still it is not easy to use. You can use it by walking and standing, you should follow many rules in order to operate it. Years passed, the evolution of computers has made. Today's computer is easier.

Another benefit of technology is about medicine. Since human was made, even our ancestors lack of resourced when it comes to medicines. That's why when a person got sick, diseases or cancers they easily die because no equipment surround them. All they have and they can afford is herbal medicines and some equipment that aren't enough for their sickness. Luckily, we, the millennials and generation Z were born in the age of modernization. It is easy to cure cancers because machine for diseases are already in our hands. Technology also paved a way for the rise of science discovery. Scientist now has the actual pictures of galaxy, planets, moon, asteroids and other heavenly bodies. Astronaut can personally see and admire the beauty of God's creation, not only in painting but astronaut can't experience that without the use transportation.

Transportation is also part of technology, transportation is now easy. Back then, Filipinos use Kalesa for travelling but now, we have jeeps, motorcycles, cars. Through transporation we can get what we want because it is used for delivery. Business also can be done through transporation. We can ride other's car because of transportation app or what we call "grab" and etc. Businesses can be done everywhere. Robots, they are part of it. Google play is also an example. Ask what you want to ask, command what you want to command because it controls your house.

But there are questions running in my mind...

Is anyone from ancient times would have thought that super advanced technology will happen?

Do modern world makes you happy or ancient time where you live simple makes you satisfied?

If today, some are eaten by technology, how much if more centuries will come? How advance do the world will be?

On the other hand, technology won't exist if there's no God behind it. Who gave humans intelligence to make what has been made?

G O D

Technology is made for a purpose,

To enlighten one's mind

Not to destroy someone's mind.

Not to destroy someone's behavior.

Not to destroy someone's good habbits.

Not to destroy someone's relationship toward his/her loveones.

Technology has many branches in terms of its effect, it can change the behavior of a person and they can be bullied but aside from that, did this question ever crossed your mind,

"Is technology still under control of God?"

If yes, then my answer will be yes too. God controls everything. The reason why some persons are in the street, getting garbage is that because they didn't asked God

"Is my path right?"

"Is this the path you have reserved for me?"

Same goes in technology. The purpose of it is Good, it is not meant for cyber bully, watching p*rns and other wrong doings in social media. It is just that, we misuse technology, we overuse it, we misunderstood it's purpose.

He under controls technology, but the bad effects that happen to us is also cause by non other than us, we, humans ourselves.

We shouldn't forget that God sees and knows everything. He sees what we do in technologies, in cellphones, in social media platforms. Don't even think that he doesn't care about technology just because He lived many decades ago, we think that He is old but the truth is

GOD IS OMNIPRESENT

We should base everything that we do in God's scripture. Not because something is in trend, we should do the same. Not because that's how they use technology or specifically social media, we should do the same. Not because we used to do something like doing bad things in social media means we have no chance to change. Change is the only constant. According to Romans 12:2, be transformed in the renewing of thalamus. Basically, thalamus is the place for addiction, some is addicted to p*rns, or addicted to games or anything that s connected in technologies, but still thalamus can be trained and we have the chance to change.

Change comes from ourselves not what others wants to change for ourselves. Know who are worth following. Know which person helps you to go to the path where God wants you to go because that person is important.

You only live once, they said. The life of our loved ones has limit and sadly, we don't know when. We should spend our time wisely,

Wisely with our parents

Wisely with our family

Wisely with our friends

Help yourself get up and don't be a loser when your opponent is just technology. Don't let your system be eaten by it. Don't let modernization invade your privacy in life. Never go with the flow.

Time spent in your family and in God is worth more than the time wasted from technology.

First and foremost, before using technologies, ask and consult yourself...

Do I need this?

Will this help me grow physically, emotionally, and spiritually?

What is my purpose in using these?

What can I get from these?

What possible habits of mine can be taken away by this?

What possible habits can I adapt from this?

Lastly, surround yourself of things that will help you grow. Make sure that using technologies will help in developing yourself so that you can be a better person. Another impact of technology is that, when you watch horror movie, yes, it has thrill but it brings fear. Absolutely, horror movies do have spirit that's why we are scared. Fear refuses your faith in God. When you are in fear of other things, the tendency is that you will be afraid to try it. For example, you are afraid of going to the comfort room alone because you watched horror movies, you will forget your faith in Lord. You will forget to remember that "God is with me, why do I need to fear?"

Now let me ask you.

IS TECHNOLOGY GOOD OR BAD?

[comicteaparty]

December 2nd-December 8th, 2019 CTP Archive

The archive for the Comic Tea Party week long chat that occurred from December 2nd, 2019 to December 8th, 2019.  The chat focused on Da Pukas by Pembroke W. Korgi. 

Featured Comment:

Chat:

RebelVampire

COMIC TEA PARTY- WEEK LONG BOOK CLUB START!

Hello and welcome everyone to Comic Tea Party’s Week Long Book Club~! This week we’ll be focusing on Da Pukas by Pembroke W. Korgi~! (http://dapukas.com/)

You are free to read and comment about the comic all week at your own pace, so stop on by whenever it suits your schedule! Remember, though, that while we allow constructive criticism, our focus is to have fun and appreciate the comic. Below you will find four questions to get you started on the discussion. However, a new question will be posted and pinned everyday (between 12:01AM and 6AM PDT), so keep checking back for more! You have until December 8th to tell us all your wonderful thoughts! With that established, let’s get going on the reading and the chatting!

QUESTION 1. What has been your favorite scene in the comic so far? What specifically did you like about it?

QUESTION 2. What aspect of the world-building in the comic caught your eye and why? Relatedly, what do you think happened to the older people who left all their technology behind, and how might this fact continue to play a role in the story?

RebelVampire

QUESTION 3. At the moment, who is your favorite character? What about that character earns them this favor?

QUESTION 4. What do you think happened to the pukas who left the village 10 years ago? Can they be found, or are they truly lost forever? How do you think Lider will handle the answer emotionally regardless of which case you choose?

AntiBunny

1. Personally my favorite scene is the first encounter with Chacal the Jackal. This is their first encounter with the villain, and they throw every idea they can come up with into their escape to see what sticks, eventually bumbling their way out of trouble and establishing what will be an ongoing menace.

2. light is clearly a big deal there. While the saying "lords of light" is a classic cartoon reference on the surface, the significance of their lantern shows that to an underground dwelling people a light source is something that could be seen as a gift from the gods, and not simply something to be taken for granted. It's never exactly explained, but can be gathered.

3. Alegre is my favorite character. I love the enthusiasm with which she throws herself into everything. She tries it all, laughs off her failures, and keeps going.

4. I think they'll show up much later in the comic with some big reveal. Perhaps they found a way to the surface, but can't come back. Maybe there's a point of no return.

RebelVampire

QUESTION 5. What has been your favorite illustration in the comic so far? What specifically about it do you like?

QUESTION 6. Do you think Lider and company will ever return home? If so, how do you think the journey will have changed them? Also, do you think they’ll ultimately be accepted back into their village, or will the council still exile them?

RebelVampire

1) My favorite scene so far is probably when Quetz makes good on the friendship and comes and saves everyone from Chacal. For a decently comedic, somewhat light hearted comic, that was a rather gruesome fight and it made me cringe (but in a good oh no way). I also liked that Quetz didn't magically fade into the background and there was immediate consequences for friendships being made. 2) The aspect of the world that interests me the most is the whole underground thing itself. I like how its treated as this natural thing by the characters, but as the reader I have so many questions. Like where did this huge underground network come from? How is it nobody has explored things to the point most places seem isolated? Etc. But I like how the story works with the underground in unique ways, like the issues of light, how they get food, etc. As for the people before them, I'm just going with common denominator and assume they destroyed themselves.(edited)

3) My favorite character is definitely Apocado. I like that Apocado is kind of the reluctant heroine with a lot of self esteem issues that are flat out addressed a lot throughout the comic. At the same time, though, I like it's balanced by the fact she actually does have talent and can come through for the group when it counts. Mostly, though, I just find her and Lider adorable together. 4) As for what happened to the past explorers, I feel its a combination of they got lost and didn't know the way back plus where they wound up needed their help a lot more. I do think they're gonna be found, but I think it's gonna be not good for Lider. I feel like Lider is gonna have this expectation that they never returned for some noble heroic reason, only to find out that they kind of chose just to ditch their old lives to a degree after a point. Even if that's not the case though, I do think happiness will turn to anger and resentment for a while about why they couldn't go back. Alternatively, everyone is dead, and Lider will fall into depression because life is hopeless is and bleak.

RebelVampire

QUESTION 7. Which characters do you enjoy seeing interact the most? What about their dynamic interests you?

QUESTION 8. Given the story’s focus on themes such as friendship and forgiveness, what event related to the themes impacted you the most? Overall, what is your take away from the story in regards to these themes?

5) My favorite illustration is definitely this page http://dapukas.com/?comic=belmontsville. I love the amount of colorful detail in the image. But what really sells it for me is the perspective and angle. It really captures that feeling of feeling like a stranger in a big city and really puts you in the character's shoes. I love when illustrations work with the story, so definitely a great one in my book. 6) I do feel like Lider and everyone will come home. Probably with a lot more people and with fanfare. However, I definitely feel like they won't stay. I get the impression the journey will make them see there's more to their underground life than their own little village. And I feel they'll want to help more people or something like that. As for whether they'll be accepted back, I think yes and no. I think the council won't want to, but that their hands will be forced lest they earn public ire.

RebelVampire

7) I enjoy seeing Apocado and Lider interact the most. I love how opposite their personalities are in a lot of ways, so it creates lots of friction. Yet they still care about one another. Plus, their relationship is just adorable. Like how Apocado just basically jumped down a hole after Lider. XD Just precious and funny. 8) The one that affected me the most was when Artifice forgave Rumi. I think in life we often forget that accidents are a thing. And that people can hurt other people will out ill intent, and that it's easy to become wrapped up in the blame game. At the same time, sometimes that anger is a bit justified, since some accidents are bigger than others. All in all, forgiveness is hard. But I think the takeaway is that it's still good to do since focusing on what were mad at the person about rarely fixes anything.

RebelVampire

QUESTION 9. What sorts of art or story details have you noticed in the way the comic is crafted that you think deserves attention?

QUESTION 10. Do you think we’ve seen the last of the jackal Chacal, or will they continue to hunt Lider and group? If the latter, what do you think it will take for Lider and the rest to be free of Chacal?

RebelVampire

QUESTION 11. What do you think are this particular comic’s strengths? What do you think makes this comic unique? Please elaborate.

QUESTION 12. What do you think the device Lider was given is? Can it be fixed, and if so, what role will it play in Lider’s quest? Additionally, will Lider be able to get the lantern repaired as well?

AntiBunny

7. Right now I'm loving the interplay between Artifisk and Malo. They haven't interacted that much, but having a scene alone together shows that Artifisk is the one who's a questioner. Most people just accept that Malo is the way she is, but Artifisk actually shows curiosity about Malo's personality.

8. Probably the moment they left the village. They treat it as a grand adventure, but they also know they can't turn back. It's not unlike the moment in Lord of the Rings when the Hobbits realize that one more step will take them further from home than they've ever been.

9. Certainly the element of danger. There are villages that are safe, but it's treated like leaving these villages is a major risk. A few individuals live between, but in general the caverns are very much a sort of death world filled with hazards and dangerous creatures. It sort of reminds me of a Metroid game in that way. Isolation is the name of the game. This small crew on their journey become a small party in strange and hostile world. You really see that contrast in their behaviors in and out of a town too. Outside they're always on edge, always in danger, never able to relax. Inside a town they relax more and you see their personalities in a different light.

10. Chacal certainly will be an ongoing threat. What I wonder is if the Pukas will become better at outwitting and evading them, or if Chacal as we saw with Qwetz will continue to grow as a threat.

11. A well balanced core cast. The personalities are all just right to play off of each other. Sometimes complimenting, and sometimes conflicting. Everyone has a role to play in the character dynamic.

12. Some kind of tracker I think. When it starts working it will probably give them a direction to go in.

RebelVampire

QUESTION 13. What are you most looking forward to in the comic? Also, do you have any final thoughts to share overall?

QUESTION 14. How do you think Bimmy will try to scam the pukas out of their gold? Will Bimmy succeed, and if so, what will the pukas do? Further, do you think Ali will get involved again somehow?

RebelVampire

9) A detail I've really liked in the comic is the just the comic's abilities to keep plot threads relevant. For example, Rumi. It would've been super easy for the comic to just kind of drop it for 50 chapters and then bring it up again. But the comic is super good at remember to involve these plots from time to time before you forget them. And I think that's a real merit. 10) Nah. Chacal is definitely gonna show up again. I feel like Chacal is the sort of character who becomes easily embittered and revenge filled. So even if it takes a while, Chacal will always remember the offense and only become more desperate and violent. As for how Lider and them are going to be free...honestly...probably murder. Or at least imprisoning Chacal for life. I don't think theres anyway else out of the mess. 11) I think the comic's strength are its characters. They all have these kind of exaggerated personalities that are just enjoyable to read for both comedy and dramatic scenes. At the same time, though, the story is able to take a step back and show the darker sides to the characters and their kind of personal traumas and inner conflicts. And I always like when theres a good balance of that. 12) I think the device might be some kind of knowledge base. Maybe like a mini-version of Wikipedia with a little bit of GPS thrown in. And it will inevitably prove vital to their navigation I think as they get farther and farther away and start having to rely on more random tech. Which yes, by that implication, I think it will be fixed. I think the lantern will be fixed as well, though I think Lider will have to give it that extra push to get it working.

13) I am looking forward to Lider and Apocado's further relationship development cause they're just so gosh darn cute together. And I'm interested to see what sort of tests they'll face since the further they delve into the caverns,, the more dangerous it will be. 14) I feel like Bimmy is gonna intercept the tech somehow and say "Hey pay me and I'll help." and then whoops, money is gone. However, I doubt Bimmy will succeed longterm. More likely Bimmy will be hunted down, probably with Ali's help, and defeated. But defeated in a way there'll be an eternal grudge.

RebelVampire

COMIC TEA PARTY- WEEK LONG BOOK CLUB END!

Thank you everyone so much for reading and chatting about Da Pukas this week! Please also give a special thank you to Pembroke W. Korgi for volunteering the comic and creating it! If you liked Da Pukas, make sure to continue to support it via some of the links below!

Read and Comment: http://dapukas.com/

Pembroke’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ArtificialOrangeStudios

Pembroke’s Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/pembrokewkorgi

Pembroke’s Teepublic Store: https://www.teepublic.com/user/pembrokewkorgi/albums/13501-da-pukas

Pembroke’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/pembrokewkorgi

[kiatastic]

Fall

The deep exhales of breath released from my nostrils became visible in the crisp, cold air around me. Tree branches hovered over my head as the sun filtered its beaming rays through hues of green, red and yellow leaves. Each step I took was followed by a crunch – the sound of fallen leaves under my feet. As beautiful as fall is, there is also a harsh reality:

When leaves fall, they die.

Similar to the pruning process autumn brings, there were leaves in my own life that had to fall while transitioning from the dorm room to the boardroom – habits, tendencies and character flaws that had to die if I ever wanted to grow. Moving away from Atlanta to start my career began as the loneliest season of my life. At the same time, it brought new opportunity to experience the Lord for myself, allow Him to change me and experience Him in new ways. Andy Mineo said it best in one of my favorite songs: 

“I was so far from home – and everything that I’ve known. But I got grown in that time alone and that faith became my own.”

I was an anxious college-graduate. Ready to leave those awfully flavored 5-hour energy shots behind me in the KSU Sturgis Library. Eager to box my work within the parameters of 8am – 5pm. Prepared for the ultimate corporate office slay! I was also entirely wrong to believe my most challenging years were behind me. In the words of my late grandfather Charles W. Little, "All your life you are a freshman". I was at the top of my game as a college graduate and at the bottom of the largest learning curve of my life – all at the same time.

Before starting my job I was required to make a pit stop at Indiana University for 3 weeks of training sponsored by the Company known as Immersion I. Think of it as an intense boot camp for rookies in Corporate America. I met all 150 of my colleagues in the Digital Technology Leadership Program from around the world including Brazil, France, India and Egypt – and they were truly the brightest minds I’ve ever met. Each morning began with a quiz on previously reviewed material. The remaining hours were spent in C# building our capstone applications – a language I did not learn in school. I seemed to be the only one starting from ground zero. While many of my colleagues could afford to go out at night after class, I expended several hours in my hotel room learning the very basics. 11:00 pm turned into 2:00 am. 2:00 am turned into 4:00 am. 4:00 am turned into resurfaced doubts as I reflected on all I accomplished in college. From being named a top 5 IS student to winning Miss Alpha South – I started wishing I were back at KSU.

Thoughts and feelings from the previous night lingered in my head the following morning as I talked myself into finally putting my feet on the floor… so much for ditching those artificially grape-flavored 5-hour energy shots. While eating breakfast, an email notification appeared on my phone titled “Short Daily Devotion” – a daily email I receive with a short scripture and word of encouragement. The Lord put my thoughts in check with Isaiah 43:18-19:

“Forget about what’s happened; don’t keep going over old history. Be alert, be present. I’m about to do something brand-new.”

After all the Lord brought me through in college, I had not really learned to trust Him. It was obvious through my desire to retreat back to a season that presented more comfort – but the only place to fully blossom is in the soil the Lord chooses to plant us. That is where His grace and perfect will reside.

I walked back to my hotel room stiff as a board – the Lord had just snatched my entire life with one scripture. I approached my room and heard a voice singing, “You are the Living Word” by Fred Hammond. It was Rachel – another colleague from my Company. I said to myself “she MUST be a believer!” We ended up going out for Endless Wing Monday at a bar that evening. From that moment to this one Rachel has been one of my closest, dearest friends. I never expected to meet a colleague at work who was also a strong Christian. The Lord orchestrated our friendship in the time I needed it most.

Three weeks passed as boot camp came to a close. Aside from earning an A in my first graduate course, my group was awarded for having the best capstone project out of all 150 colleagues in the class. I reflected back on day 1 and remembered how intimidated I was by everyone around me. Since high school, I have always had an unhealthy habit of comparing myself to others. I habitually convinced myself that I was not smart enough, experienced enough or good enough to be among the best. The problem is – there is no win in comparison. When I compare myself to others and come out on top, it breeds pride. When I compare and come out underneath, it produces false humility. Both are wrong. There is absolutely no competition for your seat at God’s table. Only you are eligible for the plans the Lord has for you.

After leaving Indiana, I flew home to get my car and drove to my new home in Jackson, TN. The commute to work was about an hour. I spent my rotation delivering software solutions to bridge gaps in the manufacturing processes on the shop floor. Fresh out of college, I knew absolutely nothing about engineering or manufacturing IT. I had Google pulled up on every phone call to look up all the terms and acronyms I did not understand. I quickly got up to speed by enrolling in free SAP classes and setting up 1x1 meetings with electrical engineers. A typical day included walking the factory floor in goggles, steel-toed boots and earplugs – so much for that ultimate corporate office slay.

Outside of work, I spent most of my weekends alone. Jackson, TN wasn’t exactly overpopulated with young professionals. Solo movie dates and online shopping became regular weekend pleasantries. I needed to get involved with a church ASAP and find some less expensive hobbies. Upon my first visit to a nearby church the pastor told me Jesus Christ was not my savior because I had not been baptized specifically in their congregation. I left in tears – devastated by the twisted approach they taught on the Word of God. I learned that day how important is to know the Word for myself. That evening I went for a walk around my apartment complex saying “Lord, if you don’t lead me directly to a new church home… I think I’d rather attend Bedside Baptist! I cannot risk experiencing that again and I need your help. Show me what to do.”

The next week I was leaving the factory floor when a man named Andre noticed me. He introduced himself and said, “Hey, I’ve seen you around and heard you’re new in Tennessee.” I looked down and noticed a brochure he was holding in his hand. “I would like to invite you to my church, Historic First Baptist”, he continued. Immediately, I remembered my prayer to the Lord. Overwhelming joy took over my countenance as I replied, “You have no idea how crazy this is. I JUST prayed for a church recommendation on Sunday!” I met Andre and his wife at HFBC that Sunday. It was more traditional than I was used to – but Pastor Watson taught on the foundation of the Bible and that was most important to me. There was no time to waste. I joined THAT Sunday. Throughout my time in Tennessee Andre and his wife, Liakita were my God-sent blessings. They encouraged me to take the New Member’s class and introduced me to so many people there. My circle of friends outside of work was birthed at HFBC. They even encouraged me to grow in my relationship with the Lord. Although I wasn’t perfect with daily quiet time, I did my best to set aside Saturday mornings to pray and read my Bible.

One Saturday in particular, I spent my morning watching a sermon on YouTube recommended by my friend Gabby called “Five Keys to Finding Your Soul Mate.” I had my pen and notepad ready – finding bae was a priority on my to-do list. The pastor, Toure Roberts made an altar call for loneliness at the end of the sermon. To my own frustration and disappointment, what I took away from that sermon had nothing to do with finding bae. Instead, the Lord brought an ugly truth in me to light – a void of loneliness.

I never knew I was lonely because I often “talked” to guys I never had any business considering. To fix that the Lord moved me to a place where I had no choice but to “talk” to Him. There were no longer casual movie dates or “good-morning, beautiful” text messages to fill my void. I began to realize that “trying to fill an infinite hole with a finite thing or person only leaves an insatiable appetite that can never be fully and finally satisfied.” Any attempt to fill a God-sized void with selfish pleasures (no matter how harmless they seem) will fail every time. The Holy Spirit showed me that the part of my life I wanted to control was the part He wanted most. I paused the YouTube video while going into one of the most unorthodox cries I have ever had. For the first time I became aware of God’s relentless pursuit of me – and my half-hearted acknowledgement of His love in return.

“… Every man’s emptiness is nothing more than a hunger for God, masked by temporary pleasures. We always want more and more of it, because it will satisfy us less and less – until soon it does not satisfy us at all.”

I had tried several times to surrender my love life (or lack thereof) to the Lord – but never sincerely meant it. I regretfully acknowledge that He had to strip me of all options to win my undivided attention. “For the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a Jealous God (Exodus 34:14).” In complete vulnerability and transparency with Him, His love ushered me into His perfect peace – a need for no one else but Him.

That same evening I received a FaceTime call from my close friend, Drew. Andrew became my go-to Alpha during my time serving as Miss Black & Gold at KSU. However, we became friends through a Bible study group the Lord led me to start during my junior year of college.  After expressing how much he valued our friendship, he shared that night that he had feelings for me he could not quite put his finger on. Immediately, I said in my head “Lord, you’ve got a serious sense of humor. I know I just cried my eyes out about being single – but this is not what I wanted. Drew is my friend! I can’t date him.” Still, I was pleasantly shocked to be pursued (for the first time) by a God-fearing man. I knew Drew personally as a friend for years. I have even tried to hook him up with a friend in the past! I told him I did not know how to feel about it. He assured me that if I did not feel the same way, he would still love me as a friend. Surely this man was from another planet. Never in my life had a man with such humility and Godly love approached me the way he did.

When it was time to wrap up my first rotation in Tennessee, Drew surprised me by driving to Jackson to help pack up my apartment. I told him my company was paying all the expenses for movers to come pack – but he insisted on coming anyway. He stayed in the hotel across the street and never insinuated wanting anything out of me. I became drawn to the sincerity and Godliness of his heart. Although I thought about him often, I knew the Lord was still working on me. I read a book called “Your Knight and Shining Armor” by P.B. Wilson. At the end of it I concluded I was not ready to date anyone – there were parts of me that needed work first. Drew and I remained friends for the next several months.

Two days before my rotation ended, I pitched out my final results from my rotation to several executives and business leaders. I made friends with so many people in the factory – they even brought in home-cooked dishes on my last day! I was thanked personally by the CIO of the business for going to work alone in a factory without any IT colleagues or mentors. It was an a-typical situation for someone new to the Company, but the Lord was my Source through it all.

In Tennessee, I learned that my weaknesses are the best platforms for God to teach me about His power. In Judges 7, the Lord commanded Gideon to slash his army down to 300 men before going into battle. It wasn’t about terrifying Gideon – it was about stripping away anything that could suggest that God was not the reason for his victory. These are win-win scenarios - the Lord is glorified and our faith is strengthened in the process.

As soon as I started to build my network, understand supply chain IT and become comfortable in my new city… it was time to do it all over again. One rotation down - three left to go. I packed the few remaining valuables from my apartment in my Honda accord and headed to my second rotation in Houston, TX. The autumn leaves had fallen, but a new season was on the way. Bundle up – winter is coming.

[digitalinsight]

It’s Game On

Who remembers these?

Or this?!

Source: http://childrenofthenineties.blogspot.com.au/2009/05/tetris.html

Ahhh, the good old days. Thinking about it makes me realise how much the gaming world has changed so much. If you told me 10 years ago that by 2017 we’d able to talk to our friends through games, compete with them live, or even play along with them at the exact same time I’d think you were ridiculous!

But here we are today, with gaming consoles that even enable us to experience it in virtual reality!!!

Oh how technology just keeps getting better. It’s like the gift that keeps on giving.

For something that was once so socially limited and un-advanced, gaming has essentially become a concept that has captivated the social world (Baek, Ko & Marsh 2014, pp. 4-6). Through the use of the world wide web, many gaming companies have been able to offer its users to connect with others through one simple thing – the internet (Graham 2012, pp. 1-2). Consoles such as Playstations and Xbox have evolved greatly over time, and after multiple generations, players are now able to play these consoles in an online mode with other players, both friends and strangers, granted that the game their playing offers online play, which most gaming organisations have already enabled particularly in today’s ever-increasing online craze (Gilbert 2016; Moss 2013). Evidently enhancing social communication more than ever before.

Taking it to the next level, many game producers have now sought the use of social networking sites to help boost their business and seek to attract a larger user-base following, and what better social networking site to use than Facebook?! (Graham 2012, p. 1). With approximately 1.94 billion active users (as of March 2017), who wouldn’t want to partner with them to promote their game (Statista 2017)? A great example of game producers who have done such include Zynga (who created Farmville, Mafia Wars and Zynga Poker), and the creators of Candy Crush, King, which I myself plead guilty to playing connected through Facebook (Graham 2012, p. 1). I’m sure you’re guilty of it too. As such, both these gaming companies alongside many others, have found themselves thriving in success leeching off the advantages offered by Facebook and other major social network sites (Garside 2014; Stuart 2014).

Source: Candy Crush Saga Facebook.

So if social gaming has positive repercussions for gaming businesses, and has opened up a new realm of connecting, enabling us to form new relationships with others online through a means other than actual social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, what’s the big deal?

There has been so much talk about how the gaming industry has been a “boys club.” A thing that boys do and boys play, not girls. This stereotypical view that has been greatly contested and refuted by many of the female gamers in today’s society, which many males are not happy about. #Gamergate is an online movement aimed at ‘protecting’ the gamer ‘identity’ by attacking those who are perceived as breaching the so-called “ethics” in video game journalism (Jason 2015). Females are indeed, are a specific target for these Gamergate advocates, which with the use of social media and the internet, have been able to gather a large following and the interest of many gamers to participate in what they believe is upholding the traditional gamer identity (Hathaway 2014). Zoe Quinn, a female game developer, became a victim to this Gamergate nonsense, when her ex-boyfriend decided to publicly blog about all aspects of her personal life, in an attempt to destroy her reputation (Hathaway 2014). Of course with social media, it’s now easier than ever for people to access these things and begin talking. In fact, Gamergate started after this incident with Quinn (Jason 2015). As such, she became subject to constant online abuse, harassment, and was even confronted with death threats on all of her social media, and because all of this was public, and online, on social media, it affected her personal and work life greatly.

It’s a shame that some people feel the need to put a gender to the face of the gaming industry, I mean, why can’t we all just enjoy it?

Nevertheless, social media has brought upon great benefits to the world of gaming, but I guess with all things good, comes bad.

References:

Baek, Y, Ko, R & Marsh, T 2014, Trends and Applications of Serious Gaming and Social Media, Springer, Springer Link.

Garside, J 2014, ‘How King Digital Entertainment’s CEO conquered the gaming world’, The Guardian, 6 June, viewed 9 May 2017, <https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jun/06/king-digital-entertainment-ceo-riccardo-zaconni>.

Gilbert, B 2016, ‘PlayStation 4 and Xbox One owners can finally play online games together’, Business Insider Australia, 15 March, viewed 9 May 2017, <https://www.businessinsider.com.au/microsoft-opens-xbox-one-online-play-to-sony-pc-2016-3>.

Graham, W 2012, Beginning Facebook Game Apps Development, Apress, Safari ProQuest.

Hathway, J 2014, ‘What Is Gamergate, and Why? An Explainer for Non-Geeks’, Gawker, 10 October, viewed 10 May 2017, <http://gawker.com/what-is-gamergate-and-why-an-explainer-for-non-geeks-1642909080>.

Jason, Z 2015, ‘Game of Fear’, Boston Magazine, May, viewed 10 May 2017, <http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2015/04/28/gamergate/>.

Moss, S 2013, ‘The PlayStation 4 Guide: Everything You Need to Know About Paid PS+ Online, Hardware, Games, News and More’, PlayStationLifeStyle.net, 17 June, viewed 9 May 2017, < http://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2013/06/17/the-ultimate-playstation-4-guide-paid-ps-online-hardware-games-news-and-more/>.

Statista 2017, Number of monthly active Facebook users worldwide as of 1st quarter 2017 (in millions), Statista, viewed 5 May 2017, <https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/>.

Stuart, K 2014, ’10 ways Facebook changed gaming for ever’, The Guardian, 5 February, viewed 9 May 2017, < https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/04/10-ways-facebook-changed-gaming-for-ever>.

[angel-gidget]

Stars Unearth Your Fires (ch3/?)

Title:  Stars Unearth Your Fires (Ch 3/?)

Fandom: DCU, Teen Titans, Red Robin (preboot)     

Rating:  PG  | Words: 2320  | a03 link    

Summary: Tim Drake never thought of himself as a troublemaker as far as Robins go. But a passing accusation quickly escalates into a case of stolen memories, technologically backwards clues from his past self, interdimensional hijinks, reflections on the good old days, and possibly the rekindling of a foregone romance. Eventually Tim/??? Mystery ship!

A/N: Thanks to @kiragecko for being my lovely beta on this. And thanks to @komadoriwonder, and JLAGuyer and regulusmarkara on a03 for their thoughtful reviews. ^_^

“Dude. You know you just paid wicked money for good seats to the show right? So why are we not in those four front row seats with Wayne’s name on ‘em?”



“Because it doesn’t feel right, Kon.”



It did, but it didn’t. Fashion show. He had been so sure at the time that the term wasn’t code for anything. But as he watched the snappily-dressed crowd converge on the runway waiting for the lights to dim, he just got the feeling that actually attending the official show wasn’t quite what his younger self had in mind.



“So… what does feel right?” Bart asked, looking up from his e-reader. Cyborg had customized the processing power to keep up with Kid Flash’s speed, and so far, it was doing wonders for creating the public illusion that Bart was a patient person. So long as no one looked too closely at how quickly his finger tapped from page to page. 



Even if Bart had paused for half a second, Tim wouldn’t have been able to read it. Bart had studied Dutch last week, and was currently reading about some variety of European alternative rock in its native language.



“I don’t know,” Tim sighed, “Just… walk with me.”



They did. They were amazingly patient with him, dodging and weaving through the crowds. Kon and Bart chuckled at a cheesy poster for running shoes that seemed to appear after every third store.  Cassie allowed herself to admire a couple dresses in their respective windows—he had seen her in a dress exactly once but apparently she liked to look at them a lot? Unclear. She lingered longer over a pair of hot pink boxing gloves in a sportswear display. Future Christmas present. He made a note.



“So, not that this isn’t kind of a novelty for us,” Kon interjected, “Because you know we never do normal things, but… is there anything for us to check out here that we couldn’t have checked out in ‘Frisco? Or Gotham? Which would both be less crowded by now?”



Tim sighed.



There was something different about the Beverly Hills Mall’s ambience. He just couldn’t put his finger on it. The posters were the same stupid posters in shopping centers back in Gotham. The music was the same blaring music. The people… the people.



“The girls.”



“Hah, very funny.” Cassie rolled her eyes.



Bart chuckled.



“What about them?” Kon blurted, taking his statement seriously.



Tim’s gaze latched onto a circle of three girls—late teens to early twenties—chatting loudly with each other as they dug into their food court lunches.  He pulled out his phone and discreetly snapped a handful of pictures.



“Wait. You’re serious?” Cassie blinked.



“Bart, pick a topic and start talking. Low voice. We’ll take the open table close to them and keep it casual. I need audio.”



Cassie grimaced, “Oh my god, you are serious.”



Bart shrugged and proceeded to perfunctorily lecture on Darwinian evolution as a growing topic for romanticization in symphonic metal music. It actually struck Tim as vaguely interesting, and he made a note to ask Bart to repeat his spiel when he was better able to pay attention.


For the moment, he leaned back and let the cadence of the girl’s voices wash over him. They were talking about the fashion show, its pluses and pretentiousness, because their friend Valerie was clearly more talented than those ‘professionals’ as she actually designed things that were fun to wear. That somehow evolved into a discussion on nail polish remover as a multi-purpose solution, and really—while the nail polish thing might prove useful—none of it really mattered.



There was a common speech pattern. Not accent so much as slight dialect. Word choice interspersed with the casual pop of Mindy’s bubblegum.  For the first time, it wasn’t something about the milieu that was the same; it was something about it that was familiar.



Yet Tim couldn’t remember for the life of him where he had heard it before.



“Go 2 fashion show @ Hollywood Mall. Compare/Contrast costume.”



West coast street fashion was inherently different. While not terribly fashion-conscious in his own right, Tim had been exposed to nearly all walks of life, and their clothes, in Gotham.  The destitute in patched up hoodies, the wealthy in designer suits, the middle-class in semi-ironic polo shirts. But it was all Gotham. Even the goths and hair-dyed punks had a certain aesthetic that fit to a mold.



The California mall had different molds. Mindy’s glittery tattoo-style tights under her faded denim skirt, and Raquel’s bangly earrings jangling against the careful color palette of the beads in her cornrows had a certain feeling to it that was more theatrical than anything Tim ran into outside of his costumed life.



And Sylvia’s bright yellow jacket demanded that he stare at it. He didn’t know why.



“… I love your fashion sense!”



Tim’s head snapped around, “What?”



“Is that what you were planning on saying to them?” Bart had an eyebrow raised, “‘Cause you’ve been kinda badly hiding that you’re looking at them for the last 43 seconds and even with me providing conversational cover, they were going to notice. Soon.”



While Bart appeared merely curious, Kon and Cassie had their patented looks of concern on their faces once more.



Tim tapped his phone to stop the audio recording.



“I’m done. I’m good. Let’s go.”



——



“So,” Bart called out while skateboarding into a loop in the gym-obstacle course hybrid of Titan’s Tower, “What do we do when we hit up Paris?”


“What?” Tim blinked, pulling out one earbud. 



He hadn’t been playing the audio clip of the girl’s voices on repeat very loudly, so he had heard the question just fine. He just wasn’t on the same page, exactly.



“It was in your notes,” Kon explained from the corner where he was spotting for Cassie’s weight-lifting. “Go to the most romantic city?”



Tim snorted, “Paris is NOT the most romantic city. Nowhere close.”


Cassie grunted from beneath her gym record of 74 tons—it was frustrating for her, he knew, because she’d stopped a passenger jet once. Theoretically, she should have been able to press twice that without shredding her muscles, but apparently even superheroes had a kick-in-the-pants relationship with adrenaline that wasn’t easily replicated with a machine.



“Nnhh… okay then—guh—We’ll bite. Why? Baguettes not on your diet?”



Tim lifted an eyebrow. 



“Paris is filled with street gangs who know my face, and there’s nothing wrong with my diet.”



He wasn’t an idiot. He wasn’t trying to lose muscle-mass. It was just an unfortunate side-effect of focusing his grocery list on immunity boosters instead of protein or comfort food. Mackerel and ginger and salads did good things for his lack of spleen, but didn’t help him look ripped. 



At once, Bart was in his face with a cold slice of leftover pizza.



“OkayTim. Every time you say something drenched in the waters of DeNile, youhavetotakeabite.”



He wasn’t in de—ooh anchovies on extra cheese. It wasn’t like he couldn’t use the protein. And cold or not, it smelled good. He took a bite.



“Good boy.”



“Screw you.”



Bart cackled and ate the rest of the slice himself. Jerk.



He zipped away and the clattering of pots and pans a level away signaled that Bart had started the process of cooking dinner for the evening. Tim mentally rescinded his jerk comment.



“So Rob,” Kon’s use of his old nick name snapped his attention back, “What is the most romantic city then?



Tim shrugged, “Not Paris.”



“Well, nnnngh, that’s helpful.” Cassie set down her weights, and reached out a hand. Kon wordlessly handed her a water bottle emblazoned with a W.



Kon tapped a finger against his chin.



“Is it Moscow?”



Tim frowned, “You think the most romantic city is Moscow?”



“Uh, no,” Kon scratched the back of his head, “I think you might think that Moscow is the most romantic city because you and Tam Fox had kind of a love nest going on there…? Didn’t you?” His eyes flashed quickly to Cassie, as though unsure if Tim would want to talk about it in front of her.  Tim rolled his eyes.



“We had adjoining hotel rooms that had good room service. Hardly the mark of ultimate romance, Kon.”



Cassie smirked, “The Tower is subscribed to the Gotham Gazette.”



Oh. Oooooh. Tim winced. Knowing his friends watched the news to keep an eye out for his exploits as Red Robin was one thing. Knowing that they were reading all the gossip columns on Timothy Drake-Wayne was another.



“This does not leave the Tower, but if you wanna know, I’ll tell you.”



“Please.” They chorused. And wow, but things must have been dull around San Fran if they were all that starved for proverbial bread from the rumor mill. Tim sighed.



“The only way in which we took advantage of those adjoining hotel rooms was by having breakfast together in our pajamas. Yes, I was flirting. And yeah, I really, really enjoyed it.”



Both Kon and Cassie had small, tight smiles on their faces. They were waiting for the other shoe to drop. Because, well, they knew him. Tim pretended that he didn’t see Kon reach behind his back, handing Cassie a twenty dollar bill. He was too tired to ask about the specifics of the bets anymore.



“But it’s all irrelevant now as I have since managed to royally piss off Tam, and have just barely earned enough forgiveness that we can work together in a civil manner. It’s over…”



Kon snatched the twenty back.



“… No matter what I want.”



Cassie reached behind her again, claiming final victory on the crumpled bill.



“Hera, that’s rough. Sorry, Tim.” 



At least Cassie sounded sincere. And at least the value of his personal woes had risen with inflation. Bets about his mask had only been worth ten bucks back in the day.



“Grub’s up!,” Bart’s shout came from the kitchen, “And Ikindabrokethemicrowave, so get it while it’s hot!”



———



Tim wasn’t sure why he had been so suspicious of ‘peppered lamb lasagna’. He should have learned to trust Bart by now. The sting of spice and rosemary with cheese lingered on his tongue as he slouched with the group—and their full stomaches—on the giant couch in front of the 70’’ TV.



They had it set to Gotham news. Which was boring, seeing as Tim helped make the news by putting Riddler back into Arkham, so he already knew it all. But apparently, boring news was the point, because boring news was easy to talk over. 



Kon was the first to breach the white noise.



“So you never did answer the question.”



“Ugh,”  Tim pinched the bridge of his nose.



“What question?” barked Gar from his basset hound form. He was snuggled up next to Raven, who had similarly snapped out of her private world to pay attention.



“For four hundred points,” Bart mock-intoned, “What is the most romantic city in the world. Andon’tsayParis. SayingParisstartsawholeTHING.”



“New York?” Gar mumbled, sliding back to his human self.



“Ain’t got nothing on Honolulu.” Kon rejoined.



“I’d say Themyscira,” Cassie enunciated around a last bite of lasagna, “But you can only take girlfriends there, not boyfriends. So…”



“Funny thing is, I know the absolutemostperfectcity,” Bart muttered, grabbing the remote and flipping through channels, “But it hasn’t been founded yet. Welcome to thespeedsterlife.”



Raven’s voice managed to seep through the white noise and the commentary, causing everything else to go silent.



“You know the answer, Timothy. You just need a moment to breathe and think.”



She stepped away from Gar to kneel in front of him, placing a hand at his temple. Tim shivered. 



He wasn’t inherently comfortable with magic, but he refused to shut it out the way Bruce did. Refused to let that twinge in his gut make him shut people in his life out. He might not ever be as relaxed in Raven’s presence as Dick could be—as Dick pretended to be?—but as much as he could consciously open himself up to someone who had fought and bled with him, he would.



So he leaned back, and breathed out…



“Venice.”



He came out of the meditative moment to find everyone staring at him. It was getting kind of old. His friends seriously needed some more hobbies. Kon finally restarted the discussion.



“Y’know? Not bad. Venice is… a good choice.”



“Shoddy infrastructure, though.” Bart sighed.



“Pretty sure that’s a huge part of the charm, kiddo.” Gar chuckled.



“Seriously. Why?” Bart tilted his head.



Tim shrugged, “Venice has gondolas.”



Cassie nodded, “That it does. Guess that’s pretty romantic.”



Tim continued, “Gondolas are the perfect date activity. Historical romantic tradition. Often a new experience for both parties. A mix of public space to create a feeling of safety, but enough privacy to… um. Make out. If you want to.”



How did he know that? That wasn’t… he couldn’t ever remember setting foot in Venice. Or a gondola. But now that he was stopping to breathe and think—thank you, Raven—it made perfect sense. Huh.



His hooded empath of a teammate gave him a gentle smile before returning to her corner of the couch once more.



“I’m just saying that Venice will have collapsed by the time I’m even born,” Bart objected.



“You are so missing the point, my man.” Kon retorted.



Tim let their squabbling wash over him like a blanket. The last several times he had come to the tower, he had simply fallen asleep on the couch. It was always warmer there than in his room, and it didn’t hurt that he was usually in someone’s company. He had every intention of sleeping there again. But until then… he rose and headed for the kitchen.

By his calculations, there was one piece of lasagna left.