#unscheduled because I want to post this one before the one I have scheduled at 6pm

[neo-contemporaryfailure]

A chest cold tests Olive and Jack's relationship; Jack thinks about his time with Mary.

JACK is half awake, laying face down, in bed. Olive, across the room, is pulling on a wrap dress over a leotard. 

JACK

Why are you here?

OLIVE

I've been thinking of taking a ballet class. I'm getting a bit rusty. But I enjoy our mornings in the studio much more. So imagine my surprise when I get there this morning and you aren't there-

JACK

But why are you here?

OLIVE

God forbid I see my husband in the morning. Just wanted to make sure you're alive.

JACK 

I'd never kill myself without telling you.

OLIVE

Gentleman. I wanted this dress and I wanted my shoes that match. I have a bag that goes with it at my place, I'm not sure why this dress never made it over.

JACK

Why are they here?

OLIVE

I spend too much time with you. 

JACK 

A woman's place is in her apartment. 

OLIVE 

Yet another thing we agree on. 

She looks at him with genuine affection. Disgusting (and she knows it.)  She sits next to him and messes with his hair. He half rolls over and swats her away. 

OLIVE 

(Thoroughly entertained)

Do you want me to pick you up a bottle of NyQuil? You look like shit.

JACK

No. That garbage isn't good for you.

OLIVE picks up a bottle of pills off the nightstand, she reads the label.

OLIVE

You're right. Secobarbital is all you ever need. 

She opens the drawer and puts the pill bottle in it. Among others.

OLIVE

Okay, my lord. Whose kneecaps do I have to break for getting you sick? Was it Maurice? 

JACK

I think it was the kid’s brat. Children are disgusting. 

OLIVE 

Well that's unfortunate. I have a “no killing children” rule. Guess avenging you will have to wait 12 more years.  See you at the studio tomorrow morning?

JACK gives a thumbs up. OLIVE leaves.

JACK'S MIND. Or maybe the past.

A huge stage. People around him.  Jack is 18 years old. 

Bright  lights. The ensemble is singing.

He is dancing, and has been for at this point, 7 minutes straight. 

The number changes into a waltz. He waltzes with Mary. Her eyes are serious. 

She is whisked off stage. 

The number changes again, into the culmination of the show, something big and serious that makes the audience want to stay. JACK keeps dancing, now doing tap. 

It's so aggressive. 

He continues, and continues, and continues, then, in one final moment, sticks the landing to thunderous applause. Lights go down, the curtain falls. He cannot breathe. One of the ensemble members helps him off stage.

MARY

(quiet)

I need you not to look like you're trying so hard. It's distracting.

JACK nods. He loosens his collar.

JACK

I'm trying.

MARY furrows her brow.

MARY 

Get some fresh air. You're turning purple.

Back to now.

JACK is taking a cold shower because he's a freak. His eyes are closed.

The living room. JACK enters.

OLIVE is on the sofa. She's reading a book. Her ankle is wrapped in an bandage and resting up on the arm of the sofa.

JACK

What happened?

OLIVE looks up.

OLIVE

I fucked the landing right before intermission. Greg dropped me a half moment too early and my ankle rolled and I fell flat on my face.

JACK

Why didn't you call? I would've gone down there and yelled at you.

OLIVE 

I did. You didn't answer. But I managed the second act. I'll probably be fine tomorrow, if I rest it tonight, which I'm doing and that's why I'm here instead of going all the way out to my place. Sorry if you had a flu-orgy planned tonight.

JACK shrugs and goes into the other room.

BACK in Jack's mind.

Another day from the same show as before. Something has changed, a costume or an orchestration, it's been a few days.

We are at the beginning of the tap segment. Jack is working so hard and everyone can tell it. He looks younger than he is. 

Suddenly, he stumbles, he stops dancing. He steps back.

The ensemble doesn't know what's going on, but they keep working. 

JACK gets back to it, but he's all messed up. He keeps trying. 

MARY, watching him from off stage, is confused.

He can't do it. 

He can't do any of it. He stops dancing again, he stumbles back. He falls over. The audience laughs.

MARY gestures for someone to grab him, then zips out and finishes the number herself, so casually.

A few moments later. JACK sits. Behind him is one of the ensemble members, who is sorta propping him up. So nice.

MARY enters. Everyone speaks in whispers.

MARY

Extra long intermission, I got us 10 more minutes. 

She kneels in front of Jack. She barely looks real. She looks like she's going to say something. Mary is not the type of person who can obscure frustration on her face.

MARY

We need to give him something to– does anyone have some- shoot what's it- dexedrine? Get him some of those, he'll be good to go.

Everyone looks at her like she's insane.

Back to now!

Olive is way too close to Jack. She is sitting  on his chest, staring into his soul. Jack shoves her away as he snaps back into the real world. They're in the bedroom.

OLIVE

You weren't breathing.

JACK

Yes I was.

OLIVE

I came in here and you weren't breathing. What'd you take?

JACK

Liv, I have a chest cold. I'm not shooting up heroin.

OLIVE

Heroin no. Mixing barbiturates with whatever the fuck your dealer is calling coke–

JACK

Jesus Christ. Fuck off.

OLIVE

You're freaking me out, Jack. 

JACK sits up, he's disoriented for a moment. He looks for a pack of cigarettes.

JACK

 Fucking hysterical.

Jack finds his cigarettes. Yippee. He lights one. 

OLIVE

I'm calling them and telling them to send the understudy– Don't smoke. Don't smoke, Jack, come on. 

JACK

Make me.

She grabs the cigarette. She puts it out. 

OLIVE

Let's go sit outside.

They sit on the balcony. It's mid morning. Jack has his hands over his eyes. Olive is stretching.

JACK 

How's your ankle?

OLIVE

I didn't know you had the capability to remember something from two whole days ago. Impressive. It's fine, thank you. You're so kind and considerate.

JACK

City air is making me feel worse.

OLIVE

Do I need to bring you to the seaside for your delicate constitution? Are you wasting away from consumption?

Jack doesn't get it.

JACK

I don't think so.

OLIVE

You look like a corpse.

JACK

When you were sitting on my chest, my first thought was, “I can't breathe.” My second thought was, “this bitch needs to lose 10 pounds.” No wonder Greg dropped you.

OLIVE

I cannot wait to take everything from you in the divorce.

Jack stands up. Woozy, a bit, he goes back inside. Olive follows.

JACK

Go do the show, Liv. I'll be mad if you don't…

Jack's mind again. Somewhere, Jack isn't focused on where, he is sitting. Mary is sitting up close to him. She's all he notices.

MARY

Jack. Look at me. I'm not saying this to hurt you. I'm not mad at you. I want you to understand that this show needs to go forward.

JACK 

I can do it.

MARY

Buddy, kiddo, you can't. You've made it clear that you can't pull it off. Not for 8 shows a week. I can't have you nearly dying every intermission. 

JACK

I can do it. I have the skills–

MARY

And you have the talent and you have the chutzpah, I know. But Jack, I built that number around how you can move, just because you can move that way doesn't mean you should.

JACK 

(As hurt as humanly possible)

You don't think I can do it.

MARY

You can't. You tried and you couldn't pull it off. You're not meant to do it. 

JACK

But I'm ruining your show.

MARY

Bert and I already found someone to replace you. Nothing is ruined. You just can't do it. There are all sorts of things in life that you just have to fail at. And you failed at it, Jack. Okay? Everyone fails all the time. It's a part of life.

JACK

Mary, let me try again. Please. Mary.

MARY

It's been 4 days, Jack. The- the show has to go on. Okay? You know that.

JACK 

You asked me to do this show and I have to do it for you, Mary.

Mary looks so overwhelmed by this pathetic loser.

MARY

You're gonna break my heart, Jack. You're going to make me cry. Don't do that. Just tell me it's okay. I know you know that it's for the best if I fire you.

JACK

I don't want you to fire me because I can do it. This show is important, Mary, I can't ruin it.

MARY

Jack, you're going to ruin it if you keep trying to play this role. You can't do it. You don't have the tenacity, you don't have the endurance, you have asthma. You need to be the one who decides that this is not the best option for you as a person.

JACK

I don't care if it is. I can do it and I'm going to do it, until I can't.

MARY

Jack. You are at the can't. Now, you can either let me fire you or force me to. And you force me to, it's going to hurt me a lot. I don't want to send you back to New York upset with you. I need you to tell me you'll be okay if I replace you.

Ouch. Mary touches his face and looks him in the eyes. Maybe there's love, or maybe it's just frustration. 

MARY

Say it, please.

JACK

Okay.

Mary hugs him.

MARY

You're fired.

She pulls away. She looks at him. She's very serious but she's not honest.

MARY

This show means less to me than your life, Jack. You understand that?

Jack nods.

MARY

Okay. So you're going to go back to New York, you're going to my place, you're going to recover, and then when we're in New York, you're going to come back and help me finish up the choreography, you understand that? There's always room for you, Jack. There's always going to be a place. It's just not opposite me.

Back to now.

Jack and Olive sit in the living room. It's a few hours later. Olive is reading a book, half resting on him. How embarrassing, enjoying being with a person. Cringe.

Olive adjusts and looks at him. He is a bit startled to see her.

OLIVE

What?

JACK

I forgot you were still here.

OLIVE 

You were mumbling in your sleep.

JACK

I was thinking about Mary.

OLIVE 

You know I saw her at the the ballet once. As a little girl. I thought she was so beautiful.

JACK

She was. Did I tell you that she fired me?

OLIVE

You have. And to that, I say that, when you and I did the Sunshine number the first time you kept adjusting my legs so I'd stop overextending even though it looked better. 

JACK

Mary didn't believe in limitations. She wanted more of everything. 

OLIVE

Viability, Jack. The perfect dancer only exists in science fiction. The viable dancer is in the room.

Olive adjusts again, this time sitting closer to him. He puts his arms around her and closes his eyes.

[kanmom51]

The choices

I guess this post will be me repeating myself for the umpteenth time, but I feel like it all needs to be said, even more so after watching most of Are you sure?! and most definitley after watching 2 of the 3 Sapporo episodes.

JM and JK chose to do this show.

They chose to travel together in CT, JM flying out to JK who was just starting his solo debut journey.

They chose to travel to Jeju for the show, just before Chuseok (where they went back together to Busan and spent time with their families) - Tae not being part of the plan, basically insisting (being adamant about it) to join them just a couple of days before they were meant to leave for Jeju and doing so when JK was literally overseas at the time performing and busy just before the release of 3D and later on Golden.

They chose to go to Jeju for the show while only a month or so prior they were there together alone, no cameras and no Tae (who knows, maybe even scouting and checking out where to stay and what to do for the show).

They chose to do this seconds before 3D landed and JK and JM are thrown back into crazy schedules (JK with Golden and JM with Muse - which we were unaware of at the time).

And they chose to go together to Sapporo for their last trip before enlistment (after spending a couple of days in Tokyo together).

To spend that last opportunity of doing stuff they wanted, being free, eating good food, TOGETHER. Quality time with EACH OTHER.

THEY CHOSE!!!

Just as they CHOSE to enlist together and spend the next 18 months of their military service together.

You know, the latter could maybe (not really) be explained as a need not to go through this alone, the whole hardship of military service, not necessarily with each other. Although that explanation doesn't really hold water as: a. they could have, if it was about not going through it all alone, enlisted with another member, which clearly they they chose not to; and b. In doing so, they chose a harder service- so if this was about making military service easier on them, well this was definitley not the way to do so. The two chose to go through whatever process they had to go through in order to be able to do this together. The together, the two of them, was the end deal. Yes, it is easier on them because they have each other to go through everything that military service and life entails, but the point is that it needed to be JK and JM and that this choice and being able to do this is what makes enlistment bearable for them.

Enlistment was a choice made but at the same time, imo, a necessity for the two of them. And yes, don't come at me for saying this. Of course they could and would survive going it alone, but at the same time that would be it - surviving. Them doing this together was something both of them needed.

Back on track...

Joint enlistment was a choice but also a need.

Spending their last free time, doing the things they love to do, enjoying good food, enjoying the snow, enjoying hot springs, enjoying snowboarding and skiing, enjoying BEING - doing all of this together just before enlistment - that was a full on choice!!!

Imagine you are about to be sent away for the next 18 months to a place where your whole life is restricted. What you eat, what you do, when you wake, when you sleep, you're told what you're allowed to do and what you aren't, when you can use your phone and when you can't, you are given only several days every 3 months to go home, have time off.

And before that happens, basically 2 weeks out, you have a little tiny window of some free time (unscheduled) in which you can do whatever you want, go wherever you want to with whoever you want to, one last time before it all happens - enlistment.

Think for a second what you would choose to do in that time and who you would choose to spend that time together with.

JK chose to spend it with JM.

JM chose to spend it with JK.

(And they allowed us to have a peak into that with this show - out of necessity but also another choice made by them to let us see THEM as they are with each other - well some of how they are with each other).

All while both are going to be spending the next 18 months together as is in the military.

Do you get it now?

The choices and how very loud and obvious they are?

It's about making those memories before enlistment.

It's about having those experiences to reminisce on while in service.

But above all it's about doing that together.

Making those memories together.

Living those experiences together.

And then enlisting together.

CHOICES!!!

I think that anyone that has eyes and half a brain can see just how meaningful, even emotional, this trip is for them.

Their choice of BEING together in this specific place and time is everything.

As I'm writing these lines, @wonsummernight went and posted this:

A perfect edit to a perfect song choice, as usual!!!

And what a perfect finish to my over sentimental post.

💜💜

[therandomartmaker]

(In Case I Don’t See You) Good Afternoon, Good Evening and Goodnight.

DPxDC

After a reveal, things go strange for Danny. At first, he thinks it’s just the lingering effects of having his vigilante identity out in the open. Sam and Tucker tell him he’s being paranoid, and Jazz doesn’t talk much with him because she’d left for college. She only listens to his words and talks him through the feelings, a steady presence.

It’s then that he realises that his ghosts had been showing up… regularly. Not erratic and randomly, they were almost scheduled; he’d checked once, and they had always shown up when the time was even. He’d said this to Sam and Tucker, Tucker looked concerned but Sam brushed him off. “They’d have to coordinate for that, Danny,” she said, “Do you really think Skulker wouldn’t take every chance possible to fight you?”

His ghosts were getting more agitated. It wasn’t hard to defeat them, they were just. Angrier. They also went down easier, but got back up faster. They also were disjointed in their banter, and it got worse as time went by, fights quieter and more… emotion filled.

It’s only when Danny spots several white vans nearby his fights that he realised he’d forgotten about the GIW.

Danny rushed home, to the portal- he’s unlucky, or perhaps rather fortunate, that he stumbles upon the GIW in his home, talking to his parents. It’s an easy decision to turn invisible.

“Keeping Patient Zero in the Truman cage is working well, but it might be catching on. Unscheduled fights give us more subjects, so you’ll be lent Subject-E and Subject-SK in two days, in the private laboratory, as they are currently useless in field and hinder the process.”

Patient Zero? Subject-E and Subject-SK? Useless? What process?

Truman Cage? …Danny knew that movie. Watched it with Jazz a few years before, because Jazz had a project on it, wanted to do inquiry on unethical ‘imprisonment’ and isolation.

Static buzzed through the air, and Danny heard the GIW agent pick up an ecto-proof walkie talkie. “Report, Patient Zero has been missing for two minutes, unknown whereabouts, may be heading or already at FW Household.”

Danny swore mentally, flying away to the roof of the Nasty Burger, still invisible.

Shit. What were they doing- what kind of shit had they already done?

…What could Danny do to stop it?

—

Batman stared at the report in his hands. Phase One of the Ghost Investigation Ward’s plan was going well, to capture and learn everything they can about ectoplasmic beings and a ‘villainous creature’ that has taken control of a small town in Illinois. Supposedly, the ‘creature’ was a volatile destructive being that repeatedly put the town through constant attacks.

Everything about it smelt fishy, and he’d found about the ‘GIW’ was flimsy, and a strangely large amount of money was being siphoned into it. The Fenton research being used was also something that shouldn’t’ve been published, biased and clearly contradictory in areas.

The information blockout was just asking for investigation.

sorry that this isn’t more for the story! I may write more for this, but idm this being used as a prompt post either! If you respond to this in a separate post, please tag me, i like to see what y’all make, don’t just link this post and run y’all. Also, i’m like 80% sure someone’s made this already or at least done something similar, so if someone could find and link that, that’d be awesome

On a side note; some notes for this specific thing, but freedom is encouraged and this is mainly for myself because ik i’ll forget about this.

The GIW learnt danny’s id before the reveal and figured out very quickly that they wouldn’t be able to do anything to him because he’s legally human and he hasn’t had biological testing to make sure he isn’t human. They got ghost confirmation via the fenton parents after the public reveal, but had already informed the fentons of the possibility of danny being a ghost and proposed the ‘Truman Plan’ to them.

The plan was to set up another ghost portal with coordinates set to the same area the fenton’s portal lets out and recapture whichever ghosts danny lets go there, and this works exponentially well. They gain a bunch of speech capable ghosts to experiment on, and decide quickly that they’d start ways to put them under control and make them stronger, in order to, eventually, capture danny.

Phase Two is weakening Danny and looking into his skillset and how to counteract it.

Phase Three is actually capturing Danny.

Danny figures out that the GIW has agents everywhere, bugs everywhere and nowhere is safe. The only people he is absolutely certain he can trust to not make the GIW aware he knows he’s entrapped is Jazz, Sam, And Tucker, but since the last tw oare in the bounds of the GIW, he can only talk to Jazz to plan (he flies up up up and calls because tucker had them up on a private network so the only risk was being overheard, really)

B only discovered the GIW while passing over recent government records, and sets up one of his disguises to visit the town, eventually.

He ‘just so happens’ to be bowled over by Danny Fenton one afternoon and sets up a white noise generator to tell the boy the JL was on his side. After all, something wasn’t right, here.

[z-h-i-e]

Artists of Arda

The hottest new Discord Club is Artists of Arda. A place for artists who create any sorts of Tolkien-related works, and those who just like looking at the pretty arts.

Text chats

Voice chats

Scheduled events

Unscheduled events

Events that are just Zhie accidentally hitting the voice channel and other people wandering in

Events that are just Zhie's cat accidentally hitting the voice channel and other people wandering in

Virtual studio gatherings

Places to share art (both finished and unfinished) and get feedback (both positive-only and for workshopping things like 'what are hands??' and 'should I put a bird on it?'*)

Places to promote other places, events, and even yourself (if you do art commissions)

Find the link behind the magic cut...

And here are the rules, so that you don't have to awkwardly try to join at 2am to see the rules in case you're not keen on the rules and want a way to slip out the back door before a half dozen people flail at you with giant peach stickers. (We actually have that feature turned off completely.)

1) Please introduce yourself in welcome-nest before participating in other discussion. Just like a party where you'd knock on the door and say hi before you start dancing on the table, we'd like to get to know you first! (And then, by all means, disco on that table all night long if you want!)

2) This server is a non-toxic Tolkien group. Gatekeeping, elitism, snobbery, or other unseemly behavior will not be tolerated. Members here range from casual fans to super scholars, but one's experience should not be compromised because of one's knowledge or expertise. The same is true for artistic skills and experiences--stick figures and moodboards are just as valid as forms of art expression as mural-sized acrylic paintings that could hang in museums. We were all novices on both topics at one point; please keep this in mind during your interactions, and be supportive of one another!

3) NSFW items must stay in NSFW channels! All NSFW art must ALSO be spoilered when posted; finished art should also include the information from the template. Shaming is not allowed--not for content or characters or concept, period--but spoilers should be utilized even in the NSFW area so that viewers can self-curate the content they wish to view. However, due to laws and legal jurisdictions, content which sexualizes underage characters is NOT allowed on this server. Child pornography is highly illegal, a violation of federal laws in the United States (and in many other countries), and not protected under First Amendment rights. Breaking this rule is one of the few things that can get you instantly yeeted into the Void (permanently banned). 4) Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits workplace discrimination based on religion, national origin, race, color, or sex. We add to that class, gender, level of ability, level of education, and political affiliation. While this is not a workplace, these are all protections that everyone should have and not be in fear of discrimination, bullying, or behavior unbecoming from other members. Please be mindful when wording requests and having discussions so that your tone is not dehumanizing to others. (And going back to basics: If you can't say something nice, don't say it at all.)

This also includes commentary about characters vs people IRL. Discussion of characters? Perfectly fine if done respectfully. Discussion of a person who is portraying a particular character on the above topics? Not necessary.

5) If you try to side-step these rules by using a blog, PMs, or other means to engage in toxic behavior elsewhere, especially with or against other members of this server, it will be as if you said it here and appropriate action will be taken. This does not mean moderators are going to be actively searching for violations; it is a protective measure to be proactive about past fandom interactions where individuals would take their views off servers, technically not violate server rules on the server, but would bully, harass, dox, and others disrespect members in other places. This is not non-toxic behavior and is not allowed. 6) Moderators make mistakes, but arguing with a moderator on the server is not going to put out happy vibes, and may land you in time-out (or kicked, if you continue the behavior after multiple warnings). If a moderator shuts down a topic or conversation, please respect this decision. If you have questions or concerns, please reach out to a moderator about these topics. Sometimes, a moderator does not have all the information about a situation or hasn't been able to read through everything before they make a decision. It is fine to question such decisions in private and in a calm manner.

7) These rules are subject to change. Hopefully we don't need more, but, y'know, things happen, and when they do, this list will grow. It is expected that you will read and adhere to all rules if you are participating in this server. Not reading the rules is not an excuse for not abiding by the rules.

[meatheadosis-sf]

Hypnocon 2021

The 22nd annual North American convention/conference for men into men into erotic and recreational hypnosis will return to San Francisco this year. It's free to attend (with donations welcome).

$139/night event room rates for the Con weekend (and the day before and after, if you'd like to enjoy the rest of the city while you're here). Locals, or people making other arrangements, can of course attend without booking a room.

Enthusiastic informed consent is required for any hypnotic play (or other play, for that matter) at the Con. There will be presentations about negotiating consent early Saturday morning and before each play party.

Check out http://Hypnocon.com for more details and the group rate hotel booking info.

____________________________

SCHEDULE

October 15th - 17th at the Hotel Spero in San Francisco CA

At past Hypnocons, because they're free, many people were able wander in at will, to see only the events they were interested in. Because of this year's vaccination requirement, that won't be true this year. Once you've registered, you can certainly come and go as you please (hang on to those name tags!), but you must register!

Proof of vaccination is REQUIRED by the city of San Francisco and the hotel itself, and will be checked at registration. A digital photo of your vaccination card is sufficient, assuming the name on it matches your photo ID. To the best of my knowledge, no one planning to attend will be crossing any borders to do so. If you are coming from a different country, please let me know before you come, so we can figure out what works as proof for you.

Friday:

Registration 2p - 6p in Jarvis's Corner (the desk will direct you to it). Hypnocon is completely FREE (donations are welcome), but you do need to register so that we can check your proof of vaccination (including photo ID), and give you your name tag. Name tags will be created with both scene/screen name and the name you want to be called at the Con, color coded to distinguish hypnotists, subjects, switches, and observers from each other. Feel free to add preferred pronouns.

After 6p, you may be able to find someone to register you at the hospitality suite, but we're all here to enjoy the Con ourselves. You'll have to gamble. You MUST register, show proof of vaccination, and wear your name tag to attend!

If you would like to be notified via text when things happen that aren't on the schedule (e.g. where people are going for dinner; when the play parties start, etc.) you can choose to put your name and phone number on the Text List. We'll also be posting news to the Discord server.

Several people volunteered on the survey to be part of a Welcome Team, to introduce newbies to people, break the ice and help everyone get comfortable.

Friday and Saturday nights, VisibleRestraint and their partner will host a Kinky Hypno Play Party in their suite.

Flanelbear will host the Hospitality Suite, which is a great place to socialize, meet a hypno partner to play with, and see impromptu demos.

Unscheduled social time for the rest of Friday. We won't have the meeting room until Saturday, but the hospitality suite will be open (though limited in seating). Jarvis's Corner might sit another small group at the table, and there's a small restaurant inside the hotel.

This might be an excellent time for out of towners to visit Mr. S (in-store shopping has returned), since it closes at 6p. And of course all of the Tenderloin restaurants are nearby. Impromptu groups of people go out for dinner together based on food preferences, and maybe one place will draw a big group - it's a great way to get to know each other.

After dinner, you can join the play party, hang out in the hospitality suite socializing, or hit the SOMA or Castro bars. The SF Eagle will be within a 30 minute walk, or about 17-20 minutes on the Muni 9 bus, and I know there'll be a Hypnocon contingent there Friday evening. Or maybe you'll find a hypnotist or subject to play with privately in one of your rooms.

Saturday:

8:00a - 9:00a Registration in Jarvis's Corner (see above). You MUST register, show proof of vaccination, and get a name tag in order to attend! There's a brief window for latecomers, but it's important to get here in time for the first presentation:

9:00a - 9:50a Negotiation And Consent by VisibleRestraint [50] Enthusiastic, informed consent is required BEFORE engaging in any hypnosis at the Con, so everyone is encouraged to attend this workshop. There are nuances to hypnotic negotiation that might not be familiar to those of you who are old hands at BDSM consent negotiations.

10:00a - 10:50a Hypnosis 101 by JohnBear [50]

11:00a - 11:25a JoshSF will give a "Pre-Talk" [25]

11:30a - 12:20p Hypnovices: Sharing The Kink, And Onramps For Hypnocurious Doms by MindFoxxx Muscle [50]

12:20p Just before we break for lunch, we'll have the traditional (and optional) Group Photo taken [10]

LUNCH BREAK

1:30p - 2:20p The Awakenings Project: Preliminary Results Of A Formal Study Of The Erotic Hypnosis Community by SamHypnosis [50]

2:30p - 2:55p Hypnosis And Rope Bondage by VisibleRestraint and their partner [25]

(! No gap, in order to get one ten minute break instead of two five minute breaks)

2:55p - 3:20p Hypnosis And Working Out/Muscle Growth by GreyMuscleBear [25]

3:30p - 4:20p Kinesthesia Bootcamp - Wondertushy will awaken, develop and enhance our somesthetic (aka kinesthetic) sense. [50]

4:30p - 5:15p Horny, Tranced, And Stupid - a panel discussion by RicktheTist, VisibleRestraint, and Visible Restraint's partner (open to others who'd like to join in) [45]

6:00p (?) Group Dinner - location TBD

8:00p Kinky Comedy Stage Hypnosis Show performed by The Dominicator. A separate donation bucket will be there specifically for him, and we encourage people to enjoy this show even if they're not staying for the rest of Hypnocon.

Sunday:

9:00a - 9:55a Jarvis's Corner will again be manned briefly for latecomers needing to Register for the day.

10:00a - 10:50a Hypnosis And Neuro-Linguistic Programming by JoshSF

11:00a - 11:30a Hypno And Pup Play - Further Down And In by AnimalJSmith

11:40 - 2:00p SpiralBear will facilitate group participation hypno games. Fractionation Station and Speed Trance will involve everyone as either hypnotist or sub.

Checkout time at the Hotel Spero is 12p noon. You'll be able to store your bags in the hospitality suite, the meeting room, or with the front desk, so that you miss as little as possible Sunday morning/afternoon. We have the meeting room until 2:00p, and the Hospitality Suite for the rest of the day.

Many attendees are booked through Monday checkout, so the fun doesn't have to end - but we won't have the meeting room after 2p, so anything else will be completely informal.

[such-a-random-rambler]

Birthday Surprise

heeeeyyyyy @lenle-g

Happy Birthday!!!! - sorry that this is a bit late, but I didn’t intend it to be quite this long so had to finish it today.

(Prompt was John and Stabbed and boy did I have sooooo much fun with this. I might rewrite this one day into something much longer because I loved this idea so much. So thank you for the idea!)

Hope you enjoy.

“So, then I pulled her up off the floor - “ Gordon explained, getting into the swing of it now.

“Yeah, I know.”

“And I said ‘Hold on tight’.”

“I know.”

“And I fired a grapple hook off, getting the angle just right to wedge it into the top of the cliff face, not an easy shot I can assure you.” Gordon gestured upwards sharply, now with less than half his concentration on the selection of root vegetables in front of him. They would all need chopping to roughly equal sizes to roast evenly but they could wait a second while he recounted his latest feat of heroics.

“I know Gordon.” John said, reaching round behind him to get to the pots of fresh herbs for the basting of the turkey. “I was there.”

“No you weren’t.”

“Ok.” Gordon could hear that eyeroll. “Maybe not physically, but I was listening.”  

“Yeah, so let me tell it, because I say something really funny in a minute.”

John nipped back round him to the refrigerator for butter or something. “You’re not meant to be joking about on the job.”

“It’s not joking around, it’s lightening the atmosphere and putting the rescuee at ease in a tense situation.”  

“Fine.” John reached round for a mixing bowl. “Before you carry on and tell me everything I already know, have you preheated the oven yet?”  

“No.” Gordon turned back to his vegetables. It wasn’t often they got a house full but tomorrow was a special day at the end of a good week. They’d only had half a dozen dispatches, no fatalities, not even a broken bone. Virgil, Alan and Scott were on the way back and weren’t they going to be pleased to see that John had descended in their absence. Particularly Scott as it was his birthday tomorrow. If Gordon played it right he might even be able to play it off as Gordon’s present to the eldest: coaxing John out of the heavens and a full Thanksgiving-style roast even though it wasn’t the time of year for it.  

“I’m going to get so many brownie points for this. You here, Scott’s favourite food already in the oven: this was all my idea.” Gordon grinned, giving a particularly tough carrot a few enthusiastic chops. They went soft and sweet on a long slow roast – delicious.

“Do you need those brownie points for anything in particular?” John squeezed past him again, back to the refrigerator.  

“Well. There might have been a slight incident on Tuesday.” He paused. “No wait Monday.” Gordon counted back the days since the thing with the sock, conducting his thoughts. “Definitely Monday.” He whipped around, triumphant to have caught John out. “But I thought you knew anything anyway, so surely -”

The words died in his throat. John was close. Very close. Right behind him.  Eyes wide. Bowl in one hand, with the butter rub that would be pushed under the skin of the turkey to make it moist and flavorful. Too close. Gordon had frozen at the slight pull of resistance from the knife in his hand as he turned. The knife that he had sharpened to tackle the carrots and potatoes and parsnips and sweet potatoes. The one he had been gesturing with for the last fifteen minutes.  

Gordon’s gaze drifted downwards and for a moment thought he had imagined the soft gasp from his brother. He couldn’t quite understand what he was seeing. John. Too close. His knife. Where John was. Blood, creeping across the front of John’s shirt.  

John’s shirt was almost brand new. Not that new in fact, probably a few years at this point but it still had that soft new feeling of something that hadn’t been laundered too much. It was one of Johns favourites, but he wasn’t here enough to wear his civilian clothes a lot. Certainly not to wear them out, so they were always fresh and neat and clean. But now this one was covered in blood.

CRACK

Pottery dropped to the floor, the aroma of parsley and basil and rosemary and more blooming into the air.

Gordon was still gripping the knife. He moved, just a fraction of an inch, and John’s hand darted out to grab his wrist.

“Don’t move it.” he breathed.  

Gordon knew that. One of the basic tenants of first aid. Don’t go pulling objects out of wounds if you’re not prepared to deal with the bleeding that will follow. He wasn’t going to just rip the knife out. He wasn’t. He knew that. But. It had been instinct, just for a moment there to get it out.  

But John, who saw everything, who knew everything, knew what to do. Had stepped up even with a knife in his gut.

Slowly, forcing each finger carefully back Gordon released his grip on the knife handle, with John’s grip still firm around his wrist and red filling Gordon’s vision.  

Gordon locked shocked eyes with John, noting his normally suntan-free skin had lightened by several shades.

“I -” John started, swallowing heavily and continuing shakily. “I need you to help me sit down.”

“You need to lay down.” Gordon corrected, first responder instincts kicking in from somewhere in his subconscious while his conscious was still largely frozen.

Gordon stepped around to John’s back, where he could take most of his weight in a controlled descent to the floor, then pulling him back until he was horizontal. There was a med kit in the book case. But there were dish cloths here. Gordon grabbed the nearest clean one as a compress: laid carefully around the knife so as not to dislodge it put then pushed firmly to stem the bleeding.  

John gave a reflexive flinch, squeezing his eyes shut and letting out a low groan.

“Thunderbirds One and Two on final approach.” Scott’s voice boomed across the room. He sounded happy, relaxed: back from another successful mission after a pretty damn good week. “We’ll be landing in five.” He didn’t know.

“This was all my idea.”

Scott took the steps up to the gantry two at a time, heart light. He was already in a good mood when he had landed: yet another day where he barely got his uniform dirty. In and out, quick and easy, that’s the way he liked his peril. Virgil was taxiing Two back in and wouldn’t even need to do a medkit restock today. He was loath to say anything out loud, but Scott offered silent prayers that this was yet another day they had come back home with barely a scratch.  

Walking across the hangers he paused mid stride at the space elevator resting on it’s own pad, tucked neatly into the corner. Scott usually had to wrestle John down for his scheduled rest days, of which today was not one.  John always, without fail, notified him if an unscheduled visit was needed  for health and safety reasons and there had been not so much as a whisper of anything wrong on Five for weeks. Which meant this was a social visit.  

Scott broke out into a broad grin and lengthened his stride, making quick work of the several flights between the hanger and the house. With John down that would make a complete set for the first time in who-knows-how-long. Scott wasn’t big into birthdays, his own in particular. They were just a reminder of how long it had been since the holes had been ripped in his family, and there was usually some sort of incident to attend to anyway. But maybe, just maybe, he might get a couple of minutes of them all together for his birthday.

He tried not to storm into the kitchen – the first place to look for John was by the bagels – but he was keen, so at first he didn’t notice a ginger mop of hair on the floor as it was six foot below where he would usually be looking. Was this some sort of post-orbital stretching? Almost continual space duty was taxing on the body but surely they could come up with something other than being a human trip hazard asleep on the kitchen floor.

Gordon was leaning over John, back to Scott.  Typical for him to be involved in something inappropriate but he had picked up all sorts of weird things during his lengthy physiotherapeutic tour of the world after his accident.  Scott shook his head, but frowned as his noticed a bright red pool of paint, spreading across the plain while tiles. What the hell?

Gordon must have heard him come in, for he glanced over his shoulder. Scott had seen Gordon look that pale and shell shocked exactly twice before. Once for Mom and once for Dad, and it struck terror at Scotts core in an instant.  

Like an optical illusion his perspective changed and a brand new and much more terrifying scene resolved before his eyes. John wasn’t asleep, he was unconscious or close to it. That wasn’t paint. He was lying in a pool of blood.  

Scott didn’t remember covering the intervening distance but in a flash he was standing right next to his two brothers, where he could see the blood soaked cloth in Gordon’s hands. And the handle of the kitchen knife standing out from John’s side.

“Help me.” Gordon begged, looking up at him, face ashen.  

Gordon and Alan leapt up from where they had been waiting on the stairs just out the medbay. Scott straightened from leaning against the wall. Scott looked worried. Alan looked worried. Gordon looked damn near terrified.

“He’s going to be fine.” Virgil said, giving his final pronouncement now the bandaging was complete. “It nicked a blood vessel but we’ve got that sown up and it didn’t perforate any internals. Muscle damage mostly. He just needs a bit of rest now.”  

Alan immediately relaxed, shoulders lowering and a relieved grin spreading across his face. “See,” he nudged Gordon, “I told you he was going to be fine.”

“I.... I didn’t mean to.” Gordon stuttered, eyes on the floor.  

“Gordon.” Scott said sharply, bringing Gordon’s eyes up to his, and Virgil shot Scott a warning look to take it easy on him, even if he had spent the last hour holding John’s stomach together for Virgil to stich, then cleaning up his blood from the kitchen floor.

“Whatever you are about to say I don’t want to hear it.” Scott said a little more gently but with uncharacteristic lack of tact. “Whatever you need to say, you need to say to John.”

“I don’t think he’ll want to see me.”

“He does,” Virgil said “he’s been asking for you.” As soon as he had been stable enough to talk John had started to ask about Gordon, and it was only a promise that he would see him soon that kept John in the bed while Virgil was trying to god-damn stitch him up. Painkillers always made John stubborn.

Gordon made no move to go in and Virgil heaved a huge sigh at the difficulty of having younger brothers. “He’s awake right now, but he needs his rest so get a move on.”  Virgil grabbed Gordon by the shoulder and shoved him towards the door. “We’ll be having pizza when you’re done. Alan go and put the oven on would you, you can see John later, when he wakes up.”

Alan nodded and scampered along the corridor. He was a good kid. Virgil gave Gordon another push through the door, and closed it gently behind him.

Scott looked tired. He always looked tired, but more tired than usual.  

“Not what I expected to come home to.” Virgil said wryly.

“No.” Scott agreed. “I suppose it had all been going too well these last couple of weeks, we were due for a disaster. I thought someone had broken in or something at first.”

Virgil had heard Scott bellow for a medic from three floors away and as he had rushed in his first thought had been an attack from the Hood or the Chaos Crew as well. Amongst the application of a proper emergency compress and manouvering John down to the medical room Gordon had haltingly explained there was no intruder to pursue. Which stopped them putting the island into emergency lock down at least.

“Do we need to do anything?”

“With Gordon?” Scott raised a questioning eyebrow. “I doubt it. He’s had the fright of his life. So have I. I don’t know about one year, I think I’ve aged about ten years tonight!”

Virgil slung an arm around Scott’s shoulder as they followed in Alan’s wake to the kitchen. “At least he’ll definitely be down for your birthday.”

John was only half aware of the conversation going on outside the room, quite happy to let the wonderful drugs do their fine work, but the soft click of the door and tentative shuffling footsteps made him force his eyes fully open. Gordon stood by his bed, awkwardly swaying from side to side and not quite looking him in the eye.

“Hey.” John -  mustering himself to say something a little more intelligent -  sat a little more upright. Not much more upright though.

“Hey.” Gordon returned, eyes flicking to the almost empty blood bag. “Does it hurt?”

John was just going to reach round for a clove of garlic when Gordon turned, and at first it was like a punch. But after that initial impact the pain morphed from something blunt and bruising to sharp and breathtaking.

“No, I’m on the good stuff.”

Gordon nodded. Acknowledgement? Approval?

“Errrr..... Virgil said you wanted to see me, but, well I don’t know, if you want to rest, or whatever, I don’t mind - “

“I did.” John interrupted. “I wanted to make sure you were ok.”

Gordon met his eyes in surprise. “Me? I’m fine. I’m.... I’m not the one who got stabbed. I’m the one who....”

Deer in headlights. John knew what that meant now. John was aware of every second they were frozen in that awful tableau, the slow spread of warmth outside, the frozen spear stabbing inside. The look of shock and terror and disbelief written across Gordon’s face. The big brother in him wanted to do something about that. He wanted to make the fear go away and promise that it would all be ok. The little part of him that was always on Thunderbird Five snapped at him to prioritise so he’d left that comforting for later and focused on the bleeding.  

John reached out – being careful not to pull on the i.v. - to take one of Gordon’s hands in his. “I’m going to be ok Gordon. A bag of blood and a few stitches, a bit of bed rest and I’ll be right as rain.”

“I’m sorry.” Gordon whispered. “I didn’t mean to.”

“I know. I shouldn’t have been running around right behind you like that.”

“I should have not been waving a knife around like that. I almost killed you.”

The kitchen floor was cold against his back, apart from where his own blood warmed him. It probably wasn’t even that much, but he’d lost enough to make him a little light headed and to be glad he wasn’t still trying to stand. He tried not to show how much it hurt when Gordon pressed down, but every breath jostled the metal protrusion. It might not even be that deep but his imagination was conjuring unhelpful images of being run through. John thought he had felt feint vibrations from the depths of the island and was hoping that wasn’t his imagination. His concentration was slipping and Gordon needed backup.

“You didn’t. And I’m going to be fine.” John peered into Gordon’s face to see if he was taking it all in.  

Gordon nodded, slightly teary. He might have to be told it a couple more times, but he would get it in the end.

John let his head drop back against the pillow: exhausted, fuzzy and ready for sleep. “Look on the bright side though, neither of us is going to be given kitchen duty for a while.”

[deadanddeactivated]

Changes

So @figurative-siren-song posted a thing today and uhh apparently i was really in the mood to write some heavy angst. This was before i was having a really shitty day (tbh when i wasnt having a shitty day it had a happy ending).

Anyway no fancy post editing because tumblr mobile sucks, please enjoy

AO3

--

The sides weren't like real people.  They couldn't just… reinvent themselves or change the way a real person could.  When the sides wanted to change, they had to break apart. Become a fragment of their old selves, and let the other fragments fade.

Virgil knew a thing or two about changing.

Not like De, who was still self-preservation no matter what he called himself.   Or like the twins, who couldn't even remember King tearing himself in two.

Forgetting didn't work so well for Virgil.  Instinct wouldn't have made the mistakes Fear and Anxiety had.  

Then again, Instinct was the one that started the whole mess.

(It's not like the memories had stayed away anyway.  Not like with the twins. Virgil supposed he should have expected that.  It just wasn't in his nature to forget, even if he couldn't remember what he wasn't forgetting.)

The point is, Virgil knew a thing or two about changing.  

So the pit in his stomach didn't really come as a surprise.  He knew the risks. Lifetimes ago Instinct and King had talked about them at length.

"Hey Roman."  Virgil greeted that morning, hoping Roman didn't notice how tense his smile was.  "You want to spar or something today?" 

"Don't distract me!"  Roman declared, yanking a snack from the cupboard and turning back towards his room.  "I have to get this project done! Thomas is depending on me!"

"Oh."  Virgil breathed, even though Roman was already gone.  Patton walked in next, offering a smile as he prepared a quick breakfast of sugary cereals.

"Good morning Virgil!"  He greeted.

"Morning Pat."  Virgil returned the smile, even if it didn't  reach his eyes. "Hey, do you maybe want to bake today?  I think we're running low on cookies."

"Oh that sounds swell!"  Patton said. "But Thomas is feeling a bit disheartened at the moment, I need to spend the day lifting his spirits!"

"Right, of course."  Virgil mumbled. 

"Thanks for understanding kiddo, we'll bake tomorrow."  Patton assured, planting a kiss atop Virgil's head as he passed.

"Tomorrow, right."  Virgil agreed, looking down at his hand.  Tomorrow.

Logan was already at work when Virgil knocked at his door. 

"Yes?"  He asked, sounding a little annoyed at being interrupted.  Virgil hesitated, biting his lip a moment before pushing on.

"I was just wondering if you wanted to go stargazing, maybe."  Virgil suggested. "The sky in Remus' side of the mindscape always does cool things when you're around."

"My apologies Virgil but I am busy preparing next week's schedule.  Perhaps we can go some other time." Logan refused and immediately turned back to his work, assuming the conversation to be over.  Virgil just sighed, stepping from the room and wondering what now.

As he was turning to his own room, thinking of maybe writing a letter, the rundown door at the end of the hall caught his eye.  

Trying in person couldn't do any harm, right?

Stepping through to the other side of Thomas' mind, Virgil was a little surprised to find he remembered exactly how to get to the living room.  He even remembered which of the floorboards creaked and which would break if he stood on them. It was actually a little bit of fun and by the time he found De, reading on the couch, he was smiling.

"He De!"  He greeted.  "Wanna hang out?"

"Why?"  De hissed, destroying Virgil's good mood.  "I'm sure the others didn't send you here to spy on me."

"What? No, I just wanted to-"

"Don't save it."  De spat, standing.  "You didn't choose your side, don't live with it."  Without another word, De walked off.

That…

That didn't go the way Virgil was hoping.

But it's alright, he told himself.  There was still Remus. Hopes high, Virgil eventually found the green side in his side of the imagination.

"Remus!"  He called, waving.  The glare Remus shot his way made Virgil stagger back.

"Fuck off."  The duke growled.

"Wait, Remus-" But before Virgil could speak, throned vines rose from the ground to separate them.

"I said fuck off."  Remus repeated.

Oh.

Right.

Okay.

That's…

That's fine.  

It's fine.  

Virgil will just try again tomorrow, right?

But even as he thought it, Virgil knew he wouldn't last that long.  He didn't have the drive to fight against the growing pit in his chest.

Wiping his eyes, Virgil knew there was really only one thing left to do.  It still took him another moment to sink out.

"Virgil!"  Thomas startled as Virgil appeared, jumping back from his computer. "Uh, not that I'm complaining but what are you doing here?  I'm not anxious."

"I know."  Virgil said, leaning against the back of the couch and looking off to the side.  "I just, wanted you to know that I'm proud of you. You're doing a great job."

"Thanks?"  Thomas frowned, sounding unsure.  "Is everything alright man?"

"Yeah."  Virgil lied.  "It's nothing I wasn't prepared for."  He took a deep breath and forced himself to look at Thomas.  "Bye Thomas." He said.  

Then, in a blink, he was gone.

Instinct sat with King a lifetime ago.

"If you break apart you might fade."  Instinct warned.

"I'm going to tear myself apart no matter what."  King argued. "Maybe this way I'll survive it."

"It's too dangerous." Instinct argued.

"It's my only choice."  King shrugged. "I'm going to forget this.  I don't want the mini mes to know about this, just in case they keep breaking.  In case they become something so small, Thomas doesn't need them anymore."

"Thomas is always going to need his creativity."  Instinct claimed.

"Not this one he doesn't.  I don't make sense to him anymore."  King sighed. "Look after them, won't you?"

"...I will."  When King broke he tried for two perfect halves and yet Virgil's pretty sure there were pieces missing.  Things so very King that went to neither Roman nor Remus.

Years later Instinct sat alone.  

Thomas wasn't listening to him, the sides weren't listening to him.  He couldn't be sure if it was Morality turning Patton, and therefore all of Thomas, against him.  Or was it Thomas' new ideas of instincts being somehow lesser than normal thoughts. Maybe it was Instinct himself athat had pushed them away.

Whatever the cause, the problem remained.  Thomas wasn't listening to him. The sides weren't listening to him.  He couldn't do his job like this.

What was the solution?

King.  King was.  

That night, something in Instinct broke and he ceased to be.  

Fear arrived in the mindscape a few days later.

Fear had long since broken into Anxiety when the memories started flooding back.  Spurred on by desperate attempts to remember a name he wasn't sure he had.

And with those memories came a realization.

Anxiety was a fragment of a fragment.  He was too small a side. Instinct could handle a change in Thomas.  But Anxiety? One wrong change and he'd cease to be.

That night Anxiety tried to leave first, hoping it might hurt less.

Now, fading into Thomas' subconscious, Virgil was glad he stuck around.  He just wished he had longer, to fix the things he broke.

But Anxiety wasn't like Emotions or Logic or Creativity.   Next to them he was just a small part of Thomas. A part Thomas could manage himself now.  He didn't need Virgil.

Would the others notice, Virgil wondered.  Would they realize what he'd been asking for all day? 

Would they care?

Virgil didn't have long left to ponder that.

None of the sides were particularly happy to be called for an unscheduled meeting, all rather busy.  However they couldn't just ignore a summons from Thomas. Patton, Logan, and Roman appeared together and yet Thomas looked around desperately, like he was looking for something.

"Is everything alright kiddo?"  Patton frowned.

"You threw off my groove!"  Roman claimed.

"Where's Virgil?!"  Thomas asked, panicked.

"Why he's right-"  Logan cut himself off, turning to see Virgil's regular spot empty.  "That's odd." He frowned.

"Did something happen?"  Patton asked.

"I don't know!  He just, he popped in and he said he was proud of me and then he was just, gone!"  Thomas explained.

"But you clearly still have your anxiety."  Logan noted. "You acted rather different when you didn't."

"Then it can only be one thing!"  Roman declared. "Rise, you fiends!"  At his shout, Deceit and Remus find themselves appearing.

"Oh yes, this is exactly what I wanted to do today."  Deceit claimed, rolling his eyes.

"What did you do to him?!"  Roman demanded.

"Who? Jeffery Dahmer?"  Remus asked, tilting his head with a smirk.

"I believe he's asking if you've seen Virgil."  Logan clarified.

"Not at all."  Deceit huffed. "He certainly didn't try to trick me into 'hanging out' with him."

"Me too!"  Remus gasped.  "So I skewered him with thorns!"

"Remus!"  Patton exclaimed.

"Okay so I didn't skewer him."  Remus grumbled. "But I tried! And that's what counts!"

"Virgil must have been real desperate if he went to you two for company."  Roman muttered.

"He did ask if I could spend time with him, unfortunately I was busy with the schedule."  Logan said.

"He asked me too."  Patton realized.

"Geez, what would make our local loner desperate for company all of a sudden?"  Roman asked.

"His room."  Patton whispered.  He sunk out quickly.

"Patton?"  Thomas called, concerned.

"What about Virgil's room?"  Remus questioned. "Is it dirty?"  He smirked.

When Patton rose up a moment later, his face was seldom enough to put them all on edge.  He opened his mouth to say something but instead found tears filling his eyes.

"Patton?"  Logan pressed.

"It's, it's gone!"  Patton managed through tears.

"Guess you lot weren't good enough for perfect ol Virgy either."  Remus smirked.

"No." Logan said, understanding washing over him.  "If his room is gone that means… Virgil faded."

"What?  No, that's impossible!  Thomas still has anxiety!"  Roman argued.

"Thomas will always have anxiety.  However, he no longer needs Virgil to manage it."  Logan explained, shaking his head and trying to pretend his hands weren't shaking.

"I still need Virgil!"  Thomas argued. "We have to bring him back!"

"I'm sorry Thomas, you don't need him.  Subconsciously, you know that." Logan said.

"But we can bring him back, can't we?"  Roman asked.

"No."  Patton sobbed.  "We can't." A thunk cut into the sense of grief falling over the sides.  Turning, they saw Remus had fallen to his knees.

"I…"  Remus' voice was a whisper, quieter than any side had heard it.  "I didn't let him talk. He tried to talk to me."

"He wasn't lying." De said.  "He was trying to say goodbye."

"He isn't gone!"  Remus screamed. "Maybe he's just, he just moved back, yeah?  Let's go check De, I bet he's picking a movie for movie night!"  He decided.

"Remus."  Deceit tried but Remus was already gone, racing through the mindscape for a room that wasn't there anymore.  Patton sobbed louder to the side but Deceit barely heard him.

Virgil tried to say goodbye.

Deceit never let him.

He's not going to get a second chance.

Another thunk rang through the room.

[dream-wreck]

A Song to Suit Yourself

It feels so good to write fanfiction again. Heck, it feels good to write again. This little thing started last summer, inspired by this post, and I’m finally sending it afloat upon the internet’s temperamental waters. Good Omens fandom, I hope you receive it well. Enjoy!

AO3

Title: A Song to Suit Yourself Rating: G Word Count: 2,186 Description: Crowley fixates on a new type of music, though Aziraphale can’t quite figure why. What would a demon want with lullabies?

Neither knew exactly how they ended up in the same Scottish field at exactly the same time beneath the same lonely apple tree, but it probably had something to do with their impending assessments.

Hastur and Ligur would be around soon to check in and report on Crowley’s Deeds of the Day, which were quickly becoming Brief Surveys of the Deeds of the Decade, as they hardly ever popped around anymore. Crowley didn’t dare complain. But he’d been putting off his Evil Deed -- you know, the Big One, which made up for a long dry period of demonic activity -- and it was time to get on that. So. Scotland.

Aziraphale still received regular unscheduled visits from Gabriel, “just checking in” to see that all was going smoothly. Aziraphale had begun to question his own understanding of omnipotence. Or, at least the Head Office’s ability to communicate sporadic schedule changes to literally the only active angel they had on Earth. In biding his time -- and seeking some overdue meditation -- Scotland.

So much for that.

“They’re calling them ‘lullabies’,” Crowley said. “They sing them at children. To make them fall asleep.”

Aziraphale considered this news while he cut off another slice of red apple. He offered some to Crowley. The demon curled his upper lip at the clean white disk.

“Humans have always sang songs to their children,” Aziraphale said once he realized that the news was not news at all. “Remember Babylon?”

They both smiled self-pleased smiles. You’d almost think they were sharing the same memory, but for Crowley baring considerably sharper teeth. “Oh yes,” he said.

“That poor woman you tormented for a spell,” Aziraphale recalled. “I was the one who recommended that she write her composition down. It was a beautiful tune...in spite of its inspiration.” 

Crowley shrugged. “I did not ‘torment her.’ She adopted me as the house god, what was I supposed to do? I was on assignment. Besides, she had a lovely home. It was nice to settle down for a bit. The point is, now they have a new word for it.”

“For tormenting?”

“No. The music. Keep up.” He let the pieces of the word roll off his tongue. “Lull-ah-bye…”

Aziraphale was occupied with his apple, plucked from the branches above. In his humble and learnéd opinion, few tastes in the world yet rivaled that of a fresh-picked apple. Being an angel, he also had an extensive understanding of the art of Music. Angels invented it, after all, but its purposes were rather limited in Heaven. If Crowley had come to him with news of a new kind of Music, or a new purpose for it, he would have been ecstatic and fully enthralled. But he hadn’t, so he wasn’t, and was therefore only mildly interested, though he tried his best to humor his associate. “Singing to babies helps them grow, you know. It teaches them new sounds, new words. And I personally don’t believe you’re ever too young to discover the joy of Music.”

Crowley chose not to tell him that he was missing the point, but he wasn’t entirely sure of his point to begin with. Something about the word struck a strange chord with him (all puns unintended and unrecognized). It had a sound like a plucked lute string and the curve of a lifting chin.

For a while, in silence, the two continued their survey of the Scottish countryside and a hundred miles beyond. Serious business. The evening began to settle in a comfortable calm, the sun yawning out a stretch of gold before its final disappearance beneath the hills. The angel and the demon each wondered what the other was thinking. Aziraphale wondered why Crowley had become so caught up in a single word. Crowley wondered why Aziraphale hadn’t.

The angel bit into another slice of apple. The satisfying crunch in the silence finally whet Crowley’s own appetite. He flicked his wrist and a bright red replica of the angel’s supper fell into his hand.

Aziraphale looked hurt. “I hadn’t realized this tree’s fruit dissatisfied you.”

“What, did I hurt its feelings?”

“No,” Aziraphale said, taking a moment to examine himself, not wanting to lie. “But I’m quite proud of this tree.” He sat a little taller. “I planted and raised it from seed myself, you know.”

Crowley -- who had been leaning against the apple tree’s trunk since the early morning -- sat up and scrutinized the bark as though he’d just noticed it were there. 

“Well what’d you go and do something like that for? When you could just --”

He snapped his long fingers. A few paces off, a plum tree that had not been there before shivered in a gentle breeze that had not been caused by anything but a general notion.

Aziraphale flushed. “I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. They’ve been cracking down on miracles that are not meant for a heavenly purpose. Besides, I found that I rather enjoyed the process of raising a living thing. You might try it, learn a thing or two. Watering, trimming, revisiting the little sapling now and again to encourage it out of the ground. And it clearly paid off. It took time and it took patience. And it was beautiful. The way God intended.”

Crowley gagged. Time and patience. The plum tree disappeared, but a pile of fresh, dark plums remained at his arm’s length, the skin so deeply purple they were almost black. “Suit yourself,” he said. “Just seems a waste of time.”

“Of course you’d think that,” Aziraphale said. “You know, it’s your constant need for excitement that gets you into trouble. You never sit still.”

“I do!” Crowley defended through a mouthful of bleeding plum. “I am now! And I do when I...you know, when I...you know.”

Aziraphale did not know, but he waited patiently for Crowley to realize that. Crowley did not elaborate.

He tossed his half-eaten fruit into the field, grumbling, “Who came up with the name ‘lullaby’ anyway? They’ve been rubbish at naming things from the Beginning. I’ll never forgive them for the turtle dove...Lullaby. Luhll. Ahhh. Bye. Stupid from the start. Lull....”

“For a dissenter, it sure sticks to your tongue easily.”

“So does mud. Doesn’t make it worth the taste. They think they’re so clever. If they’re so clever, switch things up a bit, do. All those songs, all lullabies ever talk about are dreams and trees and all the pain coming your way if you don’t fall asleep right this instant. All these languages since Babel and not a single one has whipped together hardly anything to move me to tears. Frankly, I’m just not impressed.”

He stopped. Not because he was finished. He felt eyes on him. Angel eyes, confused and concerned, and certainly out of their element.

Aziraphale cleared his throat. “Perhaps if you let them know that you have been their target audience all along, they’d show improvement. Better yet, put all that wealth of yours to use and commission one to your liking. Lord knows why you care in the first place.”

Aziraphale’s apple had finally been reduced to its core. The knife he was using ceased to exist.

“They’re too much like you lot,” Crowley continued. “Or at least you. Moving so slow. Doing slow things and inventing things that make them move even slower. Want to put the goblins to sleep? They’ve got spells for that. Spoon o’ brandy will do the trick. Or a knock upside the head. Practically instantaneous.”

Aziraphale bristled. “I thank God no one has put a child in your care.”

“On that, angel, we assent.”

The angel stood up, brushed out his jacket and tights. “I best get a move on. Several evening miracles to perform in the next town over.”

Crowley didn’t move, but he was suddenly standing. “Likewise. Which way are you headed?”

Aziraphale pointed to the north.

Crowley jabbed a thumb over his shoulder toward the south.

“Will you be in Scotland long?”

Crowley looked out to the empty fields. “Depends on what I can find here. I suppose if you’ll be around, I’ll be around. You know. Cancel --”

“Cancel each other out. Yes,” Aziraphale said, low and bristling, turning to the north. “Well, good evening to you.”

He paused. “I hope you find a song to suit your heart.” And he started north across the field, leaving Crowley, who did not turn to the south, alone beneath the apple tree. 

Crowley slumped down against the trunk with his legs stretched toward the setting sun.

Sunsets start to look the same the more you see and the longer you live. There had been only a handful of truly extraordinary sunsets that stuck in Crowley’s busy memory since the Beginning, and few of them were memorable without their contexts. Context is everything. He’d given up long ago on watching sunsets for the hope of an explosion of color to beat the rest. But he still appreciated the thrill of witnessing night stretch over the world like a lumbering dragon splaying out for a nap.

He missed dragons. Not many of them left, nowadays.

As darkness settled in, Crowley began a meditation of his own.

All around him, he felt history’s fine threads weave through the air. Ghosts and imprints left on the surface of the earth and the face of Time itself that had disappeared from visual perception, but lingered as golden strands only few could ever see. Battles and laughter, deaths and creation, all tangled together and tumbling, just above the ground and through the rich soil. Threads thick as vines wrapping around the trunk of the apple tree. The eternal, distant echoes of screams and songs looping round and round the earth like Saturn’s rings, and if Crowley squinted hard enough, he could see their harmonies gleaming.

“I do sit still,” he said to no one in the dark. Or maybe, not to no one.

“Why do they get songs?” he wondered aloud. “What do they have to be comforted about? Everything is given to them, handed to them. All they do is sleep. Bet no one sings their parents songs. They’ve got the hardest of the lot. They’ve got all the troubles. No one writes lullabies for the ones who need them most.”

And he knew in his heart -- or the swirling matter he’d begun to think of as the place where part of his not-soul lived -- exactly why children got all the songs. Because children need distractions from all the Unknown they float in, until they can lift their heads and start finding answers for themselves. The Unknown is a terrible thing to dwell on, even for the youngest minds, whose curiosity more often than not sustains them.

And for the ones who know? Are there no songs for them? The Unknown scrambles the mind, yes, but the Certain, the Absolute, whittles the mind to a rounded end. Fixation on the Certain can be as maddening as floating in obscurity.

Crowley was falling back into fixation. Such was often the case whenever he sat still, so he tried to avoid it whenever possible. But true to pattern, his mind eventually numbed to the humming of the world, to the whispers of Time wrapping like gossamer around this green earth, invisible to all but the eyes of those who have seen more, who know more, and carry the burden of the Certain. And the boiling lake sloshing deep within the earth grew hot against his calves and the heels of his feet.

He tilted his head up to the sky and squinted into the cobalt. The harmonies of history came into focus, golden ribbons rippling in tired dance.

He hadn’t slept in nearly a century. When he last awoke, he’d missed a lot, and wasn’t anxious to miss any more. But now, unnamed weight rested on his head, a heavy fog that stings the eyes and confuses the senses. The kind with its own eyes lurking just beyond the haze. Not a comfortable Saturday morning fog, by any means.

He wanted to lie down forever. He wished this field were safe enough to do just that, but sensed beyond the hills the warm bodies of beasts waking up to hunt by dim starlight, and he fancied this body too much to risk its demise.

Suddenly, there was a snake, long, dark, and terrifying, and if someone were to notice this creature as it slithered around and up the wide tree trunk, they’d see its scales shimmering impossibly through the pitch black eve, reflecting an invisible light. It curled up on a scooping bough like an endless coil of shadowy rope, and it was thankful for the tree being there tonight. 

Snakes cannot hum. That’s impossible. But many impossible things had already happened that day, and the snake, feeling safe enough to do so within the dense shelter of leaves, tried his hand at melody, content for the words he deeply felt to remain unformed, unspoken, as the song was for him alone, and he was -- as he knew and feared -- quite alone for now.

[paging-dr-bowen]

Tips for Fourth Year of Medical School

So at this point you’re so over Medical School am I right or am I right? But you have one tiny year left…well it’s actually the biggest year sort of kind of…Okay so Fourth year is when you apply for the residency of your dreams, enter the Match, go on the adventure that is interview season, Match day, then graduate with your MD and live happily ever after in residency and beyond.  With the current pandemic that is Covid-19 I’m not sure what fourth year will look like but my advice should still apply. Here are some tips below for scheduling your fourth-year electives, letters of recommendations and what is expected of you as a medical student at this level.

1. When scheduling your fourth-year electives it is advised that you front load rotations in the field you are applying to.  It shows interest in the field and you get more exposure in the field to add to the conversation on interviews because let’s be honest a 6-week core rotation is Psychiatry isn’t enough if you love it and are applying to that field. It also gives opportunity for an extra letter of recommendation if you did not receive enough (suggest 2 in your field of interest and 1 in another field in which you made a great impression). Aim to schedule a rotation 3 months before the rotation start date or as early as the hospital graduate medical education allows you. 2. For the months of September-December you should schedule rotations that are less demanding.  These months are high activity months for interviews (especially November).  If your schedule allows you to graduate on time and skip a month, you might even want to leave a month unscheduled (November or December) to do multiple interviews back to back.  I had rotations scheduled the entire interview season and was fine, but it was annoying having to tell my preceptor that I had an interview multiple times a week.  I was lucky enough to not receive much push-back, but I do know of classmates who weren’t as lucky and had to cancel or reschedule interviews due to this. 3. Unsure of what rotations to schedule in addition to ones in your field of interest? Pick anything you might want to learn that you weren’t exposed to yet- Dermatology, Radiology, PMN&R etc.  Don’t try to recreate a residency schedule by difficult picking rotations you think will prepare you for residency (i.e. 2 months of ICU) – nothing will prepare you but don’t worry…that’s what residency is for. 4. What is expected of a fourth-year medical student? You are expected to act like an intern…But you know nothing John Snow…Hysterical I know.  At this point in time you do not have any shelf exam lurking at the end of the rotation nor a near approaching USMLE Step exam (you should have taken Step 2CK and CS prior to fourth-year if applying for this year’s Match).  So, when you arrive at the hospital or the clinical site you are expected to work as if you’re receiving a paycheck (only you’re not).  There won’t be much to study daily, you’ll be focusing on putting your clinical skills to practice. 5. Timeline – The summer’s focus is on gathering all your letters of recommendations you requested from your preceptors during third year eons ago and writing your USMLE Step 2CK and CS. Take your business headshot for ERAS.  Buy your interview attire. September’s focus is on submitting your ERAS and all supporting documents as soon as the application is open. September-January is interview season. February your Rank Order List of all the programs you interviewed with and desire to go to is due. March is when you find out if and where you match. May or June is graduation depending on your school. I suggest you create a timeline you can easily access with all important dates of your interviews and when things pertaining to the match are due.  A nice app to store interview information such as date of interview and any notes you make is the NRMP Match prism app (it also has a list of important due dates). 6. Additional – Go to a conference or multiple conferences during third year through fourth year once you decide what specialty you’re interested in. You learn a lot about what the specialty offers in terms of career paths as well as get the opportunity to network at conferences.  Conferences are great conversation pieces during interviews.  Most conferences have discounted or free tickets for student attendees and often have scholarship opportunities as well. 7. Make a monthly budget with wiggle room for unexpected expenses that may come up. 8. Eat healthy, exercise and find time for your hobbies.  You get a lot of your free time back for fourth year since you don’t have to study – take advantage, you deserve this! 9. Don’t try to fit in – you are unique, and your dream program will want you for YOU. 10. Be kind to yourself and everyone around you.

*Tomorrow I’ll post everything I did in preparation for and during interview season.

[adashofstarshine]

Day In, Day Out - A Niki Story

Usually I post Niki stories to AO3, but I thought this one was short enough for tumblr!

Get up, shower, get dressed and have breakfast. Go to work, have lunch and dinner between shifts, go home, shower, and then get some rest. Repeat the next day. And the next. And the next. Until it was Thursday. Gods, he hated Thursdays. But Fridays were the same, and Saturdays, rinse and repeat until the following damnable Thursday.

It wasn’t a bad routine. Most importantly, it was his routine. One he’d become so used to over the last twenty years that he went through the motions like clockwork. He no longer needed to weigh how many porridge oats he needed for his breakfast. He no longer hurried along the pavement, worried he might be running late for an early rehearsal.  The seller at Been’s Beans knew his order and had it ready every Saturday before afternoon matinee. The only part of his day that could go unscripted was when a repeat client dropped by for an unscheduled appointment. Then again, he’d been doing this so long, he took surprises like that in his stride.

Except on Thursdays. Most of the other performers worked four or five days a week, depending on family commitments. With no such things holding him back, and an abundance of energy to spare, Niki would have happily have worked every day. However, Madame Director wouldn’t let him. She insisted he needed at least one day to ‘get his head away from it all’ – whatever that meant. So, Niki worked six. Two days as lead, two days as chorus, and two days on compulsory wait duty (boo.) It worked out neatly really, and the timing of the shifts only changed from season to season. Six days a week he was occupied. Six days a week he could use all his boundless energy and talent to wow his audience and woo his admirers.  If he was lucky, a client would whisk him away from wait duty, or see him after a show, to give him even more work to fill his time. But not on Thursdays. Thursdays just left him feeling kind of…lost.

He could get up and get ready for the day, but what was he preparing for? His home was so tiny, three box rooms and a hallway, that it was almost impossible to entertain himself there. He didn’t even have a proper kitchen, unless you counted a hob and a fridge the total sum of a kitchen. He could lie on his bed and read whatever novella he’d last taken out from the library. But that left him feeling incredibly restless.

He’d explored every part of the neighbourhood that wouldn’t get him stabbed, and a few places that would. He liked the bathhouse two streets along, but there was a limit to how long you could stay in there. He liked shopping, but once again, space was at a premium in his shoebox of a flat. If there was a fair nearby, he’d go there, happy to travel further afield if the posters led him that way. An hour away was Rough Rita’s All Day Carnival – a warehouse turned into a permanent indoor fairground. But entry added up and there was only so much of Rough Rita’s décor he could stomach.

He had friends; Niki liked to remind himself. One had moved to District Three to work at some fancy elves-only clinic and the other… the other was kind of prickly after she’d learned her brother was paying Niki for sex.  They were still on speaking terms but…well, she lived in the next precinct now anyway. It occurred to Niki, it had occurred to him so many times, that most people had more than two friends. He had Beth as well but, well, anything he told her would certainly go back to Madame D and well…

He didn’t want Madame D knowing why he truly hated days off.

For all Madame Director knew, he was a completely normal and healthy employee, who maybe had some self-endangering trauma, but was overall the best she had and she should give him all the best parts in all the plays ever. What she didn’t know, wasn’t going to endanger his chance at being the theatre’s darling. Or continuing to be so. Or something like that. He was ok! He was fine! So perfectly fine, he was finest anyone had ever been! So, so, so, so very…

Krokt, he was such a mess.

Niki was lonely. He hated Thursdays because they reminded him that he was nothing without work. Nothing to achieve, no one to really talk to, he was just one figure in the uncaring bustle that was Ravnica. If he died, Roxy and Kay would be sad for a little while, but then they’d acknowledge that Niki had known the risks of the life he’d chosen and simply move on. He hadn’t made enough of an impression of anyone to have them want to meet up with him. To ask after his health, to want to do fun activities or go to interesting places. He was in desperate need of friends.

But how? How did anyone just find friends? Was there a set way to do it? Was there a guide he could follow? How did people just connect seemingly by nature? How did you just meet people and know friendship had occurred? This line of thought made Niki’s head spin, worried that it had condemned him to a life of loneliness. No one had ever taught him how to make friends. It sounded like the sort of thing he should’ve learned when he was younger rather than how to pirouette or dance on an empty stomach. His parents had kept him purposefully apart from other elves his age, and as a teen, his interaction had mostly been performances of some kind or another. How did you tear down the invisible wall between you and someone else? How did you step from ‘acquaintance’ to ‘friend’? Niki wasn’t shy. He was an actor! He danced and sung for hundreds! He was the opposite of shy. Yet, he just couldn’t. He didn’t know how and he hated it.

If he couldn’t make friends, how was he ever going to fall in love?  He was taking things one step at a time. Friends first, but he spent his evenings nose-first in novels detailing the most fantastic of relationships. Young protagonists, feeling alienated in their everyday lives, would catch the eyes of handsome men and find their life partners, not without a degree of dramatic strife. Some of the sex scenes were a bit meh, but otherwise… Oh to be a swooning romantic hero in a billowing white shirt, in the muscular arms of his gorgeous and devoted boyfriend. They would leave the pressures of society behind and run away to an enormous (possibly-haunted) manor and make love until the sun rose through the stained glass. There they would restore the place to its former glory and hold lavish parties for all their many many friends.

Niki knew the novels were unrealistic, but couldn’t an elf dream?

He’d just settle for mattering. Meaning something to someone. Anything really. Just enough of an attachment that they’d look forward to seeing each other and miss each other when apart. Was that too much to ask? He just wanted to be something to somebody. He had so much love to give but… These thoughts always came to him when there wasn’t any work to distract him. When he couldn’t lose himself to the glamour of being on stage, or the admiration he received when off it. Even waiting was preferable to this. He could secretly rate customers, angle for tips, it was as much a show as anything else, just with a different costume. Yet on Thursdays, there was no hiding behind a painted smile and a bubbly attitude. There were no clients to please and no colleagues to laugh with. He just had himself and… being himself was clearly insufficient.  

What could he do? He didn’t know and that led him back into the same routine, week in week out. Six days of work, one day of sadness, six days of work, one day of being alone. It was very easy to follow a schedule when you knew it like the back of your hand. So the cycle continued and Niki continued to hate it when Thursday came, just like all the other Thursdays came before it.

[eponymous-rose]

Weird question, but you seem really productive despite seeming to have a constantly fluctuating routine, with both your work and your hobbies. Most people think having a solid routine is the only way to increase your productivity but I've pretty much given up on having a routine since my life seems similar to yours--a lot of travel, weird and always changing work hours. Do you have any advice on how you deal with routine and productivity in spite of that?

Oh gosh, this is definitely something I struggle with a LOT, and I’m not sure I’ve found a coping strategy that works for me yet. But the small things that have been helping have been (1) keeping a routine in my planning even if the stuff I do changes dramatically (even if I’m traveling, I have a notebook where, every Sunday, I list all the stuff that has specific dates/times for the following week, I list the stuff where I still have to come up with a date/time, and I list the stuff I’ve gotta do that week for sure), and (2) finding multiple ways to approach the same goals that I can tailor to my level of energy/spare time on any given week (so this week I’m just not in a super exercisey mindset and can’t rely on having the motivation to run every day, but instead I’m making an extra effort not to eat out this week—lower-effort for my current state of mind, but all toward the same goal of feeling a bit healthier overall).

I’m also very cognizant of how little time at work is actually spent working, so I try not to feel guilty if the total number of hours worked is low as long as the work’s getting done. I’m an incredibly routine-oriented person, but it’s been a bit freeing to slowly and steadily teach myself that stuff just has to get finished one way or another, and the easiest way to do that is to just focus on specific goals and let the rest be flexible.

Anyway, yesterday I was thinking of this ask and was like, “You know, I’ll just write up what I do on Monday as an example, and I bet things will go hilariously awry.” And so they did.

So here’s what my weekly planning list looked like last night:

Dated Events:

Call with paper coauthor at 9AM Monday

Call with leadership academy planning committee at 10AM Monday

Call with peer mentoring group at 9AM Tuesday

Sit in on class at 11:30AM Tuesday and Thursday

Seminars Wednesday at 3PM, Thursday at 4PM, and Friday at 3PM

D&D Saturday at 6PM

Undated Events:

Coordinating abstract submission for an upcoming conference (early week)

Setting up Skype calls with a couple friends I haven’t talked to in a while (late week)

Assorted Priorities:

Book hotel for work travel in July

Accept journal article review request and scope out how long that’ll take

Review some materials sent out for my peer mentoring call

Revise my paper and submit the revisions before the Monday deadline

Get my driver’s license renewed (the joys of yearly visa renewal… your license has to be renewed yearly as well)

Put together a schedule for a biweekly Twitter feature highlighting new publications for the account I run for a subcommittee in my field

Respond to an e-mail about a conference in January about some weird deadline that popped up for next week

Come up with conference abstract ideas before the as-yet-unscheduled meeting

Fill out some action items in advance of my 10AM Monday call

And some more specific checklists for four research projects I’m focusing on this week

I purposely try to group conference calls together, because I currently share my office and feel weird doing video calls when she’s stuck in frame five feet away from me while she tries to work. So Monday seems like a good day to work from home, and I can squeeze in Tuesday’s call before heading to the office that morning. I’ll be in the office Tuesday-Friday, which means I’ll be able to attend those seminars and classes with no problem. I have most of my D&D prep done already because we ended early last game, so I can leave that until Saturday. The only thing I might have to shuffle to next week is the driver’s license thing, because it’ll take three hours and I have to account for finding a Lyft there and back. Okay. Aces.

Wake up this morning to find my internet’s out, and I also somehow left the hard drive with all my research on it at work. Hoo boy. But staring over my to-do list, I think I can set today up as a “big picture” day and not have to do any actual coding, so I’m still okay to work from home. I can also phone in to the conference calls instead of using the video call software. All good.

Luckily, the internet comes back right before my first call of the day. Said call is with someone who also happens to be a dean, so she has a tendency to get held up at meetings, so I take that delay to look at the action items for my second call (I mean… if you send me action items at 8PM on a Sunday I am not gonna touch them until Monday morning).

When she did make it online, we chatted about the new paper, and she strongly encouraged me to send it to our other coauthors in case they have suggestions. We’re submitting on Monday, which is way too short-notice to read a 20-page research paper, but they already read the pre-revision version in great detail, so I shot them an e-mail that included a summary of the substantial changes and a note to the effect that if any of them want more time to look at this stuff, I can beg the editor for an extension on their behalf. Minor crisis averted.

Second meeting is very intense and structured. Everyone has to volunteer to organize and lead two webinars in the next three months, so I go ahead and volunteer for the two April ones so I’ll get it out of the way early. Aaand the first webinar is at 1PM this Friday. Okay. I’ll work from home that morning so I can do last-minute prep, then head into the office in time for the 3PM seminar. No biggie. One organizer puts together a draft schedule, and I send a quick e-mail suggesting a different use of one of the ten-minute time slots. One of the other organizers requests another conference call tomorrow instead of e-mails. I tell them I can only do after 4PM, if I leave work early. Eh. We’ll see how that works out.

After the call, I get through a bunch of small tasks in maybe 20 minutes: hotel booked, Twitter posts prepped, review request accepted (not due until May 20, so plenty of time on that), conference deadline e-mail chain started. I spend the rest of the time before noon getting sucked into an article someone sent me about the myths surrounding undergraduate grade inflation and then reading up on the peer mentoring materials for our call tomorrow. A couple other minor e-mails pop up (scheduling the precise date of a conference mixer in January, that kind of thing) and I manage to deal with them right away.

Lunch! Clearly working from home means I should take the opportunity to indulge in some fine cuisine, some leisurely cooking that highlights—

I heat up a microwave meal (chicken couscous) and watch YouTube videos for an hour.

Back in it! I write up some abstract submission ideas and make a valiant attempt at setting up a time to talk about them, but it looks like that might have to wait until next week. We’re still a ways before the deadline, so that’s okay.

Mmmmmmm someone on Twitter mentions a conference in Germany in September and a workshop in Colorado in July that both look like a good fit for my research. I’m in a situation where I have a big chunk of travel funding that’s going to disappear unless it gets spent in the next year. Oh no. But also oh yes.

Just in case, I put together a couple point-form ideas for stuff to propose that I can bring to the people holding the purse strings.

The rest of the afternoon is spent putting together weekly goals for four of my research projects: each one involves a collaboration with a different person, so I’d like to be able to send each of them an e-mail with at least one new thing to share about that project this week. Just in case that doesn’t happen, though, I rank them from most to least important. Worst-case scenario, I don’t have to send any of them this week, but it’ll make next week tougher if I don’t.

It’s only about 3:30 at this point, but honestly, I’m feeling a bit exhausted and overwhelmed (some of the e-mail chains have gone through five or six replies at this point and keeping it all straight is giving me a headache), so I opt to get some groceries and call it a day.

I may have added some stuff, but I got a lot crossed off today! Here’s how that last checklist looks at the end of the day:

Assorted Priorities:

Revise my paper and submit the revisions before the Monday deadline

Project #1: come up with a new exploratory figure and send to Person A.

Project #2: summarize the early results I started last week and send to Person B, along with an ask to see whether he’d be up for me presenting this stuff in Europe in November.

Project #3: improve on figures I showed last month and send to Person C.

Project #4: prepare a rough outline of the next paper to send to Person D.

Not having my work hard drive means I was able to just focus on the stuff that wasn’t specific to research today. In all the chaos of today, I’ve set myself up well for a research-heavy rest of the week where I (hopefully) won’t have to worry about non-research stuff or big changes to the schedule and can just burrow into research, emerging for occasional seminar/webinar breaks. A good Monday, all around.

[burlybanner]

Syzygy - 2

Syzygy - An AU of Infundo (post-Infundo Chronicles).

Chapter 2: Phase I Trials

Chapter 2 Summary:  Talking through the baby steps. Together.

Link to Chapter 1

Author notes: This a ridiculously short chapter, so no  “read more” tags needed. Also my posting schedule will be Tuesdays, until I’m stuck in the story and haven’t caught up to my writing schedule.

****

Truth was they couldn't start right away, not without enough data. It took a good two months of Tony and Bruce meticulously analyzing Bruce's metabolism. After tirelessly testing his food consumption, mobility, and sleep habits - and adjusting Bed with different "supplements" Bruce could enjoy throughout the day - they pinpointed the handful theories holding some promise.

"You know," Tony said, eyes scanning the floaty blue diagram of Bruce's body. "We haven't taken one thing into account."

Bruce spread his fingers, further blowing up his body's image while concentrating on the data. He noted a few interesting nuances but his thoughts floated in and out of reality so he didn't pick up on Tony's brainstorm. "I thought you agreed with me on the finer details."

"In theory, I guess, but you didn't like my other suggestion. You know it'd help, in the long run."

Bruce nibbled his lip and cautiously turned his effigy on its axis. His belly became a mountain, high and proud, rising above all the data points. "I'm not sure it would. There's a good chance it'll aggravate the Other Guy, resulting in an unscheduled Code Green."

"True, true." Tony nodded and fiddled with another data stream. "But speed, Brucie. It's a faster way. What we have right now might work, sure. But it may take a while before we get close. Years, even. You wanna wait that long?"

Bruce grimaced and spun his figure around, unnecessarily. "You know I don't. But I've put the cart before the horse before and the results weren't pretty."

"I dunno. Green still suits you."

Bruce glowered over the schematic readings, ignoring him.

"I'm just sayin', Bruce. Think about it."

Bruce remained mum but Tony knew he'd planted the seed.

**

Although the first test week was adequate, Bruce didn't get the results he'd wanted.

"Less than a kilogram? That's it?"

"Well, we're fightin' nature, Big Guy. I can adjust the formulas of the current weight gain drinks and powders but you still need to consume it fast enough to override your body's heightened abilities."

"It's still not...bad," Steve murmured. "It's some gain, right?" But even he looked a little disappointed.

"I know, I know." Bruce ran a hand through his curls and they toppled over his scalp like loose springs. "There has to be a faster way, though."

Steve gestured at the data pulled from Jarvis. "Is there anything else we could do? I mean, it doesn't look appetizing but you could try one of those heavy duty Vitamix blenders and liquefy your solid foods."

Bruce made a face. "I'd rather not vomit, thanks." He grimaced at his boyfriends. "The problem is trying to eat beyond my point of feeling stuffed. We have to increase my caloric intake but the gains don't last when I'm not physically able to eat enough or fast enough."

Tony rocked on his heels, leveling his steeliest gaze in Bruce's direction. "You know my thoughts, Banner."

Bruce held up a stern hand. "No. I refuse. I told you before it's not safe."

Steve frowned. "What's not safe?"

Bruce briefly glanced at Tony who made a curt go ahead, tell him gesture. "It's...possibly faster."

"Guaranteed faster."

"Allegedly faster," Bruce said a little louder, in case Tony didn't hear him the first time. "I'm not risking massive property damage just to gain a pound or two."

"We could use the Green Room in the basement."

Bruce rolled his eyes. "Not you too, Steve."

"Well maybe I want in on the secrets. The two of you can't keep discussing options without me, because I'm as much a part of our family as you two are."

Bruce and Tony traded uncomfortable glances. "Sorry," Bruce muttered.

"Agreed. We should've included you in the science stuff." Tony made a face at Bruce. "We might as well tell him, mind if I--?"

Bruce sighed testily. "Be my guest. You were going to, anyway."

"Right," Tony murmured, and for penance from pushing his portly bf a little too much he gave Bruce a small peck on his forehead. "It's one option that yields good results: fasting."

"Fasting?" A scowl marred Steve's features. "Isn't that the opposite of what we're trying to do?"

"Yes and no. If we do it right it'll make Bruce hungrier and he'll overeat, even beyond the levels he's eating now. Every five days we can switch up his eating routine."

"And beyond that," Bruce said, sheepishly glancing down. "I've been...working on a few experimental compounds to quicken the results. But I haven't tested my hypothesis and I'm a little unsure of the outcome.

"But fasting..." Bruce paused and sighed. He ran a chubby hand through his curls and nibbled his bottom lip. "Fasting is problematic because it potentially riles the Other Guy. I hope the compound I'm developing works because I'm hesitant to try anything that threatens my calm."

Tony rolled his eyes. "We've got this, hon'. You know we do. We have the Hulk pod in the basement, and you could even stay down there while you get hungry. Not that you'd want to. And Steve and I'll get your favorite take out, after we're done. Double portions of everything."

Bruce's eyes narrowed, and Tony swore he saw a little green. "We've never tested the containment pod. I've never had a need to, and I've never felt in danger since I've been here. I'd rather not unless there are no other options."

"Suit yourself," Tony said, shrugging. "Five years is an awfully long wait for a goal weight, though."

Bruce made another face. "Too long."

"So go for broke," Steve sighed.

"Exactly,” Tony said. “What harm could it do?"

Bruce locked eyes with Tony. "You don't want the answer to that question."

Having heard enough, Steve sauntered over to his favorite scientists. He slung an arm over both their shoulders (though his reach strained over Bruce’s wide back), and gave both a peck on the cheek. "I think the answer is staring all of us in the face," he told them, and both Tony and Bruce gave him the side-eye.

"It is?"

"You know something we don't?” Tony snarked. “Impossible."

Steve chuckled softly. "Bruce, I know It's not something you really like doing, but the Hulk is part of you. And you eat more after a Hulk-out, don't you?"

Bruce folded his arms and planted his feet, as unyielding as a marble statue of himself. "But I also use up a lot of calories. It's a zero-sum game."

Steve nudged Bruce with his chin and immediately Bruce settled into his warm arms. "Muffin. I think both you and Tony will come up with a plan that'll work, but I don't want either of you over-stressing." His gaze flickered to Tony, who finally caved, lips breaking into a small smile. "We'll figure it out. I'm thinkin' maybe we try a little of everything, yeah? Can we start out slowly, just to see what'll happen? We have time. The answer doesn't have to come today."

"Hmm," Bruce sighed. "I guess so."

"Yeah, okay," Tony grumbled. "I guess he's right."

"You're welcome." He kissed Bruce's temple and held out his other hand for Tony to take it. "Tonight, let's enjoy each other's company. A little food, and fun."

"Don't have to tell me twice," Tony said, quickly shutting down their work station.

                                                         * *

Part three: https://burlybanner.tumblr.com/post/186018435219/syzygy-3

[aparticularbandit]

Current State of Bandit Fic:

This is long, so I apologize to everyone on mobile if that read more does not work and you have to scroll through a really long thing you don’t want to read.  Sorry!

Completed JTV Fics (by which I mean completed drafts not completed and posted):

Carla

The rough draft is completely finished.

There are fifteen chapters total.

Some of these chapters are really rough and need a lot of editing.

Okay maybe not a lot but definitely some editin.

I plan to post a chapter every other week hopefully on Mondays.

But honestly idk if I’ll keep track of which Mondays I’ve posted a chapter and which I haven’t unless I have something to alternate them with.

Luisa and the Fox

The second draft is completely finished.

It’s off with my betas.

I’ve mostly let it lie fallow for the past month-ish (or maybe only a couple of weeks idk how long it’s been friends), which means I should be able to come at it with new eyes, too.

There are five chapters total.

However, I do currently plan to have a second connected fic that’s half a direct follow-up and half I just want Luisa and the Fox fluff.

Stuff that didn’t really fit into the fic proper (like the freckles scene).

I plan to post a chapter every other week on also hopefully on Mondays.

The plan is to alternate these with Carla chapter updates, but right now I’m waiting on input from at least one of my betas before posting another chapter.

This may change in the future because I’ve been getting antsy for...a lot of reasons.

In-Progress Posted JTV Fics (by which I mean I don’t have a completed draft):

If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now

Now that Carla’s rough draft is finished, polls have said to focus on this one.

These chapters are harder, so hoping to do one a month.

But this really depends on how well the chapter is going - y’all probably noticed a longer wait between chapters 7 and 8 because group therapy was a barrier.

Unlike Carla and Luisa and the Fox, this fic doesn’t really have a chapter-by-chapter plan (and even Carla didn’t until those last chapters...mostly).

So I kind of know what I want to happen through the course of the fic and the order of things but sometimes more set-up is required than just jumping around (or maybe it’s not but I feel like it is).

I have no idea how many chapters are left.

At least seventeen, if my current projections are correct, and that’s dealing with stuff that I feel like needs to be in separate chapters (although I may change my mind on that later), not even necessarily including stuff that I want to sprinkle in among other things (Rose meeting with her therapist, scattered Susanna stuff, etc.), which means it might be longer, it might not be.

And like - even with those seventeen - I feel like some of them definitely warrant some cool-down time between or something like that, so guesstimates would project more than that.

Jane: The Real Story

This was second on the polls as far as things y’all wanted me to focus on.

I don’t plan to schedule updates on this one.  They may just happen when they happen.

These tend to be less intensive than the IYLHYBHN chapters, and they may fill in the every other week on Mondays slot when Carla is posted, but don’t hold me to that because I would prefer these to be unscheduled.

I also have no idea how many chapters are left.

I do plan on at least getting into s2 and s3 and potentially dealing with some of the stuff happening in s5 - like the Michael has amnesia! bit because that was part of the original post - but this is subject to change.

Mainly I have plans for that Michael bit and then dealing with Susanna and why Luisa and Rose are gone for a while.

And if this turns into Jane quit telling Mateo lies! then we...need an older Mateo.

I don’t know where/when I plan to end this.

This one is super flexible and I intend to leave it being flexible because I like having it that way.

The Adventures of Rose, the Baker’s Daughter

I like writing fairy tales don’t judge me.

This may jump into the every other week on Mondays slot when Luisa and the Fox is posted, but I may just start immediately into the other Luisa and the Fox fic that I mentioned instead.  Not sure on that yet.

I don’t know how many chapters are left.

There are at least seven, but just as with IYLHYBHN, that’s stuff I feel should be segmented into chapters and does not include other stuff that might happen between those chapters (like, for instance, I have a couple of general plot point chapters for later but don’t know all of the interconnected stuff).  In this case, I’d expect more than seven chapters.  If I finish it.  Y’all don’t seem too keen on this one.

There’s a lot of uncertains on this one, too, but I think that’s okay because y’all don’t seem too excited for it.

In-Progress Unposted JTV Fics (by which I mean I don’t have a completed draft):

Everything’s Coming Up Rose’s

90s rom-com au that no one really asked for but I’m over 17k deep into writing so you’ll probably get it anyway.

I mean.  Technically it was fourth on stuff y’all wanted me to focus on, actually ahead of The Adventures of Rose, sooooooooo.  Y’all want it but when it comes down to only getting one option on things, you don’t.

And you certainly don’t want it more than any of the other proposed aus.

Looking at maybe twelve? chapters.

Already wrote the first two and started the third, as well as having a chunk of chapter...7?? written and a bit that maybe shows up in chapter...8?? and another bit that might show up...in one of the earlier chapters maybe but I’m not sure where to put it yet.

The first two chapters are super rough but I like them, and I like this story.  A lot.  Which is why it kind of hangs out and still shows up on polls.

AND LIKE.  I ACTUALLY KNOW THE WHOLE PLOT.  DO YOU KNOW HOW RARE THAT IS.

I don’t know when I’ll start posting this one, and since y’all’ve told me y’all want me to focus on other fics in-progress and other aus, this should be lower on my totem pole but.  I like it.  So it’s not.

Luisa and the Fox: Shenanigans

Continuation of Luisa and the Fox.

No set number of chapters.

This is here for me to have more with these characters because I like them and there was more I wanted to write with them (originally just the freckles scene, but there’s starting to be some other stuff that I kind of have hanging around in my head that I might do) that didn’t really fit into the original story.

Don’t plan on posting these until after Luisa and the Fox is posted for obvious reasons, and this may fall into the every other Mondays slot once Luisa and the Fox is done.  I haven’t decided yet.

Brainstorming JTV Fics (by which I mean they’re primarily in the brainstorming stage but they may have a little bit written for them):

Harry Potter AU

The most requested AU on the poll.

Currently projected to have seven multi-chapter books.

Currently planned to be set concurrent with the original series.

Which means it may be more a crossover than an AU.  Ish.

I’ve been rereading the original series so as to get a better idea of how things fit together (and the anti-Slytherin stuff and commentary is so big and I don’t think it stops because even if you bring up Snape it’s in context of we sorted him too soon and he should’ve been in Gryffindor so like.  THOUGHTS).

This looks like it will be really long if I keep with this idea and write the whole thing.

Please don’t expect this to be finished quickly.

Please expect that I will likely take breaks to write other things.

Focus is on Clara as the viewpoint character.

I’ve made changes to birth years so that Clara and Luisa are born in the same year.

This does put Luisa a year higher in school than Clara, but since they’re in different houses anyway, this doesn’t really present a problem.

I might be overthinking this.

I’ve started outlining the first book.

I paused at chapter twelve because still figuring out the overarching series plot so the first book plot should tie into that.

I do have a general idea of character arcs for Clara/Rose and Luisa over the series and how that plays into what is discovered by the original trio over the series.

I also have a good idea of what happens in the final battle.  It’s the externals that’s causing me more problems than the character-character and internals.

I’ve started the first chapter of the first book, but it’s really rough and probably will have a lot of changes.

Hallmark Holiday Special

The second most requested AU on the poll.

Currently I have a general idea of which version I want to go with.

Those of you who were around in November/December know that there were two variations I was playing with.  A lot of aspects of those got retooled and put into Everything’s Coming Up Rose’s - and I mean a lot of aspects of both because I took the Rose from one and the Luisa from the other and meshed those together.  However, this means I can take the one that plays the Hallmark tropes straight and not worry about the complications I’d originally planned for that because they come up somewhere else, which. lets me play it more straight.

Straight, hah.

Maybe five chapters?

Off the top of my head thinking about where the chapters would break?

Maybe?

Sounds about right?

Because they’re, like, 1.5hr shows with commercial breaks every fifteen minutes, but each commercial break is like five minutes or more, so there’s like.  five segments, right?  Something like that?  My math on this is probably wrong but.  five segments?  Maybe?

I could probably jump back into writing this (I did start this somewhere in November/December) but I think I want to retool the beginning for other stuff that I think might mesh better than what I initially did.  And it needed to be edited and I should rewrite the beginning anyway, so.

This is just backburner as far as writing because do you see all of the other stuff?

Also there’s -- just because I know what needs to happen in each chapter doesn’t mean I actually have concrete plot for each chapter and I kind of want to know the complication before I jump into writing so I can make sure to get that set up properly soooooooooo we’ll see.

The hope is that I have this set and ready to post in July.

Primarily because the idea of Christmas in July makes me happy.

--and you know what.  There are five Mondays in July.  I could just have this be what I update weekly in July if there are actually five chapters.

Tentative schedule maybe????

University AU

Tied for third most requested AU with canon-compliant soulmate AU, which is below.

Since the poll for prof/prof or student/student is deadlocked at a tie, I plan to go with prof/prof.

To counterbalance the HP AU, which is a really long extended student/student AU.  With a whole bunch of other stuff.

I may do a student/student university AU later, but probably not.

My most recent ideas for the student/student university AU combines with the non-canon-compliant soulmate AU and hit some of the same points that IYLHYBHN does but in a different way with different variations.  Ish.  So because I still have general ideas for that, maybe, maybe not.  Unsure.

This is currently being brainstormed.

I have a general idea for how to start this off.

So, like, the first two chapters, maybe?  Or, like, a prologue and the first chapter?

I know how I want Rose and Luisa to meet, which would be the second chapter or...not the prologue.

I have a general idea as far as Luisa’s character.

I have less on Rose as far as concrete aspects, but I may get there.

I might jump into this one before the Hallmark Holiday Special just because it’s lingering in that place where you feel like you could be starting off on writing something and it’s there sort of thing?

Idk, it feels like less fluff than the HHS, which still needs some plot straightened out before I feel completely comfortable jumping back into it.

Canon-Compliant Soulmate AU

Tied for third most requested AU with university AU (see above).

I’m not focusing on this right now.

I know people like the one-shot and want a continuation of that, which is why this was on the poll.

I like the one-shot as a one-shot.  I think it is complete as a one-shot.  I don’t think expanding on that one will actually make it any better.

Which is why, if I revisited the soulmate timer idea, I’d planned on doing it differently and ended up combining it with the university student/student AU idea.

I do not plan on continuing the one-shot but instead want to deal with other soulmate AU tropes if I do another soulmate AU.

Given that I’d rather play with other soulmate AU tropes, I want to look through general ideas.  Once one of those stands out to me as something that could mesh better in the long form for something canon-compliant, I can start better brainstorming.

So I guess this is less in the brainstorming stage and more in the idea collecting stage.

I hang out in the RPC, so I should be able to find one of those soulmate tropes posts at some point.  And if not, you have all these other things above to look forward to that are getting more focus than this is.

This, of course, doesn’t include any one-shot ideas or the other aus I listed on that poll (I still really want to do the SG/Tick/JTV crossover because I’ve got ideas for that and how that would work), nor does it include any non-JTV fics I may or may not be writing/editing/etc.

So, basically, lots of content if I can get my butt sat down to write it.  We’ll see how it goes because, honestly, looking at all of this is intimidating, and like, I’m excited for...most of these projects but.  It’s a lot.  It’s a lot.

But I just wanted to update y’all on current projections for these.

[wenevergotusedtoegypt]

girloverhere replied to your post: THEY FIRED MPC BARUCH HASHEM OMGSH

Finally.

I know, right.

need-more-skirts replied to your post: THEY FIRED MPC BARUCH HASHEM OMGSH

DEETS!!

So I actually wish I had more details to share, because I’d love to know what exactly finally got them to do something about this situation. Like I said, I definitely felt like last week was a turning point, between MPC’s refusing to be in the same meeting as me and IB’s heavier involvement. After last week I did feel like he would get fired at some point. But I figured that the absolute soonest would be after I came back from vacation, because having both our positions absent at once would be judged too much a disaster - better he at least got some stuff done than no one being there.

I honestly don’t know whether they were planning to fire him today ahead of time. As I wrote earlier today, he emailed IB that he would be late because he was having trouble getting out of the house, and didn’t show up til 10:45. This was probably a worse day than average for that to happen, because B’s B had sent him something over the weekend with a note to do it immediately today as quickly as possible (it was sent by fax and I get all the faxes). But most of the day proceeded normally. MPC even had multiple conversations with IB about a longterm project he was working on and plans for it.

Then at 4:30ish B’s B came over and said, “[MPC], [IB] and I would like to meet with you.” Based on his body language, MPC seemed totally laid back and unworried. I’m guessing he thought it was something about the conversation of our respective roles going forward. I, on the other hand, was like, “Oooooohhhhhhhhh!” because I couldn’t picture any scenario where this would be a positive conversation. B’s B has a notoriously packed calendar; it’s difficult to get a scheduled meeting with him much of the time, and he had not had meetings with either MPC or IB scheduled. For him to jump out of his back to back meetings unscheduled, to talk to MPC along with IB rather than just having her do it, was a clear negative.

Literally no more than 1-2 minutes later, I heard a door shut a little harder than usual (enough that it was unclear whether it had been slammed or just accidentally shoved a little too hard). MPC walked back to his desk, rustled some things around a bit, put on his jacket, picked up his bag, and walked out without saying a word to anyone.

2-3 minutes later IB pulled me into a conference room and gave me the news. I’m the only one who was told today, and was told not to say anything to other coworkers until the official email announcement goes out tomorrow. B”H I have plenty of non-work people to tell to tide me over. 😂

einodmilvado replied to your post: THEY FIRED MPC BARUCH HASHEM OMGSH

What are you gonna blog about now though? 😜just teasing

Probably the stresses of covering 2 positions for the 2nd time in a year lol, and this time unplanned at that (last time started as a maternity leave).

But I’m very hopeful about where this is going. Prior to MPC’s firing we were already going to discuss some level of restructuring the 2 positions, and now we’ll be able to do it before we hire someone new, without clashing personalities or baggage involved. I wanted to do this last year when I was offered MPC’s position after the person before him decided not to come back after maternity leave, but my boss at the time wasn’t open to hearing my thoughts about the positions. This time I feel confident I’m going to be consulted much more and taken seriously as an authority on the 2 positions. I also have a feeling they’ll actually let me be at least somewhat involved in the hiring process for the new person this time, unlike last time when I didn’t get to so much as meet any of the candidates before someone was hired (and I could have told you from a simple google search that MPC had poor judgement, if nothing else).

I’m mainly just worried about this week and a half I’m going to be gone, but...we’ll figure it out. I was already trying to get as much done before I left as possible, so that it wouldn’t be in MPC’s hands, so we could be in a worse position than we are. I’d also already begun compiling an email to him last week (since he wouldn’t speak to me) about everything that needs to get done in my absence, as well as projects for the person I supervise, so now we have that information to pass onto....someone, no clue who, but we have the information. :P

[wannawrite]

The B In Baejin Is For Boyfriend Material

• who?: Wanna One's Bae Jinyoung • genre: 🌸 • type: bullet point blog navigator. • pure fluff of what Jinyoung would be like as a boyfriend on campus kdlsjskdjsj I'm honestly really terrible at the boyfriend type of content because I'm not good at speculating or assuming how people actually are in real life. But this was fun to do and I hope it isn't a total flop. Thank you for requesting this anon!! - Admin L 

• first of all, regardless of what college you apply to or enrol in, Jinyoung would be super supportive • even if your dream college and his dream college were 200 miles away • luckily, you guys somehow got into the same college • hell yeah • you wouldn't see your boyfriend for awhile because you're too busy packing and getting ready for college • but this is Bae Jinyoung we're talking about   • *ring ding dong* • you peel open the door to reveal a smiling Baejin, hands filled with packing materials such as masking tape • "yah ~ aren't you supposed to be getting ready as well? Why are you here?" • "i'm here to help!" • you sigh and raise your eyebrows at him • then again, you aren't actually complaining about it • who wouldn't want to have your boyfriend around • and helping you • Jinyoung's house is closer than yours to the institute so he doesn't have much to bring to his dorm • he can travel that half an hour every weekend • your situation is different • much different • a dozen of your things are packed and ready to be shipped to college with you • which is practical because you can't be travelling 5 hours up and down every day • you need everything in your dorm • literally • including that cute plushie Jinyoung gifted you on your birthday to sleep with • otherwise, you know you won't be able to fall asleep • your roommate is cool with you pretty much occupying the entire dorm since they too live extremely close to the college • you love your roommate already • let's not lie Jinyoung is probably decent at packing and being neat • sure, he's no Minhyin but he makes an effort to try and help • folds your clothing • realises it's his sweater he thought he lost last Winter • Baejin sighs but smiles and tucks it in your luggage anyway • his baby WILL wear his clothes • stops to observe the things you packed and realises you have like 500 boxes of household equipment • "....love, how much stuff do you actually need?" • "LovE hOW muCH STufF dO YOu acTUALLy NeED" you reply • *insert Spongebob meme* • "you will help me carry it to my room, won't you?" • your voice drips with honey, sickeningly sweet and begging • Jinyoung pinches your cheek gently, "ahh, I can't. I'm moving in two days after you, remember?" • "yah! is that your reason for moving in after?" • a cheeky smile spreads on his face but before you can retort something snarky, he presses his soft lips to yours • packing is forgotten • you are sad you're moving in before your boyfriend does • he doesn't forget your move in date • at first, your parents were going to drive you and your things over • surprise • on that day, it was Bae Jinyoung and  your parents who showed up in the car to pick you • you nearly melted into tears • he lives far away from you so any unscheduled meet up is rare and always makes you cry • bc he doesn't have to make that 5?? 6?? hour journey to and fro • but he chose to • well duh, it's for you • he's that type of person let him live • your parents were in on it too • the car ride to college is one of the more enjoyable ones you have had in your life • Jinyoung is so charming your parents fell for him immediately • he's talking about baking, politics and gardening all at once to both your parents • it's amusing • and you really wouldn't have it any other way • look at your boyfriend and family getting along so well • he bouta be part of the family soon • wink wonk • your parents love him as much as you do • maybe even more • as soon as the car is parked, your parents venture out to sip tea in one of the on-campus cafes, promising to see you before they leave for the long drive back • your legs are so wobbly you can't even stand up straight anymore • pins and needles are a PAIN • thankfully, you have an amazing boyfriend by the name of Bae Jinyoung to assist you in balancing • both of you make multiple trips back and forth, each time the load of boxes seemingly heavier • djosapdkdl you realise it's going to take the entire day even if you started at 7am • Baejin pulls out his phone. "Hi Jay, clear my schedule for today. I'm really busy right now" • eventually, you do finish up unloading and unpacking every box and bid your family goodbye • you let your lips linger on Jinyoung's for a few more seconds than usual • "it's never a goodbye kiss, Y/N." • of course, you are reunited on his move in day • the favour is returned by you helping to carry like two boxes of things   • he only needed three boxes and one bag • wow • don't you love staying nearby • college starts and your life is flung into a flurry • you barely catch a glimpse of Jinyoung throughout the first couple of weeks but you two decide on a schedule • he walks you to your first lecture every odd week • and you buy him coffee after his classes every even week • sometimes, he just calls you out of your dorm to grab a pizza at the restaurant on campus • college isn't like this irl but • picnic dates at the picnic tables outside the cafeteria • cloud watching, enjoying the sun, just conversing and finally! relaxing after all the stress from your studies • Jinyoung takes a ton of pictures to save as his wallpaper • you talk about your troubles and spill everything during those sessions • it becomes somewhat therapeutic • when either of you has a bad day, you call each other as soon as classes end • "babe..." • "hang on babe. grab your coat, we're headed out" • it happens all the time • you grab dinner together and then go for a nice night stroll • such romantic • 110% mood improved • study dates in the library when it's finals season • it's meant to be a date but you guys concentrate so much on your studies and nearly forget each other's presence • the library closes late for night study etc • you're wrapped up in his sweater and poring over your notes, frantically trying to memorise information • whenever you look like you want to tear your hair out, Jinyoung takes your pen from you and scribbles on a post-it before stamping it in your notes • "take care of yourself! i love you. :)" • your binder is covered in those neon stickers and they make your heart melt every time you see them • always reminds you to eat and stay hydrated • buys you 'cheer up!' stationery such as ramen shaped erasers or a pen with a cute design • you never actually use them and you keep them in a special pen holder on your desk • your roommate teases you about it, especially when more stationery is added • when Jin gets frustrated, you always remind him that he is worth it and that he isn't going to screw up • hyping him so his confidence doesn't fall to where it used to be • to Baejin, your smile itself is enough to make his day • it only gets better when you leave handwritten notes and sometimes a small snack in his bag while he wasn't looking • walks in and out of the exam hall exuding confidence • one night, you fell asleep at the library, surrounded by all your books • Baejin can't exactly leave you there yet he doesn't want to wake you up • so he took over the graveyard shift from the student librarian just to keep the library open and operating • so that you could have a good sleep • and so that half the cohort could cram a night before finals • in the morning, you are forced to literally drag him out lest he miss his final • you blush when your friends tell you about his gesture • how extra™ • you shake your head out of embarrassment but your friends find his care adorable • he gets really shy when you confront him about it • "really? was there no better way to solve it? you could have woken me up you know?" • "ahh but if I did, you wouldn't have gotten an A* on your paper? would you?" he teases • hahaahahaha true • since it's after finals, Jinyoung decides to take you off campus on a date • he goes out of his way to obtain a special parking pass for campus parking • idk we have that here so ^ • "jin, wasn't that cafe over there? why are we headed to the carpark?" • you feel a bit overdressed for your usual spot but he told you to dress your best • Jinyoung tightens his grip around your hand and beams with a wink • "we're going off campus tonight, sweetheart" • S W E E T H E A R T • by the way, I should mention that he looks absolutely dashing in his suit and maroon tie • you're practically drooling and thanking God for your amazing boyfriend • he's glad he heeded Guanlin's fashion advice • anyway • you can hardly contain your excitement as it's been awhile since you got a break from the college scenery • when he sees your mouth stretching into a giant smile, Jinyoung can't help but grin too. • he's happy you're elated to the point that it can't be hidden • since he lives in the nearest city which is 30 minutes away, you take time to admire the foreign scenery • wow....I can't believe Jinyoung lives here.... it's so pretty • ....maybe one day that will be your hometown too • MOVING ON • Jinyoung takes you to the finest restaurant he knows • his mum ONLY brought her clients there to eat so he knows it's serious • parks his fancy car right next to the entrance • you're wondering how he can afford it • he's still in college • maybe he's in the mafia? or a stripper? • okay i'm sidetracking again I'm sorry • with your arms linked, Jinyoung walks up to the host and confidently says, "I have a reservation under Mr. Bae Jinyoung, table for two" • A S D F G H J K L • dinner isn't as tense as you figured it would be • there's still laughter, jokes, and small talk about your school life • it feels the same - if you minus the fanciness of the place - as one of your regular dates on campus • no matter what, Bae Jinyoung is your boyfriend. the type of date doesn't change who he is • the walks to class • the on-campus dates • staying up late to cram for finals • helping him with his presentation slides • going to watch a movie at the media centre • visiting his dorms with food in the middle of the day when you found out he had been cooped up in there and refused to eat lunch • thank you Daehwi • you propped your head in your hands, sighing but beaming • one hand reached out to grab Jinyoung's, he didn't complain • your hands intertwined lovingly • "my college days are so much better with you"

[talabib]

How To Live A More Relaxed And Productive Life

Many of us feel overwhelmed with busyness. Whether it’s our smartphone and the eternal ping of urgent emails or our domestic life and all its attendant demands, there’s always something vying for our attention. What we sorely lack is time to relax and do what we want with our days. But, even when we do have time to ourselves, we often spend it worrying that we’re not accomplishing as much as we should, or wondering what the next item on our agenda is.

So how can we create a life that’s both productive and enjoyable? To find out, we’ll need to explore why some people feel as though they have all the time in the world while others never seem to have enough.

In this post, you’ll learn why most modern workplaces have developed cultures of busyness, and why it’s now normal to have much of your free time monopolized by meaningless meetings. Furthermore, you’ll learn how you can change your attitude toward time, so that you can become more relaxed and make time in your busy life for the people that matter to you. You’ll also learn what you can do right now to feel less busy and get more done.

Learn exactly what you’re doing with your time, even if it scares you, by keeping a log.

We may not readily admit it, but most of us have an obsession. Laura, for instance, is obsessed with time, and the ways in which we pass it. She’s so obsessed, in fact, that she’s spent years logging how much time she spends on different activities. Her logbook is extremely precise. For example, she could tell you that, on Friday, July 14th, 2017 she got up at precisely 6:45 a.m., spent exactly 45 minutes on paperwork from her child’s school and later, for 30 minutes, dealt with her mail.

Prior to logging her time, Laura thought she had a pretty good handle on how she spent her days. Her logbook, however, quickly showed her that she had had no clue.

For instance, despite often telling people she worked 50 hours a week, she was shocked to discover that she was actually averaging only 40 hours. And she’s not the only one prone to this overestimation. In 2011, a study by the Bureau of Labour Statistics found that people claiming to work more than 75 hours a week were typically overestimating by around 25 hours.

This raises an important question: If we’re not working as much as we think we are, where is our time really going?

Surprisingly, many people don’t want to know the answer to this question. Although rigorous time tracking provides a deeper understanding of how you’re actually spending each week, many of us are resistant to the idea.

For starters, we may worry that tracking time will show us just how many hours we’re wasting on things that aren’t meaningful or beneficial to us or our loved ones. Second, we may fear that tracking our time will constantly remind us of our finite time on earth, which will lead to anxiety about misspending each minute.

Despite these potential downsides, it is found that time tracking allows us to recalibrate our lives. Armed with greater knowledge, we can make positive changes in how we spent our time.

For instance, Jane discovered she was spending almost 327 hours per year on reading trashy magazines, she became motivated to carve out time to plan her reading habits more carefully. After making lists of good books and scheduling time to buy them, she replaced her consumption of celebrity gossip with a more nourishing diet of quality titles.

Make your hours memorable by filling them with exciting moments.

We all have memories, good and bad, which shape who we are today. Interestingly, our memories also play an important role in how we perceive time.

In general, the more memories we make, the more time we’ll feel we’ve had. The reason comes down to how the human brain processes its environment and archives what happens in it.

As we move through daily life, much of what happens to us is quickly archived in the depths of our brain, or thrown out completely. For instance, can you recall what you were doing on today’s date three years ago? Perhaps you can if something particularly noteworthy happened, but if it was a routine day like any other, you probably can’t. Why? Because we don’t think about our established routines. In fact, this lack of thought is why our routines feel so comfortable.

Unfortunately, the result of this lack of thought is that our brains don’t catalogue our routine time. For instance, if you take the same work commute 235 days of the year for around four years, then your brain will typically decide to store all these commutes – approximately one thousand of them – as a single trip! And just like that, one thousand of your precious hours have been whittled down to one. Worryingly, if your brain receives too much sameness such as this, entire years can vanish into memory black holes.

So how can you stretch your perception of time and avoid losing the hours to your routine? The key is to create memories that are intense or novel in some way. Taking vacations, for instance, is a surefire way to generate such memories. Our brains make memories out of novel experiences because they can’t be sure what they’ll need to remember in the future. As a result, they store everything that’s new.

Therefore, if you want to stretch time, have an adventure. For example, in our everyday lives, we may well remember just a handful of interesting occurrences in the course of a fortnight. But by vacationing in an exotic place, you’ll probably obtain that number of novel experiences before you’ve sat down to breakfast.

Our own insecurities keep us constantly busy, so learn to free up your calendar.

Most of us feel so busy all the time that we naturally assume every other hardworking professional must feel the same way. When scheduling a meeting with Jeff Heath, a senior director in a technology company, Laura was shocked when, after asking him when he would be available for an interview, he breezily replied that he was free all week, so when was good for her? How did a senior professional have so much free time?

When pressed on how he managed to keep blank spaces in his schedule, despite working in corporate America, Jeff replied that it was all thanks to his mind-set.

Crucially, he avoids the mental trap that so many other professionals get caught up in. Jeff thinks that despite their lamentations about not having enough free time, most professionals actually don’t like having white space on their calendar. Why? Because having a jammed schedule gives people mental reassurance that they’re doing something productive with their time. For instance, we spend so much time in meetings because they make us feel busy and useful.

According to this busy-is-good attitude, if something is scheduled at a particular time, with particular people, it’s automatically more important than unscheduled events.

Imagine that a couple has arranged for a plumber to deal with a leak in their apartment. The partner who has nothing in his calendar at work that day is much more likely to stay home and let the plumber in than the partner who has several scheduled meetings. But let’s think a little deeper. Are those meetings really more important than the uninterrupted time the other partner might have spent thinking about his biggest work dilemmas? Possibly not.

Avoid this detrimental mind-set by ignoring the temptation to fill all your spare time. You don’t have to value busyness just because the world does. Don’t say yes to meetings simply because you’re theoretically available. And if you’re feeling guilty for declining them, remember that the dirty secret about meetings is that, more often than not, they take up more time than is justified by the issue they’re addressing.

Don’t believe it? Just look at the meetings on your agenda and you’ll probably see that they’re all 30 minutes or an hour long, regardless of how much they need to accomplish. So say no, unless they’re genuinely important.

Spending time with loved ones can stretch our perception of time, and may even increase our lifespan.

Friends enrich our lives, make life feel less lonely and give it more meaning. But what does the time-management literature have to say about lingering with our treasured companions? A strict time-management schedule is incompatible with spending long afternoons and leisurely evenings with friends, right?

It’s a common misconception that time management is incompatible with leisure time with friends. In fact, a smart way to manage your time is to make friendships your priority. Why? Because devoting more time to your important relationships not only makes you happier; it can actually create a perception of having more time.

For example, in a survey of how people spent one particular day, those who spent the most time with family and friends on this day were also most likely to report feeling that they had the most amount of time in general. Conversely, those who felt they had the least amount of time in general were also the most likely to report spending less time with family and friends during this day.

Importantly, it was not the case that those with the lowest time-perception scores actually had less time than any other respondents; rather, it’s that spending time with friends and family is usually a relaxing, feel-good experience, and it therefore makes you feel as though you have all the time in the world. Time spent on, say, Twitter, won’t produce this feeling.

Furthermore, in another survey, those who strongly agreed with the statement “Yesterday, I made time for my loved ones” were 15 percent more likely to also say that, generally, they had enough time in their lives for everything they wanted to do.

Importantly, making time for those you care about may not only stretch your perception of time, but may also, in the long run, literally stretch your time. How? Well, research has shown that people with stronger social connections tend to have a longer life expectancy than those without such social connections.

This is likely the case, because good friends and close family encourage you to look after yourself, as well as care for you when you get ill. These healthy upsides to friendships mean that, when it comes to longevity, maintaining tight relationships is approximately equivalent to stopping smoking.

Accept the constraints on your time and lower your expectations.

Like many of us, Laura has a big family and a hectic life. During a recent and particularly chaotic week, she found herself thinking of those authors who seem to spend months away from their families in secluded garrets, with oodles of time to write. Why wasn’t she able to spend her time like that? Many of us have experienced this uncomfortable disconnect between our expectations and reality, but what can we do to overcome it?

The best thing to do is to alter our expectations of how we should be spending our time.

Importantly, once Laura made a conscious effort to lower her expectations about how much she should accomplish, she seemed magically able to achieve more in the little time she did have. For instance, she found she was suddenly able to write a first draft of a magazine article in a few hours, and could edit that draft in 90-minute windows of time between other domestic commitments.

How did this miracle happen? Well, when we lower our expectations of how much we can achieve, we no longer waste time worrying that we should be doing more. We often cause ourselves pain when our expectations become bigger than reality. This self-imposed suffering then leads to hours of worry about our unproductivity, which, in turn, prevents us from savoring the time we actually have.

Therefore, rather than holding big expectations about all the time you should be spending on your work, the key to long-term success is to consistently set and meet low expectations.

Consider the advances that a small child makes in learning language. Their development is not a matter of long hours of strict language lessons and harsh punishments for gradual progress. Rather, children advance slowly, and are praised for every new word acquired and for each minor linguistic breakthrough. To make a similar amount of progress toward our own goals, we adults should also adopt expectations of slow and gradual advancement.

Spend your money on enlarging pleasant experiences and minimizing bad ones.

We each have an equal amount of time allotted to us – 168 hours a week to be exact. However, while our weeks contain the same number of hours, our bank accounts don’t contain equal funds. But where does our bank balance figure in our quest for happiness? Does money make us happy, or is it simply the case that the more money we have, the more problems we can expect?

Interestingly, when it comes to money and happiness, it’s how you use your money – not how much money you have – that matters.

Money can boost happiness if you use it to buy things that facilitate pleasant experiences. These experiences later become fond memories – continuous wells of pleasure from which we can draw mental sustenance. Importantly, cherished memories aren’t subject to the diminishing returns of happiness that physical objects usually are. For instance, a child given a new toy will initially be excited to play with it. After a while, though, she will likely grow bored and stop using it. In other words, it will stop bringing her joy. In contrast, if you buy a tent and then use it to go camping, that tent may bring you lasting happiness. Why? Because you will forever remember the starry nights and campfires of that trip.

Additionally, if money is used to boost our happiness, we must rethink how we measure such happiness.

When we consider how happy we are, we often think only of life satisfaction, which refers to how well we think our life is going in general.

So, if you have a great job and a good house, you may consider yourself happy. However, this life satisfaction may not be the best measure of your happiness. Indeed, your moods are often much more driven by your hour-to-hour experiences than by your overall life satisfaction. For instance, your mood may often be depressed if you have a grueling daily commute to that dream job.

With this reality in mind, we can begin to assess which of our daily activities bring us happiness, and which make us miserable. We can then strategically use our money to either enlarge or minimize these activities. For instance, research has shown that commuting to work is often the unhappiest time of a person’s day. If this is true for you, too, then you could use your money to move closer to the office, thus reducing that commute and boosting your mood. Though this may cost a significant amount of money, it would be an important investment in your happiness.

Have time for adventures.

Ever feel like time just slips from one end of the hourglass to the other? No one can make more time, but a few simple strategies can make the time we have feel richer and fuller. Here are five tips on how to feel less busy while getting more done.

1. Figure out where the time really goes. People tell themselves plenty of stories about where the time goes (“I’m so busy! I have no free time at all!”) but why not find out for sure? Try tracking your time for a week. You can use an app, a spreadsheet, a notebook – whatever works. Most people discover that they have some pockets of time that can be redeployed for meaningful activities if they wish.

2. Plan in little adventures. When time isn’t memorable, we don’t remember it. That’s how whole years can disappear into memory sinkholes. Try planning in little adventures to make the days stand out from each other. These adventures don’t have to be elaborate. Grab colleagues for a picnic lunch. Take the kids to a playground after dinner. Just do something to switch up the routine.

3. Be careful with “yes.” If you want to have time for adventures, you can’t pack your schedule with things you don’t want to do. One strategy? When asked to do something in the future, ask yourself if you’d do it tomorrow. That makes the opportunity costs clearer. If the answer is that you’d move things around or cancel things to fit in this new obligation, then by all means say yes. But if the answer is absolutely no for tomorrow, probably that should be your answer for the future, too.

4. Slow down. Rushing just makes you feel rushed. Try noticing a moment when all is calm. Consciously call your attention to sights, sounds, details. Take deep breaths. Savoring good moments makes them seem longer – and that can stretch the experience of time.

5.Put friends on your calendar. People who spend lots of time with family and friends actually feel like they have more time than people who spend equivalent quantities of time watching TV or perusing social media. A dinner party takes effort, but it’s more rewarding than looking at photos on Instagram of other people’s dinner parties. Aim to schedule in relaxed time with friends this week. You’ll look forward to it – and feel like you’re the kind of person who has the time to get together with friends. That will make you feel less busy right there.

We all have the same amount of time each week, but our mind-set can greatly influence our perception of that time. Spending time with family and friends, and making fond memories, makes us feel as if we have more time. In contrast, worrying about our productivity and going through the motions of a boring routine can make us feel like we have less. In order to make the most of our time, it’s important to stop worrying, ditch the routine and start having adventures with those we love.