#which is literally three keystrokes away

[count-woe-laf]

currently running off some chicken nuggets, corn chips, pure rage, and playing two songs with the same bpm over each other

[novelconcepts]

Jamie & Dani short prompt- Online Dating au meeting online and being from bad past relationship. Thank u

This is probably a bad idea. It is, isn’t it? Almost certainly.

Why is she here?

Dani Clayton has been playing this particular set of thoughts--bad idea, terrible idea, why would you do this?--on repeat for three days. Ever since setting up that dating profile. Ever since realizing there isn’t much use in setting up a dating profile if you’re not going to use it. 

Oh, it’s all fun and games, building the thing. Find a photo that accentuates all the best parts of your face--Dani, after an hour of careful consideration, wound up going with one that accentuated her hair, more than anything, but she suspects the same idea counts. Then, the profile. What do you like? Teaching, long walks, new experiences, bad coffee. What don’t you like? 

Men, she’d thought, and snorted aloud into her wine before settling on: Deep water, accordion music, expectations, being called Danielle. 

A little more flourish, tipsy keystrokes, a casually-framed short-version of her life. Perfect. And then...well, then you hit the publish button, don’t you? You decide, for better or worse, to jump off this diving board and see just how far you can stand to swim before the energy gives out on you.

The faces appearing before her hadn’t been bad, certainly. Pretty, most of them. Interesting, a few. Still, she hadn’t swiped right on any--once or twice, because she’d forgotten which way meant yes please, but mostly because no one seemed quite...right. Which, she’d thought, was silly. The whole point of an app like this is to cast as many nets as possible and see what comes up. The whole point is to have fun. 

But every time she’d hovered over a promising image, a woman who likes dogs, or plays the violin, or goes rock-climbing in her spare time, she’d thought of him. Eddie. Who had taken one yes to a single date, and tried to make a whole life with her out of it. 

Eddie, who had taken her two decades to pull away from. 

What if the women here were the same? Not Eddie, exactly, but--presumptive. What if they believed a swipe-right was as good as a marriage proposal? What if she got bound up in conversation, and then a date, and then a relationship with someone else who just didn’t fit right?

Left. Left. Left. 

And then: the mistake.

She hadn’t meant to swipe right. Exactly. She hadn’t planned, maybe is the better way of putting it, on swiping right. She’d only wanted to look at the woman’s profile a little longer. Only wanted to inspect the facets this woman had put out on display with almost resigned simplicity. 

Some people, Dani had by now realized, wrote poetry and paragraphs to describe themselves. 

Jamie Taylor had bullet points.

“Gardener. English. Likes: Plants. Stories. Tea. Dislikes: Bullshit.”

The end. That had been quite literally the sum of it. Gardener. English. No bullshit.

But the picture, somehow, Dani hadn’t been able to look away from. Not because of carefully-arranged lighting, not because of a curated model-clean image--but because the woman appeared to have posted the photo almost under duress. It came in profile, as though someone else had done the job, her head turned toward the camera as if interrupted. Her hands were buried in a flower pot. Her clothes were simple--a tank top, a silver chain resting against the jut of collarbones, a pair of worn-looking jeans with holes in the knees. Her eyes--some fascinating color Dani couldn’t quite place--looked somewhere between amused and irritated. 

She looked real. 

Stupid, Dani thinks now--because that was probably the idea, wasn’t it? This woman, Jamie, had planned to look exactly this way. Real. Vexed at the idea of putting herself out there. Reluctantly available. 

It was a ploy, certainly--but one that seems to be working, because not only did Dani accidentally-not-accidentally swipe right, she found herself texting the woman. For hours. She’d expected much less, had figured this Jamie person would be as brief in text as she had been in bio, but...

Jamie had talked to her. Willingly. Teasingly, with more humor than truth, maybe, but with no sign at all that she was sick of Dani’s questions, bad jokes, nervous assessment that I really don’t do this, I honestly don’t get it. 

I don’t, either, Jamie had replied, and that had felt like enough of a reason to keep testing the waters. Enough of a reason to keep the conversation going back and forth, back and forth, until nearly two in the morning.

Shit, she’d said. I need to be at work in four hours. 

Shame, Jamie had replied, her tone already searingly familiar over text. Own your own business, make your own hours. Far wiser approach. 

I’ll make a note of it for when I found an elementary school, Dani had replied, laughing. She hadn’t said she’d already been in bed for an hour, the phone resting on the pillow beside her head so she wouldn’t miss the buzz of a new message. It had seemed perfectly reasonable at the time, with wine-warmed blood and the happy haze of good conversation. Jamie made her laugh. Jamie put her at ease. Jamie might not have been real, but she felt real, and that was good. 

Better than anything she’d felt in years, if she was honest with herself. 

Still, when the next day had come and gone with no message, she’d thought, Fair enough. Jamie had been good virtual company for one night. It was more than she’d expected to get out of this app.

Far more than she’d expected, particularly when Thursday night rolled around and her phone buzzed.

Teacher, yeah? No school on Saturday?

Correct, Dani had replied, as amused by the out-of-left-field text as she was irritated with how her stomach had flipped over upon receiving it. You have figured out the complexity of the American school system. 

I am a genius, Jamie sent back, followed quickly by: Drinks tomorrow night? 

Drinks. A thing that people do. A thing that adult people do for date reasons. 

She isn’t real, she’d thought, even as her thumb was punching back: How’s 8? Miller’s?

A mistake. Definitely a mistake. Because the app had been a lark, and the conversation had been too easy, and the fact that she can’t quite pick out the colors in Jamie’s eyes from a single photo is making her crazier than she’d like to admit. 

A mistake, saying yes. A mistake, suggesting the local pub-like establishment around the corner, whose beer-and-burger specials had kept her fed on too many evenings spent working late. A mistake, because once this goes south--as it’s absolutely bound to, as everything Eddie-shaped always has--she’s going to lose her favorite hangout in the deal, too.

And yet: here she is. Standing at the door, wondering if the outfit chosen for the evening festivities--tight jeans, pink blouse, hoop earrings--is too much or not nearly enough. 

What am I doing here?

Maybe, she thinks with mingled alarm and hope, she won’t even have showed up. Maybe it’s all part of the ruse: look approachable, look human and normal, look a little too beautiful in the most grounded way possible--then, cheerfully, invite a woman to drinks and just don’t show. A fun story for whoever comes next. Can you believe she thought I’d want to meet her after one night of texting?

“Dani?” 

English, Dani thinks with a sudden rush of heat. Right. Somehow, she hadn’t quite been prepared for the accent, which--coming out of this woman, draped with languid ease at a table--is truly a little more than Dani thinks she can handle just now. The accent, combined with the mess of curls dragged back from her face, and a dress sense that manages to be both casual and deeply attractive at the same time, is...

“Jamie,” she says, her voice a little lower, a little more hoarse, than is truly necessary. The woman pushes up from her seat, a small-framed figure in a black button-down, suspenders, ripped jeans. She’s pressing a hand toward Dani, offering a firm shake as though they are business partners, not an off-the-cuff bad idea of a date. “You look--”

“Never been here before,” Jamie says, almost apologetically. She gestures for Dani to sit before dropping back down in a sprawl that implies exactly the opposite of what her mouth is insisting. “Wasn’t sure about the, ah, dress code.”

“You--you did fine,” Dani tells her, wishing suddenly she’d gone for a dress. Or a  different human body altogether. She feels too tightly-strung, too anxious for the easy smile on Jamie’s lips. “Um. You’re very. In person.”

“Very,” Jamie repeats, a hint of uncertainty in her voice. “Is very American for wish I’d gone left, after all?”

“No. No. Absolutely not. That.” Bit too forceful, she suspects, judging by the smile spreading into a grin. “No, it’s just--your picture didn’t--tell me you’d be so...”

“Clean?” Jamie suggests innocently. She raises her hands, wiggling her fingers in a small wave. “Scrub up fine, when I need to. Seemed to call for it.”

“And you...sure did answer,” Dani says stupidly. “The. Call, I mean. I’m sorry, I really don’t do this often.”

Something seems to soften in Jamie, her smile less teasing as she leans across the table. “Hey, no worries here. Same person you were talking to the other night.”

Dani nods, embarrassed, and flags down a server. Drinks ordered, she draws in a deep breath.

“I mean, I haven’t done this in years. Or. Ever, I guess.”

“A first date?” Jamie asks. When Dani doesn’t answer, she adds in a knowing tone, “A date with a woman?”

“Both,” Dani says honestly. “My last relationship was--well, I mean, we were engaged--”

Jamie whistles under her breath, reaching up to scratch her head. “Blimey. What happened?”

“He’s...him.” It’s too much to go into on a first date, too much to explain, even though talking to Jamie over text had been so dangerously easy. “My best friend growing up, but that was...growing up.”

Jamie nods thoughtfully, tilting her chin in thanks when the server deposits two full pint glasses and a basket of fries on the table. “Rough time, sounds like. I can relate. My last relationship also did not go well.”

“Was he also a man who thought you’d be all too happy to quit your job and take care of a bunch of babies?” Dani asks, perhaps a little too bitterly for the occasion. Jamie flashes another grin, sipping her drink.

“She was a woman who thought I’d be all too happy to take the fall when she got busted for possession.”

Dani gapes. “Oh. Oh--I didn’t know--I’m so--”

Jamie shrugs. “She wasn’t wrong. I was nineteen, and deeply stupid. Live and learn, as the poets say.”

“Which poets?” Dani asks, smiling a little. Jamie’s brow furrows.

“John...Lennon, possibly? Hard to say. Anyway, relationships are a chore and a half, but the greatest people in the world tell me thirty is too old to play musical bedframes, so. Here we are.”

No bullshit, thinks Dani approvingly. For what little she’d put into her profile, Jamie evidently hadn’t been lying about that.

“You haven’t been in a relationship since you were nineteen?”

“In my mind, I was still in the relationship at twenty-four, when they let me out. She didn’t agree. Found out she’d been married two years, by then.” Something darkens in Jamie’s eyes for a moment. She sighs. “Like I said. Not my finest. But I am, as they say, a shining beacon of reform these days.”

“Now, when you say they,” Dani teases, grinning. Jamie nods decisively. 

“John Lennon. Definitively.”

There it is, thinks Dani, watching Jamie pop a fry into her mouth. There, the easy roll of conversation from the other night. As though they’ve known each other forever. As though two people who have thus far failed irrevocably at relationships make a perfect match.

Easy, she thinks. Don’t go wild, now. 

“So,” she says, when the comfortable silence between them has grown a bit too comfortable for the setting, “who are the greatest people in the world? The ones who tell you thirty is too old for...did you say musical bedframes?”

Jamie laughs. The ring of it curls gently around Dani’s head like a soft hand, a sound she’ll find herself replaying later with a skipping heart. 

“Not many willing to put up with a grump of my caliber, but Hannah and Owen fight the good fight. So long as I at least pretend to try.”

“Let me guess. They set up the account for you?”

Jamie makes a sort of gesture in the air with the hand not holding her glass. “Threatened to bury me in puns and children, respectively, if I kept putting it off. Owen’s still grumpy about the photo choice.”

“I liked it,” Dani says without thinking. Jamie raises an eyebrow.

“Well, you did swipe as much. Mind if I ask why?”

Walked into this one. Still, she doesn’t mind as much as she probably should, not with the genuine curiosity in Jamie’s eyes. “You looked--don’t laugh.”

“No promises,” Jamie says, but with the gentle tone of one who knows exactly how much to tease before it’ll hurt. The idea warms Dani in a way she’s not quite ready to look at yet.

“You looked real,” Dani says. “Like you weren’t going to play games, or waste anyone’s time. Like you just wanted to be happy in peace.”

“That is,” Jamie says, holding out a fry for Dani to take, “sort of the idea, yeah.”

There’s an almost puzzled cast to her smile, like she didn’t entirely expect this answer, and is pleased by it at the same time. That same sense from the photo sweeps over Dani now--that this woman is authentic, even if she’s not always shiny, that she’s kind even if not entirely clean. That she doesn’t have any interest in muddled expectation or living a comfortable lie.

“And me?” Dani asks. She doesn’t entirely mean to--but she’s sure, in asking, that Jamie will answer. Jamie is unlike anyone else she’s ever met, the first person she’s ever known to meet each question head-on. 

“Honestly?”

Dani nods. Jamie seems to consider it, turning it over in her head as she twists a fry between her fingers like a cigarette. 

“All of it.”

“That’s,” Dani begins to laugh, “that’s not--”

“No,” Jamie says, and she isn’t smiling, exactly. Her eyes have a sort of shine Dani likes very much, but there is no hint of teasing in them now. “Really. All of it. You’re...very pretty, and that’s--but the way you described yourself. Like you didn’t care to be anyone in particular. You like new experiences, and bad coffee. You hate being called Danielle. I...I wanted to know why.”

“It’s not my name,” Dani says simply. Jamie gives a brief laugh, her hand moving across the table to lightly brush Dani’s fingertips. 

“I wanted to know why all of it. Why do you like bad coffee--”

“It’s the only kind I know how to make,” Dani says automatically. “Just sort of leaned into it.”

“--and teaching--”

“I want to make a difference,” Dani says. 

“--and where you most like to go on those long walks--”

“Anywhere I can breathe,” Dani says. Her fingers are hesitant, tracing the tips of Jamie’s. There’s something electric about this, about barely touching, about barely knowing someone and still wanting to give them neatly-packaged secrets shaped like the mundane. 

Jamie is smiling. “See, that. I like that. All of it.”

It’s nothing, Dani thinks reflexively. A collection of details. A sparse approximation of a life. Eddie knows all of this, and then some, and never matched up to knowing her.

But this woman, leaning across the table with one hand outstretched, looks so different. Watches her with steady interest. Is listening to every word Dani says, though the bar is growing crowded around them, and soon, conversation will become a task instead of a gift.

“Would you,” Dani says, feeling certain that some mistakes are not as bad as they seem, “like to take one of those walks?”

“Tonight?” 

“Yeah. Tonight.” Emboldened by the smile, by the curl falling into Jamie’s eyes, by the knowledge that she still can’t quite make out what color those eyes are, Dani takes her hand. It’s so easy, she thinks she could do it even without looking. “Right now.”

No bullshit, she thinks. No expectations. Just Jamie looking at her like she can’t quite believe what she’s seeing. Dani can’t blame her. This isn’t at all what she’d thought she was getting, walking in tonight. 

But there’s something about it--something about the feeling that she’s been here before, or should be here forever, or will always find her way back to a woman who looks at her just like this--that almost makes her feel brave. Almost makes her feel wonderful. She rises from the table, laying cash beneath her half-empty glass, and feels a pleasant jolt in her chest when Jamie follows without another word.

If this a mistake, she thinks as they step out into the brisk evening air, it’s one she’s hungry to make. 

[svtskneecaps]

crew and cast

(gender neutral) reader x jihoon

genre: fluff + some?? angst? listen i tried lmao; words: 2.8k

well howdy @toxicsocial​ tis i, your tct secret santa. so uh, i can’t actually make people cry in a timely manner and i didn’t figure most people would be down to read like 9k of buildup, so!! the angst is minimal!!! but i tried really hard and i hope you like it i love you so much also i forgot to title it again until right now so don’t look at it too hard

You loved your high school’s theatre crew. From freshman year they’d been a staple in your life. It was refreshingly stable to be able to walk into the tech room anytime and reliably know what would be going on. Except, there was one thing about theatre you couldn’t stand: Lee Jihoon. You’d avoided him since freshman year, but unfortunately for you, you’d taken over the position of Run Crew Head and Prop Master, and he was the Student Director. You were forced to sit through every production meeting with him.

Which, fine. You’d do anything for the show to run well. But that didn’t change the fact that he made you want to commit a crime.

Or three.

“Great news guys!” you yelled, sweeping into the tech room. “The crutches still aren’t right and Jihoon wants us to repaint the brickwork on the platforms to be less ‘garish’ and the typewriter is from the 1940s when it should be from the 1890s and I’m going to set something on fire!”

Chan slammed his head against the nearest cabinet. “This is the third time he’s rejected the brickwork, oh my god.”

“Fourth time he’s hated the crutches too, and I’ve told him that the only period accurate typewriter in the basement is literally one wrong keystroke from breaking onstage but I guess he’s willing to take that risk for a typewriter that’s going to be in one scene.” You massaged your forehead. “I’m gonna stay late Wednesday so we can have our shit together by Hell Week.”

“I’ll have to join.” Chan peeled his head off the cabinet, cracking his knuckles. “You think Mingyu’s got time to spare? I might get him to help; there’s way too much platform for me to do in time.”

“Dunno, he’s pretty busy.” Vernon scooped a loose screw out of a sawdust pile and swept the whole thing into the dustpan. “Makeup’s been working hard to get the ‘ragged urchin’ look right.”

“I’ll con Soonyoung into it then, I don’t think they’re rehearsing the dance numbers tomorrow so he might be free.”

“I wish you luck with that, dude.” You scooped the crutch off the floor. “I gotta go beg costumes to let me into the basement storage and see if there’s another goddamn piece of fabric I can use for the crutches.”

“You have fun.”

You ended up getting lucky; Minghao already needed to go down there so you wouldn’t have to fight for cell signal to make sure you were allowed to deface the cloth scraps you’d found.

“You seem stressed,” he noted as he unlocked the basement door.

You snorted. “Stressed is an understatement.”

“Jihoon again?”

“If he tells me to redo the damn crutches again I’m going to nail him to the wall.”

Minghao lead the way down the stairs. “I really thought you had it that time.”

“Nothing is good enough for that guy.”

He shrugged. “He just wants the show to go well.”

“Yeah, well, so do I. He doesn’t have to get up everybody’s ass sticking his opinions where they don’t belong. He’s never been crew, why does he get to make us repaint the entire damn set anyway?”

“He’s the director.”

“Everyone else thought the bricks looked fine!”

Minghao looked at you sideways. “What’s your deal with Jihoon?”

“Like I said, poking his nose where it doesn’t--”

“No, you had beef before he got appointed Student Director.”

You sighed. “I don’t know. He’s always kind of been a pain even when he was ensemble.” You drove your finger into your temple. “And he broke a crucial prop that wasn’t his the night before the show opened and didn’t tell me.”

“You did props?”

“Buddy I was Prop Master. I literally didn’t find out until the Stage Manager tried to run that scene before school.” You glared absently at the shelves of typewriters to one side of the walkway. “I literally had to skip my last three classes and dinner to get a replacement and he never even apologized for it.”

Minghao whistled. “That’s unforgivable.”

“Tell me about it.” You waded through the costume racks to get to the bins of scraps in the back.

“And you’ve never considered forgiving and forgetting? I mean, it’s been two years.”

You sighed, leaning the crutch against a shelf. “I mean. . .”

He snickered. “Come on, it’s just you and me and the ghosts down here, you can say it.”

“I mean. . . he just makes me so mad!” You yanked the lid off a tote with a snap that echoed across the basement. “Like, every time I start thinking maybe he’s not so bad he pulls some other shit on me and I slam right back into hating his goddamn guts.”

“You’re on the same team,” Minghao called down the row. “You’re just trying to make the show better.”

“Making the show better shouldn’t involve painting the entire set three times.”

“I’m just saying, it’d put at least three years back on your lifespan.”

“Yeah yeah.”

You managed to update the crutches by the end of the day, and repainted the entire set on Wednesday--although you had to sacrifice your lunch and free periods and several hours after school to get it all done. Thursday left you with a finished set and another production meeting.

He didn’t like the bricks.

You saw red.

In the hallway, you pulled him aside.

“What don’t you like about the bricks?”

He frowned. “They detract attention from the actors.”

You wanted to seize him by the shoulders and shake him like a maraca. “It’s gray! It is the darkest most nondescript color we have in the buckets and you’re telling me it detracts attention from the actors? You haven’t even seen them rehearse with it!”

“It’s gonna be too much,” he argued. “It’s the same color as half the costumes--”

“I have seen every single costume in the show, it’s not even close to the same pigment!”

“Even still--”

“Listen,” you snapped, your heartbeat pounding in your ears, “if you want the set redone in time for Hell Week then I expect to see you in the goddamn tech room tomorrow after school wearing something you don’t mind getting paint on because I’m not going to make Chan and Vernon repaint the entire damn set by themselves for the fifth time and I have to figure out how to keep that 1890s typewriter from falling apart, do I make myself clear?”

He looked almost disgusted at the prospect, but he nodded stiffly. “Crystal.”

You turned on your heel just as stiffly, striding away before you lost all composure.

To your complete surprise, Jihoon actually showed up the next day, wearing a pair of faded jeans and a shirt so faded that whatever decal had been on the front had long washed away.

“So he arrives!” Chan yelled from his perch on the desk, where he’d been watching you wrestle with the typewriter.

Jihoon looked distinctly uncomfortable, but he squared his shoulders. “Where do you need me?”

“We gotta move all the set pieces in before we start,” Chan said. “Then I’ll probably have you start on the legs. We gotta wait for Vernon before we can move the tall stuff. One sec, I’ll--” he bolted into the hallway.

Jihoon stared after him, then looked to you. “Where is he going?”

“To tell Vernon we’re actually doing the repaint.” You shrugged. “Honestly I’m surprised you showed up.”

“I said I would.”

“Actually you just said you understood the ultimatum; we had no idea if you’d show or not.”

“Oh.”

You shrugged. “Good to have you anyway.”

Chan returned with Vernon before the silence could get too awkward, and you helped them move all the platforms back into the tech room. From there, Vernon set up his speaker and the real work began.

Jihoon helped choose the color of the bricks (and Chan threatened to really break his leg if he changed his mind about it later), and they got to laying down the base coat. You went back to glaring at the typewriter and reading through every antiques article you could find online.

After trying seven different methods to no avail, you shoved your chair away from the desk. “Typewriters are hellspawn created by the Devil himself to punish unfortunate Prop Masters.”

Vernon snickered. “That good, huh?”

“I’m going to put a screwdriver through the keyboard,” you said mildly.

“Okay maybe don’t do that.” Chan paused to pull a clean paintbrush out of his pocket and throw it at you. “You know where the overalls are; come take a break.”

“Why do you just have that?” Jihoon asked.

“A painter is always prepared.”

Jihoon glanced at you. You shrugged. “I don’t question it.”

Between the four of you, you managed to finish all but one platform by the time Chan and Vernon had to go. Being older, you had infinite time, so you cracked your knuckles and sat back at the typewriter. Jihoon lingered in the doorway.

“You need any help?”

You looked up. “Nah, I think I got it. Thank you, though.”

He shifted. “Listen, I know we didn’t really get off on the right foot but, I’m sorry. I know I never really apologized for the prop, and I’m sorry for how long it took, too.”

You sighed. “It’s fine. It’s kind of unfair of me to hold it against you this long anyway, so, I’m sorry too.” It wasn’t the only reason he made you so angry, but that chip on your shoulder made a lot of other offenses you would have normally overlooked seem larger.

“Can we maybe start over?” he asked. “Freshman year all over again?”

You actually found yourself nodding. “As long as you don’t make us repaint the set ever again.”

He laughed, running a paint-stained hand through his hair. “No, I won’t. I can’t do that to your crew again.”

“Good. Cause we weren’t kidding about breaking your legs.”

“I will keep that in mind.” He hiked up his backpack. “I’ll see you on Monday, then?”

“Happy Hell Week.”

Hell Week was hell (and the sky is blue).

Three of the actors lost their voices four days before Opening Night. One of the glasses for the restaurant scene shattered during the dance number--even though it was supposed to be offstage already--and the third lead got very close to twisting her ankle after landing a jump wrong. The actors could never manage to find their light, there were technical glitches with the backstage mics, and you were so on edge that if you heard the word standby you’d jump so bad you’d bruise your knee on the table.

The typewriter gave you more anxiety than it was worth. The actress using it had strict instructions not to actually touch the keys, because the only thing holding it together was gaff tape. You’d put Jun and Wonwoo in charge of bringing the desk it sat on onstage, because you trusted them to have it under control and keep it from tipping, because if it tipped at an angle any more than about 30 degrees, the keys would get out of alignment and that required time and experience to fix, of which you had neither.

Needless to say, you were two steps away from tearing your hair out.

At least you weren’t fighting with Jihoon, though. You’d even gone out to grab takeout with him for dinner, once, and yelling about all the problems in the car was really cathartic and you came back refreshed and relaxed, for once (only for every muscle in your back to clench at once because an actor bumped the prop table in their hurry to get in costume and one of the glasses fell over).

But it was Opening Night, and you were wound tighter than a spring waiting for everything to go wrong.

And it did.

Jihoon was in the hallway behind the stage, giving Joshua a few final notes about his big solo, and he didn’t check his surroundings closely enough. In his wild gesturing to demonstrate the level of enthusiasm, his arm clipped the typewriter.

And it fell.

He stared at it. Joshua stared at it. You could not tear your eyes from it.

The keys had tilted out of alignment. The bar holding the paper was skewed. The decorative paneling to one side had cracked down the middle. You didn’t have time to fix it before it went on. Maybe you couldn’t fix it at all.

“I am so sorry--” Jihoon started, but you stopped him with a hand, balling the other into a fist.

“Don’t,” you forced through your teeth, because you didn’t want to start yelling at him; it was an honest mistake and it was your fault for not resettling it on the desk after the last run. You were just seething with rage, at yourself, at the typewriter--you didn’t want to project it.

“Ten minutes to go!” someone yelled down the hall. You forced yourself to exhale, gingerly picking it up, flinching with every shift of the keys.

“Is there anything I can--”

“Get to the booth. Tell Seungcheol what happened, just-- be in your place. Jun!” you yelled into the tech room. His head jerked up. “I need you to take over headset for me, can you do that?”

His mouth fell open seeing the typewriter and he nodded, wordlessly, leaping to his feet and hurrying backstage.

Jihoon still stood there, looking between the typewriter and you with an anguished expression. “You’re sure you don’t--”

“I got it,” you said again, clipped. “I can handle it. I can-- just get to the booth, Jihoon!”

You hadn’t yelled. You knew enough not to yell when the audience was already in their seats. But your words had the same effect, because he flinched, and he nodded, and he turned the other way and ran.

Your rage was turning inward as fast as it was dulling, but you had a show to put on, so you placed the broken typewriter carefully on a counter in the tech room and sprinted for the basement.

You managed to get the 1970s typewriter back upstairs and on the desk before it went on, and the show went on without a hitch. The actors hit their marks, all the props found their way back to the prop table, and the pit orchestra didn’t have to loop a section for a missed cue even once.

You waited until everyone was gone before you let yourself cry.

“I really am sorry.”

You looked up.

Jihoon stood in the doorway, twisting his hands.

“It’s fine,” you said. “It’s partially my fault for not making sure it was centered right.” You rubbed your eyes with the palms of your hands, hoping to disguise the redness. “I’m sorry for yelling at you.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “Do you want help?”

“I don’t know if it can even be fixed,” you said, staring blankly at the remains of the typewriter in front of you. “It might-- it might be beyond my help.”

For a long moment, you stared at it, mind spiralling.

You pushed yourself up. “They’ll want to lock up.” You slung your backpack over your shoulders. “I’ll just come in before the show and work on it. Maybe get Jun to grab me some McDonald’s or something and eat during the intermission.”

Jihoon’s brow furrowed. “That’s not healthy.”

“I’ve done it before.” You waved him off. “The show must go on, you know?” You slung your backpack over your shoulders. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

The day came by in flashes as you researched the typewriter with a renewed vigor. You could probably use hot glue and some kind of putty to hide the crack in the paneling, you could probably put the keys back or at the very least tape them to look like they were back, from a distance. The bar at the top would be much harder but you hadn’t really inspected it the night before so maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as you thought it was?

You didn’t feel particularly hopeful when you stopped by the tech room to pick up the typewriter.

Until you saw the typewriter.

“What the fuck.” It was fixed. The keys aligned, the crack sealed, the bar sitting on top just as it was supposed to be. It looked exactly like it had when you’d first set it on that desk.

Jihoon came around the corner, dried putty staining his hands. “Hey,” he said, seeming tired but absolutely beaming at you.

“Did you do this?”

He shrugged. “Yeah. I didn’t want you putting your health on the line.”

“Oh my god, thank you. I can’t-- this is incredible!” You kept tracing your fingers over the ridge formed by the sealed crack, but you couldn’t see it.

“I did a good job, then?” He put his hands in his pockets, grinning.

“Better than good, oh my god I could kiss you!”

Your cheeks burned when you realized what you’d said, but he laughed. “Whoa, buy me dinner first.”

“Bet,” you said, accepting it like a challenge. “You pick the place, I’ll pay.”

“Okay,” he said, and then lifted his hands. “I gotta wash up.”

“Meet you by the front door in five?”

“It’s a date.”

[azurite-writes]

Problem One: The Screen(s) and Digital Workspace

Part one of my multi-part doc about what I learned from doing online college at a non-online institution. This chapter: my Desktop as a Desk

     Highlighted points: learning styles, work type/function in relation to the computer 

       My biggest problem with being pushed online after being at an in-person institution was, and still is, my forced reliance on the computer. I have to sit in front of it for hours: attending classes on Zoom; checking email every three hours; accessing Moodle pages for class and out-of-class work (Moodle is what my institution uses, other web management/e-learning software platforms include PowerLearning, Blackboard, and OU Campus, among others). And the work itself can be watching documentaries, watching seminars, accessing ebook/PDF documents, annotating documents in online portals… it's a lot. People have talked at length about "zoom fatigue," as well as the eyestrain headaches that can come with staring at said screens for hours at a time. I'll talk about my own lessons learned about that later.

       The assumption among the administrators and (some) people of older generations than those currently in school seems to be that working online with computers and smartphones is more efficient. That isn't necessarily true; it all depends on the type of task and the person being expected to complete it. In my case, I cannot, for the life of me, focus on dense sections of text presented on a backlit screen. Thus, reading and answering emails is okay, but downloading scanned textbook pages to be read on a laptop screen (along with trying to highlight and annotate them) is hell on earth.

       Why is this? Different reasons for different people, but in my case it's because reading/"writing" on a screen interferes with my learning style(s), which are visual/spatial, audio, and kinetic. Audio doesn't come into play for reading on a screen, but seeing words physically in a certain location relative to other words on a page is very important to my memory of the material. Computer screens can display pretty much anything at any given time; book pages can only display whatever was permanently printed onto them. That is, the content of a book page in physical space will always be the same unless you, the reader, manipulate it; a computer screen can have any type of content displayed as long as its pixels can light up and process the information. And for me, that's a problem because I don't have any physical space to relate the information to, plus I don't get a sense of how long the document is. Recalling a passage in a printout, for me, goes like this: "I remember it was on the top-left of a page towards the beginning, the shape of the paragraph was funny too… ah, there it is." Recalling a passage on a digital scan of the same document is much harder for me by contrast: literally any of the paragraphs could have made its way to the top-left of my computer screen, if I moved the window around or zoomed in to better read the text; documents are an endless scroll upward or downwards, with (maybe) a sidebar to tell me what page I've landed on. All of my "landmarks" are functions of the program I am using to access the document. They're static and contained to a window... that can show up anywhere on my computer screen. Not conducive to the way I learn at all.

       My kinetic learning style comes into play with the computer, too. Annotating a document? In the physical world, a pen on the document itself does the trick; going through the physical movement of circling a word or making a note are things that solidify the information in my mind. Annotating a PDF document? First of all, it's difficult to do with a mouse (and God help you if you have a trackpad), and it's highly dependent on the program that the user selects to open the PDF. I could connect a drawing tablet, if I have one, but they're very expensive and their use is, again, dependent on the compatibility with whatever reader program the user selects. All this to say: annotating on the computer doesn't work for me, either. My kinetic and visual learning styles come together with note-taking. My memory is highly dependent on seeing words as they are formed by my own hand, processing them, and connecting meaning to them as they sit in a specific place on the page (am I over-explaining this? Basically, writing notes by hand and seeing where those notes are on a piece of paper help me remember them). Typing notes isn't a replacement for hand-writing notes for me; while I'm busy fixing my typos (on words I would never misspell on paper, usually, since my fingers are just moving weirdly over the keys), the professor moves on, and I'm not listening well enough to catch the fact that I've missed new information.

       The takeaway here is figure out your individual types of work relate to being on the computer. As I said, the computer hinders many aspects of my learning when it comes to memory and efficiency. As a creative tool, however, it has almost the opposite effect; writing assignments for fiction, poetry, and screenwriting classes are much more efficient on the computer. From creative thought to keystroke, I have less time to second-guess or forget my ideas, and both the immediacy and changeability of word processing programs actually works in my favor for those sorts of things.

       What I did differently from first online semester to second:

       1) I figured out which materials helped me remember my notes the best. Honestly, I wasn't even doing this when I was at in-person college, and to my detriment, but I couldn't get away with it at all once I went fully remote. Think back to when you were in lower levels of school: were there certain types of materials you gravitated towards in the classroom? Did you like basic composition notebooks with faint blue lines? Wide-ruled or college-ruled paper? Did you discover that graph paper just worked really nicely with all notes besides math, or that blank pages were less busy for your eyes? When you used pens, did you prefer blue or black ink, or did colored ink help certain things stick? If you can control what materials you use to take notes with, consider using ones akin to those from a class you either a) remembered the most fondly or b) remembered the most information from. Scour your memories of class experiences for anything, no matter how small, that may have made your life easier. Equally, take note of what tasks actually worked well digitally. Adjust accordingly.

(Personally, I found my magic formula was a 1-subject memorandum notebook — marginless, with very narrow line rulings; while I hesitate to direct you to Amazon, they are hard to find at a decent price otherwise, and you can get a 12 pack for just over $40 from them — with black ink from a 0.38-size gel pen (I used a basic Pilot G2 pen until it ran out, then bought ink refills in the smaller size). To "highlight" my notes, I circled or underlined information with a blue gel pen of the same variety. Keep in mind again that I'm learning to be a translator; this is just what works for me.)

       2) If I needed to print something out, I printed it out. Environmental guilt is something I struggled with a lot, and there was always something about staying on the computer that convinced me I was being "less wasteful" by staying digital. But with how much time and energy I ultimately saved reading a printed document that can be recycled vs the electricity I ate up spinning my wheels in front of the ebook… to me, it was worth it. If you find that helps you, too, don't be ashamed to print certain things out.

(If conserving ink and paper is a concern to you, it is possible in some viewing/editing apps to remove or cover images, either with white squares or by taking the images out completely. I have an old MacBook Pro and on current versions of Preview, one can draw shapes and fill them in white to cover parts of the scan that would eat up ink, such as blurred black borders and scanned images. For documents in a word processing program like Microsoft Word or Pages, it may also be possible to print the documents out at a smaller size, allowing more text or even multiple pages to show up on a single sheet of paper.)

| In the coming days/weeks I hope to be posting more content about how I tried to adapt to fully remote learning and the things I’ve learned along the way! Follow for updates ♥︎ |

[untamedunrestrained]

The Untamed and Mo Dao Zu Shi

These past eight days have been surreal.

I have drowned so fully in this story that it feels like I am just surfacing.

On Valentine’s Day, fandom on tumblr reblogged this fanart of WangXian by qulfeeh and I was intrigued. The reblog was tagged with two important key words ‘Wangxian’ and ‘The Untamed’. In the brush of a few keystrokes I came across the Wikipedia page for a show known as the Untamed that was available on Netflix. The thing that stood out was that it was based on a BL novel and that both the very male protagonists were described as each other’s soulmates and somehow that was enough. So, I opened Netflix and after like a second of hesitation I started watching the show and I didn’t stop. I started at eight in the evening and I watched nine episodes in a row which basically meant I was up till five in the morning. What followed seems like a record for me. I finished all fifty episodes of the Untamed in under seventy-two hours.

I put hardly five minutes of thought into my decision to watch this story and ended up dedicating the past eight days straight. The first three days to the live action drama and the past five to reading the novel.

If it isn’t obvious this story is that good.

The Untamed

The Untamed is a first for me on so many levels. I have never watched a Chinese show before ever and that seemed extremely significant to me because China is actually a neighbouring country yet as far as my mind is concerned it might as well be on another planet. Which seems particularly odd considering shows from English speaking countries like the UK and the US are a staple for me which makes these countries feel so much closer though they are geographically on the other side of the planet. Of course, a major factor is the language barrier but another is the political scenario between our two countries and amazingly this show made me realise how much of an impact perceiving different cultures can have on your perception of their people. It has literally opened up a whole new world for me that I have just realised I have never taken the moment to discover. Well, considering this is me we are talking about, how appropriate, that it would be a drama based on a BL novel that unlocked this whole new world for me.

I have tried reading a Danmei novel before which was awful and it completely turned me off the genre but it did have a side effect of educating we about elements of a wuxia novel which made this xianxia world seem a little familiar but even if it hadn’t, I would have still been hooked.

It didn’t take long for The Untamed to find a new fan and I have been obsessing over it ever since.

The Untamed is an amazing drama which revolves around the love Lan WangJi and Wei WuXian have for each other and the plot is so intriguing that you wouldn’t be able to stop even if you tried (I didn’t because that thought didn’t even manage to enter my mind).

It’s a love story and that is undisputable for me, they don’t say it, it isn’t mentioned but there is this palpable force influencing events and you know they love each other. I have somehow really disregarded how much a show can show you stuff without ever explicitly stating it but The Untamed set me straight in that regard. I doubt anyone who watches the show would mistake it for anything but the love story it is.

Wei WuXian was an instant hit for me. He is a lovable, gregarious character always up to mischief but is someone who always wants to be on the side of justice and I have a weak spot for characters with a hard on for justice. He is just such a lively character who keeps smiling all the time that it’s just hard not to fall for him in minutes. His antics and his demeanour are so charming that you’re hooked. He would have easily been my most favourite character in any other drama that doesn’t have a Lan WangJi.

Lan WangJi is an amazing character. In a world, which has become increasing about everyone voicing their opinions (like I’m doing at present) it is hard to believe that people like Lan WangJi exist. People who are quiet, who don’t speak unless absolutely necessary. He is literally the embodiment of tranquillity and more important he is Wei WuXian’s hero. Like literally he protects him like he’s protecting his life which on second thought he definitely is.

I literally had second-hand embarrassment from how obviously romantic these two are.

Hands down the best thing I have watched in 2020 by far! The characters are amazing, the plot is intricate and it is so, so interesting. I watched almost fourty hours of this series non-stop and I don’t remember a single point where I felt like the story became boring for a second which now that I think about it is, is… astonishing. How can such a large drama be so engrossing? This isn’t binge-worthy there is literally no other way to watch the show!!!

Mo Dao Zu Shi

But after coming down from the high of the first seventy-two hours of being submerged in this world, I was reluctant to leave this world so much so that I didn’t even contemplate it. I had a wide variety of media to choose from. The story is based on a web series by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu that was made into a manhua, followed by an donghua, followed by an audio drama followed by The Untamed. It must speak to the universality of the story that the people are willing to read the same story in so many different formats, I know I’m not done.

But, high up on my list was the source material, one of the articles described the show as being extremely faithful to the novel, which made me want to jump on that wagon posthaste, and I agree whole-heartedly. I read the translation by Exiled Rebels Scanlations and what struck me was how the show and the novel were tonally the same. I had switched mediums but it didn’t feel like a different story or like I was reading different characters which is shocking because that’s literally how good the show was at translating words into video.

Differences

One of the startling things about the book is that it really ties up the plot neatly. There are tons of plot points that aren’t as completely resolved on the show as they are on the novel which I only ever realised after reading the novel. A lot of this had to do with how certain details of the plot are different. A classic example that the reason behind the scars on Lan Zhan’s back is different in the two. In the novel, LWJ whisks WWX away from the Nightless City after he massacres and pretty much beats-to-a-pulp the entire alliance of sects. LWJ then has to tend to WWX so they remain in hiding for three days. When cultivators from the GusuLan Sect finally discover the two, LWJ has to defeat all of them to keep WWX safe and that’s why he is given one whipping for every cultivator he defeated. Of course, since WWX dies on the battlefield in the show this couldn’t be the reason behind the scars so they have LWJ defend Burial Mounds which wasn’t all that fruitful considereing the LanlingJin Clan does end up with a lot of WWX’s artifacts, there was no point in defending Burial Mounds as he couldn’t have kept it up in the long run but him going to Burial Mounds after the massacre at Nightless City is important to ensure they story can credibly reveal Lan ShiZui to be A-Yuan. So, yeah differences, the show focuses on the Wen Clan and the Yin Iron while the novel doesn’t have the Yin Iron at all and focuses on Jin GuangYao. But, despite the differences the story still feels coherent between the two mediums mainly because the relationship between LWJ and WWX that is at the core of both remains central to the plot at all times.

The plot of the novel though is extremely intricate and the author does an amazing job of deconstructing it which makes it easier to understand what’s happening while the show in hindsight does get away with sweeping up certain loose ends.

Of course, the kisses and the sex are gone but I will gladly take that cliff scene in exchange. I was actually shocked that the novel actually doesn’t dwell on WWX’s first death at all. Like, we don’t even know how exactly he died in the novel and this was hsocking given how pivotal that cliff scene is in the show.

Characters

Surprisingly though a lot of the roles of side characters were expanded for the show, the novel seems to have delivered a better understanding of these characters. The biggest example for me being Jiang Yanli.

She has an elaborately expanded role in the show which does highlight how deep her bind with her brothers particularly WWX is but somehow she seems like a timid character among a bunch of very strong characters. What the novel does is that it gives you a very realistic picture of her, she might not seem like a significant influence on the story but her impact is far-reaching. The novel doesn’t showcase much of her character but the scenes that feature her in the book are some of the most poignant ones and incidentally those are the same ones that stand out in the show. I feel like novel did a better job of showing off her strength. While, in the show I couldn’t look beneath her timid demeanour the novel manages to showcase the strength of her love. She cares deeply and loves deeply and the novel manages to show you the courage it takes to love someone so deeply. I definitely admire her character more and in fact I’m kind of in awe that someone who appears so traditional was so awesome. It felt easy to dismiss her character but reading the author’s words made me realise that I would be very, very wrong in doing so.

Wei WuXian might be the luckiest guy in the world to have a shijie like her followed by a husband like LWJ who both seem very determined to spoil the hell out of him. I might be experiencing some jealousy right now.

The author somehow manages to imbue her characters with qualities that makes them real and unique. Like WWX forgetting everybody’s face which is a real world problem that I have never seen anybody suffer from in a novel but just the fact that WWX doesn’t immediately bring his old hang-ups in his subsequent meetings with side characters didn’t only have hilarious consequences but made everything that much more intriguing and credible.

This author also does an amazing job of flipping characters. There are very few villains who are black and white in this story. WWX himself is a character caught in the gray of it all, universally reviled for standing up for the right reasons. This is a theme throughout the show and the novel where bad characters might be good and good might be bad but the author endeavours to show us all sides to a character. While this most definitely applies to Jin GuangYao, I’m surprised with how it resonates with Xue Yang who’s relationship with Xiao Xinchen can only be characterized with the words “It’s Complicated”. I don’t actually know what to think of these two Xiao Xingchen was definitely betrayed but can we ignore the fact that he found himself a companion in Xue Yang his sworn enemy and Xue Yang’s feelings for Xiao Xingchen are enough to drive me crazy. This guy has no idea how frustrating he is, that piece of candy clenched in his fist will drive me crazy for the rest of my life. The entire Yi City Arc is a big mess of grey there are no whites and blacks and the show underscores that with this quote –

Once upon a time, there was a little child who liked sweets very much. But because he had no parents nor money, he could never have such things. So he’d been dreaming if only someone could give him a candy every day.

Don’t even get me started on the music that plays in the background when this quote is being narrated.

There are just so many amazing things about the show and the novel. I mean the show might have actually worked harder to make things more romantic and one scene that I’m surprised isn’t from the book is the lantern scene with both of them making pledges like that particular scene neatly underlined who WWX is and would become. The hand-fastening scene is also not from the book but then there are other scenes and other delights to be found in the novels.

This story is definitely worth reading and watching for years to come. If anyone has any apprehensions about the novel I will be glad to clarify but the everything about “The Untamed” and “Mo Dao Zu Shi” stand in the same breath.

[mauserfrau]

Eyeshine, Part 1 - Bordertober

HEY KIDS WHO WANTS TO SEE THE TWINS ON THEIR SHIP HEADED TO PANDORA.

IT’S REALLY TINY.

AND THEY’RE HAVING ENGINE TROUBLE.

...or are they?

Lots of Tyreen eating and some other general nastiness from her.  Appreciably Claustrophobic.  

The jump brought them to a space so empty it didn’t even seem black.  No— darkness rested between other stars, far off and distant.  Here was a clear nothingness, out of reach of the rest of the universe.  

Tyreen drifted at his shoulder.  He could feel her fuming.

Neither of them had made much sound since they’d stopped.  The lights were low, the gravity still off and wherever they were now, it seemed like there hadn’t been a sound there since the galaxy formed.  A word from either of them would disturb this.

Besides, this wasn’t Pandora.  This wasn’t even the Pandoran system.  Or any system.  This was nothing.

“Stars move, you know,” Troy said, fumbling the silence apart.

“It’s only been like twenty years,” insisted Tyreen.  “They can’t move that fast.  We should at least be able to see it!”

He gestured a spiral with his hand.  Did she even care that the star cluster where Nekrotafeyo had grown spun opposite this one, that they were blue-shifting verses each other and that had choked the navigation system?  He decided to summarize.  “I think the computer’s a little off and umm...”

“Umm what?”

“I might have overcompensated for stellar drift since I ended up doing it manually.”

“Troy!” She made his name sound like she’d broken something.  He half-expected a slap.

“Look.” He forced calm into his voice and turned to face her as he spoke.  

She was livid, her whole body tense and her hair standing on end.  

“We can’t run out of power.  We jumped just fine.  We have water.  We have food.  We have a working toilet.”

“And where are we!”

“I’m gonna run an extrapolation and figure that out while the jump drive resets.”

“Can’t you math it in your head?”

“Um.” Sighing, Troy turned back to the view screen, focusing first on the blank reach where their ship rested, then letting his vision float to the stars.  The blackness lived between them, but in some strands there was no between, only points of light thick enough to make mist out of each other.  “I kinda don’t think so.”

Tyreen groaned and swam off towards the bed.

*

Tyreen moved better in zero g than he did.  Troy was always twisting around to his left to push, pull, founder.  Still, he hated to turn the gravity back on.  There was something about watching her float above the bed with the covers billowing around her.  She seemed so right like that, singular and and easy and in this case put out.  

Her Coeus reader was flickering lately.  She ended up groaning and setting it loose to float through the cabin where Troy caught it.

She also said— “Hey, turn the heavy back on.  I gotta piss.” 

“Alright.  On three.  Three.” Troy threw the switch.  His back crunched as weight returned to his spine through the seat at the command console.  His sister landed with a thump.  Their foodstores yelped and howled and shed feather-forms along the floor.  Tyreen caught herself with a huff and pulled herself into the water closet, giving the cage of spindly hexlings a sour look before she shut the door.  One of them shrieked after her.  Troy shushed it and went back to the console.

The keys pressed easier with weight back in his body.  He pulled up the extrapolation program.  Another likely set of coordinates failed a final round of testing and ticked away.  The system was working to match the spectrographic information of visible stars to known clusters as far as he could tell.  Color seemed such a tenuous way to determine place, but that might have been the emptiness intruding on his thoughts more than anything rational.  Besides, he kept thinking he had somehow spied the white supergiant that held Pandora out among all the other points of light.

Troy was tempted to ask his sister to try.  She was the siren.  She might be able to do it if she listened across all the dark matter between them and that place.

She was still in the water closet.  

Troy let the extrapolator run in the background and idly tabbed into the superstructure of the ship’s hard drive.  It had been made to be piloted by someone with little skill, all of the command icons in welcoming jelly style art with three to four clicks needed to access any functions more complicated than the gravity or the sublight engine speed.  He’d picked the interface up fast enough, but modifying the OS to accept a jump drive had been more hours of frustrated keystrokes than any actual handiwork.  

Every system responded in good order.  He’d done the same check once they’d cleared Nekrotafeyo’s gravity well and before the jump.  The only difference was thousands of light years to nowhere and the bottom falling out of his stomach halfway there, not more than a heartbeat.  

He even dug into the audio system.  If Tyreen asked, he wanted to be able to tell her literally everything was fine.

A handful of loose example recordings bothered the top folder.  Troy thought about moving them, but the system considered their poor placement de rigeur and complained when he tried.

Tempted to try, he clicked down the list, which was when he realized: one of them had a different date than the others.

He leaned over a speaker and hit play, curious what had been loaded on this particular sound test file.  Since that was probably it.

Instead, he heard Dad say, “Well, if it isn’t my favorite little minx.  Yeah, that’s a good girl.  Let me see those eyes shine.  I love it when you...”

He slammed stop.

There was somebody else on the file too.  They were laughing that bubbly way he knew happened, but he barely remembered as something he’d experienced in his own life.

Troy stared at the file.  He breathed again.

A thump sounded behind him and Tyreen came tripping out of the water closet, pants around her ankles and her underwear yanked up in her fist.  “What the hell was that?”

“Ah, system check.  Since we’re here, you know.”

She growled and she sat down right where she was and in the puddle of her pants.  “Warn me next time.”

“Your intuition didn’t tip you off?”

Those words didn’t even merit an answer.  She closed her eyes and turned her back to him.

The ship was so small he only would have had to lean out of the chair and he could have had his hand on her.  She wasn’t in the mood though, not about that, not about anything to do with Dad and definitely not about playing siren anytime before they made planetfall.

And well, then she wouldn’t be playing anymore, would she?

*

Maybe that fact had settled funny someplace in her stomach.  Troy just knew that after a while she stole her Coeus back and stood in the corner, smacking the screen.  The extrapolation program ticked off another hundred coordinates that didn’t suit, approaching 50% complete at a crawl.

Tyreen peered over his shoulder, but said nothing about the progress bar.

It looked like half of their chances for finding themselves had been spent.  Troy thought it was more of a best match situation.

He wondered what he would do if he was wrong.

The jump drive ticked down to usable quiescence.  Tyreen swore and started to get back into bed.  Instead she kicked her pants off and stretched out belly-down on the floor which was chalky with the bookmarks of the night they’d left.

It had only been two days.  He thought.  The active time on the sublight engine monitor was somewhat misleading.  Startup had taken so long, but he’d been fumbling all over himself, movements thick with the shock of what he was about to do.

What Tyreen said they were doing.

Like, she just… dragged him.  Now?

Now there his sister lay, looking like she’d melted into the ground.

“What’re you staring at?” she muttered without looking up from the well of her arms.

“Mm.  Nothing,” Troy murmured.  “I was thinking about when we were kids.  That game we’d play about not getting off the bed back when we only had the one and...” Well, he thought about that a lot, even though it hadn’t been bothering his mind in that moment.

Tyreen sat up, still hunched over.  Her Coeus rattled in her grasp.  Eventually, she tipped it into one of the charging slots.  “I’m eating now.  You want in?”

“Sure.”

Food was something to do anyway.  Troy hauled himself out of the chair and got himself into the cupboard after some of the stale rye bread they’d taken from the stores back at the homestead.  He checked it for mold and then also took a plum.

Tyreen picked over the cages with a tongs.  Did she want manta eggs? A hexling or two? A flush of air coral and sprat? One one of the lonesome baby Djira mewing in their own slime?

She took two eggs.  

The two of them hunched together on a sheet of tanned air algae.  Troy’s plum was sour, but he sucked the pit clean while Tyreen stared at him.  As he reached for the bread, Tyreen shoved one of the eggs at him.  “Open it for me.”

Troy sighed.  Speaking of games from when they were children— Tyreen could have eaten the egg regardless, but he’d gotten awfully good at spinning the tops off with his knife and one hand.  He smiled and he did this for her now, placing the egg on a spare sack so that his sister’s leavings would spread through the ship, get into the Instruments.  

The egg squished as she pressed her fingers inside.  It turned to dust and glass.  “Hmm.  That was fresher than I thought.”

“Good.  Want me to do the other one too?”

“Sure.”

So, he sliced again.  He was going to have to wash his hand before he finished his own super as much as the second egg leaked.

This time, his sister stared at her dirty knees.  “Are you sure you didn’t fuck everything up?”

“If I did,” Troy said softly.  “Then we’ll deal wi-...”

Tyreen sucked the other egg down, sloppy now, sand leaking between her toes.  She grabbed the piece of rye and stuck it in Troy’s mouth before burrowing into the bed and covering her head with the pillow.  

Troy chewed thoughtfully and then moved to clean up.  The baby Djira chortled in their cages as though night had fallen.  Well, it was that time by the engine clock.  

*

[dedalvs]

Övüsi: The Elvish Language from Bright

The Elves in Bright run the world. They’re literally in charge of everything, and they look down on everyone else. They’ve always been around (which is another way of saying I’ve now forgotten where geographically they were supposed to have originated), and though their language has changed, the Elves have prevented borrowings from other languages from “tainting” the “purity” of theirs.

The language itself has changed over the centuries, but older words have been preserved in their original forms for use in magic. Both modern Elvish and a couple of words of older Elvish appear in the film. The name of the language is Övüsi Kieru, which literally means “Elvish Tongue”, and despite having 9 vowel qualities, it does not have vowel harmony. The language is SOV and strongly head-final with thirteen cases and a verb system which is weird (I honestly still don’t get it).

Remember previously when I said I designed the Castithan language from Defiance to be spoken quickly—and how I failed? This time I tried to do it right—and I think I succeeded. You can really pick up some speed speaking this language, and the tongue twisters are minimal.

The orthography is a bit of a story. I created it to be excessively indulgent, and I think I succeed in that. When I showed the art department, though, they said it wasn’t excessively indulgent enough. They wanted more stuff about. So I had to take what, to my mind, was already a ridiculously gaudy writing system and make it gaudier. The result is, in my opinion, just silly in places. I suppose it’s in keeping with the Elves’ style of dress, but some of its excesses really tax credulity. You’ll see.

Below is the phonology and orthography of Övüsi:

Couple things here. First, you’ll notice long vowels for everything but mid vowels. This is my “Don’t make actors pronounce ee as anything other than [i]” sound change. Old long mid vowels broke, becoming a high vowel followed by a mid vowel, as in Finnish (so ie, üö, ïë, and uo).

You’ll also notice some unrounded back vowels. I was nervous about trying to do unrounded back vowels, but I figured since I was going to have constant access to the actors, I’d give it a shot. Turns out I had nothing to worry about. Those unrounded vowels are super easy for English speakers to pronounce. Basically I just said, “These are pronounced like this”, and then they said, “Oh”, and did them right every time. The front rounded vowels still caused problems, but the back unrounded vowels did not. I used diereses to indicate the unrounded back vowels for parallelism. It seems to have worked.

As a final note, the long opposite-rounding vowels have no separate form. This is because though the long vowels are phonemic (in that there are places where you must pronounce, e.g., üü as opposed to ü), there’s actually no way to write them in the orthography. Everything else that has a distinguishable form (as you’ll see) is either a form that was a licit long vowel at one time, or was (or currently is) a licit diphthong. That left nothing for the long opposite rounding vowels.

Here are the aforementioned diphthongs:

If you look at the forms for ie and uo, they should look rather familiar. That’s because these used to be the forms for *ee and *oo, and they’re simply read differently now. You’ll also notice that the forms for üö and ïë are identical to the forms for ö and ��, respectively. That’s because there’s no way to indicate the long form for these vowels, and those are the readings of the long forms of those vowels.

As you look at these, by the way, most of the extra lines and weird swooshes you see were added by request.

The consonantal base forms are as follows:

You can ignore the blue box; that was my bad there (screen cap). So like...stuff happened here. Basically, the short forms of stops became fricatives, but then there already was a *th, so all those words just got respelled. So the form with the three asterisks is usually pronounced [s] before [i], and elsewhere it’s [θ], but it’s not used word-initially, unless it’s before [i]. The form with four asterisks is an old consonant that’s no longer pronounced (it’s just regular [h] now), and so there are two [h]’s in this thing.

I added those ridiculous half moons because most stuff was wanted. Also, I thought r was fine on its own, but they wanted the bottom part to extend, so I extended it, along with l. Same extension happened with the word-initial flourish on f and v and like forms. I’m just looking at this now, and I’m like...seems unnecessary...

Anyway, the system is an abugida, which means there’s an inherent vowel, and modifications are added for other vowels. The inherent vowel in this system is short e. This is a fully executed consonant that’s hopefully large enough that you can see it:

You can also see the “capital” versions that occur for some consonant/vowel combinations above. Basically, when one of these occurs as the first character of a word, there’s an extra flourish. Where there are two glyphs above, the first has the flourish, and so is an initial form, and the other would appear elsewhere in the word. I had a lot of fun coming up with these, but now looking at the extra half moons, the extra loops, the extra double lines on bö... It’s just all too extra for me. But I know what it originally looked like, so I always have something to compare it to in my mind.

Now for the sake of completeness, though it’s going to make this really long, here is the fully executed version of every glyph split into two tables. Here’s table one:

And here’s table two:

Huh. Weird error in the rei cell... Included one two many r’s it appears... The character’s still there, though. (By the way, the keystrokes are written on the left there. This is for the font. What’s “z” there is the weird old *t sound that’s become [θ] and [s].)

There’s also a geminate marker that, when you see it, you’ll be able to recognize as a reference to Castithan. I’ll show it to you in an example later.

Nouns in Övüsi have a bunch of different declensions. It’s all based on whether the original form ended in a vowel of some kind or a consonant. At this stage of the language, no word can end in a consonant, and the only codas are reserved for the first member of a geminate, so lots of different things happened to these consonant-final forms. There’s no room to show every declension, but I can at least give you one, and give you a sense of the cases themselves. Here they are (singular/plural):

NOMINATIVE:  thuoke/thuoki “bird(s)”

ACCUSATIVE: thuokie/thuokii “bird(s) (direct object)”

GENITIVE: thuoka/thuokai “bird’s/birds’”

INSTRUMENTAL: thuoku/thuokï “with the bird(s)”

LOCATIVE: thuokö/thuokü “near the bird(s)”

ABLATIVE: thuokau/thuokavi “away from the bird(s)”

ALLATIVE: thuokaalou/thuokaalli “towards the bird(s)”

INESSIVE: thuokannö/thuokannü “inside the bird(s)”

ILLATIVE: thuokou/thuokoli “into the bird(s)”

ELATIVE: thuokannau/thuokannavi “out of the bird(s)”

PERLATIVE: thuokausu/thuokausï “by way of the bird(s)”

AVERSIVE: thuokasshu/thuokasshï “avoiding the bird(s)”

VOCATIVE: thuokuo/thuokorii “O, bird(s)!”

If you look at these cases, you can probably recognize some of my favorite sound changes, and guess how some of them evolved (and in what order). The nice thing about having a nice big case system like that is it’s just there for you, like your best friend. You don’t really need to fuss about how to say stuff. Your best friend just says, “Shh, shh... Let me show you my cases.” And you take one and you’re good. Like hot cocoa in winter.

Now the verbs...

On a macro level, verbs agree with their subjects in person and number in the first person and sometimes the imperative, and just in person otherwise. Each verb has three stems: the imperfect, the perfect, and the future. Then, depending on whether the verb is dynamic or stative, there are three modes: the indicative, the passive, and the potential (statives lack the passive mode). A copula is used for emphasis, negation, and equation.

It’s best to see an example, and with verbs, the easiest to tease apart are the vowel-final ones. Here’s a table to consider:

This is the verb mikaa, which means “to say” (most of the time the infinitive ends in -ie; it’s just non-e V-final stems that are different). As you can see, the stem part here is probably -i for imperfect; -has for perfect; and, of all things, bare for future. Then there are some more or less predictable suffixes added in the three modes. To those can be added agreement affixes, but they can also be left off. Depending on whether or not they’re added the end of the form changes. The first items in each pair are how the form ends if nothing is added. I’ll show you each in a sec here. First, here’s the agreement paradigm:

Now that you’ve got that, here are two examples (and I’ll show you the orthographic forms, too):

That’s Kenie mikaithorï super large, apparently. Kenie is the third person pronoun in the accusative. Mikaithorï has a third person subject, and is in the potential indicative. Now if you use the emphatic copula instead...

That’s Kenie mikaithou shï! which is “I must say it!” Now, of course there’s nothing in here anywhere that corresponds to “must”: It’s simply the interpretation. These examples show how you use the form with the agreement suffix and without.

(Also, see the geminate thingy in there? The spelling in this one is weird.)

That’s a basic intro to this thing. It was actually a pain in the butt to use, but fun to speak. All in all pretty good. Though weird.

This is a piece the art department put together for Édgar Ramírez’s Kandomere to wear. I thought it looked pretty boss:

Looks pretty cool, until you realize it says the following...

And he’s one of the good Elves! lol This was one of my favorite pieces. That art department was amazing.

So that was what I was up to this time last year. Again, if you get a chance to see the movie, I hope you enjoy it! Süvorii!

[goldenscript]

1, 3, 17, 46 ★~(◡‿◕✿)

thank you, my dearest ;-;

1. things that inspire you

I feel like I have a sporadic inspiration, because there are moments where I’ll randomly just think of a what-if scenario like thief!soonyoung or hacker!yoongi just because there’s this flash of an image that comes across my mind and it just explodes into an entire idea. I also equate my inspiration to music, photos, games, movies, books… I think photos especially because that visual really helps me create the imagine in my head and let my imagination run rampant.

3. name three favorite writers

This is so tough! The three that come to mind as of late are Haruki Murakami, Ken Liu, andddddddd Jane Austen. Oh, and because I had a strong love of the supernatural aka vampires aka fight me because eleven-year-old me thought they were awesome, Richelle Mead (I read the shit out of the Vampire Academy series alright) and L.J.Smith (Night World series, hands down, was fucking awesome – she’s the one who makes me feel like I’ll never be able to amount in any possible soulmate fic ‘cuz hers are top-tier) are honorable mentions. LOL, I haven’t read a lot of recent books but I’m always open to recommendations!

And if we’re going talking about fanfic writers then – @warmau (literally her headcanons are GOD TIER!), you aka @minghaseok (because your svt works are freaking amazing and I aspire to write as clean as you), & @jungnoir (I’m biased as hell but let me just say that the voice of her work is so hilarious – it’s so captivating that once I read the first few lines, I’m hooked).

17. favorite AU to write

Oooh, this is such a toughie! I have so many, but I think it really volleys between best friends to lovers and rivals/enemies to lovers, because the dynamics are so freakin’ fantastic. You can find a plethora of elements in both cases, whether it’s straight up angst or fluff or things of both genres. I’m also extremely partial to friends with benefits aus and fake dating aus, because I love angst and the complexities of human nature like there are moments where you know you shouldn’t do something but against your better judgement you do so anyway because feelings can be that powerful, it’s insane! Honestly, I love the inner emotional turmoil because that’s what I write best with.

46. share a scene of a story that you haven’t published yet

side note: I see u~ I’ll post a few sneak peeks because I’m feeling quite generous with my 70+ wips LOL

when the ice melts | hacker!yoongi

You break your trained gaze of the upside down bucket located between the desk and the couch in hopes of meeting a pair of eyes.

What greets you instead is the back of someone’s head peeking from the top of a black leather swivel chair. The hard tap on the keyboard breaking into the space of the song, a series of one’s and zero’s etched across the screens. You have to look elsewhere because even just trying to keep up with the rapidfire is disorienting.

This goes on for longer than a minute, something you didn’t mean to time but by the sixty-first Mississippi you were a little over the whole thing. Clearing your throat, you hoped the subtle call for attention would be enough.

He doesn’t so much as pause in a single keystroke until another song begins to play. That’s when he raises his hand to beckon you forth. His dull drawl cuts into the relatively still air: “You’re Jimin’s friend, right?”

Your breath gets stuck in your throat. Although it is a devoid of the unbearable snark, you know this voice.

You barely manage to say, “Ye—“

“—Okay, c’mere so we can get this over with,” he says, craning his head only slightly from his position. You begin to walk forward. “What’s your na—Y/N?”

You halt only about a foot away, feeling a strange mixture of regret, a mild heart pang, and a small urge to walk over there and embrace him and scream at him for the hell that came in the two years without him. But you remain firmly planted where you are, watching as he turns in his spot with an undecipherable expression to the naked eye.

“What are you doing here?”

You raise a brow. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that question?” 

loving you (has never been easier) | fake boyfriend!minghao

He’s staring.

You know nothing’s on your face. You definitely made sure to brush your hair too. Even your clothes are a little more than the usual leggings and stolen T-shirt from one of your mutual friends who can’t seem to stop leaving their articles of clothing at your place for reasons other than simply drunkenly tossing them aside and leaving you to 1) wash said shirt and 2) keep it for yourself as reparation for the cleaning and the torture of watching your friends strip themselves. But right as you find notice in a particular piece of lint to which you curse because goddammit this is your good shirt, the corners of his lips curl upward and his eyes soften, as if the scrutiny was only meant to screw around with you before the Big Question.

Minghao gives you a raised brow, partially probing for an answer to an unsaid question. He’s notorious for this, namely with you, sometimes guessing what you want before you even say so or simply hitting the mark to most ailments because he’s quite painfully observant. But you highly doubt this is anything within range of requests. You’d probably grovel right then and there if he somehow knew about your current predicament though for your own safety as well as his, you made no mention of this to anyone else because the rest of your friends are all blabbermouths and it’s already enough that they know you’re being set-up this Christmas by your great-aunt (bless her soul, really, but that’s the last time you’re ever answering your phone in the presence of Seungkwan or even Seungcheol).

“What’s up?” he says this carefully, one of his hands wrapped around the slightly steaming mug. The billows of fading steam comfort you, even more than the way his mahogany gaze, and that’s saying something.

“I need a favor,” you blurt out.

He huffs, “If you think I’m taking your shift during finals week, then you’re better off asking me to stick my head into the snow.”

“No—!” You shake your head, feeling the ask bubble up in your throat but still falling short to reach air nonetheless. “God, I’m not even scheduled, thankfully.”

“Well,” he says carefully. “What is it then?”

“Will you be my fake boyfriend?’’

cursed | vampire!jeno

With his hands up, he tries to talk, sounding a lot smaller than his usual grovel, “Y-Y/N, I’m sorry—”

“—Sorry?” you whisper harshly, wanting nothing more than to will those words away. It’s a weakness for you. To hear him say sorry in such a small and genuine way just makes you want to forgive him. “No, no. Don’t, Jeno.”

He bites his lip. Carefully, of course. The fake fangs he had on this morning have now molded into the real deal.

“Did Yeri give you the orange treat?”

He nods, looking guiltier.

You hate doing this. You really do. But you need to confirm your own theory, and cross your fingers that it isn’t anything like Joy or even Wendy’s snacks, because you can’t even imagine the aftereffects of what their can do to a mere mortal.

“Didn’t I tell you not to eat it?” When he nods, you ask, “Why did you?”

And okay, a huge part of you is still pretty pissed that he went ahead and ate your dessert despite you telling him not to.

“I-I know, and that’s why I’m sorry. Yeri said it was fine, so I did it without thinking!”

You exhale loudly, shooting him a brief glare before it softens once again, “Well, you need to make sure not to do anything stupid until after school. I won’t see you until then but you’re not to leave my side until that wears off, alright?”

He nods fervently, blurting out, “I’m really sorry, Y/N—!”

“—Get to class, love birds!” Your head turns to the hall monitor wandering the halls, and of fucking course, it’s Chenle.

fanfic asks! | inbox

[star-trekkin-across-theuniverse]

Resource Management, pt19

Word Count: 2381 Tags: @supermoonpanda @rayleyanns @sistasarah-sallysaidso @feelmyroarrrr @anyakinamidala @dirajunara @anotherotter @little-study-bug @rampant-salamander @goodnightwife @samaxraph99 @anotherotter  @outside-the-government @kingarthurscat @coyote-in-space @originalpottervengerlock @dolamrothianlady @curiositywillbethedeathofme @superheroesofbothuniverses @mtriestowrite @wanderingkat77

A hand shook me from my sleep in the middle of the night, and before I could scream, another one clapped across my mouth. The bedside lamp snapped on and I was both relieved and terrified to see Director Fury looming over me. And so incredibly relieved that I slept in pyjamas. I pried his hand off my face.

“With all due respect, Sir, what the fuck?” I hissed. He sat down on the edge of my bed, causing me to scramble up into a sitting position.

“You noticed the van following you?” He asked. I nodded. “Until McKay is able to regain her access, you are the only person in HR with level 10 clearance. You are at risk.”

“Yeah, smart move,” I rolled my eyes.

“I’ve enabled a ghost protocol for your account. If you ever suspect you are in danger, change your login by one digit. Doesn’t matter which one. I’ll be informed immediately,” he explained. I rubbed my eyes, trying to comprehend.

“What good will it do if there’s a gun to my head?” I demanded.

“You’ll still have access to everything you need. Your life will not be imperiled,” he promised.

“And this couldn’t wait until the morning?” I yawned. He gave me no response. “I’d offer you a coffee, but this just seems so weird.”

“You are going to be targeted, Ellis. Is there anything you think I should know about?”

“You said not to trust you,” I began, and took a deep breath, “but if I can’t trust you, I don’t know who I can. We found this at Cecelia Banks’ place.” I reached under my pillow and pulled out the notebook, holding it out to him. He took it and began to flip through the pages.

“Anything else?” He asked, nodding as he flipped through the pages.

“Nope.” It was a lie, but if Fury was not on my side, I needed to keep Phil safer than I was. “None of us could figure out the code.”

“It’s not commonly used anymore, but I know this one. Thank you, Ellis.” He turned and walked out of my room. I had to wonder if I’d made the right move. Thanks to Cecelia Banks, I suspected that HYDRA agents had infiltrated SHIELD again, but I had no information or idea of how far. For all I knew, Fury could be setting me up. I wanted to talk to Phil. I wanted to, but I was nervous about Fury’s visit. If he’d felt he couldn’t message or call, that meant my phone was not secure. I didn’t want to divulge anything by mentioning it to Phil. I wished I were better at cyphers, as Phil seemed to figure them out relatively quickly.

To say my sleep was unsettled for the rest of the night would have been an understatement. I tossed and turned, imagining all manner of horrible endings that could come to me. I gave up trying to get rest at around 4am, and just got up. I sent a quick text to Lex, trying to figure out our schedule for the next while, and as I was making myself a coffee, I received a rapid-fire succession of texts in response. On checking them, I had one from Natasha and one from Clint, but nothing from Lex. Natasha was confirming that she’d signed off on my hand-to-hand competencies and would be setting up follow-up assignments for me. Clint’s message was to let me know he’d been called away on assignment, and expected me to continue my target practice daily.

“Since I know you aren’t tied up with H2H anymore.”

“Any specific recommendations?” I typed back while I sipped my coffee.

“Get better. Get faster. Stop hesitating. If you need to use it, you need to stop your attacker, no matter the consequence.” He was basically telling me I had to be fast enough to shoot first, and accurate enough to kill with my first shot. No pressure. I finished my coffee and decided to head into the office. It was probably the safest place for me to be. No one would attack me in a SHIELD facility. It would almost be worth moving into the office until whatever was happening was over.

The office was disturbingly quiet when I walked in. It was to be expected, as it was only 6 am, but it still felt weird. I slid they key into my door look and was surprised to find it already unlocked. I knew I had locked it before I had left the office last. I was horrified to realize I had immediately reached for my sidearm before opening the door. It swung wide, and the light automatically turned on, showing the room empty. I holstered my weapon and walked in, letting out the breath I didn’t realize I was holding. I could hear a faint whirring noise and realized my computer was also on. I reached for the locking drawer on my desk and was relieved to find it still locked. I flicked the mouse and the screensaver vanished. The computer seemed to be uncompromised, but I called IT anyhow. I wanted the whole thing replaced before I signed in. In the meantime, I took my stack of work and carried it out into the main office. I settled in at the reception desk and started pounding through the last of the big pile of paperwork Erin had dumped on me. An hour or so later, IT showed up with a new computer, and went to work switching out mine.

“Should be all set, Director.” The IT guy leaned across the reception desk and handed me a small book, “that has any troubleshooting info you might need for these new workstations.”

“Is it the same as the one I had?” I asked. He shook his head.

“No, it’s identical to this one you’re working on though,” he explained. I nodded.

Once I was sure he was gone, I turned the lock on the main office door and quickly traded computers with the reception desk. Fury had scared me, and I took literally the advice to trust no one. No one would have any reason to put any kind of tracking or keystroke-logging app onto the reception desk computer. She had always only had level one clearance. If the computers were identical, I could trust that no one would know any different if I switched them, but that I could be sure my computer was clean and safe. My stomach growled, prompting me to lock up again and head to the nearest café for a breakfast bagel or something.

I logged back into my new computer when I returned, and continued working. The office slowly came awake around me as staff trickled in. Erin popped her head in when she arrived.

“I have hand-to-hand this morning with Jackson at around ten. Is there anything on the table that you’re needing me for?” She looked tired.

“There’s a stack of level three clearances from Science that need to be completed, and if you could take this pile, I would love it.” I pointed to a stack of internal applications for positions on the new helicarriers. I’d already sorted them according to clearance. She nodded and grabbed the folder. She turned just before she left my office.

“Oh, Agent Garrett was in yesterday looking for you. Something about that project he’s on,” she mentioned. I shook my head.

“I’m not sure which one that is?” I asked. She nodded and pursed her lips before gently closing my door.

“He’s been working on that Centipede thing. He thinks there’s a mole, and wanted to access some files. I’d been helping him out when I could, but with my restrictions in place,” she trailed off.

“Gotcha. Was he going to come back, or just send a request?” I asked. She shrugged and headed back to her office. I went back to processing the internal applications. I set my phone onto the speaker dock on my bookshelf and cranked up some loud, angry music to get focused on the mountain of postings I had to get through. The new helicarrier project was due to launch in days, and the maintenance and MedBay postings had only just come down. It was another thing to mention to Fury about the HR restructuring. Job postings were going to need to come down sooner if there was only going to be two people processing applications above level four.

My desk phone rang some time later, startling me out of the groove I’d settled into.

“Ellis, HR,” I answered.

“Annie, right? This is John Garrett. Honey, I was in yesterday to see Erin about some files I need to see, and she’s got restricted access right now. Are you around this afternoon? I need to take a peek at a couple of personnel files for higher-level agents. I’m trying to root out a mole,” he had an overly familiar way of speaking that I’m sure a lot of people found charismatic and charming. But I’d never in my life appreciated being called honey.

“I should be here until 3pm, Agent Garrett,” I thought maybe being formal in my response would send a hint.

“Alright darling, I’ll see you after lunch. It’ll be nice to finally meet you,” he positively oozed the charm. I forced myself to smile before I spoke.

“Of course. This afternoon then,” I ended the conversation with a shudder. I was not looking forward to meeting him. I hit the intercom button on my phone and keyed in Erin’s local. It was the epitome of laziness but I was telling myself I was multitasking.

“Yeah?” Her voice crackled across the comm.

“Did anyone go into my office yesterday while I was out?” I asked. There was something about Agent Garrett that unsettled me enough that I wondered if it hadn’t been him playing with my computer.

“Not that I saw, but janitorial was in late yesterday afternoon. I left before they got to our offices.” That made sense. I was probably completely overreacting. I had likely left my computer on, and janitorial had forgotten to lock back up when they left my office. I felt a flush of embarrassment wash over me, and I found myself wanting to text Phil to share my embarrassment. But then the spectre of Fury’s midnight visit came back to me, and I got paranoid about contacting him again.

Garrett was just as smarmy and slippery as I’d suspected. He breezed into my office like he was the director of SHIELD, and shook my hand with that limp indifference that some men reserve for women. I had to conceal the shudder of contempt that ran the length of my spine. He made himself comfortable in the chair across from my desk and smiled while he assessed me. He didn’t even try to hide that he was checking me out, either. Subconsciously, I pulled my blazer across my bust and crossed my arms. He smirked, completely aware of how I was responding to his gaze.

“You’re a pretty little thing, aren’t you?” He asked. I forced a smile, waiting for the inevitable Barbie comparison. Men like him always made the Barbie comparison.

“I guess that’s a matter of opinion, Agent Garrett.” My jaw was tight, and if he was as good a judge of character as he should be in order to ‘root out moles’, he knew exactly how I was feeling. And it didn’t change his behaviour, which meant it was intentional. In that moment, I decided I hated John Garrett.

“You don’t strike me as Phil’s type. His last girlfriend was brunette, petite. Real classy, plays the cello,” he continued.

“Are you suggesting I’m not classy, Agent Garrett?” I raised an eyebrow. His eyes snapped up to mine, giving away that he’d been staring at my chest. He held his hands up in mock-surrender.

“No, no, Sunshine, I’m sure you’re just as classy. You just –“

“Look like Dominatrix Librarian Barbie?” I asked, suddenly realizing who’d sent the text to Phil. He at least had the decency to look away, although I didn’t believe for one minute that he was embarrassed.

“It’s a good look,” he winked, making eye contact with me again. I felt nauseated.

“Agent Garrett –“

“Please, honey, call me John,” he interrupted.

“Agent Garrett,” I emphasized both words, “Unless you’ve got a bet going with someone about how long it will take me to slap you with a Stark, I would strongly suggest you get to the point of your visit.”

The cocky veneer vanished, and his grin turned cold. He sat up in the chair and leaned forward.

“I need to access some personnel files that are pertinent to my investigation of the Centipede project,” he began.

“Has Erin not run you through the appropriate channels for requesting information? Fill out a P440A online for each file you wish to access. I’ll process them as soon as they hit my inbox, and you can access them from whatever workstation is nearest you.” I made a mental note to have a conversation with Erin before her clearance was reinstated about appropriate documentation. There was no point in having security clearance if we didn’t follow through with the checks and balances that were in place. Garrett nodded abruptly and rose.

“Thank you for your time, Director Ellis. I’ll be sure to get those requests to you this afternoon,” he held out his hand. I stood and reached across my desk to shake his hand. It was a more appropriate and strong grip this time around. He released my hand and turned to walk out.

“Agent Garrett?” I stopped him before he left. He glanced over his shoulder. “I hope you understand that if SHIELD is to discover and deal with traitors, part of that is playing by the rules. It allows those of us who are innocent of wrongdoing to stand free of judgment, when the cards start to fall.”

“I take it back, Director Ellis,” He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes, “you are exactly Phil’s type.”

The way he said it made it an insult. I was left wondering if any of us should trust John Garrett.

[arplis]

Arplis - News: How to Decorate Your Bunker

Survival bunkers are not typically large structures, so you must use every single inch of space to your best advantage. There are two vital aspects to take into consideration when deciding how to fill your emergency bunker: storage space and morale.

Living in a bunker will be a lot like calling a tiny house home or living in an RV with a SHTF twist. The scale of everything that you need must be downsized as much as is humanly feasible to make room for everything you need.

Thankfully, tiny house living is all the rage, so you will not need to squeeze in single use standard size furniture into your small survival space or build everything you need.

America is over five million preppers strong (at the lowest estimate) which also opens up another avenue of multi-purpose shopping opportunities when decking out your bunker.

Concealing furniture was once a complete DIY proposition, but now you can simply tap a few keystrokes on your laptop and have a couch with a hidden rifle compartment delivered right to your doorstep.

Building your own concealed multi-purpose furniture will still be a lot cheaper than buying the mass manufactured version, and a growing number of free plans are available online.

Top Features of Bunker Furniture

Lots of Drawers

Multi-use furniture

Firearms supplies concealment compartment

Sturdy construction

Tall and narrow

Fold away design

There are only three types of furniture that are essential for bunker living. If you choose or build multi-purpose furniture each piece of furniture moved inside of the survival bunker will serve at least two purposes leaving more freedom of movement.

Even if you will be staying in the emergency bunker alone, you will want as much room to move about as possible. The mental and emotional impact of being sequestered inside of a bunker for an extended period of time can be lessened by the ability to do physical activity.

In the bunker you will need storage containers lots of storage.

A place to eat.

A place to sleep.

Survival Bunker Furniture First Steps and Tips

Placing furniture in the bunker that offers as much storage space as you will need is priority number one. If your bunker is especially small you could make due with bedding down in a sleeping bag on the floor, if necessary. You back will not be thanking you, but your stomach will if the space allowed for enough food storage.

If you plan well when buying or building survival bunker furniture, there should be no need to go to such sleeping extremes. Before you buy or make storage unit furniture for a bunker, you must determine, down to the last square foot, how much storage space you will need.

The best way to decide how much space you will need is to literally place in front of your absolutely everything that is going to be taken into the bunker. Only then can you know how much space it will take to house all of those items and be able to make or build multi-purpose furniture in an economic, smart, and usable manner.

I bet you never once thought your life might depend on furniture purchases, but it just might. You may be well advised to weigh and measure items, or groupings of items, to determine down to the last knowable detail how it will fit into any bunker furniture you plan to buy or build.

A thorough prepper, one with a lot of helping hands preferably, would pack all of the preps that will go into the bunker actually into the bunker. Stack them all up against the walls to get a good visual of the amount of items and space they take up when placed inside.

Go yet another step further and have everyone who is going to be staying in the bunker, Fido included, go into the survival structure and sit down somewhere.

Seeing all of the people and all of the supplies inside the bunker together for the first time will drive home the need for not only multi-purpose furniture and how much space essentials take.

Give every member of the family a reality check when making decisions about wants luxury items they can bring with them and how crowded their SHTF domicile will feel.

Better to have that shocking realization now, and not 5 minutes after the world has gone pear-shaped, and the entire family is rushing inside the bunker.

Next you will need to make a determination on how many wants or comfort items everyone can bring with them. Streamlining the bag size before setting a quantity limit.

This will save a lot of stress and fussing, especially if you have children or teenage girls just an observation from a woman who survived raising one.

Trash bags would be perfect for streamlining a bag size, remember, the bag the items are packed in will have to remain in the bunker as well. If the bags the items are transported in will serve as hanging wall storage, you can still use trash bags as a measuring tool to place any items your family members will be bringing with them, inside.

Remember, the trash the family makes while in the bunker will take up space, as well. Factoring in both how trash will be disposed of should be considered when factoring the available storage space inside a survival bunker.

Types of Furniture Needed

General Storage

The first furniture items you buy or build should be general storage items because they are the mosts important and will be the largest. If your bunker is not an open space.

If you have built and- or hanging beds, make sure to measure them before purchasing or making any storage units when decorating the survival bunker.

You do not have to buy expensive storage units, or to spend a plethora of weekends making them. You might be able to repurpose something you have or score bargain storage units at yard sales, flea markets, or auctions if you start thinking outside the box.

The items that will make the best storage units are not metal shelves (although they are handy for large and self-contained items) but furniture with lots and lots of drawers.

Keeping your bunker preps in specific drawers will make them easy to find, organized, and avoid fussing over items being misplaced (yes, even in a small space like a survival bunker) when tensions are already strained.

Best Repurposed Storage Unit Ideas

Dining Room Buffets

Tall Dressers also called Hi-Boys

Library Card Cabinets

Metal Hand Tool Storage Cabinets typically the kind that are on wheels.

If using or making shelving units that will run floor to ceiling and attach to the bunker wall, include or add dividers on the shelves to compartmentalize the space.

You can also put plastic storage chests in a variety of sizes to place onto the large shelving unit to infuse the drawer concept into the unit and allow it to be stacked tighter making better use of the space.

Typically, these plastic storage chests have three to four removable sections and come with different colored frames and or drawers. You can color code your preps to better organize the bunker, or simply make labels to put on the front of the drawers if they are all one color.

Drawers are substantially better than storage tubs because you will not have to pull them down to sift through them to find a needed item, you simply slide out a drawer and the grab and go.

The only up side to using storage tubs is the top can double as an eating space, or a tabletop for sanity-saving hobbies, like board game playing or crafts for children.

Beds

If you are used to a spacious king-sized bed, better spend a few nights in your bunker as practice to get used to the more austere digs. Unless the beds will be suspended and set up bunk bed style so they can be folded up out of the way when not in use (Murphy bed style), they should serve at least one other purpose.

A bed that will remain on the floor at all times must be built with storage compartments underneath to make up for the massive amount of space it is using in the survival bunker.

A sofa bed or futon bed, at least for parents, is ideal. This bed will fold up and give the family a space to gather during the day. Do not underestimate the value of normalcy when hunkered in very close quarters with your family for weeks or months especially if you have young children or grandchildren.

Sofa beds can also have slender storage tubs or storage drawers built beneath them to better take advantage of the space they are using. If the wall behind the sofa bed is not going to be used entirely for storage consider placing the sofa bed on a fold out wooden or metal platform to snag more storage underneath.

Floor Storage

If you have not yet built or ordered you bunker, strongly consider installing storage beneath it that can quickly be accessed via a hinged piece of flooring.

If your bunker is already on-site, it might be feasible to put in a false floor to accomplish the same goal. Whether or not adding in a false floor will reduce wall space too substantially to make the remodel worth it, will depend on the size of your survival abode.

Weapons

Fitting a large safe inside of a bunker might not be ideal, or even possible. You can use a wall rack for weapons and storage drawers for ammo, repair kits, and gun cleaning supplies.

Concealed furniture, especially the space saving type you will need for bunker living will not hold a lot of firearms, but can keep guns handy, safely away from children, and keep them stored without taking up much space.

A firearms storage bench can be used as seating or a table area, and a makeshift gun cabinet at the same time.

Firearms concealment shelves, often referred to as stealth shelves are the perfect size to hold a handgun, and a few boxes of ammo. You could place these shelves up and down along any bunker wall to uses that storage space well and keep your firearms within quick reach, as well.

Under table, desk, or shelf holsters that screw into place and often magnetized attachments to hold an extra filled magazine, are yet another economical way to store handguns inside a survival bunker if keeping them out of reach of young children is not a concern.

If you are handy, you can make your own gun storage attachment system to place under the mattress frame of a sofa bed or under a futon bed to house a rifle.

You can also build or buy a shadow box style picture frame and use it to house ammo and weapons. Some retailers are now selling concealment picture frame.

As a morale booster, take photos of the outdoors around your home or a favorite place so the picture in the frame can mimic a window to help alleviate at least some of the closed in feeling the bunker inhabitants will increasingly feel the longer they are in the survival structure.

Kitchen Table

You can make or buy a murphy bed style kitchen table that will not only fold up and hang on the wall when not in use, but some versions also have storage space for a few items and the folding chairs that come with it as a set.

A single fold away table will work just fine if you are going solo in the bunker or want to make space for each child to store some toys, learn, and do activities.

You can also build small or long tables that are hinged to a bunker wall with fold away legs that can be popped down to serve as sturdy support when in use and folder away back to the wall when it is not. This type of table only sticks out a few inches from the wall.

If such a table is not in your budget, purchasing a folding square card style table will still provide eating and gathering space without taking up too much of.

The table and chairs can be folded away, and hung on hooks on the bunker wall when it is not in use or slid under the sofa bed to avoid taking up too much wall space.

Rolling stand style table and chair units that also fold to only a few inches wide are yet another option for survival bunker dining and gathering space. These tables will always take up floor spacpane, but far less than even a small table that cannot be folded away to a wall or placed under a bed.

Kitchen Storage

Use hooks to hold all utensils and utensil holders in the bunker kitchen that are not so large that they have to go into a cabinet. When doing a chore, like cooking, as much as what you need should be within arms reach.

The first aid kit and fire extinguishers should be kept in the kitchen area as well, and be stored low enough that the youngest responsible member of the bunker family can reach it in case of emergency.

If you are using paper plates and cups to conserve water while in the bunker, these items will take up a copious amount of space and should be placed first in the cabinets and on wall storage in the cooking area.

The kitchen counter will likely be small, so consider buying or making a unit with at least one but preferably two pull-out chopping blocks to give you added work space when preparing a meal of doing other tasks.

A fold-up stool could be kept in the kitchen and hung on the wall for use at the pull out draw. The stool will not take up much storage room and can give a family member a little quiet space away from the group at the couch when they feel they need it.

Personal Storage Morale Boosters

Be space-conscious but do not skip on morale booster and learning items. By learning, I mean both homeschool and self-reliance skills which can overlap substantially.

Use not just wall space, but under the top bunk bed, on the outside of bunkbed, a hanging storage flap that dangles out from the edge of the mattress, and even the ceiling.

You could use a pulley system, bungee cords, or build a loft to house additional items of all types. Building a wood organizer bin on the bunk bed wall can house toys, books, art supplies, socks, and other items of similar size and shape.

Bungee cords could also be stretched from side to side on the base of the lower bunk bed to hold blankets and clothing folded as neatly and small as possible into bags or similar containers.

You could also build a folder over and down little tray or desk top for the person sleeping in the bunkbed to use for work or pleasure an old school desk style pivot and fold mini work space.

Using netting in corners of walls to hold lightweight items like stuffed animals, extra pillows, etc. can also make use of small but valuable space.

The back of the bunker door could be turned into a top to bottom bookshelf to hold books, board games, playing cards, etc.

When planning for the education of the children while inside the bunker, consider items that can be re-used instead of being wasted after only one learning session and taking up space as trash.

A wipe-off board can be hung on the wall for each child and used to practice writing (they sell lined paper versions of wipe off board at Dollar Tree stores), and other lessons as well as using it for fun time drawing instead of paper.

Document and Vital Items Storage

A small fire safe should be part of the bunker storage plan. Important documents, maps, keys, and similar items should be stored inside the fire safe, so all of these essential items are not accessible and in danger of being damaged during the time the family spends in the bunker.

An inventory of the supplies in the bunker should be kept and updated regularly so the family has an exact count of all the supplies on hand and can adjust the rationing plan accordingly.

The inventory should be kept on a clipboard that is hung on a hook or nail in a prominent place that is not reachable by children such as the upper side of the primary storage unit.

Planning for the Day You Exit the Bunker

When packing items into the bunker and storing them, spend some time thinking about what you will need the day your and your loved ones leave the bunker.

Although many of the items you have with you can help sustain you, there are other valuable supplies that may also need added to your list.

Knives, axes, and archery supplies. Remember, all the ammo you have inside the bunker may be all that exists when you come out.

Outerwear And Footwear. Even if you enter the bunker during summer but you might be leaving the survival structure during the middle of winter. During the time you are inside the bunker, babies and young children can grow substantially.

While you and your loved ones were riding out the apocalypse safely inside the bunker, a lot of chaos and looting was likely going on outside. Consider hiding caches near the survival bunker that you can quickly reach and recover upon your exist.

A map to the caches including an inventory list of what is inside should be laminated and stored inside the bunker in a spot the entire family has been drilled to remember.

The post How to Decorate Your Bunker appeared first on Survival Sullivan.

Arplis - News source https://arplis.com/blogs/news/how-to-decorate-your-bunker

[adtwixt]

Adtwixt - News: How to Decorate Your Bunker

Survival bunkers are not typically large structures, so you must use every single inch of space to your best advantage. There are two vital aspects to take into consideration when deciding how to fill your emergency bunker: storage space and morale.

Living in a bunker will be a lot like calling a tiny house home or living in an RV with a SHTF twist. The scale of everything that you need must be downsized as much as is humanly feasible to make room for everything you need.

Thankfully, tiny house living is all the rage, so you will not need to squeeze in single use standard size furniture into your small survival space or build everything you need.

America is over five million preppers strong (at the lowest estimate) which also opens up another avenue of multi-purpose shopping opportunities when decking out your bunker.

Concealing furniture was once a complete DIY proposition, but now you can simply tap a few keystrokes on your laptop and have a couch with a hidden rifle compartment delivered right to your doorstep.

Building your own concealed multi-purpose furniture will still be a lot cheaper than buying the mass manufactured version, and a growing number of free plans are available online.

Top Features of Bunker Furniture

Lots of Drawers

Multi-use furniture

Firearms supplies concealment compartment

Sturdy construction

Tall and narrow

Fold away design

There are only three types of furniture that are essential for bunker living. If you choose or build multi-purpose furniture each piece of furniture moved inside of the survival bunker will serve at least two purposes leaving more freedom of movement.

Even if you will be staying in the emergency bunker alone, you will want as much room to move about as possible. The mental and emotional impact of being sequestered inside of a bunker for an extended period of time can be lessened by the ability to do physical activity.

In the bunker you will need storage containers lots of storage.

A place to eat.

A place to sleep.

Survival Bunker Furniture First Steps and Tips

Placing furniture in the bunker that offers as much storage space as you will need is priority number one. If your bunker is especially small you could make due with bedding down in a sleeping bag on the floor, if necessary. You back will not be thanking you, but your stomach will if the space allowed for enough food storage.

If you plan well when buying or building survival bunker furniture, there should be no need to go to such sleeping extremes. Before you buy or make storage unit furniture for a bunker, you must determine, down to the last square foot, how much storage space you will need.

The best way to decide how much space you will need is to literally place in front of your absolutely everything that is going to be taken into the bunker. Only then can you know how much space it will take to house all of those items and be able to make or build multi-purpose furniture in an economic, smart, and usable manner.

I bet you never once thought your life might depend on furniture purchases, but it just might. You may be well advised to weigh and measure items, or groupings of items, to determine down to the last knowable detail how it will fit into any bunker furniture you plan to buy or build.

A thorough prepper, one with a lot of helping hands preferably, would pack all of the preps that will go into the bunker actually into the bunker. Stack them all up against the walls to get a good visual of the amount of items and space they take up when placed inside.

Go yet another step further and have everyone who is going to be staying in the bunker, Fido included, go into the survival structure and sit down somewhere.

Seeing all of the people and all of the supplies inside the bunker together for the first time will drive home the need for not only multi-purpose furniture and how much space essentials take.

Give every member of the family a reality check when making decisions about wants luxury items they can bring with them and how crowded their SHTF domicile will feel.

Better to have that shocking realization now, and not 5 minutes after the world has gone pear-shaped, and the entire family is rushing inside the bunker.

Next you will need to make a determination on how many wants or comfort items everyone can bring with them. Streamlining the bag size before setting a quantity limit.

This will save a lot of stress and fussing, especially if you have children or teenage girls just an observation from a woman who survived raising one.

Trash bags would be perfect for streamlining a bag size, remember, the bag the items are packed in will have to remain in the bunker as well. If the bags the items are transported in will serve as hanging wall storage, you can still use trash bags as a measuring tool to place any items your family members will be bringing with them, inside.

Remember, the trash the family makes while in the bunker will take up space, as well. Factoring in both how trash will be disposed of should be considered when factoring the available storage space inside a survival bunker.

Types of Furniture Needed

General Storage

The first furniture items you buy or build should be general storage items because they are the mosts important and will be the largest. If your bunker is not an open space.

If you have built and- or hanging beds, make sure to measure them before purchasing or making any storage units when decorating the survival bunker.

You do not have to buy expensive storage units, or to spend a plethora of weekends making them. You might be able to repurpose something you have or score bargain storage units at yard sales, flea markets, or auctions if you start thinking outside the box.

The items that will make the best storage units are not metal shelves (although they are handy for large and self-contained items) but furniture with lots and lots of drawers.

Keeping your bunker preps in specific drawers will make them easy to find, organized, and avoid fussing over items being misplaced (yes, even in a small space like a survival bunker) when tensions are already strained.

Best Repurposed Storage Unit Ideas

Dining Room Buffets

Tall Dressers also called Hi-Boys

Library Card Cabinets

Metal Hand Tool Storage Cabinets typically the kind that are on wheels.

If using or making shelving units that will run floor to ceiling and attach to the bunker wall, include or add dividers on the shelves to compartmentalize the space.

You can also put plastic storage chests in a variety of sizes to place onto the large shelving unit to infuse the drawer concept into the unit and allow it to be stacked tighter making better use of the space.

Typically, these plastic storage chests have three to four removable sections and come with different colored frames and or drawers. You can color code your preps to better organize the bunker, or simply make labels to put on the front of the drawers if they are all one color.

Drawers are substantially better than storage tubs because you will not have to pull them down to sift through them to find a needed item, you simply slide out a drawer and the grab and go.

The only up side to using storage tubs is the top can double as an eating space, or a tabletop for sanity-saving hobbies, like board game playing or crafts for children.

Beds

If you are used to a spacious king-sized bed, better spend a few nights in your bunker as practice to get used to the more austere digs. Unless the beds will be suspended and set up bunk bed style so they can be folded up out of the way when not in use (Murphy bed style), they should serve at least one other purpose.

A bed that will remain on the floor at all times must be built with storage compartments underneath to make up for the massive amount of space it is using in the survival bunker.

A sofa bed or futon bed, at least for parents, is ideal. This bed will fold up and give the family a space to gather during the day. Do not underestimate the value of normalcy when hunkered in very close quarters with your family for weeks or months especially if you have young children or grandchildren.

Sofa beds can also have slender storage tubs or storage drawers built beneath them to better take advantage of the space they are using. If the wall behind the sofa bed is not going to be used entirely for storage consider placing the sofa bed on a fold out wooden or metal platform to snag more storage underneath.

Floor Storage

If you have not yet built or ordered you bunker, strongly consider installing storage beneath it that can quickly be accessed via a hinged piece of flooring.

If your bunker is already on-site, it might be feasible to put in a false floor to accomplish the same goal. Whether or not adding in a false floor will reduce wall space too substantially to make the remodel worth it, will depend on the size of your survival abode.

Weapons

Fitting a large safe inside of a bunker might not be ideal, or even possible. You can use a wall rack for weapons and storage drawers for ammo, repair kits, and gun cleaning supplies.

Concealed furniture, especially the space saving type you will need for bunker living will not hold a lot of firearms, but can keep guns handy, safely away from children, and keep them stored without taking up much space.

A firearms storage bench can be used as seating or a table area, and a makeshift gun cabinet at the same time.

Firearms concealment shelves, often referred to as stealth shelves are the perfect size to hold a handgun, and a few boxes of ammo. You could place these shelves up and down along any bunker wall to uses that storage space well and keep your firearms within quick reach, as well.

Under table, desk, or shelf holsters that screw into place and often magnetized attachments to hold an extra filled magazine, are yet another economical way to store handguns inside a survival bunker if keeping them out of reach of young children is not a concern.

If you are handy, you can make your own gun storage attachment system to place under the mattress frame of a sofa bed or under a futon bed to house a rifle.

You can also build or buy a shadow box style picture frame and use it to house ammo and weapons. Some retailers are now selling concealment picture frame.

As a morale booster, take photos of the outdoors around your home or a favorite place so the picture in the frame can mimic a window to help alleviate at least some of the closed in feeling the bunker inhabitants will increasingly feel the longer they are in the survival structure.

Kitchen Table

You can make or buy a murphy bed style kitchen table that will not only fold up and hang on the wall when not in use, but some versions also have storage space for a few items and the folding chairs that come with it as a set.

A single fold away table will work just fine if you are going solo in the bunker or want to make space for each child to store some toys, learn, and do activities.

You can also build small or long tables that are hinged to a bunker wall with fold away legs that can be popped down to serve as sturdy support when in use and folder away back to the wall when it is not. This type of table only sticks out a few inches from the wall.

If such a table is not in your budget, purchasing a folding square card style table will still provide eating and gathering space without taking up too much of.

The table and chairs can be folded away, and hung on hooks on the bunker wall when it is not in use or slid under the sofa bed to avoid taking up too much wall space.

Rolling stand style table and chair units that also fold to only a few inches wide are yet another option for survival bunker dining and gathering space. These tables will always take up floor spacpane, but far less than even a small table that cannot be folded away to a wall or placed under a bed.

Kitchen Storage

Use hooks to hold all utensils and utensil holders in the bunker kitchen that are not so large that they have to go into a cabinet. When doing a chore, like cooking, as much as what you need should be within arms reach.

The first aid kit and fire extinguishers should be kept in the kitchen area as well, and be stored low enough that the youngest responsible member of the bunker family can reach it in case of emergency.

If you are using paper plates and cups to conserve water while in the bunker, these items will take up a copious amount of space and should be placed first in the cabinets and on wall storage in the cooking area.

The kitchen counter will likely be small, so consider buying or making a unit with at least one but preferably two pull-out chopping blocks to give you added work space when preparing a meal of doing other tasks.

A fold-up stool could be kept in the kitchen and hung on the wall for use at the pull out draw. The stool will not take up much storage room and can give a family member a little quiet space away from the group at the couch when they feel they need it.

Personal Storage Morale Boosters

Be space-conscious but do not skip on morale booster and learning items. By learning, I mean both homeschool and self-reliance skills which can overlap substantially.

Use not just wall space, but under the top bunk bed, on the outside of bunkbed, a hanging storage flap that dangles out from the edge of the mattress, and even the ceiling.

You could use a pulley system, bungee cords, or build a loft to house additional items of all types. Building a wood organizer bin on the bunk bed wall can house toys, books, art supplies, socks, and other items of similar size and shape.

Bungee cords could also be stretched from side to side on the base of the lower bunk bed to hold blankets and clothing folded as neatly and small as possible into bags or similar containers.

You could also build a folder over and down little tray or desk top for the person sleeping in the bunkbed to use for work or pleasure an old school desk style pivot and fold mini work space.

Using netting in corners of walls to hold lightweight items like stuffed animals, extra pillows, etc. can also make use of small but valuable space.

The back of the bunker door could be turned into a top to bottom bookshelf to hold books, board games, playing cards, etc.

When planning for the education of the children while inside the bunker, consider items that can be re-used instead of being wasted after only one learning session and taking up space as trash.

A wipe-off board can be hung on the wall for each child and used to practice writing (they sell lined paper versions of wipe off board at Dollar Tree stores), and other lessons as well as using it for fun time drawing instead of paper.

Document and Vital Items Storage

A small fire safe should be part of the bunker storage plan. Important documents, maps, keys, and similar items should be stored inside the fire safe, so all of these essential items are not accessible and in danger of being damaged during the time the family spends in the bunker.

An inventory of the supplies in the bunker should be kept and updated regularly so the family has an exact count of all the supplies on hand and can adjust the rationing plan accordingly.

The inventory should be kept on a clipboard that is hung on a hook or nail in a prominent place that is not reachable by children such as the upper side of the primary storage unit.

Planning for the Day You Exit the Bunker

When packing items into the bunker and storing them, spend some time thinking about what you will need the day your and your loved ones leave the bunker.

Although many of the items you have with you can help sustain you, there are other valuable supplies that may also need added to your list.

Knives, axes, and archery supplies. Remember, all the ammo you have inside the bunker may be all that exists when you come out.

Outerwear And Footwear. Even if you enter the bunker during summer but you might be leaving the survival structure during the middle of winter. During the time you are inside the bunker, babies and young children can grow substantially.

While you and your loved ones were riding out the apocalypse safely inside the bunker, a lot of chaos and looting was likely going on outside. Consider hiding caches near the survival bunker that you can quickly reach and recover upon your exist.

A map to the caches including an inventory list of what is inside should be laminated and stored inside the bunker in a spot the entire family has been drilled to remember.

The post How to Decorate Your Bunker appeared first on Survival Sullivan.

Adtwixt - News source http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Adtwixt-News/~3/f9RM9mFFKPg/how-to-decorate-your-bunker-1

[news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog]

The Hear app makes trippy sounds, but it probably won't help you concentrate

Anyone who's ever attempted to write for a living (or for fun) knows there's essentially no such thing as a distraction-free environment. Coffee shops are busy and bustling, offices are full of noisy co-workers, and personal living spaces are packed with potential procrastination options.

Like many people who are easily distracted, I often find myself struggling to give that task at hand my undivided attention. So when I learned about the advanced listening app Hear, created by RjDj, I was intrigued.

Billed as something that can "harmonize your listening experience" and "help you to be less distracted and stressed," Hear sounded very promising. I've never been one for white noise machines or soothing spa playlists, so the augmented sound aspect of Hear initially had me a bit skeptical. But I hoped the app would help me focus when writing, make noisy public settings more pleasant to be in, and allow me to filter some of the sounds in my office when I felt I needed an extra level of introspection. 

SEE ALSO: Aloe Bud is a self-care app for self-care app skeptics

Hear is free and simply designed. It offers seven free sound filters (Super Hearing, Auto Volume, Relax, Happy, Talk, Office, and Sleep,) and two additional filters (Trippy and Upbeat) available for $1.99 each. The individual filters each have their pros and cons, so to give you the most complete understanding of the Hear experience I thought it would be best to break the app down by its different listening components.

Getting set up

To start, you can download Hear from the app store. (It's currently only available on iOS.) Be aware that only wired headphones are supported at the moment "because bluetooth audio does not support high quality microphone realtime audio." But Hear audio technicians are reportedly looking into expanding the app's headphone capabilities in the future.

After downloading, you see the app's main deep red and orange color theme, and you're guided through a simple setup. You'll be asked to enable your mic so incoming audio can be processed through the app, plug in your headphones, and then you're free to swipe between the various filters just like you would on Instagram.

Super Hearing

After setup, Hear launches right into its Super Hearing filter, which, I must say I was not entirely prepared for.

Super Hearing lets you hear the world "with superhuman detail and quality," which means every keystroke you make or breath you take is extremely amplified. At first, the heightened hearing felt incredibly strange — like I'd been transported into a seashell. But once you adjust the bass, presence, brilliance, and volume to your liking, it can be pretty damn soothing.

I first tried the filter while I was working from home, and in my secluded environment I really liked the results. It made me feel like a superhero with otherworldly powers, and transformed the clicks of my MacBook Air into an old fashioned typewriter. But when I tried it back in the office — as was the case with essentially every filter — I found the amplified sounds of co-workers talking and laughing to be far more pronounced, and therefore, more distracting.

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While I was at my desk, Super Hearing allowed me to pick up on the faintest background noises, some of which I wouldn't have otherwise paid much attention to, such as the unzipping of jackets, popping open of soda cans, beeping of car horns outside, and hushed conversations between co-workers around me.

To test the app's range out I turned up the volume and slacked my co-worker who sits three rows away from me. I bizarrely requested that he cough to himself. After a bit of convincing he lightly cleared his throat, and it weirdly sounded as though he was seated right beside me.

The verdict: Overall, Super Hearing is a great and even somewhat comforting option if you're using it alone. I imagine it'd be helpful to use when meditating or deep breathing, since it allows you to look deep within yourself and hear each breath and movement so clearly. But in a noisy environment, it made me much more conscious of each individual sound more — essentially, the opposite of what I wanted.

Auto Volume

The app's second filter, described as a way to "turn off the background noise, but still hear when people talk around you," seemed promising. But honestly, it didn't wow me.

The Auto Volume filter starts off silent and only picks up select noise, resulting in sudden bursts of sound and occasionally choppy feedback. This particular filter didn't always pick up the sounds I wanted it to, and would occasionally cut out while someone was speaking to me, which got to be pretty frustrating.

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The verdict: While I'm not passionately against this filter, I honestly just didn't see the point in using it. Turning it on in a room alone doesn't add much to your work experience, and though you can change the volume, suppress noise, and remove hiss, I couldn't seem to find a settings adjustment that convinced me otherwise. Overall, I found the harsh distinctions between absolute quiet and sound distracting.

Relax

Hear told me its third filter, Relax, would make me "lose myself in harmonic waves of bliss," and while I was incredibly hopeful at the thought of finally getting a taste of app-induced relaxation, I can assure you I experienced no such thing.

Have you ever seen the episode of SpongeBob SquarePants where Squidward screams "alone" in that white room over and over again? Or in Finding Nemo when Dory tries to speak whale? That's the vibe the Relax filter gave me.

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It's great if you want to hear sneezes, coughs, and other sounds echo through your mind for far longer than they should. But I didn't find it to be especially helpful when trying to relax. The filter might not be so bad if you're in the presence of waves crashing on a shore or another soothing sound you'd like repeated. But in an office? No thanks.

The verdict: This filter was fine and the bright side is that there are ways to adjust the settings to make it more tolerable. I highly suggest turning off the echo to get rid of the creep factor.

Happy

The Happy filter is by far the single most trippy experience I have ever had with a piece of technology. The app describes the filter as "turning sounds around you into cascades of happiness," but to paint you a far more accurate picture, imagine the Relax filter just downed some shrooms. 

The filter repeats sounds back to you in different octaves more than 20 times, to the point where you feel like you have voices in your head. It was low key traumatizing and honestly felt like I was in a living nightmare. Pharell Williams is quoted saying the app is "like legal drugs with no side effects," and this was the first time I really understood how much he wasn't exaggerating.

You can adjust the settings on density, spread, space, and volume to make the filter less dramatic, but all using this in my office did was allow me to hear everything my coworkers were saying on what felt like a never-ending loop. 

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The verdict: Absolutely NOT. I can't imagine one single scenario, aside from prepping to star in a straight up horror movie, in which anyone would willingly want to use this filter. It's a nightmare. I experienced a roller coaster of emotions while trying the Happy filter out, but let me tell you, happiness was not one of them. I was petrified, uneasy, and honestly think a tear rolled down my cheek at one point. So, um, the hardest of passes here, folks.

Talk

The Talk filter is for anyone who's "fed up with boring voices" around them. Essentially, the app auto-tunes incoming sounds and voices so they sound more musical, which again, is fun as hell, but also super distracting.

With the ability to adjust echo, space, harmony, and volume, you can really manipulate the sounds around you in an impressively cool way, though. Seriously, T-Pain would be proud of this thing.

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The verdict: This filter was one of my favorites, partly because it was one of the few I felt produced semi-pleasant sounds, as opposed to cursed ones. I will, however, admit that I got very little done while using it. I spent the majority of my time with Talk singing Daft Punk and Imogen Heap songs, but hey, I had a great time, and it helped me recover from the traumatizing Happy filter.

Office 

The Office filter — you know, the one I'd been waiting for — had finally arrived. It's suggested use is when you can't concentrate and want to "detach yourself and focus," but all I could focus on was how artificially extra it was.

The best way I could describe the filter is as a menacing spa soundtrack. It does keep out the harshness of direct voices, which might be helpful for some, but it replaces them with muffled, distant, creepier noises.

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The verdict: I unfortunately was not a fan of the Office filter. In "unhumanizing" sounds, it sort of makes other people sound robotic, which is not something I personally felt my life was lacking. While using the filter I felt like a character in the movies who's just coming to after having passed out, and that was not exceptionally pleasant.

Sleep 

Remember when I said nothing could be worse than the Happy filter? I spoke too soon because the sleep filter is here to literally haunt your dreams.

I don't know how exactly to describe it, but some words that come to mind are evil haunted clown dementors, if that helps at all.

The settings on this filter make all the difference, and while they could thankfully be adjusted to stop me from having a full-blown anxiety attack, they can also be turned up to make the filter far more frightening.

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The verdict: The Sleep filter is said to "induce the most deep and surreal dreams of your life," and sadly I will never know if that's true because I can barely tolerate the sounds it produces when I'm awake. It's a bold statement, but I think this filter wins the Most Cursed award.

What's with the paid filters?

While most of Hear's filters are free, there are two in-app purchases you can make at $1.99 each.

The Trippy filter is said to "distort the world around you" with a "fantastically unusual auditory experience." But after experiencing how trippy the first seven filters were, I can't even imagine what this one sounds like. Hear warned it "includes hallucinations without side effects," so honestly, download at your own risk.

The second paid filter, Upbeat, is said to take the sounds around you and "loop them into a one-off audio experience like no other." I think the echo in several of the other apps gave me more than enough looping, so I wasn't really compelled to download this extra, either.

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Image: hear

To download or not to download?

Hear is marketed as "a listening experience like no other," and I can confidently say that is accurate. Hear is, quite frankly, like nothing I've ever heard in my life. The only thing that's even come close to the Hear experience for me is the sound-centric John Krasinski film Nobody Walks.

Though my experience with the app wasn't always positive, I can certainly say it is the most unusual app I've ever used. But outside of the fact that it's impossibly distracting and some of the filters are terrifying, the app does have a few other cons.

For starters, if you have a mic on your headphones  it picks up all the sound that gets augmented. So any sounds you yourself make, such as speaking, coughing, etc., can be uncomfortably loud. (If you're using headphones without a mic, this isn't an issue.) Another downside is the fact that the settings bars overlap with the pause feature, so if you try to pause the filter when settings are opened you'll unintentionally raise the volume scale to its max. Ouch. 

It's also worth noting the app does drain your battery if you keep it enabled throughout the day. 

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But it's not all bad. I enjoyed the minimalist design — a colorful screen with a circle in the middle that changed size in response to sound waves — and it is nice that each filter can be adjusted for maximum customization.

Several of the filters (like Super Hearing and Talk) were genuinely pleasant and helpful in a solo setting, and while others were more distracting, there's no denying it was cool as hell to distort sound like that.

Would I recommend downloading the app for a fun and interesting listening experience? Absolutely. Pull the app out at parties, share some laughs with your friends, and use it to take a break from reality every once in a while. 

But overall, Hear didn't help me cut down on distractions or focus on anything other than the app. So if you're solely wanting to increase your productivity, look elsewhere.

WATCH: Meet Walker, the smart companion of the future

[spookypastatoo]

Pale Luna

In the last decade and a half it’s become infinitely easier to obtain exactly what you’re looking for by way of a couple of keystrokes. The Internet has made it all too simple to use a computer to change reality. An abundance of information is merely a search engine away, to the point where it’s hard to imagine life as any different.

Yet, a generation ago, when the words ‘streaming’ and 'torrent’ were meaningless save for conversations about water, people met face-to-face to conduct software swap parties, trading games and applications on Sharpie-labeled five-and-a-quarter inch floppies.

Of course, most of the time the meets were a way for frugal, community-minded individuals to trade popular games like King’s Quest and Maniac Mansion amongst themselves. However, a few early programming talents designed their own computer games to share amongst their circle of acquaintances, who in turn would pass them on, until if fun and well-designed enough, an independently developed game earned its place in the collections of aficionados across the country. Think of this as the 80s equivalent of a viral video.

Pale Luna, on the other hand, was never circulated outside of the San Fransisco Bay Area. All known copies have been long disposed of, all computers that have ever run the game now detritus buried under layers of filth and polystyrene. This fact is attributed to a number of rather abstruse design choices made by its programmer. Pale Luna was a text adventure in the vein of Zork and The Lurking Horror, at a time when said genre was swiftly going out of fashion. Upon booting the program, the player was presented with a screen almost completely blank, except for the text: -You are in a dark room. Moonlight shines through the window. -There is GOLD in the corner, along with a SHOVEL and a ROPE. -There is a DOOR to the EAST. -Command? So began the game that one writer for a long-out-of-print fanzine decried as “enigmatic, nonsensical, and completely unplayable”. As the only commands that the game would accept were PICK UP GOLD, PICK UP SHOVEL, PICK UP ROPE, OPEN DOOR, and GO EAST, the player was soon presented with the following: -Reap your reward. -PALE LUNA SMILES AT YOU. -You are in a forest.There are paths to the NORTH, WEST, and EAST. -Command? What quickly infuriated the few who’ve played the game was the confusing and buggy nature of the second screen onward — only one of the directional decisions would be the correct one. For example, on this occasion, a command to go in a direction other than NORTH would lead to the system freezing, requiring the operator to hard reboot the entire computer. Further, any subsequent screens seemed to merely repeat the above text, with the difference being only the directions available. Worse still, the standard text adventure commands appeared to be useless: The only accepted non-movement-related prompts were USE GOLD, which caused the game to display the message: -Not here. USE SHOVEL, which brought up: -Not now. And USE ROPE, which prompted the text: -You’ve already used this. Most who played the game progressed a couple of screens into it before becoming fed-up by having to constantly reboot and tossing the disk in disgust, writing off the experience as a shoddily programmed farce. However, there is one thing about the world of computers that remains true, no matter the era: some people who use them have way too much time on their hands. A young man by the name of Michael Nevins decided to see if there was more to Pale Luna than what met the eye. Five hours and thirty-three screens worth of trial-and-error and unplugged computer cords later, he finally managed to make the game display different text. The text in this new area read: -PALE LUNA SMILES WIDE -There are no paths -PALE LUNA SMILES WIDE -The ground is soft -PALE LUNA SMILES WIDE -Here -Command? It was another hour still before Nevins stumbled upon the proper combination of phrases to make the game progress any further; DIG HOLE, DROP GOLD, then FILL HOLE. This caused the screen to display: -congratulations —— 40.24248 —— —— -121.4434 —— upon which the game ceased to accept commands, requiring the user to reboot one last time. After some deliberation, Nevins came to the conclusion that the numbers referred to lines of latitude and longitude — the coordinates lead to a point in the sprawling forest that dominated the nearby Lassen Volcanic Park. As he possessed much more free time than sense, Nevins vowed to see Pale Luna through to its ending. The next day, armed with a map, a compass, and a shovel, he navigated the park’s trails, noting with amusement how each turn he made corresponded roughly to those that he took in-game. Though he initially regretted bringing the cumbersome digging tool on a mere hunch, the path’s similarity all but confirmed his suspicions that the journey would end with him face-to-face with an eccentric’s buried treasure. Out of breath after a tricky struggle to the coordinates, he was pleasantly surprised by a literal stumble upon a patch of uneven dirt. Shoveling as excitedly as he was, it would be an understatement to say that he was taken aback when his heavy strokes unearthed the badly-decomposing head of a blonde-haired little girl. Nevins promptly reported the situation to the authorities. The girl was identified as Karen Paulsen, 11, reported as missing to the San Diego Police Department a year and a half prior. Efforts were made to track down the programmer of Pale Luna, but the nearly-anonymous legal gray area in which the software swapping community operated inescapably led to many dead ends. Collectors have been known to offer upwards of six figures for an authentic copy of the game. The rest of Karen’s body was never found.

[mauserfrau]

Eyeshine 1&2 - Bordertober

Reposting 1 since I changed the one line that gets repeated.  Ooof.  This thing might be quite a few parts! Not complaining.  Def. expect a spit-polished version on Ao3 eventually.

Anyway, last verse same as the first: Twins on the ship, something fishy is going on, Tyreen’s being Tyreen.  Hecking claustrophobia.

The jump brought them to a space so empty it didn’t even seem black.  No— darkness rested between other stars, far off and distant.  Here was a clear nothingness, out of reach of the rest of the universe.  

Tyreen drifted at his shoulder.  He could feel her fuming.

Neither of them had said anything sound since they’d stopped.  The lights were low, the gravity still off and wherever they were now, it seemed like there hadn’t been a sound there since the galaxy formed.  A word from either of them would disturb this.

Besides, this wasn’t Pandora.  This wasn’t even the Pandoran system.  Or any system.  This was nothing.

“Stars move, you know,” Troy said, fumbling the silence apart.

“It’s only been like twenty years,” insisted Tyreen.  “They can’t move that fast.  We should at least be able to see it!”

He gestured a spiral with his hand.  Did she care that the star cluster where Nekrotafeyo had grown spun opposite this one, that they were blue-shifting verses each other and that had choked the navigation system? He decided to summarize.  “I think the computer’s a little off and umm…”

“Umm what?”

“I might have overcompensated for stellar drift since I ended up doing it manually.”

“Troy!” She made his name sound like she’d broken something.  He half-expected a slap.

“Look.” He forced calm into his voice and turned to face her as he spoke.  

She was livid, her whole body tense and her hair standing on end.  

“We can’t run out of power.  We jumped fine.  We have water.  We have food.  We have a working toilet.”

“And where are we!”

“I’m gonna run an extrapolation and figure that out while the jump drive resets.”

“Can’t you math it in your head?”

“Um.” Sighing, Troy turned back to the view screen, focusing first on the blank reach where their ship rested, then letting his vision float to the stars.  The blackness lived between them, but in some strands there was no between, only stars thick enough to make mist out of each other.  “I don’t think so.”

Tyreen groaned and swam off towards the bed.

*

Tyreen moved better in zero g than he did.  Troy was always twisting around to his left to push, pull, founder.  Still, he hated to turn the gravity back on.  There was something about watching her float above the bed with the covers billowing around her.  She seemed so right like that, singular and and easy and in this case put out.  

Her Coeus reader was flickering lately.  She ended up groaning and setting it loose to float through the cabin where Troy caught it.

She also said— “Hey, turn the heavy back on.  I gotta piss.” 

“Alright.  On three.  Three.” Troy threw the switch.  His back crunched as weight returned to his spine through the seat at the command console.  His sister landed with a thump.  Their foodstores yelped and howled and shed feather-forms along the floor.  Tyreen caught herself with a huff and pulled herself into the water closet, giving the cage of spindly hexlings a sour look before she shut the door.  One of them shrieked after her.  Troy shushed it and went back to the console.

The keys pressed easier with weight back in his body.  He pulled up the extrapolation program.  Another likely set of coordinates failed a final round of testing and ticked away.  The system was working to match the spectrographic information of visible stars to known clusters as far as he could tell.  Color seemed such a tenuous way to determine place, but that might have been the emptiness intruding on his thoughts more than anything rational.  Besides, he kept thinking he had somehow spied the white supergiant that held Pandora out among all the other points of light.

Troy was tempted to ask his sister to try.  She was the Siren.  She might be able to do it if she listened across all the dark matter between them and that place.

She was still in the water closet.  

Troy let the extrapolator run in the background and idly tabbed into the superstructure of the ship’s hard drive.  It had been made to be piloted by someone with little skill, all of the command icons in welcoming jelly-style art with three to four clicks needed to access any functions more complicated than the gravity or the sublight engine speed.  He’d picked the interface up fast enough, but modifying the OS to accept a jump drive had been more hours of frustrated keystrokes than any actual handiwork.  

Every system responded in good order.  He’d done the same check once they’d cleared Nekrotafeyo’s gravity well and before the jump.  The only difference was thousands of light years to nowhere and the bottom falling out of his very existence for a heartbeat.  

He even dug into the audio system.  If Tyreen asked, he wanted to be able to tell her literally everything was fine.

A handful of loose example recordings bothered the top folder.  Troy thought about moving them, but the system considered their poor placement somehow proper and complained when he tried.

Tempted again, he clicked down the list, which was when he realized: one of them had a different date than the others.

He leaned over a speaker and hit play, curious what had been loaded on this particular sound test file.  Since that was probably it.

Instead, he heard Dad say, “Well, if this isn’t some sweet doll over here..  Yeah, that’s a good girl.  Let me see those eyes shine.  I love it when you…”

He slammed stop.

There was somebody else on the file too.  They were laughing that bubbly way he knew happened, but he barely remembered as something he’d experienced in his own life.

Troy stared at the file.  

A thump sounded behind him and Tyreen came tripping out of the water closet, pants around her ankles and her underwear yanked up in her fist.  “What the hell was that?”

“Ah, system check.  Since we’re here, you know.”

She growled and she sat down right where she was and in the puddle of her pants.  “Warn me next time.”

“Your intuition didn’t tip you off?”

Those words didn’t even merit an answer.  She closed her eyes and turned her back to him.

The ship was so small he only would have had to lean out of the chair and he could have had his hand on her.  She wasn’t in the mood though, not about that, not about anything to do with Dad and definitely not about playing Siren anytime before they made planetfall.

And well, then she wouldn’t be playing anymore, would she?

*

Maybe that fact had settled funny someplace in her stomach.  Troy just knew that after a while she stole her Coeus back and stood in the corner, smacking the screen.  The extrapolation program ticked off another hundred coordinates that didn’t suit, approaching 50% complete at a crawl.

Tyreen peered over his shoulder, but said nothing about the progress bar.

It looked like half of their chances for finding themselves had been spent.  Troy thought it was more of a best match situation.

He wondered what he would do if he was wrong.

The jump drive reported usable quiescence.  Tyreen swore and started to get back into bed.  Instead she kicked her pants off and stretched out belly-down on the floor which was chalky with the bookmarks of the night they’d left.

It had only been two days.  He thought.  The active time on the sublight engine monitor was somewhat misleading.  Startup had taken so long, but he’d been fumbling all over himself, movements thick with the shock of what he was about to do.

What Tyreen said they were doing.

Like, she just… dragged him.  Now?

Now there his sister lay, looking like she’d melted into the ground.

“What’re you staring at?” she muttered without looking up from the well of her arms.

“Mm.  Nothing,” Troy murmured.  “I was thinking about when we were kids.  That game we’d play about not getting off the bed back when we only had the one.” Well, he thought about that a lot, even though it hadn’t been bothering his mind in that moment.

Tyreen sat up, still hunched over.  Her Coeus rattled in her grasp.  Eventually, she tipped it into one of the charging slots.  “I’m eating now.  You want in?”

“Sure.”

Food was something to do anyway.  Troy hauled himself out of the chair and got himself into the cupboard after some of the stale rye bread they’d taken from the stores back at the homestead.  He checked it for mold and then also took a plum.

Tyreen picked over the cages with a tongs.  Did she want manta eggs? A hexling or two? A flush of air coral and sprat? One one of the lonesome baby Djira mewing in their own slime?

She took two eggs.  

The two of them hunched together on a sheet of tanned air algae.  Troy’s plum was sour, but he sucked the pit clean while Tyreen stared at him.  As he reached for the bread, Tyreen shoved one of the eggs at him.  “Open it for me.”

Troy sighed.  Speaking of games from when they were children, Tyreen could have eaten the egg regardless, but he’d gotten awfully good at spinning the tops off with his knife and one hand.  He smiled and he did this for her now, placing the egg on a spare sack so that his sister’s leavings would spread through the ship, get into the instruments.  

The egg squished as she pressed her fingers inside.  It turned to dust and glass.  “Hmm.  That was fresher than I thought.”

“Good.  Want me to do the other one too?”

“Sure.”

So, he sliced again.  He was going to have to wash his hand before he finished his own super.

This time, his sister stared at her dirty knees.  “Are you sure you didn’t fuck everything up?”

“If I did,” Troy said softly, “then we’ll deal wi-…”

Tyreen leeched the other egg, sloppily this time, sand leaking between her toes.  She grabbed the piece of rye and stuck it in Troy’s mouth before burrowing into the bed and covering her head with the pillow.  

Troy chewed thoughtfully and then moved to clean up.  The baby Djira chortled in their cages as though night had fallen.  Well, it was that time by the engine clock.  

*

Tyreen sat in the bed.  She left her Coeus in the charging station and kept scratching her ankles.  Suddenly, she tugged her socks off, tossed them aside and toppled over and over the blanket until she ended up beneath it.  She turned the lights down and resumed watching the space above her.

“Hey, Troy?” she said.  

“Hey yeah,” he answered, turning in the seat for the navigation console.  The old bearings hissed.  

“Who decided which way the ceiling goes in these things?”

That didn’t sound like a her question.  It held too much potential to wander.  It also did, echoing in him as he considered if she wanted an answer or not.  In a way too, it made sense.  Space brought no horizon for her to navigate, no right side of a Marrow Bone to climb.  “Well, that’s the same place the ceiling went wherever it was built.  There’s no up out here.”

“Right, right.”

“No North either.”

“So we can’t get to Pandora upside down?” she asked that last part in a slow, measured voice.  

“We actually cannot do that.  But we are…” Troy pointed towards the viewscreen.  “…somersaulting real slow that way if you see the stars changing at the edges of the viewscreen.  It’s just with the gravity on we…”

“OK, OK.  I get it.  I’m going to sleep now.” She turned over, back to him, clenching the covers.  “Saving my excitement for later or whatever.”

He could tell she was still hungry, the way she bundled up.  Troy didn’t mention it though.   Instead, he said, “Excitement shouldn’t be much longer.”

There was no answer.  

*

Troy listened for his sister’s breathing to even out and to the abandoned place kind of quiet in the shuttle.  The water and oxygen cycler ran every fifteen minutes, bubbling at the end.  The fans for the computer equipment hummed in a way that reminded him of the ruins back on Nekrotafeyo.  Their Djira murmured at one another through the dried scrub that made up their cages and the faint chemical reek of their drained acid.

And the sounds of her sleeping.  That too.  

Little by little, he swung towards his pack, slipping his fingers inside and feeling around until his touch glanced a familiar cord.

The headphones were older than him, their audio tinny and erratic given the air algae patches on the wires.  

Troy held one pad to his ear.  The jack filled with static as he tabbed back to the errant audio file.  He set the volume down low and pressed play.

The speaker rang to life.  There was music— synth and beats and wind instruments.  Some other sound too, water or distant conversation.  

Then, Dad’s voice.  “Well, if this isn’t some sweet doll over here.  Yeah, that’s a good girl.  Let me see those eyes shine.  I love it when you act all shy.  No, wait, wait, wait…” a swish of movement followed, besides the strains of laughter.  Typhon.  And a woman.  “…there’s some fancy word for that.”

“Coy? Coquettish?” Fuck, her voice was light as sunshine, ephemeral and gone someplace in the worn-out headphones.  “Well, Mr. DeLeon, what’s the big idea? I followed you back to your little ship.”

“No, no.  It’s a boat.  Ships are big.  Got names.”

“So I must be anything but shy.  Riiight?”

“You know I put the recorder on.”

“Oooh.  That’s different.”

There was a kiss.

Troy swallowed.  He shut the playback off and pulled the headphones out of the jack.

He breathed like he’d been down to the bottom of a crater lake long enough to make his ears throb.

He breathed and breathed until the cycler ran and Tyreen snuffled in her sleep.

The location program still hadn’t produced a result.  It seemed to be running slower again.  Feeling over the housing for the processor, he didn’t think it felt any warmer than the rest of the shuttle, so it wouldn’t be a mechanical issue.  Hopefully.  

Troy stood and stretched.  He tried to wash his face in the water closet, but that got him cold.  In the end, he went over to the bed, still damp, and he pressed himself into the smallest place beside his sister that he could manage.

The thing was damned uncomfortable, lumpy and musty and too short for him.  Besides, he had no way to match the fold of his knees to Tyreen’s.  What little space he did find wasn’t a comfortable one.

He rubbed at his eyes one more time, tracking water off from his lashes.  In the brief moment before his eyes focused he saw his father, a shadow of a woman draped elegantly beside him as they each breathed wine on the microphone.

He also saw himself, curled up below the bed, arm wrapped protectively around his head.

That looked even less comfortable than he felt.

Besides, he was too tired to move.

*

Tyreen chased him out of the way so she could head to the water closet.  One of the hexlings chittered at her as she passed and she flipped it off.  She stayed in, swearing for awhile, as Troy pressed himself to the wall side.  He left her the blanket and squeezed his toes between the mattress and the wall.  

He almost slept again before the toilet flushed and she returned.  She ground herself to his back, so close he could taste her breath when she sleep-sighed.  Well, he got some blanket too this way.

Troy thought he heard her scuffling off of the bed right before he drifted off again, but it must have been the shuttle itself again since his last awareness was of her nearness making his back twinge.

They got up together what would have been shortly before dawn by their clock.  Troy ate a slice of bread and Tyreen the leaking Djira.  She swung around to the consoles with one of its clipped claws dangling between her fingers.  “Yeah, that one was no good for you.  This didn’t poof.  Musta been dead.”

“Sure didn’t,” said Troy.  “Look what I’ve got.”

Tyreen looked from a space bent over his lap.  A pleased snicker flowed from her.  She pointed to a globule of brightness wedged in the very corner of the viewscreen.  “Pandora’s that way! Yes!”

Recalling what his fancy from earlier, that maybe she could spy their destination between all of the emptiness, Troy laughed too.  There were other stars in the way and lagging behind, but she looked pretty much right to him based on the jump display.  “Pandora’s where we’ll be in like ten minutes.  Just gotta get us cued up.” He made a show of gliding his hand up the charge slider for the jump drive console.  “Well, and then a day or two while we pull into the system and land.  I’m not gonna take us in super close because of…”

“Yeah, yeah.  We’re almost there!”

“We’re almost there!” 

The parameters for landing the jump hadn’t saved.  He muttered to himself as he slid them back in.  He wanted the shuttle to appear this many AUs from the planet, LaGrange points to be avoided in case of debris or sudden space stations.  Time was as soon as possible.  Gravity…

As Tyreen fiddled with her Coeus, he announced, “Heavy off on three.  Three!”

And his sister, reader in hand, pushed up on her toes, floating towards the ceiling as her supper squealed and the fan in the water closet took up some stray water droplets.  

This was a much smaller jump than the last one.  It took, well, closer to twenty minutes for the system to finish processing exactly how to suck them through spacetime.  

The chime sounded.  Troy hovered his hand over the execute button, wiggling an eyebrow at his sister and daring her to push it first.  She lunged.  He slammed his fist down.  She pulled his hair as he laughed again.

And then nothing.

Unknown Error said the jump drive console.  Nothing else changed.  There wasn’t even a chime from the audio system.  

*

[stephmolliex]

Your new iPhone XS or iPhone XS Max needs a portable, foldable, or even rollable keyboard

Those gorgeous big screens mean you're going to be using your phone more -- and it could even become your primary computing device. You need, and your iPhone deserves, a physical keyboard for when you've got serious work to do. AppleInsider surveys the scene. You know that there are keyboard cases for the iPad: protective cases that feature a slightly cramped physical keyboard. There was a little spate of keyboard cases back when the iPhone 6 came out, too, but those failed because they were too cramped and too small. Now, though, we are now looking at a range of iPhones that are bigger than ever before. No doubt: there will be new phone keyboard cases made and you can bet money that the first device to get one will be the iPhone XS Max. That size of screen and that powerful a device mean it's a serious tool and a keyboard makes the most of this. You don't have to wait for manufacturers, though. If you can't yet get an actual iPhone keyboard case, you've still got options. You already have many different ways of using a physical keyboard with your iPhone -- and you may already have what you need. What you've already got If you have an external Bluetooth keyboard of any kind, it will work with your iPhone. It may not be terribly practical to rip the Apple keyboard away from your iMac Pro and carry it around in your pocket, but you can do it. Slightly more practically, if you have a older iMac Bluetooth keyboard going spare, you could throw that into your luggage and put up with funny looks at check-in. Then just a bit closer to actually being practical, you may already be using an external keyboard with your iPad. If it's in an iPad case then there's nothing you can do: it's wedded to your iPad. Yet if it's any kind of external one then you can pair it with your iPhone exactly as you did with your iPad. What's more, very many external Bluetooth keyboards can be paired with multiple devices. You pair each one separately and assign it to a particular button or keystroke on the keyboard. Then swapping between iPhone and iPad is a matter of a tap and possibly counting to five before you begin typing on the new device. We've done this many, many times. Writing on our iPad, we get a text message on our iPhone. Tap a button, type a reply onto the phone, tap another button and be back writing on the iPad. That's worth it for the convenience and the speed and the sheer fun of making your message recipient jump because you've just sent them a 100-word reply in seconds. It's not worth it, though, if your keyboard can only be paired with one device. Yes, you can pair and unpair it as often as you like but sometimes these connections are less Bluetooth and more alchemy. You can have to schlep through the same pairing process over and over again before it works. The alternative is to buy a keyboard especially for your iPhone and that's when you can go to town with ridiculously small ones. Not only small but foldable or even rollable. Typing is a very personal thing: your absolutely perfect keyboard may very well not be ours. We'll keep digging into this and examining the best in each class that we can find but so that you know the range of possibilities, this is what you can buy while you wait for your new iPhone to arrive. Just small keyboards For reference, the standard Apple Magic Keyboard without a numeric keypad is 27.9cm wide (10.98 inches). The model with a numeric keypad is 41.87cm (16.48 inches). Now compare that to just one example of the small keyboards you can buy. The HDE Bluetooth 3.0 Keyboard Mini Travel Size is only 11.5cm (4.5 inches) wide. Or put it another way. This keyboard is narrower in width than any shipping iPhone is in height. Turn your iPhone to landscape, pop this beneath it and you'll have a little room to spare on the sides. Maybe this is too small for serious use and it's surely far too small for protracted typing. However, it's only going to cost you $13.99 to find out. That's actually a typical price for this size of keyboard or slightly larger. Foldable keyboards We were once early for a meeting so took a table in a Starbucks, got out a foldable keyboard -- and wondered why this little girl on roller skates kept circling the table. Trying not to be too obvious about it, we looked around for her parents and there they were, quite nearby and completely unconcerned. So we ignored the little girl and carried on working. Until eventually, on about the tenth orbit of our table, she called out "That's really clever" and skated off back to her family. She meant our keyboard and she had a point. There is something about being able to take out a CD jewel-case-sized device, crack it open and be typing on what's close to being a full size keyboard. This is the one she liked and it's our favorite too: the Microsoft Universal Foldable Keyboard. It typically sells for around $75 but be sure to follow that link to check it out: Microsoft has very similarly-named ones that we don't like as much. This one, though, this is good. The feel of the keys is remarkable: for such a slim device it has excellent travel on the keys, you're really conscious that you're pressing down on a physical keyboard. There is one thing that you'll notice when you open it up. It's a split keyboard. Yes. It takes time to get used to that split between the two halves of the keyboard and especially so if you're a touch typist. However, when we say time, we mean seconds. You very quickly get used to it and can type at something approaching your full speed. Note, though, that we find if you ever stop to think about where your fingers should go then you immediately start getting it wrong. If you just get on with your typing, though, it works very well. In fact this one works so well that we've used it for at least tens of thousands of words. It hasn't got quite the depth of travel of, say, the Apple Magic Keyboard, though, and the spacing of the keys is tighter so your hands aren't in a brilliant position. If you like mechanical keyboards, that is the ones that really clack when you type, then you're out of luck for foldable ones. Except there is the iClever, which comes close. The iClever Wireless Folding Keyboard has just a little more of an old-style keyboard feel and it folds up like a steampunk one would. Where Microsoft's folds in two like a book, the iClever one comes in three sections that click back into place. When extended out into its full 16.2cm (6.46 inches), you can also switch on a back light. It's an LED backlight which gives you a choice of three colors and, truly, we think the carrying bag it comes with is a bit more useful. However, it does look cool. The iClever Wireless Folding Keyboard is typically sold for around $37. You're kidding, right? We don't carry that Microsoft keyboard absolutely everywhere - but that's because it doesn't quite fit in the pockets of all of our jackets. When it does or when we're wanting to carry just a little luggage, we do. If you don't have jacket pockets, if you never carry any kind of bag, or if you are simply curious to see whether this is real, you could buy yourself a rollable keyboard. It is real and there are a few of them but here's one: the 2 in 1 Rollable Wireless Keyboard by Glosse which costs around $26. This one rolls up into a little case and that's very clever. Still, when we learned of rolled keyboards, we weren't thinking of ones like this that have each line of keys on a separately hinged mechanism. Truly, we were imagining something like the rolled up piano keyboard in "Star Trek: The Next Generation". You can get keyboards like that, ones that literally roll up, but they all connect via USB wire and so are no use for iPhones. One more thing There is one more type of keyboard that might be good if you can figure out where to put your iPhone. It's a projection keyboard. You place the projector unit on a flat surface and, using lasers, it displays a QWERTY keyboard in front of itself. Then as you "type", it detects which parts of the laser's path your finger interrupts and then interprets that into which key you must've pressed. These were one of those devices that were promised for years, built up quite a fanfare when they came -- and then somehow seemed to fade away. Nonetheless, they exist and one example, the AGS Laser Projection Bluetooth Virtual Keyboard typically sells online for $29. It's worth it That projection keyboard might be a gimmick. Even if it isn't, you're typing directly onto the wood of a table or whatever surface is in front of you and that's not going to be good for your fun or your fingers. Then the rollable ones and the folding keyboards could be flimsy. We've had our Microsoft one for some years now and it's had the odd little problem not registering a keystroke from time to time but otherwise is strong and robust. The onscreen keyboards of the iPhones are excellent and you can type on them very well -- but you can type so very much better on an external keyboard. You've heard that for years about the iPad and it's the reason there are so many keyboard and keyboard case options for it. Now it's also true for the new larger-screen iPhones too, given that the iPhone XS Max is a good percentage of the way towards the iPad mini's size. Keep up with AppleInsider by downloading the AppleInsider app for iOS, and follow us on YouTube, Twitter @appleinsider and Facebook for live, late-breaking coverage. You can also check out our official Instagram account for exclusive photos. https://goo.gl/Pzypmj

[foursprouthealth-blog]

I Spent 2 Weeks Trying to Eat More Slowly to Lose Weight—Here’s How It Went

New Post has been published on http://foursprout.com/health/i-spent-2-weeks-trying-to-eat-more-slowly-to-lose-weightmdashherersquos-how-it-went/

I Spent 2 Weeks Trying to Eat More Slowly to Lose Weight—Here’s How It Went

I’ve always been a fast eater. I like to think this habit was born out of necessity—I played competitive golf in college, so I got used to scarfing down a banana while hustling 150 yards to my next shot.

I didn’t just snack fast during tournaments, either. Mandatory 5:30 a.m. workouts left little time for breakfast, so I kept granola bars to shove in my mouth while running out the door most mornings.

Fast forward to today, and even though I’m an editor at a healthy-food website, I’m in the habit of eating quickly and distractedly.

On any given day, I’m chugging cups of coffee during a meeting, bolting lunch at my desk, or skipping a sit-down dinner to eat over the kitchen sink. (Don’t judge.)

Eating quickly isn’t something I’m proud of, though it’s definitely something other people notice. Everyone from family to snide waiters have remarked “Wow you ate that fast!” or “You really enjoyed that, huh?”

I hate these comments. There is no polite way to respond. It’s embarrassing. And regardless of whether it was born out of necessity, I know it’s not a great habit.

I also know I’m not alone. Americans are fast eaters. It’s part of the “busy” lifestyle we love to glorify. If you eat lunch at your desk, it shows how dedicated you are to work. If you eat dinner in the car on the way to your fitness class, it means you’re disciplined.

This past summer I traveled to Spain. While there I became keenly aware of how little thought I give to eating. In Spain, it’s normal for dinner to last two hours. People will enjoy a glass of wine, and savor the smells and flavors of their meal.

Eating is not something they get through to get on to the next thing—it’s something they make time to enjoy. While that may seem difficult to replicate here (who has time for a two-hour lunch break?), it turns out that slowing down food consumption has real benefits—and can even lead to weight loss.

A recent study out of Kyushu University in Japan found that people who take time to chew slowly have better digestion and feel fuller, faster. Researchers also found that, on average, slower eaters had a smaller waist circumference and lower body mass index.

Another study, presented at a conference of the American Heart Association late last year, found that fast eaters are 11% more likely to develop metabolic syndrome—which is to say three or more risk factors for cardiac disease—including obesity, high levels of bad fats, high HDL cholesterol levels, high blood pressure, or high blood sugar.

These scary stats got me wondering if, at the ripe old age of 26, I could change my eating habits. So I decided to try slowing down my chew for two weeks, to see what happened.

The thing is, eating more slowly is hard. You think you can just do it, but then you look down at the remains of your lunch, and note that five minutes have just passed, and realize that you failed. So I did some research and found five different methods of slowing down. I gave each one a try to see if it helped me savor my food. Here’s what worked, what didn’t, and what habits I’ll be holding on to going forward.

Change Your Eating Environment

The theory is that if you change where you eat (i.e. not over the kitchen sink, but like a civilized human being, at a table, with a plate), you can ultimately practice more mindful eating.

It sounds easy, but this was actually pretty hard. After work, my fiancé Nick and I like to unwind with dinner and watch something mindless on TV. This is super relaxing, but it’s also easy for me to eat a larger portion than intended (without even enjoying it).

It took some convincing to get Nick to turn off The Office and move our dinner location, but switching up our eating environment—even just for a few meals a week—helped me practice more mindful eating.

There’s something about physically sitting at a dining room table, sans distractions or noise, that makes you really focus on the eating experience. An unexpected bonus? I felt more connected to Nick, and conversing with him over a meal forced me to slow down and take breaks between bites to speak.

Count Your Chews

Bite counting is a popular way to chew more slowly, and it’s even purported to help you lose weight.

According to Time, “Some preliminary research has found that chewing until “no lumps remain” increases the number of calories the body burns during digestion: about 10 extra calories for a 300-calorie meal.”

Apparently chewing more thoroughly aids digestion as well. It makes sense: Smaller bits of food will be more thoroughly digested. And the research indicates all that chewing increases blood flow to the stomach and gut as well—so everything is doing its job better.

This tip sounded super promising, but, honestly, I just forgot to do it most of the time. And when I did remember to count my bites, it just annoyed me. Food should be enjoyable, and this felt like I was punishing myself. Rather than focusing on how my food tasted, my mind was focused on doing basic math.

Drink Water Between Bites

Drinking water forces you to take small breaks between each bite. The ideas is that all that water aids in digestion.

While I definitely felt more hydrated and got fuller faster, it wasn’t an “I’m truly satisfied” kind of full—it was the “I have a lot of water in my belly and now I’m bloated” full. I ended up feeling hungrier sooner, but I also ate less to begin with.

Find a Slow Eater and Pace Yourself to Them

You know the old adage, “If you hang with dogs, you’ll get fleas?” Well, this applies to my family and friends because they’re all pretty fast eaters (sorry, guys).

Finding someone to mimic was a challenge. Thankfully, I have friends who eat slower. Oddly, they’re from Ireland and Australia. We all went out for tacos one night, and I tried to pace my bites to theirs.

I have to say this felt really creepy, and not at all how someone at a restaurant with friends should act. I did it for about 3 minutes before all that focus on my friends’ chewing paces made me feel incredibly invasive and weird.

This tip may work for some people, but all I felt was an odd sense of shame. Eating more slowly is just NOT WORTH being the weird person at the dinner table.

Put Down Your Utensil Between Bites

The easiest way I found to eat more slowly was to literally put my utensil down between bites. If the meal didn’t require utensils, I just put the food down on my plate. That’s it—I put it down and didn’t pick it back up until I was totally finished chewing.

This tip was by far the best of the five. It’s so easy and intuitive that it actually worked for me, and I’m going to keep doing it.

But Did I Lose Weight?

Well, no. I didn’t experience any significant weight loss (although I did lose about 1.3 lbs).

I did, however, experience major stress relief. Whereas before, I’d think nothing of grabbing a bagel and hastily shoving it in my mouth on the way to work or taking bites of a salad between keystrokes at my desk and calling it lunch, I realize now how tense that was making me.

Purposefully stepping away from technology and distractions to sit outside in the sunshine or at a dining room table made mealtime feel special, and way more relaxed. I noticed the flavors of my meal more, and I felt more satisfied (even if I ate a little less), and I just felt happier.

I may not eat every meal slowly from now on—it’s easy to get caught up in the hustle and bustle of life. But I see how important it is to take time out your day to slow down and enjoy a meal, for both your physical and mental well-being.