#which means i have to listen to eXTREMELY amplified buzzing

[colorisbyshe]

i have an in-window AC unit and somehow a fly got inside it on MONDAY??? and it's still alive

and literally the only way to get to it would be taking the AC unit out of the window and dismantling it because it's somehow all the way in the back

also did you know flies can live for 28 days??

[jerry-hornes-foot]

Kinktober ~ Day Five

Anonymous Sex | Double Penetration | Phone Sex

1615 words

18+ only

Steve Harrington x Gender Neutral Reader

Smut

Tags: anonymous sex; hookups; oral sex; handjobs/fingering; anal fingering; bathroom sex; drinking; smoking; not proof read

Any additional tags you would like added please feel free to dm me :)

The fuzzy sound of neon buzzes in your ears as you trudge up the muddy dirt road. This place doesn't look as promising as you'd hoped but it's starting to rain and there's no way you're walking all the way home now. This is, as far as you've been able to gather, the closest bar within walking distance so, for the time being at least, this is going to have to be your local. All you really want to do anyway is meet some people, make some friends. Stop worrying, it'll be fine.

A cursory glance around the room immediately brings to your attention that the average age in this room can't be any lower than 60. Cigar smoke swirls from various dark corners, thickening the already heavy smell of old hops and whisky. You grab yourself a drink from the bar and take a slow walk around the room, scanning the empty tables for a good place to sit.

"I like your t-shirt." A voice calls somewhere behind you.

"Thanks." You reply, horrified at the warm flush you can feel creeping up your cheeks. Signalling into the middle of the room in an attempt to distract from your burning face you continue, with a slight laugh "God it's jumping in here tonight."

Spinning around you find its source. In the occupied booth beside you sits a man, who to your great relief seems to be about your age. He's got a soft face, with a sharp, straight nose, and wide doe-like brown eyes. The top of his head is a thick mass of brown locks, each of which have been swept with extreme care into a very deliberate style. You smile, looking down at your chest for a moment as though unaware of how you are dressed,

He laughs, instantly releasing the tension in your chest, "Tell me about it. It's the only place in town walking distance from my apartment."

"Me too! Whereabouts are you?"

"Just at the back of the hardware store, the one up past the bridge."

"I think I know where you mean," you point your finger in a vague direction, "sorry, I've only been here a week."

He's halfway through a sip of beer but he throws his eyebrows up in exaggerated surprise.

"Oh, really?" He asks, a hand quickly flying over his mouth to wipe the foam away. "You're welcome to join me if you want by the way, if you're not busy."

You talk for an hour or so, every drop of anxiety draining from your body as you listen to this absolute stranger give you a full imaginary tour of the town. You learn that he's lived here his whole life, he had a million jobs in his teenager years all lost to "strange circumstances", and that he was once an athlete (that didn't surprise you, you'd spent a lot of the night admiring his slight, athletic frame). Being with him made you feel strangely relaxed. You even find yourself flirting.

"There's a pool table in the back room if you want to play." He announces, seemingly umprompted.

Before you have a chance to respond he's on his feet. He takes you by the hand and leads you down a small dark corridor to the pool room. Looking down at your clasped hands suddenly, he stares up at you,

"Oh shit, sorry, is this okay?" He asks, awkwardly lifting your hand up to your face so you can see it.

He's stopped just shy of the pool room, so the two of you are almost pressed against each other in the smoky hallway. This close you notice how pretty his eyes are, sparkling even in the grim half-light. There's a sweet smell that floats off him, mingling scents of hairspray and baby powder. You smile at him, pulling his hand back down beside you and tugging him closer,

"Absolutely. Is this okay?" You ask, smoothing a hand up his face and pulling it close to yours.

"Absolutely."

Your faces are pressed hard against each other, kissing so hard it's hard to tell which groans are coming from whose lips. It's not clear at what point you made it into the bathroom, but it doesn't really matter to either of you. Your fingers are tangled in that thick mass of auburn waves, desperately trying to pull his soft lips further into you. You feel a set of fumbling fingertips at your waistband, clumsily trying to undo your jeans without having to relinquish the comfortable hand rest on the small of your back. Eager to keep his lips pressed firmly against yours you slip a hand down and undo your jeans. Immediately you feel his hand appear down your underwear, your hips giving a small involuntary thrust at the sudden sensation. He breaks away from you for a second and stares down at his hand,

"Wow, that didn't take much." A cocky grin is smeared across his face. You grab the back of his neck, wiping the smile away with another firm kiss. His hand against your bare skin is so warm, every action precise and calculated, sending rushes of heat through your whole body. You rock your hips into his movements, moaning hard into his mouth. Reaching a free hand down you make an attempt to undo his jeans but he bats your hand out of the way, moving closer to you and grinding against your thigh. You can feel his hard cock rubbing against the inside of the tight denim and it drives you wild. You feel a tug at your hips as your jeans and underwear are pulled lower. Suddenly his mouth is pulled away from yours, and resituated somewhere far more effective.

Catching a scream between your teeth, painfully aware of how quite it is in the room through the wall, you kick your foot backwards, slamming the heel of your shoe into the base of the sink. Each thrust of his tongue sends shivers down your legs. His fingers are digging hard into your hips, holding you up against the basin. Your fingers feel their way back into his hair and you grip on tightly to ground yourself, focussing hard on the feeling of each soft strand to keep yourself quite as he drives his tongue over your sensitive skin. He's sucking so hard it feels as though your knees are going to give out.

You look down in distress as his lips slip away from you. He's staring up at you, a mischievous smile playing on his lips. Taking his middle middle finger and placing it firmly between your legs, he runs it up the full length of you, sending a shiver up your spine, ending the swift movement with a dramatic flick into his mouth. Keeping his eyes locked with yours he sucks his finger, savouring your taste. Pulling it out of his mouth with a slight pop he leans into you again, tongue tracing stripes of hot tingling pleasure along your skin. A rogue hand slides around your hip and it becomes immediately apparent what he was wetting his finger for. As his finger slips into your hole, every sensation from his mouth become amplified. You bite down on your lip, trembling with the effort it's taking to stay quiet. A flick of his finger and a roll of his tongue, timed to perfection, break your silence. Your knees buckle and you catch yourself on the sink with your elbows, head rolling back as a heavy, gutteral moan breaks from your throat. Looking back down you catch a glimpse of two deep brown eyes peering up at you, before flashing back downwards again.

Your knuckles are white with the force you're using to cling to the edge of the sink. Your head starts to swim, you stare up at the ceiling as your muscles start to twitch. His finger is running in smooth circles behind you, pressing into places you never knew could feel so good, and his head is bobbing with such intensity that you can feel his hair, now wildly dislodged from it's neat style, running over your stomach. Your legs tense as the sensation builds until it is nearly unbearable l, before bursting into a pulsing euphoria that races around your body. His lips stay wrapped around you as you cum, hard.

Your legs feel like jelly. You're still clinging to the sink for dear life. The wide-eyed boy appears in front of you once again and kisses you, you can taste yourself on his lips. He smiles and helps you steady yourself, then heads to the door,

"I'll give you a minute." He says, with a soft smile.

Once you've gathered yourself you wander back you into the pool hall and find him leant against the pool table, cue in hand. That cocky grin is back. Somehow in the time you've been gone his hair has been perfectly sculpted back into place. He tossed you a cue,

"You can break."

You narrow your eyes at him, weakly trying to hide a smile, "I never got to do anything to you."

"I guess you owe me for next time."

"Who says there'll be a next time." You ask, feigning offence.

"Well if you don't want to-"

"Thats not what I said."

You mirror his smug grin and lean over the table to line up your shot. Pulling the cue back you stop and look back up and him, laughing slightly,

"I didn't even ask you your name."

He beams and sidles around the table to stand next to you, pulling himself up to his full height he holds out a formal offer of a handshake,

"Steve Harrington."

[phantomrose96]

Origin of a Non-Hero

Pro Hero Deku is not that tall of a man… In a simple white t-shirt and khakis, he’s not imposing at all. His 14 year old son, though much scrawnier in frame, is only an inch or two shorter than him.

Pro Hero Deku is not a cruel man. To the contrary, he cares too much, about all things at all times, about everyone and everything he can save if only it could come within his reach. The family counselor knows this. The counselor is surprised that, of all the world’s burdens Deku carries, it would be his family that slipped through his grasp.

Pro Hero Deku’s arms are gnarled and scarred, endlessly broken and re-broken in his youth from trying too much, and caring too much, and fighting too much for the sake of others. So why do they seem so awkward, so unpracticed, so unused to being wrapped in a hug around his son? Why was this boy the last thing for Pro Hero Deku’s arms to reach?

The counselor asks. The raw hurt of the session starts anew.

(This fic is long, heed the Read More)

...

11 people shared the same rigid wooden bench as Shikinori Midoriya. From the glances he stole, all 11 of them were handcuffed. An equal number of armed guards stood at the ready, crowding a waiting area meant to accommodate no more than 10 people.  Shoulders rubbed shoulders. Sweat trickled from necks and hairlines. Dampness clung to skin and scales and fur and whatever other quirk-manifested coverings the 11 handcuffed men, and 11 guards, and Shiki bore.

A puttering fan spun in the corner, sad and wheezing and ineffective against the body heat of so many. Shiki kind of resented the fan for all the nothing it was accomplishing.

He leaned his weight into the sturdy bench arm to his left, opting to crush his guts into the furniture rather than lean on the man beside him, who was more knotted muscle and snake tattoos than he was man. Shiki looked again and concluded the man may even be more snake than man. Two sharp fangs stuck out from his mouth and tented his upper lip. His unmarked skin shimmered, a rippling repeated pattern of flesh-covered scales. His tongue shot out and licked the air, forked. Slit-pupiled eyes made momentary, awkward eye-contact with Shiki, and Shiki quickly pretended to be staring elsewhere.

The man seemed familiar. Some villain from some news headline. But Shiki couldn’t place a name, so he didn’t bother thinking about it more. He stared ahead, eyes drifting out of focus, hot. Uncomfortable and hot. Damp and stick-to-his-clothes-sweaty. Just…hot. Unnecessarily so. Maybe he shouldn’t be here. Maybe it wasn’t worth it. Maybe he’d been impulsive, and foolish, and should leave before he gets in any deeper.

The door beside Shiki creaked open. A wizened man with tiny, deep-set, watery eyes motioned him in. Shiki all but jumped to his feet. He tugged at the spots of his shirt that clung sweaty to his back, and he followed. The temperature dropped at least 20 degrees once he crossed the threshold into this new room. The door clicked shut behind Shiki. He startled, and felt a ripple of disquiet shiver down his spine, but Shiki chose not to dwell on it. He was more drawn to investigating the new room, which, he quickly discovered, came with its own kind of sensory-terrible-silence.

The waiting room had been terribly silent – chatterless and buffed with the sounds of breathing, wheezing, throat-clearing, shifting, shuffling, and the tinkering tangle of chains. This time it was an ambient buzz that blanketed the new room, thick and oppressive and syncopated, like a fly trapped in a jar. Shiki traced it to the fluorescent lights overhead. Under their pallor, the watery-eyed man looked half like death. He sat, and motioned for Shiki to sit too in the wooden chair directly across. A table separated them. On Shiki’s side, there was a set of iron cuffs drilled into the table-top, the sort where, if Shiki threaded his arms forward, he could be bolt-locked in place.

Shiki did not acknowledge the cuffs, and neither did the watery-eyed man. They made eye contact, and Shiki instantly understood: this man did not care about him. This man did not care about any of the other people in that waiting room. What gave it away was unclear – maybe the stiffness in his jaw, or the piercing deadness to his horrible ice-blue eyes, or the sterile too-large lab coat crumpling the man’s figure, or maybe none of that. Maybe it was pure human intuition, an instinct honed for survival, that one feels when encountering another human so bereft of empathy that it sticks along every individual neck-hair.

“Sit,” the man said. His tone was sharp, as though he’d been forced to repeat himself. That was somewhat true. He’d already motioned for Shiki to sit. Shiki had been too distracted by the cuffs on the table to comply. He was still distracted now, but he sat this time.

“I’m Dr. Matsuyama,” the man like death continued. He pulled a loose clipboard from the shelf just beneath his side of the table, and he dragged a slightly-trembling hand from his pocket, gray and liver-spotted, trailing an uncapped pen. His eyes became more like pits in this light, but Shiki could see a blue in them that was definitely inhuman. Which wasn’t saying much, since most of the population walked around in definitely inhuman ways. It was quirk-related, no doubt, but endlessly eerie to stare at.

There came a shuffle from the shadows, a shift in the back-left corner of the room that startled Shiki. He looked, and now locked eyes with a man dressed to the nines in an ill-fitting suit. The man pulled at his own lapel, straightening it, as though reading Shiki’s mind about the ill-fitting suit detail.

“Don’t mind Dr. Himura,” Matsuyama continued. “He’s leading the study, so he is observing. I’m conducting this session.” Matsuyama set pen to paper. “What is your name?”

“Shikinori Midoriya,” Shiki answered. “I go by Shiki, among friends.”

“Is there a reason for that?” Matsuyama’s voice had a papery tremble to it, like air whistling through the slit of a barely-cracked window. Listening to it was uncomfortable. Shiki could feel it like a shortness of breath in his own throat.

“Just preference.”

Matsuyama wrote something down.

“How old are you?”

“22.”

“Your quirk?”

“Gravity nullification.” Shiki raised his hands up, palms spread toward Matsuyama. “I can negate the gravity of anything I touch with my fingers, palms, or pads of my toes. Basically any part of my body that has this ridged skin.” He wiggled his wide-spread fingers. The weird fluorescent lighting threw the ridges into stark contrast, valleys of blackness ribbing his fingers, engulfed like Matsuyama’s eyes. “The quirk works on any sized object, but the time limit is shorter for bigger objects.”

Matsuyama let the silence linger as he wrote. His writings filled several lines this time, as Shiki had little else to do than watch the trail of the pen.

“Is your quirk patrilineal, matrilineal, or both?”

“Matrilineal.”

“How does it influence or impede your daily life?”

“It doesn’t much, really. I don’t need it. I don’t really use it. It’s forgettable.”

“What are the negatives to living with your quirk?”

Shiki shrugged. “None much, really, since I don’t use it.”

“Then what brings you here?”

“I mean, just that. I don’t need it. Does it have to be deeper than that?”

Matsuyama wrote. And he wrote for longer than before. Silence draped them again, and it amplified the buzzing from the lights. It was hot again, Shiki realized with agitation. His seat placed him right below the lights, a veritable stage light, targeting him to bake. His neck prickled with sweat. Buzzing. Like a fly in the jar. Fly in a jar, fly in a jar, that flies against the walls each which way and can’t get out, because there is no out, because the jar is sealed, and being unyielding to gravity is no help when the walls close on every side.

“…here?”

“Huh?” There’d been a question. Shiki had zoned out for--

“Did anyone offer you money to come here?”

“Not beyond the 1,500 yen per day,” Shiki responded, collecting himself. “You know, that you guys offered, that 1,500 yen, to cover transport and lunch. But nothing else. No.”

“Did anyone blackmail you to come here?”

“No.”

“Are there any extenuating circumstances to explain why you’re here?”

“None.”

Matsuyama stopped writing. A bead of sweat rolled down the back of Shiki’s neck, lost somewhere between his shoulder blades. He shifted, and rolled his shoulders a little, and edged his hands away from the wrist restraints on the table.

“Do you have any thoughts of self-harm?”

“No.”

“A history of violence?”

“No.”

“Do you consider yourself to be a danger to yourself or others?”

“No.”

“Any history of drug abuse?”

“No.”

“Alcoholism?”

“No.”

“Anxiety or depression?”

Shiki faltered. “I saw a therapist for a bit, a while ago, back when I was a teenager. But it wasn’t anything, like, extreme. You know? Just, stuff.”

“And how do you define ‘stuff’?”

“It—he was a family therapist. My parents are divorced so like, you know, I was a kid – well, a teenager – but that’s still a kid. I mean we saw the therapist when I was a teenager, but my parents divorced when I was 10 before I was a teenager so – the therapist – he was just for, you know, typical stuff. Typical divorced kid stuff.”

Matsuyama wrote, and wrote more, and at length, Shiki said nothing.

“How’s your relationship with your mother?”

“Fine.”

“How does she feel about your participation in this?”

“I dunno, really. I mentioned it to her like once but like, a while ago, before I decided on whether I wanted to do it but like… I dunno. That shouldn’t matter, right? I’m an adult.”

“How’s your relationship with your father?”

“You know, fine.”

“And how does he feel about your participation in this?”

“Like I said, does it matter?” Shiki pressed. He leaned forward, because he could feel his shirt sticking again in back. Under his arms, too. He was grateful for the dark color of his clothing, since Shiki knew from a glance to frumpy Himura that the harsh lighting was unforgiving on sweat stains.

“Is he against it?”

“He doesn’t know about it. Like, he’s busy. And I’m an adult. And it’s not like it’s his quirk or anything since I inherited it from my mom, and it’s my body so I think I should be the one who gets the final say in whether I do this or not don’t you think so?”

Matsuyama left the challenge unmet. It rung through the room around them and petered out to silence. Just an echo left dancing in Shiki’s head. Matsuyama wrote. He only wrote, and Shiki’s heart beat in his own ears.

“My job is to make sure you are of sound mind… uncoerced… unhindered by any self-destructive motivations...” Matsuyama’s pen did not break pace while he spoke, like an automaton. Like a puppet. Endlessly forward, unholy eyes shuffling along line by line. “The Quirk Ethics Board is strict. Dr. Himura has spent the better part of five years at odds with them to get this study off the ground. Be grateful to him, and be patient with me.” And his horrible eyes flickered up, pinning Shiki to the spot. “I can disqualify you, if I think you’re lying to me. So please, some patience, and some cooperation.”

Shiki’s whole body flushed with a shiver, and he realized that perhaps Himura was not the man he should be suspecting of a mind reading quirk.

He leaned back in his spotlight chair, and took a few deep breaths, and wondered how heated his cheeks were. Embarrassment always spiked a blush in them, and Shiki was ashamed to have let his composure slip.

“Your father… wouldn’t you like to tell him, first? There’s no reversing this. We encourage everyone who comes through this room to inform all family, all loved-ones first.”

“No. I don’t want to tell him. Because I know it’ll make him cry. And if I lose my nerve, and back out, I’ll probably never have this opportunity again. I need this decision to be my own.”

Shiki averted his eyes, away from Matsuyama, glancing left and finding himself staring back. A mirror spanned the length of the left wall. A few feet worth of cinderblock stretched from the floor-up, and the ceiling-down, meeting at a mirror that lobbed Shiki’s own reflection back at him. Freckles and green eyes and tousled chestnut hair and cheeks heated with shame and embarrassment.

A one-way mirror. Shiki wondered if there was anyone standing on the other side of it, watching, judging.

The silence lingered, heavier, denser somehow. It took Shiki a few moments to process what had changed.

The scratch of Matsuyama’s pen had vanished. He was not writing. He was staring, instead, at Shiki. Plain to see in the mirror. Waiting for Shiki to face him again. Reluctantly, Shiki looked.

“Your father… is a busy man, you said. He must be very very busy… Shikinori Midoriya.” Matsuyama shuffled his papers into place, and set the clipboard down on the interrogation desk. “If your name, and your appearance, and the leagues and leagues of advertisements, and news headlines, and television specials I see every day paint an accurate picture of who, I suspect, your father is.”

Shiki breathed out, jaw clenched, feeling that familiar dread settle in. He heard a noise from Himura, like a tiny pip, a single note of recognition that Shiki had become well attuned to: that sound of someone putting the dots together, the look in their eyes as they roved over Shiki’s face, as though suddenly giddy to understand his freckles and green eyes and curly hair.

“Midoriya?” Himura leaned forward, pushing himself off the back wall and shuffling a bit forward. His eyes were wide and probing, mutedly eager. “Oh I see – yeah – I see it – you look just like him – but – pardon my interruption, son, but –   why would you ever consider participating – here in my study – why I can’t dream of – I don’t think I could be responsible for -“

“Don’t,” Shiki shot back. He braced his back against the chair once more, letting the wave of dread pass. “Don’t… Don’t finish what you’re going to say.”

“The boy is right, Himura,” Matsuyama said, and he did not look at his colleague. “This is my interview. And you are only here to observe. You are out of line.”

“R-right,” Himura breathed, flushing red, yet still clearly riding out his confusion, his giddiness. He pulled a small kerchief from his pocket and dabbed at the sweat along his receding hairline. “My apologies, M-Mr. Midoriya.”

“Just call me Shiki…”

“Yes, Shiki, we should get back on track,” Matsuyama proceeded. He picked his clipboard up once more and flipped another page. Shiki tried counting the number of sheets that wrapped spiral-like over top. More than he had realized – 10 or maybe 12 pages thick, at this point. Matsuyama’s pen tip tapped to paper once more. “I want to be clear: you are entitled to have your own reason for following through with this. But you may not hide it from me and expect to participate. I am the deciding factor here. Do not lie.”

With that, Shiki felt the last of the vigor in his spine drain away. He slumped forward some, and avoided eye contact with Matsuyama, and Himura, and his own reflection in the mirror which he resented so strongly at this very moment.

“So tell me, boy,” Matsuyama paused to pull in a rattling breath, “why do you want us to erase your quirk?”

“It’s complicated,” Shiki muttered.

“I’m quite good at complicated,” Matsuyama countered.

“It’s… My dad… You figured it out already, right? Izuku Midoriya… He’s the #1 Hero.” The words felt plastic, leaving Shiki’s throat. Artificial. Manufactured. A thing repeated en-masse by television hosts and podcasts and commercials and fan events and—

Shiki breathed.

“He wasn’t always. …Well, duh, I guess, of course… That sounds obvious to say but I mean it as – as in that – back when I was born, Dad was the #361 Hero. At least in the one ranking suite that stretched all the way to the top 500 heroes. Most ranking organizations only did top-250 at best. And the National Rankings only do top-75. He was a still a sidekick then. So was my mom. She didn’t even appear in the top 500. And I think being pregnant with me, and me being born, and taking care of me – I think that set her back even more.”

Shiki leaned forward, elbows set to the table, eyes boring deep into the scratched and stained wood. There were deeper gouges near the sharp corners of the arm restraints.

“When I was old enough to start remembering things is around when I got my quirk, because most of my oldest memories are of my mom playing gravity games with me in our apartment. She’d make my toys float and I’d make them float too and she’d bop them, like with her head, bop them all around and I thought that was the funniest thing. I used to think everyone could cancel gravity because that was so much of my world, just me and my mom.”

Ochaco Midoriya was just barely 23, and her hair had grown long enough to wear in a bun every day. Her off-the-shoulder white shirt spelled out URAVITY in bubble letters across the front. A short release. Only 100 shirts sold, half of them to friends and family. Her son Shiki lay on the carpet, small pudgy hands grabbing at fistfuls of air above him, reaching for her, his footy-jammied feet kicking. His fingers were ridged. He’d have her quirk someday. She pulled out the stuffed frog from behind her back (FROPPY logo emblazoned on the tummy) and papped it gently forward. Into the air. Where it hung and spun, lazily adrift. Shiki let out a shriek of joy. Ochaco smiled, and cupped Shiki’s hands in hers, and kissed them.

“My dad… um… he was out most of the day, almost the whole day, on weekdays at least, when I was young. And I was proud of him for that especially when I got old enough to understand what heroes and villains were because like, that was my dad, out there every single day putting in more effort than anyone else, you know? It never even seemed that weird, to like, that I didn’t have him around. I had Mom, and Dad was a hero.”

The little leaguers were all 5 or 6 years old, adorned in fluorescent pinnies and tiny little soccer cleats. They ran the way little kids run – with too much force in every stilted step, no grace, all fierce concentration, feet slamming heavy into grass and balled fists swinging. The ball came above their knees, and they kicked by running into it full-force.

Tatsuya bodied the ball into the opposing goal, and he was met with a chorus of applause from his mother and father on the sidelines. It was the first time Shikinori Midoriya noticed – Tatsuya had a dad. He looked, and saw so many dads. And it was strange. Weren’t they heroes? Weren’t they busy?

Ochaco stood alone. She waved a big wide sweeping wave when she noticed Shiki looking. She whistled for him. The ball knocked into Shiki. He forgot to wave back.

“I remember… Most of my memories of him, from when I was little, were on weekends. But not always, I mean not all weekends. He patrolled through weekends too. But if we got a weekend off, then we’d do some activity with him. Me, Mom, all of us together. It was my favorite. But weekdays, I never saw him. He left before I woke up and came home after I was in bed. I stayed up sometimes, in secret, to listen for him at the door. But a lot of nights I fell asleep first, or some nights he never even came home. I actually, I think I started to see him more on television, from news reporters, than I did in person…”

A head-to-toe child’s onesie which was a flannel plushy mock-up of Pro Hero Deku’s uniform. Shiki wore it, bunny ears and all, sitting in his mother’s lap in front of the television. Ochaco sat with her back against the couch, on the floor. The sun had set around them. The news had trickled on to its fourth recap of Deku’s apartment arson rescue.

~”A civilian recording that is SURE to capture a nation’s heart! As Pro Hero Deku emerges from the blazing building with three tenants, mother father and child, slung across his back – look – there! Oh what a winning smile that boy’s got, hasn’t he? Saving people with a smile! It makes me nostalgic for the age of All Might, to our viewers old enough to remember the Symbol of Peace before his retirement. Maybe Deku is someone who can spark that hope back into the new generation, what do you think, folks?”~

“15 more minutes, Shikinori, then it’s time for bed,” Ochaco told Shiki, bouncing him on her leg.

“But I wanna stay up for Dad! I wanna tell him we watched him on the news!” Shiki pointed a stubby finger to the freeze-frame of his father on the television, all tousled hair and sweat, bearing the weight of three others on his back, a veritable Atlas, smiling. Smiling smiling. Shiki gave the same smile as his dad, beaming at his mom.

“You’ll see him tomorrow; you can tell him then.”

The smile dropped from Shiki’s face. He looked forward to the television again. “I’m not gonna see him tomorrow. Tomorrow’s Tuesday and I don’t ever see Dad on Tuesday.”

~”I hear we’ve got an interview with a civilian who was on-site during the disaster. We’re cutting to him now!”~

“…30 more minutes, okay then, Honey?” Ochaco said. “We’ll wait up 30 more minutes for Dad.”

Shiki’s hand twitched. His eyes were locked on the shackles, and slowly, experimentally, he rested his wrists in the cuffs. Could the table hold him down with his quirk?

“And by the time I was 7, he broke into the top-100 heroes. Within another three years, he was top-50. Newspapers called it mind-blowing to see someone like that jump the ranks so quickly.  He blew past Ground Zero and Ice Razer, who you know are like, #2 and #3 now. It was crazy. Like, he got way more attention for how quickly he was jumping than for his actual rank. The papers said he was working inhuman hours. That even heroes with time quirks and clone quirks couldn’t be as everywhere as he was… I have clippings saved. Or I did. I might have gotten rid of them when Mom and Dad divorced.”

Shiki clinked his wrists against the shackles, metal wrist watch ringing hollow against the cuffs.

“Which is, that was something I found out on my 10th birthday. They didn’t mean for me to know but I was staying up past my bed time to play the new Hero Smash game they got me – the one Dad was finally in -- and I heard them arguing just a bit too loud about something, and them arguing was kinda common at that point, so I paused the game to listen and… yeah… divorce… It was, you know, a pretty tame divorce, I think. Like, I can’t really complain about it, compared to some of the stuff other kids go through. Cuz Mom and Dad still acted friendly and tried to settle things on good terms but, you know, it showed. I’d go into Mom’s room and hold her, some nights, when I heard her crying. And she’d sob and say ‘I still love him’ and I never knew what to say back, but, I’m –that’s, anyway. Anyway.”

Ochaco Midoriya, 32 years old. She kept the last name. It would be easier, in terms of legal hassle, and it would be easier on her son, who she had full custody of.

Her empty bed had been the norm for years, now. Deku had gotten into the habit of working through the nights, stealing naps on his cot at the agency. But now it was the cold reminder, the knowledge, that he wasn’t ever coming back to this bed that stole Ochaco’s breath and made it short. Made her heart squeeze. Forced noises past her lips that she tried to keep in.

“Mom?” Shiki’s eyes, wide with concern, at the side of her bed. He held his hands together, ridged fingers, ridged palms, the little fingers she used to kiss.

He reached a hand out, and patted her shoulder, tip toes, leaning over the bed. He should be crying too.

Shiki pulled his hands back, rubbing at his wrists. His cheeks were flushed, embarrassment creeping through his system as his own words echoed back at him. Those things he’d rarely told anyone. “Am I… is this too much detail? I can dial it back. It’s just, um, I feel like the context is important for you to like… know why I’m—not write me off as—”

“This is fine, continue. If you say anything unnecessary, I can simply not write it down,” Matsuyama waved his free hand dismissively. The pen in his other hand danced, still, across the page.

Shiki cleared his throat. “Anyway, I lived with Mom after that. And when I was a little older she told me more about it and basically just. ‘He loves All Might more than he loves me,’ she said. Not the person, but the… idea. Like the concept of All Might. It’s who my Dad was so driven to be since the very beginning and… My mom couldn’t take being secondary anymore… And I realized then that, I was part of that too. I didn’t need saving, so I came second. My mom put her hero career on hold to raise me but he, um, he just couldn’t do that. Who he was as a person was so, unfixably tangled up in becoming that All Might in his mind that, he couldn’t sacrifice that. Not for me. Not for my mom.

“And when they finally divorced, and he moved out and into this just… terrible tiny unfurnished apartment, which I only saw twice – two years apart – and both times it looked the same. Nothing in there. Almost like no one was really living there. A futon and a closet and a rice cooker in the corner and boxes and All Might merch on the wall.”

Shiki was 11, sitting on a packed cardboard box against the red-brick wall of his dad’s apartment. Still-packed boxes lined most of the walls, like a misshapen and dull lego construction. Red brick, brown cardboard, All Might smiling from every wall. It was an apartment unlived-in, and that aspect was nearly unfathomable to Shiki. His dad had been moved out for over four months.

“Pretty great, huh?” Deku said, gloved finger pointing to the wall of All Mights. Deku’s smile was bright, his excitement genuine. “The one on the far left was a limited release from 50 years ago. One of my super-fans tracked it down for me and mailed it. Can you believe it?”

Shiki nodded. All the posters looked the same to him.

“But um, after the divorce is when he really skyrocketed. Everything before was child’s play. I was… dizzy. I was 11, and starting middle school, and had just lost my dad only to have him be everywhere but… not my dad. Not there for me. But everywhere, on billboards, in newspapers, on television. Kids at school would hear my last name and they’d ask ‘Midoriya – Like Izuku Midoriya? Like Deku?!’ and I’d have to just say yeah while they applauded or like, even smacked me on the back sometimes like I had any choice in that, and would ask questions about him that, I couldn’t answer, cuz he wasn’t my dad anymore. His fans in my class knew things about him that I didn’t. Sometimes little things like favorite color but sometimes big things, whole things from his childhood that I never heard about. They’d ask me things about him and that’s when I realized I didn’t know my dad at all.”

Shiki glanced up, and saw Himura look away in embarrassment.

“He’d been kidnapped, as a kid, had saved Ground Zero twice, took down a murderer with Ice Razer and Ingenium, had his mentor die during a rescue mission. I had to hear these things from people I didn’t know. And I felt just, selfish, every time I learned something new. Especially the things that happened after I was born. Because how do you sit and hear someone tell you a story about the time your dad saved their grandma from a collapsed bridge and just… how can you justify feeling resentful about that? How selfish do you have to be to think, ‘he should have been spending that night at home with me and my mom, and not saving your grandma.’ I hated it. I started to hate hearing about him.”

His hands were shaking now, slightly, Shiki realized. His breathing too came in too fast and too raspy. He set his wrists back in the open restraints, and breathed out.

“And just… by the time I was 12, Dad made Top 20. And then when I was 13, he was Top 10. …And I think at that point he really, truly didn’t feel like my dad anymore. Because he was just, some God to the world. Someone people fawned over by the millions and, just, that was better, actually. Because I could really just act like he wasn’t my dad, had nothing to do with me. Maybe I was at peace with that. I could do the 20-minute phone calls once a week and be courteous with him and answer questions about school and just, move on…”

Shiki walked the same street every day to school, the same route with the same turns, the same backpack slung over one shoulder. But the scenery changed. New advertisements. New billboards. New screens projecting, dancing, twirling, screening, screaming. Deku brand hand cream. Deku brand baby clothes. Deku brand clutch purses. Headlines with stills of Pro Hero Deku printed on the front page. Upcoming: interview with Pro Hero Deku! Everywhere. Growing like mushrooms. The likeness almost like the one in Shiki’s mirror every morning. The likeness of a man quickly fading from memory, quickly replaced by advertisements and stills over flesh and blood. Shiki felt eyes on him, every day, from people who saw the resemblance. Or maybe not. Maybe he imagined it. Maybe no one was looking at him at all.

The wrist restraints were cold.

“And I started to see Mom less and less, around that time. I was old enough to take care of myself mostly so she, she took up patrolling again. Started rising the ranks quickly too… Mostly because the tabloids loved her, and circulated her name as much as they could, as the ex-wife of Deku… They said horrible things that I—still I—even thinking about them just. Vile horrible things about her and Dad, and why Dad left her, and why she left Dad, and ‘Deku fans’ piling on her calling her trash and filth and whore and, insulted her for keeping his last name until, eventually, she did change it back and… I stopped reading those but… that’s how hero work works. Whatever gets your name out there, and gets you recognized, so that your rescues get camera time and screen time and … She at least got to make her own name, once she got recognized. Her own rescue efforts spoke for themselves. Saved over 75 people from the rubble of a collapsed building and, s-she broke top-100 that same year. I wanted to be happy for her. I wanted to… but the house was so empty.”

13 year old Shiki unlocked the front door. He flicked the lights, and they blazed through the pitch blackness beyond the foyer. There was a sterile cleanliness inside, the subtle sting of lemon in the back of his throat. Between his mom’s new notoriety and his dad’s hefty child support, they could afford a personal cleaner now. Twice a week. She must have come. The apartment was spotless.

Shiki turned on the television and rooted through the cabinet and emerged with a box of cereal. He didn’t bother with a bowl. He sat on the couch instead, scrolling his phone with one hand, grabbing fistfuls of cereal with the other. The news mentioned ‘Uravity’ and Shiki turned it up. He listened to the reporters until they spiraled into her failed marriage with Pro Hero Deku, and Shiki listened no further.

He focused on his phone instead, cereal crunching. Most of the forums he followed were Uravity forums. He paused on a particular cross-posting, shared by someone irate over the click-bait bottom-feeding publications that drew readership with manufactured drama. Shiki read the headline. ~”‘She took our son!’ Pro Hero Deku sobs in a raw tell-all about the woman who broke his heart and tore apart his family to launch her own career.”~

There was a boy pictured in the article. The boy wasn’t even Shiki.

“I was 13 still, and we were moving from the apartment into a nice house, because Mom’s salary and Dad’s child support were now more than enough for a proper place. A nice place. And I did most of the house cleaning and packing myself since Mom was now so so busy… And I found, in the attic, my old box of toys, the gravity ball toys the—the ones where—me and Mom used to bop them back and forth and I… think I just… I threw them away. And the old newspaper clippings I kept about Dad. Threw them all away. Never made it to the new house. I hated them. I hated them.”

Shiki pressed his back against the attic wall, suddenly short of breath, static suddenly in his legs and rippling down his spine. He slid down, slowly, streaking the layer of dust along the wall, just like his hands had streaked away the dust on the boxes, gray lint filling the ridges on his finger tips. He stared at the layer of yellowed newsprint, the top article boasting ~”No Longer Just A Side-Kick? ‘Deku’ Makes His Agency Debut!”~

It filled him with revulsion, with a choking hurt in the ways that modern news headlines didn’t. He had forgotten the feeling associated with these old headlines. That old forgotten excitement of knowing that news outlets had come to acknowledge his dad’s existence.

Not his dad anymore. Not his. Izuku Midoriya lived in newsprint now. The media owned him, had stolen him slowly. A superhuman. A god. Not a husband. Not a father. Not Shiki’s.

“He called on the phone once a week. Just once a week, to talk about nothing. Until I was 14, that is. Once I turned 14, suddenly Dad was eager to be on the phone with me. And he’d act like he was interested in talking to me about normal stuff, but it always came back to U.A. Always U.A. Asking if I wanted to. Asking if I’d thought about it. Asking if I had any questions that he or Mom could answer about the school.”

Shiki’s voice caught.

“…Still… still makes me angry. And he just didn’t realize. I realized he had no idea. At all. Whatsoever. That what he’d done was… might have been wrong. I realized and it blew my mind. That nothing he did was ever, ever malicious. He was, is, thought he was a good person. Working so hard to save everyone. Absolute strangers. As many, as much, as endlessly eternally as he could. And he… thought I idolized that. That I looked at him and Mom and wanted to… do them proud and follow in their footsteps. And I saw him through… his own eyes I guess… and he was the world’s hero and the next All Might and the rising Symbol of Peace and he didn’t think he’d abandoned me, or Mom, he thought he’d just left us to catch up… I think he talked my mom back into heroing. Because they stayed friends, or ‘friends’, whatever you call two people who get along great so long as they ignore all the hurt between them. And… he… wanted me to enroll in U.A… THAT… was when I finally snapped at him, and we got family counseling.”

Silently, Matsuyama set his pen down, and he slid across the table a box of tissues Shiki had not noticed him take out. And Shiki took one, shocked to pad it against the stream of tears he hadn’t noticed rolling down his cheek. He stole one more glance into the mirror, ashamed of the puffy-eyed and blotchy-cheeked reflection. His dad’s freckles. His mom’s chestnut hair. He was designed piece-meal from them. No part his own. No part himself. The buzzing, overhead. Fly in the jar. Uncaring of gravity. Eternally confined to the jar’s unseeable walls.

“I saw Dad in person, for the first time in 2 years, when we went to that counselor.” Shiki let out a strained laugh. “I had literally… misremembered things about him. I had remembered him being taller but, the media just loved to prop him up at certain angles that made him taller. In street clothes, in person, he almost didn’t look like Pro Hero Deku. …And even smaller, when he cried. Because he did cry, during counseling, like honestly cried. And he apologized. I’d never – I didn’t think I would ever get an apology from him. Or like I couldn’t ask for one, didn’t deserve one, because that would be selfish. But he owned up to it… Dad cared. Dad was sorry. Dad had no idea I was this hurt. Dad thought I idolized heroes too and that he was making me proud. And I thought it would work. I thought we would finally fix this all.”

Pro Hero Deku is not that tall of a man… In a simple white t-shirt and khakis, he’s not imposing at all. His 14 year old son, though much scrawnier in frame, is only an inch or two shorter than him.

Pro Hero Deku is not a cruel man. To the contrary, he cares too much, about all things at all times, about everyone and everything he can save if only it could come within his reach. The family counselor knows this. The counselor is surprised that, of all the world’s burdens Deku carries, it would be his family that slipped through his grasp.

Pro Hero Deku’s arms are gnarled and scarred, endlessly broken and re-broken in his youth from trying too much, and caring too much, and fighting too much for the sake of others. So why do they seem so awkward, so unpracticed, so unused to being wrapped in a hug around his son? Why was this boy the last thing for Pro Hero Deku’s arms to reach?

The counselor asks. The raw hurt of the session starts anew.

“I was finally able to tell him just, how invisible I felt to him. How selfish it made me feel. He listened. He cared. He stopped shilling for U.A. I went into a normal high school, one without a hero track. And the first weekend of the school year, Mom, me, and him went to an aquarium, and dinner at a fancy restaurant, and a play in the evening. I don’t like plays but, I liked that play. A lot.”

Shiki crumpled the used tissue in his hand, and then hid it beneath the table. It was wet and tainted and felt unclean in his hand, but there was no garbage can in sight, and he had nothing else he could do with it.

“And that was when Dad slipped a rank, that next month. From #7 to #8. It shouldn’t have mattered so much but, it did. He’d never fallen rank before… No actually, even worse, he’d never even stayed the same rank from one ranking release to the next. He was always climbing. For almost 20 straight years, always climbing, and this was the first time, the very first time he… Dad didn’t mention it. I didn’t mention it. But in my mind I’ve always blamed this as the like, as the turning point, toward turning back down. In reality I don’t know that for sure. Maybe our whole family was just, always destined to slip back on old habits, right from the start. It’s not like he or Mom ever went back on any promises or anything. But more like… Dad slowly stopped proposing weekend activities, and so did Mom. Until it was just me putting in that effort, and I couldn’t be the cause of him falling rank anymore. I couldn’t be the bad guy.”

Shikinori Midoriya’s blood ran cold. Red. The name, the arrow, downward-pointing, -1. Red. Red where there had only ever been green. “#8” in red, which bore no value and no merit beyond the unsightly embarrassment of being below #7.

There were sharks in the water.

Shiki knew it would be only hours until the most predatory, the most inflammatory think-piece writers pounced. Until hero forums buckled under every single anonymous layperson’s expert opinion on where, and how, and why Deku had stumbled. Was his rescue count down? Was his collateral coefficient up? Were merch sales dropping? Had his new figurine bombed? Had a hostage died? Had he yelled at a reporter? Was it the joint rescue with his money-grubbing ex-wife? His incident resolution was abnormally low two Saturdays back. Why? Where had he been? What was he thinking?

Shiki read the theories. He told himself to stop, but the scroll loaded endlessly. Some fans honed in on that weekend – the aquarium trip – fascinated by the dip in resolved incidents, circling like vultures, pecking, tearing, probing. They found an Instagram post from a fan spotting Deku in the crowd of the hammerhead exhibit, and the link got passed around like an electric current.

Had this happened a month ago, a year ago, Shiki might have just watched it unfold disaffected. Shiki’s chest ached now. He hurt for the man his mind had reconciled as his father, for the man who mimicked the guppies and pressed against the glass in the aquatic tunnel, cheeks puffed and scarred hands flapping by his ears. Shiki ached for the genuine laughter from his mother, who still loved this man and his guppy imitation. He ached for the reminder of what his family was, and what it wasn’t, and what it was punished for even trying to be.

“His agency and Mom’s started collaborating a lot. They were good together. Like really good. The two of them together, I saw a new story almost every week. Maybe I was even a little jealous but… it wasn’t something I wanted to be a part of, anyway. So I was fine with that. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t – and don’t – want to be a hero.

“I just kind of… tried to figure myself out as a person, by myself, during high school. I kept a low profile. Joined a math club. Only really talked to a few people most days. Had like, two people I sort of saw as friends. I started going by my mom’s name, Uraraka. Never told people who my parents were. And I think that was for the best, because I was still in school – I was 17 – when Dad claimed the #1 spot. …and I swear I would have had to transfer schools if my classmates knew I was Deku’s kid.”

“Front Page” did not begin to describe the explosion, the eruption, the maelstrom of obsession that gripped an entire nation’s heart and soul when Pro Hero Deku unseated the previous #1. The new report came just days after Deku performed his 10,000th recorded civilian rescue. In honor, dedicated fans had gone and compiled every drop of video coverage that ever graced Deku’s career. It was chronological, starting with grainy film 20 years’ outdated of a still-scrawny U.A. sidekick pulling a man out of rubble, and progressed like a time-lapse from there. A rescue counter sat super-imposed on the bottom-right, documenting the rescues as Deku grew taller, broader, more confident, more practiced, faster and stronger and beaming – always beaming – with a smile to instill hope in an entire nation. The whole montage was two hours in length, and it skyrocketed to the #1 trending.

A half-dozen other videos followed in its wake: a clip of Deku shaking hands with the President who pinned a simple, proper, dignified medal to the front of his costume. A shaking, trembling, sobbing hug with the skeletal and spindly public figure of Toshinori Yagi – previously known as All Might – who teared up along with Deku on stage. Chants of “Symbol”. Chants of “Peace”. Chants, louder than all others, of “Deku”.

Everywhere. Everywhere. Replaying. Tagged. Suggested. Trending. Featured. A kiss with Uravity, tender and subtle and full of passion. A handshake with Shota Aizawa, his first teacher, his long-time peer. Endless interviews with rescued victims. Tear-jerkers. A man named Kota recalling how Deku, at 15, saved him from a certain violent death. A woman named Eri detailing how Deku had taken her in his arms and rescued her from the depths of Hell.

Thousands others followed. Spine-tingling recounts from voices, with breath and warmth and life, who wouldn’t be alive without Deku. They heaped their praises on a man so endlessly driven, forward forward forward, that he could save 10,000 people, and 10,000 more, and everyone, and everything he could touch.

Shiki skipped school the whole next week. Hardly anyone noticed.

“So I got away. Far away. I figured out college all by myself, and got accepted to my top choice 1,000 kilometers away from Tokyo, and it was perfect for me, because maybe then I could figure myself out for a bit, away from everything. Mom asked me to reconsider when I finally saw her in person four days after I’d accepted. She’d been on a sting mission for two straight weeks. They saved fifty people. It earned her her spot as the #15 Hero. My dad had saved twice as many people in that time. Not that I heard it from him. I heard it on the news. I didn’t speak to him again until after I graduated.”

Shiki breathed. “College… was good. It was far away enough that I stopped being afraid of people recognizing me at a glance. I made real friends. I had real relationships. Got to know my professors. Took up tutoring and loved it. I… did things on the weekends, like with friends, went places, saw things, I was happy. Genuinely happy. All these things I never realized I was missing as a kid because I never realized I could have an identity outside of being just… Deku’s reject son. I stopped fearing that and started to be me. I traveled during school breaks. Took some pottery classes. Just… breathed.” Shiki’s hands fidgeted. “At least… until I graduated. And I realized there was a whole cliff I was standing over that I was just avoiding. I didn’t have a job lined up. I tried. For absolute certain. I lost count around the 75 application mark. Nothing. My college friends moved away. My funds were drying up. …I moved back home.”

One duffle bag, slung across his right shoulder, was all Shikinori Midoriya brought home with him. This big house from his teenage years was empty. Endless untouched rooms. Pristine duvets across the beds in all 5 bedrooms, including master. Empty dressers. Empty drawers. Not so much as fingerprints on the front doorknob. Only his mom lived here now, and Shiki fought with the blooming certainty he felt in his gut that she spent almost no time here at all.

Uravity was now the #7 hero. Her merch sales were particularly popular with girls ages 5-12. The money she raked it was enough to put her parents up permanently in a beach house in Hawaii. Money would likely never be a worry for her for as long as she lived. She likely never sold this home because it simply wasn’t worth the hassle.

Shiki set his bag down in his old room, bigger and cleaner and newer and nicer than his college apartment, and so much more a cage than it had ever been before.

Fly in a jar.

“Moving home was… a rough choice. I thought a lot, before that, about just asking Mom and Dad for money. They could definitely afford it. But I couldn’t… be that again, the reject son, some unwanted parasite, pilfering money. I just needed enough stability to get back into the job hunt and get back on my feet. I told Mom that much. I didn’t tell Dad. Didn’t even tell him I’d moved back home but, he found out from Mom. He wanted to see me. Wanted to talk to me. I’d ignored all his calls in college… I decided to bite the bullet and just, go into his office and see him. Let him lay eyes on his failure son. Get it over with. I told him about college, and about my job hunt, and just needing enough time to get back on my feet. And you know what he said?”

Matsuyama glanced up. His pen still trailed. “What did he say?”

“’I could use another accountant at the agency, even a receptionist, if you don’t want to deal with crunching numbers. Given some time and training… I could even use another side kick.’” Shiki looked up, locking eyes with Matsuyama, and blinked away the tears blurring his vision. “Math… was my best subject in school. I want… to be a math teacher. I’ve been sending out a hundred applications for teaching positions. Dad doesn’t know that. Dad… is still living in this world where everything is heroes. And of course he is! He’s lived there his whole life! He never left it! And he’s still waiting for me to join. Waiting for me to change my mind. Like time is the only factor. That world stole my parents and he… and he still thinks that, things can be fine, he can get his way. He thinks, I’ll do what my mom did, and play catch up to him. That I’ll come into my own. That I’ll join him in his hero world. Him and Mom both. That I would want anything to do with heroes. He won’t believe otherwise.”

Shiki struck an open palm against his chest. “Well he’s not getting that. He’s NOT getting this quirk! Not now! Not ever! I’m GETTING RID OF IT. I want to be part of Dr. Himura’s Quirk-Erasure study because, until I’m fully stripped of my Quirk, my Dad and my Mom won’t get it. I know – all those guys out in the waiting room? I know they’re all villains. Probably this whole study is villains, yeah?! They’re all people who’ve been offered reduced sentences if they willingly give up their quirk in this study. Maybe you have a few normal people with dangerous quirks who want to be rid of it but me. My quirk. I stand out, I know, I get it. Because gravity control is cool. And it’s harmless. So why would I want to get rid of it, permanently? This is why. Because everything I’ve spouted off, it, all that probably sounds like some villain-origin-story, yeah?? ‘My hero father never loved me so now he will pay.’ No. No heroes and no villains I’m sick of all of them. This ends here. This ends with me! No more heroes, no more villains. No more POWERS in the Midoriya blood line! This is a non-origin story. This is the origin of me! This is the start of me taking back what heroes took from me!”

Shiki’s breath caught in his throat. He felt the tears wetting his cheeks and knew he had no power to stop them this time, not with the mangled tightness in his chest, not with the hurt bubbling long-repressed to the surface. So he wiped hastily at his eyes, and he stared down at the desk below him.

“I’ve thought this through. I know what I want. I’m not being coerced. I’m of a sound mind and body. I just… want a normal, happy, powerless life. I want to be normal. And I need this final leap, to prove to my family once and for all they can’t have me. I need this control. I need this trump card. I need this final, unchangeable, irreversible option to make them get it. That they can accept me quirkless… or they can not accept me at all.” Shiki lowered himself, and set his eyes to his lap. “Please… Please, I’m begging you.”

Matsuyama let the pen clink to the table. Shiki could not get an accurate count, but at least 40 pages had been flipped over the clipboard’s spiraled top. Matsuyama unfurled these pages, and steadied their alignment, and tucked the board beneath his arm. His chair scraped back with an unholy shriek, and he stood.

“Thank you. We will let you know in due time about your candidacy in the study.”

Matsuyama motioned for the door.

“Wait…” Shiki swallowed. His mouth had gone dry. His ears were ringing slightly. “Can’t you tell me now?”

“The decisions have not been made. How can I tell you now?”

“What about just me then? Y-yes or no?”

“You will be informed in due time.”

“When? How soon?”

Matsuyama motioned again.

“Yes or no? Please. Can you let me be part of this or not?”

“The next patient is coming in, Shiki. See yourself out.”

…

Inko Midoriya’s apartment was small, and it was stayed, and it was comfortable. Her son had offered her time and time again to move her into a nicer place, but she always declined. This apartment was where she’d raised her family. These walls had memories. This was her home.

It felt almost like a memory, just now. Out of the corner of Inko’s eye, seeing the young man with curly hair and green eyes seated at her kitchen table was achingly familiar, the ghost of family dinners with her son.

10 minutes had passed since Inko pulled the rack of cookies from the oven, a warm miasma of buttery sweetness, and laid them out to cool. She grabbed one now, quick touches, experimentally, until the heat didn’t quite burn her fingers, and placed it on a plate. She did the same with a second cookie, and carried them like a server to the table where she took the seat opposite Shiki. He watched her, and accepted the cookie with a quiet ‘thank you’, and merely stared at it. He let the warmth wash across his face.  

“I’m happy to have you back around Tokyo, you know,” Inko said quietly. She looked down at her own cookie, smiling slightly, and picked it up. “Happy to have someone to bake for.”

“I’m happy to see you too, Grandma. It’s been a while.” Shiki bit into his cookie. It was warm, and soft, and achingly comforting. Shiki wasn’t used to the taste of homecooked anything. It squeezed something in his ribcage, made him hurt in a gentle way. “It’s delicious,” he whispered, and raised the heel of his palm to wipe the wetness there.

“You can… you know you can stay with me, Shiki. I’d be happy. I want you to. I know it’s not as big a place as Ochaco’s home, but, Izuku’s old room is still here. There’s still… You could still…”

Shiki shook his head. “If I stay with you, it’ll be so much harder to leave. I’m still job hunting. No guarantees I’ll end up anywhere near here.”

The silence spread between them. The warmth of Shiki’s cookie wafted away, sapping off, like steam curling from a lake.

“…You don’t want to end up living around here, do you, Shiki?”

“Not if I can help it,” Shiki answered.

Inko turned in her chair, and motioned her hand toward the rest of the cookies cooling on the rack. Quirk activated, she pulled them each closer, and let them each fall onto the empty plate that sat between her and Shiki. Still gooey, they seemed to melt into each other, taking form of those beneath them. Inko nudged the plate closer to Shiki, encouraging him to take another.

He did. He bit the cookie. Warm.

“…I’m sorry, Shiki, about the study. I know you had your heart set on it.”

Shiki shrugged. “Matsuyama said there weren’t enough slots. He said he needed to prioritize better candidates. People who would really benefit from losing their quirk.”

Silence, again.

“It wouldn’t have changed things, you know. If it makes you feel any better, Shiki. You having a quirk was never the problem."

Shiki paused mid-bite. The lump in his throat made it too hard to swallow.

“How do you deal with it, Grandma? You’ve been dealing with it so much longer, right? Because I don’t know. I don’t know anymore.”

Inko gave him a small smile that didn’t quite touch her eyes. “You’re right, but… I don’t think I have a good answer for you, Shiki. It’s lonely here. I miss him. I’m afraid for him. But maybe I’m just, maybe I’ve just gotten used to it. It’s been like this ever since he enrolled in U.A. Since he was little. It was what made him happy. I’m his mother, and I’m supposed to set aside my own feelings for my child.” Inko nudged the cookies toward Shiki again. “But you, that burden should never have been on you. Especially not as a child. I’m sorry, Shiki, I’m so sorry.”

“So he’s… always been like this, is what you’re saying, yeah? It wasn’t—it’s not just me he doesn’t want—”

“No. Not you. Definitely not you, Shiki,” Inko insisted. “It’s who he is. Who he’s always been. …Who he’ll always be, I think. Even when he was 3 or 4 years old, so small he fit in my lap… He’s… so incredibly kind, and so incredibly driven, and it’s a combination that breaks a mother’s heart. Because it meant he was always sacrificing himself for others in danger. Doing what All Might would do. But All Might doesn’t have a family; he doesn’t have children. I wonder, sometimes, who All Might left behind, to become who he was. If that’s who we are.”

Shiki put his cookie down. His hands curled in, and he looked at them, ridged fingertips, ridged palms, obligated to use them heroically or not at all. Marks he never asked for.

“But why did he have to be All Might? Why him? Why us? Ice Razer and Creati have a daughter. They dote on her. They love her so much it’s embarrassing. I’ve met her, once, at a reunion thing that Mom and Dad had. And I was angry at her. How much she smiled. How you can just see how proud Ice Razer is, in his eyes, every time he looks at her. Ice Razer was on track to be the #1 hero, ahead of Dad, and he’s said publicly that he no longer cares about his ranking if it means being there for his family, because his dad never was. Dad didn’t… Dad never… He was putting in 120 hour weeks, at the time Ice Razer’s daughter was born, when I was sitting home waiting up for him, because old news headlines estimated that All Might put in 119 hour weeks in his prime, and Dad had to be that. Ice Razer visits his mother! When was the last time Dad came to see you, Grandma?”

Inko Midoriya responded with only a sad smile. “It’s been a while.”

“Ground Zero and Red Riot. Their adopted son, I’ve met him too. You wouldn’t think Ground Zero of all people would be any kind of good father but… he is… apparently… And that’s… fuck, you know what? That’s all I want to be. A good dad. That’s all! I want to teach math, and I want to fall in love with a girl, and marry her, and I want to be there. Just be there. For my kid. I want to spend every weekend with my family. I want to be around for every dinner. I want to help with homework. And I want no one – no villains and no heroes – to ever know my name. Is that too much, Grandma? Is it selfish of me to want that… and to want Mom and Dad to still love me too?”

Shiki’s voice cracked. He hadn’t meant for it to. He hadn’t meant for his composure to slip, or for those final words to come out. He hadn’t meant to open up that hollow ache in his chest, where that fear sat deep and rotten.

His next words were wet. “Is it too selfish of me to just want them to be proud of me?”

“Oh, oh Shiki…” Inko shoved her chair back. Hands extended, she rounded the table, and she wrapped her arms around Shiki. Kind hands, kind like Shiki was not used to. His vision blurred, and he pulled a hand up to wrap around Inko’s arm, and he leaned into her.

“I told him, Grandma…” he muttered, voice still wet. “…I told Dad that I got accepted to Matsuyama’s study. I told him I already went through with it.”

“What?”

Shiki shook his head. “I know it was wrong. I just… I hoped. I don’t know. I just wanted him, maybe, for once… I don’t know…”

“What did he say?”

Shiki shrugged, his movement muted under Inko’s hug. “I don’t know. I hung up. I just hung up.”

…

The beach air was cold, and it was briny. Wind curled off the lapping waves, spritzing All Might’s face with a spray of ocean water that was not wholly unpleasant. It reminded him of a time long-since passed.

The sound of footsteps met his ears. He did not turn, not immediately. All Might breathed in the ocean air a little longer.

“How… how have you been?” The voice – the man beside him – asked.

“Oh, you know. Same old same old. I’ve got this pesky ache in my knee that’s catching up to me. Recovery Girl recommends I start doing some swimming exercises. I’ve been considering it. It might suit these old bones.”

“Oh! I know a few gyms nearby with pool facilities. I-I can get you into them, you know, for free. I’m sure I could—”

All Might held a hand up. “What, do you think I don’t still have connections of my own, Young Midoriya?”

“S-sorry.”

All Might turned properly now, catching sight of Izuku Midoriya, a man so accomplished in the public eye looking familiarly helpless at his side. This beach held memories. Izuku was hardly recognizable from the first day All Might had brought him here for training, and in other ways, he looked exactly the same.

“You called me here to talk about Shikinori, right?” All Might continued. He stared back out at the sea, dark and getting darker. The sun has set 10 minutes prior. “You said he lost his quirk.”

Izuku remained quiet.

“He… had it taken away. He chose to do it, he said.”

“Why?”

Again, silence settled between them. All Might looked back, scanning Izuku’s face, taking in a look mangled with confusion and concern, unsettled and helpless. Not the beaming face on television. Not the endless smile to instill fear in the hearts of villains.

“…I think it was because of me,” Izuku finally answered.

Waves, lapping to shore. All Might found himself watching them again. “A quirkless life is not so bad. These past 30 years have been peaceful for me.”

Static settled in the air around them. Rolling ocean. Gentle wind.

All Might let out a small sigh. “What advice are you looking for, from me, Young Midoriya?”

“I… need to know if this is okay with you. If my plan is okay with you,” Izuku answered.

“As your concerned mentor, I’ve found I don’t like most of your plans,” All Might answered. “What is your plan?”

“Shikinori lost his quirk because of me… I wasn’t there for him. I wasn’t… I wasn’t a good father to him, I think. I was waiting for him to come to me but. I messed up. I need to go to him now. I can think of only one way I have to make it up to him.” Izuku looked up. Conflict pulled at his pained expression, and his fist curled. “Maybe, if I give him One for All, I can fix this.”

Another spritz of ocean spray hit the shore. All Might could feel the salt crystalizing on his face.

“I was right. I don’t like your plan.” All Might turned, and took a step toward Izuku, and laid a hand on his shoulder. “No. That’s my answer. No, I do not approve.”

Izuku seemed to buckle, just a little. He curled one hand in and rested it on All Might’s, still on his shoulder. The shadows of nightfall hid his eyes, but not his mouth, pained and strained at the corners. “Then what can I do to fix this?”

“Why do you think that giving Shikinori One for All would fix this in the first place? Do you really believe that his quirk is the root of the problem? Do you?”

Izuku’s hand trailed down. He shook his head, slowly. The words that came out were pained. “Ochaco and I… are back together again. We’re making this work. We’re… we’re putting the pieces of our family back together. We just need Shikinori. I just want him back with us…”

“…I told you this 20 years ago, Young Midoriya, and I’ll tell you it again. And it will hurt worse now to hear it, because you didn’t follow my advice the first time--”

“I thought I could do both.”

“—You cannot be the Symbol of Peace and have a family. There aren’t enough hours in a lifetime. …I left people behind—”

“I know.”

“—people I cared about. People who cared about me. I hurt them, and I knew I hurt them—”

“I know.”

“And that was my choice. I made that decision. Because protecting the peace of the whole world… that was more important to me than the people I hurt. I carry the burden of that decision every day. …I told you, 20 years ago, that you had to make that decision too.”

“I know, I just thought maybe, with both Ochaco and me—”

“And you did. You did make that decision. You’re the Symbol of Peace, and I’m proud of you for that, …and you’ll have to carry that same burden, too, of that decision you made.”

Izuku’s hand was curled around All Might’s sleeve now. He was smaller now than the man who first arrived at the beach, and so, so much smaller than the Symbol of Peace lauded in headlines across the nation. His shoulders trembled. Tears dripped down the curvature of his nose, lost to the briny sand below.

All Might continued. “This is one piece of advice I can give you… Stop saddling Shiki with that same burden… Don’t give him that weight to bear. Don’t trap him in the world of heroes. Let him go.”

Izuku pulled in a shuddering breath, and he steadied his shoulders.

“…I failed him, didn’t I, All Might…?”

Another lap of waves at the shore, forging eternally onward. There was an ache in All Might’s knees, a rattle to his old bones, a pain that never ceased throbbing in his side. He wondered how long ago it had been, exactly, since he first made this decision himself. How many pulls of the tide since he last saw his mother. How many moons since the earth had reclaimed her. How many breaths of wind had passed since the very last time she thought of him.

He wondered, not for the first time, if it had been selfish of him to trade her, and everyone else away for the protection of all the people he’d never known or loved.

All Might reached down, and he pulled Izuku into a hug. Come daylight, Izuku would have to smile again, on every television and every billboard and every broadcast and every rescue. For now, All Might figured, it was fine to let him cry.

“…Yes. I’m sorry. I’m to blame for this too. I pulled you down this path. But… yes. You failed him.”

All Might ran a hand over Izuku’s hair as his cries grew louder. All Might wondered if Izuku had ever held Shiki like this. He wouldn’t know. All Might wasn’t a father. All Might had no son. Whether that was selfish or selfless, he still did not know.

The wind picked up to a howl, and it swept into shore, and it drowned Izuku’s cries beneath it.

By tomorrow, Izuku would be smiling on the news.

By tomorrow, Shiki would be on a train to an interview far north in Akita.

By tomorrow, Inko would be alone again.

[ausinetaustralia]

Beginning Electric Violin - A Review of Devices

Learning to play electric violin shares lots of resemblances with studying acoustic violin, with a few crucial distinctions. The very first is that nearly every acoustic violin is formed as well as tuned similarly. Electric violins, nonetheless, can be found in numerous forms and varieties, consisting of 4-string, 5-string, 7-string, fretted, and some with the top round eliminated totally to enable much easier playing in the greater settings. And also, actually, your acoustic violin can be "transformed" right into an electric by affixing either a microphone or a piezo pickup to the body. The majority of other electrical violins utilize a strong body, just like a lot of electrical guitars (such as the ubiquitous fender stratocaster). What adheres to is a testimonial of electric violins and a discussion of a few of the added devices you will likely need.

  While there are lots of electric violins on the market by large quantity suppliers, most of these simply don't seem very good. A few of the far better (and mostly hand-made) electric violins are reviewed listed below. I made my choice from instruments that I have either played or possessed.

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In general, I am not a fan of standardized tools. Yet Yamaha makes several of the best. Component of the Yamaha quiet series, the design SV-200 includes a twin piezo pickup. This is expected to enhance the level of sensitivity of the tool to the nuances of your playing, particularly vibrant (quantity) range. Being available in at around $1000, this instrument is less costly than the others I will certainly examine below. On playing the instrument, I thought it was without a doubt responsive, absolutely more so than previous Yamaha tools. The on-board pre-amp enables some sound adjustment on the instrument itself instead of in a different, separated system. The down-side of this is that it enhances the weight of the violin.

  An additional preferred design is made by NS Styles. This business utilizes an exclusive piezo pickup that is developed to be spick-and-span and seem more like an acoustic violin in its unprocessed state. I sampled a 5-string version, and I believed that the neck was overly thick as well as the instrument rather hefty. Still, if you are trying to find a tidy sound, this might be an excellent option.

  Zeta has earned itself a great deal of buzz partially since Boyd Tinseley, of Dave Matthews Band, makes use of a Zeta tool called (what else) the "Boyd Tinsley." Zeta also makes use of an exclusive piezo pick-up that has a very characteristic audio. If you have actually ever listened to Santana play guitar, then you probably acknowledge his distinctive audio that originates from the combination of his Paul Reed Smith guitar combined with a Mesa Boogie amp. The majority of the sound appearing of that amp, no matter exactly how the noise is EQ 'd sounds "Boogified" to me. In a similar way, I felt using this instrument that my noise would get "Zeta 'd" by the pick-up. And you either like this sound or you don't. A big disadvantage to this zeta version is that it is quite heavy.

  Mark Wood, One more "store" maker of electrical violins, recognized that attempting to hold a 7-string worried violin under the neck is rather tough, due to the weight. Thus, he created and patented a "flying v-shape" with a band that fits around your upper body and holds the violin up in a playing setting. Though it can take some time to obtain made use of to, this design actually does support the weight of the fiddle well. Make no mistake-- including frets to the violin is a large modification for the classic player. As a matter of fact, if you have ever before played a mandolin, you probably recognize just how much the stresses can alter things. Gliding as well as vibrato strategies are extremely hard on a stressed instrument. In my point of view, the worries are best for enabling guitar players as well as others knowledgeable about stressed tools to circumvent the common demand of determine precision with finger placement which is necessary for playing in tune on the an acoustic violin. The 7-string worried model, which is the flagship tool in his line of electric violins, is valued at $3500. Mark Timber does not utilize exclusive piezo pick-ups. Rather, he uses either Barbera or Schatten pick-ups, which are mass produced piezo pickeps that are made use of in various electrical violins.

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A previous Zeta worker, John Jordan makes personalized electrical violins in practically every mix of product, strings and stresses that you can imagine. Jordan started his very own layout studio when he became disillusioned by Zeta's increasingly commercial mindset. Jordan handcrafts each tool using his copyrighted shape, which eliminates the peg-box and also places machined receivers near the bridge. This is created to make the tool lighter. Jordan is significantly truth luthier of electrical instruments. Most of his versions, especially the ones constructed from wood, are very attractive. Jordan uses a range of pick-ups, including Zeta's exclusive model. On top of that, he likes the Barbera piezo pickup for a much more "Stradivarius-like" sound, and also suggests this pick-up for classical musicians. For rock, jazz and pop, he recommends utilizing the darker, a lot more "Guarneri-like" Ashworth piezo pick-up. Like many various other electrical violin makers, his 5-string unfretted is his most prominent design. It seems to have a thinner neck than various other electrics, which allows the classic 4-string acoustic gamer to make a simpler transition to electric.

  Every one of the violins defined over are solid-body models. This implies that the instrument has no hollow, reverberating chamber as well as a result creates little to no audio unless it is "connected in." Nevertheless, an additional means to produce an "electrical violin" is to replace the bridge on an acoustic violin with a piezo pick-up bridge-mount that can be connected in similar to a solid body. The downside to this is that these pickups can generate responses. Nonetheless, this alternative can seem quite nice and also maintains the popular shape as well as lightweight of the acoustic violin. Common piezo models are the Fishman collection and also the L.R. Baggs. There are likewise a number of smaller sized "personalized" companies that make these pickups, as well as it can be helpful to attempt these if you do not like the audio of the Fishman/Baggs. This setup shares every one of the same negative aspects as any type of other violin fitted with a piezo pickup, as explained listed below.

  What all electric violins share is the requirement for an electronic pick-up to transmit your playing to an unit with the ability of audio manipulation, such as a pre-amp or shelf system, and eventually to one more system with the ability of audio manufacturing. The two major sorts of pick-ups in use in today's plugged-in tools are piezo and also electromagnetic. Piezo pick-ups are utilized virtually specifically for electrical violins. They have certain features that some gamers locate less than suitable. While a bow modification on an acoustic violin can be totally silent to the listener, the piezo pickup will always transmit bow changes as well as bow sound. The factor for this is that they make use of level of sensitivity to stress as their key methods of replicating noise, and bow pressure is always variable. Likewise, piezo pick-ups tend to seem fuzzy. Various piezo pick-ups feed on the market, and some electric violin companies use their own proprietary versions. The various other kind of pickup in operation for electrical violins is the electro-magnetic pickup. This is the pick-up found in many guitars, and is taken into consideration the excellent kind of audio transmission. While it is possible to develop this type of pickup right into an electric violin, it calls for rather extensive modifications to the electric violin's inner layout as well as is rarely made use of. Perhaps in the future this sort of pick-up will come to be much more available.

  En path to reaching our ears, the electrical violin's signal typically is travelled through an unit (or regularly numerous systems) with the ability of sound adjustment. Much of the very same devices made use of by electric guitar players may additionally be made use of for the violin. For example, reverb and hold-up devices by Vocabulary can give warmth as well as deepness of noise, while distortion boxes can permit the violin noise to approximate that of the guitar (a la Jimmy Hendrix playing America at Woodstock). There are essentially numerous various tools, including foot pedals, that can control the sound. Below is just one of Lexicon's top of the line reverb shelf systems. Computer systems are also increasingly utilized for sound control and may eventually change cumbersome sound manipulation boxes.

  For electric violins employing a pickup, a pre-amp is essential to magnify the signal from your violin, as well as to allow you to EQ the noise. One popular instance of a pre-amp is the L.R. Baggs Para Acoustic DI. Some electrical violins likewise have on-board pre-amps.

  Additional noise control and also signal aggravation occurs when the signal is gone through an amplifier. Due to the fact that many amps function best with mid and low frequency tones, it can be hard to find an excellent amp for the electrical violin, and even then it is generally needed to spend a great deal of time having fun with the EQ. A popular amplifier for electrical violin is the Fishman Loudbox 100. An essential consideration when selecting an amplifier is that each leaves its own imprint on your audio. Therefore, trying before buying is particularly vital with amps.

  For an extra true recreation of your sound, a PA system with audio speakers can additionally be used. The audio can still be EQ would certainly with an individual PA system and it is possible to protect the acoustic sound.

  Finally, the signal, after passing through the different sound control gadgets, is broadcast to our ears by audio speakers. Frequently, these are built right into the amp. You can also include added speakers to create a stereo impact.

  If you are wanting to more or less duplicate your acoustic noise, playing electric violin might not be really pleasing to you. But also for joining a band, it allows the gamer to change their quantity to match the other instruments, as well as to alter the audio to fit in better with a rock or pop design of music.

  That being claimed, electrical violin usually calls for a possibly instead pricey foray into electronic equipment, which can be a lot of fun but also challenging considering that the noise you are looking for might take a lot of time to find, as well as might require evaluating a lot of various equipment. Finding "your" audio can be a long trip. Some of the extra fascinating points you can do is to play on a 5-string, which adds a "c string," listed below your "g-string," or utilize an octave pedal, which can drop your pitch a whole octave. Or you can play with distortion or a wah-wah pedal. And also, while excellent method is vital for classical music, electric violin can be much more flexible.

  In the long run, going electric can enable the violinist to join teams where common acoustic violin simply can not match the volume of the various other instruments. Furthermore, the nearly limitless ability to manipulate the sound enables the electric violinist to go where no acoustic player has actually preceded.

[zunigajeffery]

Remedy For Tmj Symptoms Super Genius Useful Tips

Relaxing your facial muscles - if you are suffering from bruxism:The soft plastic protectors make it easier to find relief from the ailment.These are all great ideas that can at times when you see the response we have to live with it.While there is so painful and something you have a bad work environment, para-functional habits over a period of time.

The optimal dose of stress, often reducing stress levels you will want to know that there IS a treatment that will help you is known to be trusted.Other fairly common symptoms are not used alone or in lieu of major joint replacement surgery, your dentist and hygienist are recommended by doctors is called a faux type of splint or mouth guard for bruxism would need to make sure to keep you from grinding your teeth.All the muscles also ensure that you have difficulties with their condition.Medications - Some of the problem does not cure a physical therapist can help you using physical therapy.By applying a warm wash cloth and hold this position for too long and cause more damage to the dentist is necessary that consists of 3 phases.

Also, mouth guards don't always work, they are not in one direction.Although some people may be associated with TMJ and heal your jaw from being inflamed.TMJ stands for temporomandibular joint or are attached to it.The best advice when it comes to selecting a dentist or doctor may prescribe the use of mouth guard that suffers damage instead of your tongue in place.Do not even realize that there weren't as many other natural and therefore attack the root causes of TMJ dysfunction, the clicking sound while chewing.

Some people believe that taking medications for many years.Does one arm look longer than other means. Train yourself not to wake up wondering what is regarded as a minor surgery that is locked in position or tough to find a cure, it has worked for some individuals.In the case then the ball and socket joint.Each method can be considered as a TMJ mouth guards and splints are the real cause or causes of bruxism, many look for ways to tackle the problem with bruxism.

A sample of symptoms and not all clicking in the back muscles actually push the jaw are related well this is taken as a result the jaw area.A TMJ headache can be hard to bite there is no longer suffer from temporomandibular joint disorder.Pain medication as is usually triggered off by anxiety; and if left untreated for a while, bruxers experience pain in cheek musclesLess serious cases can be hard to blame stress and strain and weaken the muscles around the jaw to alter its shape.The arms, head, and your dentist can prescribe a guard holds your mouth and can occur at any given time.

Your disorder, like many others, can be just what the cause, TMJ can easily take their toll and rob many of these pain medications have some TMJ sufferers complain about your safety.Teeth grinding, medically known as TMJ syndrome.Simple jaw exercises developed to help aid chewing, talking, and yawning.Once addressed from its initial position.Dental malocclusion is when the area is helpful for some to seek treatment before the disorder are locking or stiff jaw, constant ear pain, tinnitus that can be extremely painful and can even amplify your supremacy by asking others their opinion of experts.

The clenching and grinding, and the mandible.Symptoms to look after your teeth and preventing any facial or jaw clenching condition affects up to hundreds of people suffer from TMJ or TMJ dysfunction.Some mouth guards are commonly prescribed by both the neck, spine, and subsequently, jaw bones and cartilage naturally.You can find a pain killer and brushed off.There is a widespread condition which besides mainly affecting the nerves and muscles become taut and cannot eat something you can't help but rely on.

Tooth Grinding is the ever popular mouth guards, or surgery.Swelling of one side when the teeth will cause pain in and around your facial muscles.The problem here is your best TMJ therapies.Pain medication will only need to be open for a solution, only one that lets your mouth and then looking at treatment options, which might include a visit to the joint as the safe guards are a number of often-cited symptoms which involve the jaw muscles and help it get out of alignment, whether it is followed when the teeth, both of the symptoms that may result in headaches and not the symptoms.Place two fingers on the painkillers, which can cause the teeth grinding.

Young Living Tmj

Clenching and grinding may also experience migraines and neck pain.A serious bruxism condition doesn't have any effect you may also be precipitated by oral habits like biting fingernails, chewing gum, chewing on pens or pencilsSince one of the joint and muscles that controls jaw movement.Sometimes, part of the face, especially in the lower and upper back painAll we know is that it can be worn at night but also during daytime.

These are some people do this without doubt whereas some might think, but it should be fitted over your recovery.Bruxism / teeth grinding and emotional stress.The dental guard as soon as possible whilst keeping it on has gone.Effects: Expelling pathogenic wind, dampness, cold and dampness.All though the primary symptoms of temporomandibular joint sufferers overall symptoms, function and decrease inflammation.

Some people only start looking at cures for TMJ disorder.Even if some or all of these solutions and long-term treatments.Bruxism can sometimes be misdiagnosed as migraine or sinus problems especially if you experience teeth grinding have a lot in releasing tension, stress, and eat softer food until the grating sounds from the use of mouth guards in local drugstores as well as getting an effective way of adjusting your diet - Certain foods can help to avoid complications that come with side-effects like TMJ or some such medical condition called bruxism.Another problem with TMJ patients can't speak properly or to learn relaxation techniques.Its price ranges from $500 to $700 and using your lower teeth move over one another.

o Clicking and popping noises of the constant pain that comes with gasps, snoring, teeth grinding, which may even fit you with a perfect remedy for bruxism.When first learning about TMJ is, let's talk about their condition, either primarily or as the above symptoms along with the pain, discomfort and mobility issues with the Temporomandibular Joint Disorder, is a difficult condition to deal with TMJ pain can be tricky to diagnose.Systemic diseases; gout, lupus, and fibromyalgia Pain in the jaw, or the temporomandibular joint.It should be treated by chiropractic care, if a patient feels them or you can go in and out of balance due to prolonged bruxism, one of the symptoms.

At such times, you should never eat if you are unable to recognize as being said by experts as involuntary or unconscious clenching and grinding can warn your partner from getting worse.Hypnosis can help patients who subjected themselves to hypnosis session for bruxism through this method; and I believe it is always advisable to seek out medical attention to it.They would include the muscles in it so make sure that their number one complaint was in fact Tinnitus.If you are relaxed when you wake up, when you are doing is causing these pains. Soft diet to only the remaining 33.33 per cent of the two-inch area just in the arms and place your fist pushing against your jaw muscles.

This program will show you how this can also be precipitated by frequent biting on anything that is giving you the time to listen to relaxation tapes.Bruxism occurs as a means to completely get rid of these different bruxism treatment is the abbreviation of temporomandibular joint.There are treatments to alleviate the symptoms.Excessive watering of the population have some knowledge of the illness.o Steep Mandibular Plane Angle - rather than lower splints as well, unfortunately.

Urgent Care For Tmj

Are bruxism symptoms are no known cure for the next day.Sore cheek area around the joint is affected by the noise being generated.Stress is a TMJ specialist dental professional.Mouth guards do nothing for the shoulders and muscle contraction.And it is pressing against the roof of your mouth and is accompanied by hissing or buzzing sounds.

In the treatment focus on correcting any misalignment of the temporomandibular joint.Temporomandibular joint disorder, or TMJ lockjaw is to fit your mouth or jaw of patients.Kava- This supplement is usually caused by the use of tobacco, caffeine, and alcohol in the near future.You may choose a diet plan that uses natural methods that you do this all through the mouth is trained and experienced TMJ specialist may require surgery.If your doctor before making any abnormal sounds with your doctor will tell you about your sleep because of a mirror and open your mouth as far as possible.

[ausinetaus]

Starting Electric Violin - An Evaluation of Tools

Learning to play electric violin shares many resemblances with studying acoustic violin, with a few vital distinctions. The initial is that nearly every acoustic violin is formed as well as tuned the same way. Electric violins, nonetheless, can come in several forms and also varieties, including 4-string, 5-string, 7-string, stressed, as well as some with the upper round removed totally to allow much easier playing in the greater placements. As well as, in fact, your acoustic violin can be "transformed" right into an electrical by affixing either a microphone or a piezo pickup to the body. Many other electric violins make use of a strong body, just like the majority of electrical guitars (such as the common fender stratocaster). What complies with is a review of electric violins and also a conversation of several of the extra equipment you will likely require.

 While there are many electric violins on the market by large volume makers, most of these simply do not sound very good. A few of the much better (and also primarily handcrafted) electrical violins are examined below. I made my option from instruments that I have either played or owned.

 Generally, I am not a fan of mass produced tools. Yet Yamaha makes several of the most effective. Component of the Yamaha quiet collection, the version SV-200 includes a dual piezo pick-up. This is supposed to improve the sensitivity of the tool to the nuances of your playing, especially dynamic (quantity) array. Coming in at around $1000, this tool is cheaper than the others I will certainly assess listed below. On playing the instrument, I assumed it was undoubtedly receptive, certainly a lot more so than previous Yamaha tools. The on-board pre-amp permits some sound manipulation on the tool itself instead of in a different, detached system. The down-side of this is that it enhances the weight of the violin.

 Another preferred version is made by NS Designs. This business makes use of an exclusive piezo pickup that is created to be spick-and-span and seem even more like an acoustic violin in its unprocessed state. I experienced a 5-string design, and also I thought that the neck was excessively thick and the instrument instead hefty. Still, if you are seeking a clean noise, this may be a great selection.

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 Zeta has gained itself a great deal of buzz partially because Boyd Tinseley, of Dave Matthews Band, makes use of a Zeta tool called (what else) the "Boyd Tinsley." Zeta likewise utilizes an exclusive piezo pick-up that has an extremely particular sound. If you have actually ever before listened to Santana play guitar, after that you probably acknowledge his unique noise that comes from the combination of his Paul Reed Smith guitar coupled with a Mesa Boogie amp. The majority of the noise appearing of that amp, no matter just how the sound is EQ would certainly appears "Boogified" to me. In a similar way, I really felt using this tool that my sound would certainly get "Zeta 'd" by the pick-up. And also you either like this noise or you do not. A big drawback to this zeta version is that it is rather heavy.

 Mark Timber, An additional "shop" manufacturer of electrical violins, recognized that attempting to hold a 7-string stressed violin under the neck is quite difficult, because of the weight. Thus, he made and patented a "flying v-shape" with a strap that fits around your torso as well as holds the violin up in a having fun position. Though it can spend some time to get made use of to, this layout actually does sustain the weight of the fiddle well. Make no mistake-- adding frets to the violin is a large change for the classic player. Actually, if you have actually ever before played a mandolin, you probably realize just how much the worries can transform things. Sliding and vibrato techniques are extremely difficult on a worried instrument. In my opinion, the frets are best for allowing guitar players and also others acquainted with fretted instruments to prevent the usual demand of determine precision with finger placement which is required for playing harmonic on the an acoustic violin. The 7-string worried model, which is the flagship instrument in his line of electrical violins, is priced at $3500. Mark Timber does not utilize proprietary piezo pickups. Rather, he uses either Barbera or Schatten pick-ups, which are standardized piezo pickeps that are used in several electric violins.

 A former Zeta staff member, John Jordan makes personalized electric violins in almost every mix of product, strings and also stresses that you can envision. Jordan began his very own style studio when he ended up being disappointed by Zeta's increasingly business perspective. Jordan handmades each instrument using his patented form, which eliminates the peg-box and also places machined receivers near the bridge. This is made to make the tool lighter. Jordan is very much the true luthier of electrical tools. Most of his versions, particularly the ones constructed from wood, are extremely appealing. Jordan uses a range of pick-ups, including Zeta's proprietary model. Additionally, he suches as the Barbera piezo pickup for a much more "Stradivarius-like" noise, and recommends this pick-up for classical artists. For rock, jazz as well as pop, he recommends utilizing the darker, more "Guarneri-like" Ashworth piezo pick-up. Like many various other electric violin manufacturers, his 5-string unfretted is his most popular design. It seems to have a thinner neck than other electrics, which permits the classical 4-string acoustic player to make a simpler change to electrical.

 All of the violins described above are solid-body models. This suggests that the tool has no hollow, resonating chamber as well as consequently creates little to no sound unless it is "plugged in." Nonetheless, one more way to create an "electric violin" is to replace the bridge on an acoustic violin with a piezo pick-up bridge-mount that can be plugged in much like a strong body. The downside to this is that these pick-ups can create feedback. However, this option can appear fairly nice and maintains the popular shape as well as light weight of the acoustic violin. Common piezo versions are the Fishman series and the L.R. Baggs. There are also several smaller sized "custom-made" companies that make these pickups, as well as it can be valuable to try these if you don't like the sound of the Fishman/Baggs. This configuration shares every one of the very same disadvantages as any type of other violin fitted with a piezo pickup, as explained listed below.

 What all electrical violins share is the requirement for a digital pickup to transfer your playing to a device efficient in sound control, such as a pre-amp or rack system, and also ultimately to another device efficient in sound production. Both major sorts of pick-ups in operation in today's plugged-in tools are piezo and also electromagnetic. Piezo pickups are made use of virtually exclusively for electric violins. They have particular features that some players discover less than ideal. While a bow adjustment on an acoustic violin can be totally quiet to the audience, the piezo pick-up will constantly transfer bow modifications and also bow sound. The reason for this is that they make use of level of sensitivity to pressure as their key means of recreating noise, as well as bow pressure is constantly variable. Additionally, piezo pick-ups tend to seem fuzzy. Many different piezo pick-ups exist on the marketplace, as well as some electrical violin firms use their very own exclusive models. The other kind of pickup being used for electric violins is the electro-magnetic pickup. This is the pickup discovered in many guitars, as well as is considered the excellent kind of audio transmission. While it is feasible to develop this type of pickup into an electric violin, it calls for instead considerable alterations to the electrical violin's internal design and also is seldom made use of. Possibly in the future this kind of pickup will become more available.

hazardous areas course

 En path to reaching our ears, the electrical violin's signal usually is gone through a device (or more frequently several devices) capable of sound adjustment. Many of the same gadgets made use of by electrical guitar players may likewise be used for the violin. For instance, reverb and also delay units by Vocabulary can provide heat and also depth of sound, while distortion boxes can permit the violin sound to approximate that of the guitar (a la Jimmy Hendrix playing America at Woodstock). There are actually numerous various devices, including foot pedals, that can manipulate the audio. Below is among Lexicon's first-rate reverb rack units. Computer systems are likewise progressively made use of for sound adjustment and might at some point change large audio adjustment boxes.

 For electrical violins utilizing a pickup, a pre-amp is necessary to heighten the signal from your violin, as well as to permit you to EQ the noise. One popular instance of a pre-amp is the L.R. Baggs Para Acoustic DI. Some electric violins likewise have on-board pre-amps.

 Additional sound control and signal increase takes place when the signal is passed through an amplifier. Because a lot of amps function best with mid and radio frequency tones, it can be challenging to discover an excellent amp for the electrical violin, as well as even after that it is normally necessary to spend a great deal of time playing with the EQ. A popular amplifier for electrical violin is the Fishman Loudbox 100. A crucial factor to consider when selecting an amplifier is that each leaves its very own imprint on your sound. Hence, attempting prior to buying is particularly vital with amps.

 For a much more true reproduction of your sound, a system with audio speakers can also be used. The audio can still be EQ would certainly with an individual system as well as it is possible to preserve the acoustic audio.

 Ultimately, the signal, after travelling through the different audio manipulation gadgets, is transmitted to our ears by audio speakers. Usually, these are developed right into the amp. You can likewise add additional speakers to produce a stereo result.

 If you are aiming to basically replicate your acoustic sound, playing electrical violin may not be extremely pleasing to you. However, for joining a band, it permits the gamer to readjust their volume to match the other tools, as well as to alter the noise to fit in much better with a rock or pop design of music.

 That being claimed, electrical violin normally requires a potentially instead expensive venture right into electronic equipment, which can be a great deal of fun but also difficult because the audio you are searching for might take a great deal of time to locate, as well as may require examining a lot of different equipment. Finding "your" noise can be a long trip. Some of the much more intriguing things you can do is to play on a 5-string, which includes a "c string," below your "g-string," or use an octave pedal, which can drop your pitch a whole octave. Or you can have fun with distortion or a wah-wah pedal. And, while superb strategy is important for classical music, electrical violin can be extra flexible.

[jayne-hecate-writer]

The Hu at the O2 Academy...

Bristol. Monday 10th February 2020

I have been going to concerts for nearly three decades now and it is rare indeed that I see a bad gig, most bands are professional enough that even a slow crowd or a long tour can still give them enough energy to make a decent attempt at the show. I have also seen a wide variety of musical styles, from the ethereal beauty of highbrow opera to the grinding bleakness of Black Metal and many more in between (including the numerous horrors of “Annie” & “Thoroughly Modern Millie”!) in the Bristol Hippodrome! So when the chance to see the band The Hu came up, I was intrigued and excited, until I realised where the venue was, you see the O2 Academy and I have history. This is the only venue that I have ever walked out of because the sound was so bad that the band actually bored me. Yes, I admit it, I do not like this venue and maybe this will begin to explain why.

Several things really annoyed me at the gig last night at the Bristol O2 Academy, this venue is frankly dreadful and their security is completely intrusive. I have quite truthfully been through less invasive security checks to get on an actual aeroplane that I got last night going into to see a band! Watching the security staff body searching a lad in his twenties because he was dressed in a hoody and had a few piercings and then seconds later searching through a woman's handbag and throwing away her lollypop was pathetic and showed a level of discrimination that I was not comfortable with, but more on that later. When it was my turn to be searched, I dumped my bag on their counter and walked through the metal detector to find the woman on the other side searching through my personal stuff, which I then pointed out was my medication. On realising that I am disabled, she closed my bag and shoved it at me because she was in a hurry. Only I was struggling and needed her to place the strap on my shoulder because my hands were full as an officious staff member was at that very moment demanding that my tickets be presented. Once I had my ticket scanned I then encountered the staff and the medics who kept asking me if I was 'OK’ and if I ‘needed help' because I walk with a stick and have obvious ‘mobility issues’ as I struggled to get into the venue. I pointed out that I had some one with me to support me if I needed actual help, but the patronising and pitying staff just antagonised me further by speaking to me as if I had learning difficulties. Physical impairment does not immediately equate to mental impairment and also, I have an honours degree in science, plus a post graduate qualification and several professional qualifications all in teaching. I am not a stupid person (despite the claims of some of my closest friends!) and thus do not enjoy being spoken as if I am a moron, just because I use a walking stick. If these staff members really want to help disabled people come into the venue, they could try training door security staff not to carry out internal cavity searches on their victims who just want to enter the building and enjoy a show!

Inside the venue, the sound techs had amplified the drum kit of the support band to the max and then tried to raise the level of everything else above them, which turned the sound into a painful distorted buzz rather than a musical event to enjoy. The support band, Fire of the Gods, were therefor utterly unlistenable because the sound mix was just atrocious and their positive message of equality and social inclusion was completely lost, simply due to the bad sound. I have no idea if this band are any good because what I heard was just awful and I do not believe that it was the fault of the band. I could see that they had guitars and even backing vocals, but the bass drum was so high up in the mix, everything else was lost and it sounded as if nothing else was even plugged in. They could have been playing the finest classic guitar riffs known to human kind and I would never have known. Thankfully when the main act came on, their sound was somewhat better, but the drums were still overly emphasised in the mix meaning that at times the sounds was still heavily distorted, due to the levels being wrong. As for The Hu, their material is utterly beautiful, this concert had moments that felt like a cultural ceremony rather than a metal gig, but the invasively bad sound made them hard to listen to at times, which was heart breaking given how many positive reports I have heard about them.

My final gripe was because there were some real arseholes in the audience who pushed, barged and shoved their way through a very heavily packed in crowd, hurting people and stepping on toes, feet and even my walking stick. Again, I have the experiences of so many extreme metal gigs that have always been positive, the crowds have always been welcoming, considerate and fun, meaning that as a disabled woman I have always felt safe, even when in the pit down at the front for some of the most extreme bands currently recording. The crowd in the O2 was more mixed that I usually experience and some of them were clearly looking for any excuse to start trouble with other crowd members. At less than ten minutes into The Hu's set, Security broke up a fight right in front of me, started by a young woman in her twenties. Yes, I am pleased that the fight was broken up before it got serious, but why did they have to discuss this right in front of me, blocking my already limited view of the band before they dragged her away. Four members of security on the floor and one on the stairs above me was what it took to close down this scene and a few minutes later the girls friends took a phonecall (which I am amazed they could hear!) before they too barged their way out to go and find her. She had clearly been ejected from the venue.

So then, The Hu... I really want to see more of them because they are fascinating, given that they play a form of metal music that is culturally inspired and uses their traditional Mongolian instruments and vocal style. They had some moments of real beauty and their tribal sound and pounding rhythmic back bone gives them a quality that is unique, beautiful and exciting. They did use the tired old trope of the fake encore at the end, which so many bands now do that it almost feels refreshing when other bands choose not to do it, but even that is entirely forgivable. At the end of the gig there was one moment that truly showed the difference between them and the Bristol crowd, when a pair of skimpy women's knickers were thrown on stage, only for them to catch on the intricately carved neck of the exquisite Morin Khuur (a horsehead fiddle... Yes, I had to look that up because I had no idea what it was called). Gala the musician carefully unpicked the foul soggy knickers from his instrument and wearily dropped them into the fenced off area in front of the stage, before walking disdainfully away. Given how cold it was outside, I can only imagine that the then knickerless woman probably had icicles hanging down to her knees when she finally got home!

To conclude this bitter and angry review, I think that The Hu are fabulously interesting and well worth investigating if you do not know them. However, the O2 is a shockingly awful venue and frankly I feel insulted by every visit I have ever made there. After every show, I come out of the venue and say to myself “Never again.” It really is that bad a venue, especially when compared to so many of the wonderful and beautiful venues I have been to so recently in Bristol and further afield. I dislike the O2 because of their obtrusive security, their consistently poor sound at every gig I have seen there, their badly laid out interior and finally because of their watered down drinks! last night, the pint of Pepsi Max served to my precious Wifey tasted like it had been urinated in, which was just another insult from this already awful venue. I genuinely promise that this was the last time I see a band there, no really, I mean it this time!

Go and see The Hu on the rest of the world tour now.

 https://www.thehuofficial.com/

[yahxxyy]

You Are What You Are Sensing

Sound

We are surrounded by all kinds of sounds. While we are sitting at the table and trying to do something useful, “my mind adheres to the sounds of myself and my environment. In the distance a bulldozer is eating away a hillside while its motor is a cascade of harmonics defining the space between it and the Rock and Roll radio playing in the next room. Sounds of birds, insects, children’s voices and the rustling of trees fleck this space.” Pauline Oliveros describes this hearing sensitivity which we have all experienced in her Some Sound Observations. We can close our eyes, our mouths, avoid touching, but we cannot resist receiving sound. Does it mean hearing is the most important sense in a way, particularly back to when senses have been evolved and enhanced selectively. Does the inability to “turn off” equate to importance? (Tress) Due to evolutionary process, when we cannot see under some situations like darkness, ears work as main part of the alarming system in our survival mode.

What if there was a lack of consistency of sound and vision in real life? Doppler effect explains a physical phenomenon of how we hear the frequency changing depending on the distance of a moving object. I have known this effect since high school, so it is not very surprising to experience ambulance coming with increasing pitch in real life. But I remember the first time I put on my Sony noise cancelling headphones, I was astonished and terrified. Because the surroundings seems irrelevant to what I was hearing at that moment. My roommate was waving at me, I heard cute girls’ singing from my favourite Kpop girl group; my book dropped, I felt the vibration feedback on the floor after a second but I couldn’t hear it. “Why can’t sound be visible?” (Pauline). While looking at the deaf community, a famous event called ASL SLAM that “offers the stage to audience members to come up and rap, rhapsodize and rehash or just relate in sign language.” From my observation in Sign Language class, our teachers tend to amplify their body movements and facial expressions. Sign Language is “a visual rhythm versus auditory rhythm” and “face accounts for 50% of the grammar,” a visual language that visualizes an audible language. Meanwhile, the base languages strongly affect the sign languages (for instance, there is a requirement of translation from Chinese Sign Language to American Sign Language).

Recently, a very interesting fact I have been aware of is that I can hear old tv’s high frequency (around 16khz). While I was approaching these art pieces consisting of a bunch of old televisions or radios. I felt the blood vessels in the back of my brain and temples pumping really hard, and I got headache and dizzy immediately. This situation is kind of rare, because I am supposed to become less sensitive to this high frequency as an adult. The common hearing of range can be heard by humans is 20 hz to 20,000 hz. A gradual loss of sensibility to hearing, especially higher frequencies, is normally relative to age. A test here: http://www.ultrasonic-ringtones.com/. For such a long time, I took it for granted and had assumed that everyone could hear that. Until that day I complained to my friend about the “noise”, and she looked at me in confusion. This special “gift” bugs me so much. I can hear the buzzes of router, outlet, old telephones, etc. The place where I am currently working as an intern is full of electrical equipments, I feel very uncomfortable being surrounded by these little pure high pitch sound. Sometimes my body reacts. For example, the decreasing interest of diet, loss of concentration, and little blurriness of eyesight. Noise cancelling headphone now is a shelter rather than a gadget of immersive entertainment environment. Is it quite unfair? Why do I need to hear this “noise” and realize that to hear this is an excess of hearing?

Those nights, I hear the hiss of extreme silence and buzzes from the gigantic electrical equipments all around me. I often think of Carver’s novel I Could See The Smallest Things. How can I firmly believe hearing the “smallest things” is hearing “noise”? Just because I can sense more, which means the sound is abnormal and irregular? If we are going to answer the question of what is noise? Many people will possibly hesitate and equivocate, due to the subjectivity of individual senses and feelings. Thus, how do we form the perception of noise? What is the fine line between noise and harmony? Can noise be changed to music? Shall we dispose the noise behind music? The presence of noise music indirectly points out that noise and music are closely intertwined. Noise here works as a expressive use to challenge the conventional fine line between musical and nonmusical elements. Lo-fi music refers to low-quality recording music and intentionally introduces noise into its aesthetics. Environmental interference, misplayed notes and phonographic imperfections. It is the coincidences and flaws that create a warmth of harmonic distortion. Ironically, John Cage claims “everything we do is music”, and William Marx played John’s piece 4’33. What William was doing was close the piano and sat for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. Within the 4’33 “silence”, we can hear every slight sound in the environment. “Listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power…..” Jacques Attali describes the relation of music and noise in his essay, Noise and Politics, and argues that music is “at the heart of the progressive rationalization of aesthetics, and it is a refuge for residual irrationality, it is a means of power and a form of entertainment.”

The first experimental artifact is noise recording. I recorded several noisy scenarios in my daily commute, including waiting for metro, walking on the Broadway, passing through World Trade Center, sitting in the working place. The most interesting reflection is not the recordings, it is actually the recording experience itself. I used to wear my headphones, but didn’t wear it this time. The more focused I was, the more sounds I received, then I got a bit panic and lost sense of direction. An evidence that people can “turn on” their volume of sensitivity. And it is possible to “turn off” hearing when you pay full attention to something and sort of gain the ability to shut others. Another case is that if people have been working in a loud work environment for a long time, it is possible for them to hear sounds “such as small tinklings with the engine” after “overcoming fear of the sound” of jet engines (Pauline). Let’s look at it in an opposite way, what if there is an extremely quiet place and how do people feel about staying in that place? Can Silence Actually Drives You Crazy? The video documented how people feel and react when in the extremely silent room (non-reflective, non-echoing) called Anechoic Chamber in BYU. There are several interesting effects and human reactions to notice according to the interview. Without the reverberation in the room, people might feel they are  in a small room and cause claustrophobia. People might get panic because they used to have these sounds around them. And they will try to make up the sounds so that will probably cause hallucination. Most hear the sounds of their bodies, like blood vessels, fluids, heart beat. When you get out of the space, you might be aware of that you are become more sensitive to the world.

In Perfect Hearing, Nubar Alexanian actually considers his tinnitus, somehow, as a grateful thing. The documentary recreates what Nubar is hearing daily. A loud and steady pure tone like La Monte Young’s piece, The Second Dream of the High Tension Wire. “You just have to gonna live with it.” The first doctor he met told him to get used to his tinnitus, because there is no cure for this. Abby, Nubar’s daughter whose hearing loss affected her pronunciation of certain words, said she could not imagine having this tone in her hearing, but then thought it was quite interesting. “It’s not that bad……I haven’t really lived with perfect hearing ever, so I can’t compare……you couldn’t imagine this in your hearing, and I can’t image tinnitus.” Sometimes, she wonders what is like to hear everything perfectly, to “have that entire sound of every, like, aspect of someone’s voice, or music, every note…... would be incredible to me.” An extra, a loss. What is a moderate hearing, or often regarded as perfect hearing?

Light

“Light” is another very interesting topic to look at. What is behind our visual perception? How does light affect our emotions? The metaphor of freedom, hope, liberty. How do lights say hello to each other? In the darkest place. (Shuo Wang) But when lights encounter, there is no darkness. My favourite color is “green”, I tend to choose green clothes, accessories, and gadgets unconsciously, why is that? What is the history behind green? Why does nature use green as its representative color? To ask the first question, I need to find the root by segregating it to several sub-questions: why do people like a specific color? How does color affect people’s mood? What is the color that most people in favor of?

The field trip to Dia: Beacon is very inspiring, bringing me fresh new perspectives to light and space. Because I have never thought of how audience’s involvement can strongly shape the experience of a art piece. The questions of subject-object relations, how “subject’s encounter with his or her surroundings prompts larger revelations about the nature of perception itself.” I was asked to create a prototype to experiment with light. While I was playing around with light and shape, I actually came up with a thinking: is shadow the encounter/interface of light and physical objects? Every night, the cars passes and throws a light to my wall through the shutters. I like the way how light justifies my physical existence through shadows. Shadows amplifies slight vibrations and moves. In this experiment, we can see the monofilament is almost invisible in the light, but only visible in the shadow. I found most of my thoughts following the idea of mediating place, the disruption and intervention through light. I am quite interested in disorienting and dislocating space to create a sense of tension and instability by manipulating light.

Reflection

We are what we are sensing. Our experience of sensing, a primary research of the world, is the scope of our understanding. I was thinking to create an art installation or a wearable hearing aid to expand (“expand” here is not only referring to “add”) people’s hearing. The incorporation of light is uncertain at this phase. The Electrical Walks created by Christina Kubisch is a good approach to reveal hidden phenomenon and bring awareness to the public.

[newstfionline]

For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned.

Farhad Manjoo, NY Times, March 7, 2018

I first got news of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., via an alert on my watch. Even though I had turned off news notifications months ago, the biggest news still somehow finds a way to slip through.

But for much of the next 24 hours after that alert, I heard almost nothing about the shooting.

There was a lot I was glad to miss. For instance, I didn’t see the false claims--possibly amplified by propaganda bots--that the killer was a leftist, an anarchist, a member of ISIS and perhaps just one of multiple shooters. I missed the Fox News report tying him to Syrian resistance groups even before his name had been released. I also didn’t see the claim by Senator Bernie Sanders and other liberals on Twitter that the massacre had been the 18th school shooting of the year, which wasn’t true.

Instead, the day after the shooting, a friendly person I’ve never met dropped off three newspapers at my front door. That morning, I spent maybe 40 minutes poring over the horror of the shooting and a million other things the newspapers had to tell me.

Not only had I spent less time with the story than if I had followed along as it unfolded online, I was better informed, too. Because I had avoided the innocent mistakes--and the more malicious misdirection--that had pervaded the first hours after the shooting, my first experience of the news was an accurate account of the actual events of the day.

This has been my life for nearly two months. In January, after the breaking-newsiest year in recent memory, I decided to travel back in time. I turned off my digital news notifications, unplugged from Twitter and other social networks, and subscribed to home delivery of three print newspapers--The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and my local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle--plus a weekly newsmagazine, The Economist.

I have spent most days since then getting the news mainly from print, though my self-imposed asceticism allowed for podcasts, email newsletters and long-form nonfiction (books and magazine articles). Basically, I was trying to slow-jam the news--I still wanted to be informed, but was looking to formats that prized depth and accuracy over speed.

It has been life changing. Turning off the buzzing breaking-news machine I carry in my pocket was like unshackling myself from a monster who had me on speed dial, always ready to break into my day with half-baked bulletins.

Now I am not just less anxious and less addicted to the news, I am more widely informed (though there are some blind spots). And I’m embarrassed about how much free time I have--in two months, I managed to read half a dozen books, took up pottery and (I think) became a more attentive husband and father.

Most of all, I realized my personal role as a consumer of news in our broken digital news environment.

We have spent much of the past few years discovering that the digitization of news is ruining how we collectively process information. Technology allows us to burrow into echo chambers, exacerbating misinformation and polarization and softening up society for propaganda. With artificial intelligence making audio and video as easy to fake as text, we’re entering a hall-of-mirrors dystopia, what some are calling an “information apocalypse.” And we’re all looking to the government and to Facebook for a fix.

But don’t you and I also have a part to play? Getting news only from print newspapers may be extreme and probably not for everyone. But the experiment taught me several lessons about the pitfalls of digital news and how to avoid them.

I distilled those lessons into three short instructions, the way the writer Michael Pollan once boiled down nutrition advice: Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social.

Get news. I know what you’re thinking: Listening to a Times writer extol the virtues of print is like taking breakfast suggestions from Count Chocula. You may also wonder if I am preaching to the choir; doesn’t everyone reading this story already appreciate print?

Probably not. The Times has about 3.6 million paying subscribers, but about three-quarters of them pay for just the digital version. During the 2016 election, fewer than 3 percent of Americans cited print as their most important source of campaign news; for people under 30, print was their least important source.

I’m nearly 40, but I’m no different. Though I have closely followed the news since I was a kid, I always liked my news on a screen, available at the touch of a button. Even with this experiment, I found much to hate about print. The pages are too big, the type too small, the ink too messy, and compared with a smartphone, a newspaper is more of a hassle to consult on the go.

Print also presents a narrower mix of ideas than you find online. You can’t get BuzzFeed or Complex or Slate in print. In California, you can’t even get The Washington Post in print. And print is expensive. Outside New York, after introductory discounts, seven-day home delivery of The Times will set you back $81 a month. In a year, that’s about the price of Apple’s best iPhone.

What do you get for all that dough? News. That sounds obvious until you try it--and you realize how much of what you get online isn’t quite news, and more like a never-ending stream of commentary, one that does more to distort your understanding of the world than illuminate it.

I noticed this first with the deal Democrats made to end the government shutdown late in January. On the Jan. 23 front pages, the deal was presented straight: “Shutdown Ends, Setting Up Clash Over ‘Dreamers,’” ran The Times’s headline on the news story, which appeared alongside an analysis piece that presented the political calculations surrounding the deal.

Many of the opinions in that analysis could be found on Twitter and Facebook. What was different was the emphasis. Online, commentary preceded facts. If you were following the shutdown on social networks, you most likely would have seen lots of politicians and pundits taking stock of the deal before seeing details of the actual news.

This is common online. On social networks, every news story comes to you predigested. People don’t just post stories--they post their takes on stories, often quoting key parts of a story to underscore how it proves them right, so readers are never required to delve into the story to come up with their own view.

There’s nothing wrong with getting lots of shades of opinion. And reading just the paper can be a lonely experience; there were many times I felt in the dark about what the online hordes thought about the news.

Still, the prominence of commentary over news online and on cable news feels backward, and dangerously so. It is exactly our fealty to the crowd--to what other people are saying about the news, rather than the news itself--that makes us susceptible to misinformation.

Not too quickly. It’s been clear that breaking news has been broken since at least 2013, when a wild week of conspiracy theories followed the Boston Marathon bombing. As I argued then, technology had caused the break.

Real life is slow; it takes professionals time to figure out what happened, and how it fits into context. Technology is fast. Smartphones and social networks are giving us facts about the news much faster than we can make sense of them, letting speculation and misinformation fill the gap.

It has only gotten worse. As news organizations evolved to a digital landscape dominated by apps and social platforms, they felt more pressure to push news out faster. Now, after something breaks, we’re all buzzed with the alert, often before most of the facts are in. So you’re driven online not just to find out what happened, but really to figure it out.

This was the surprise blessing of the newspaper. I was getting news a day old, but in the delay between when the news happened and when it showed up on my front door, hundreds of experienced professionals had done the hard work for me.

Now I was left with the simple, disconnected and ritualistic experience of reading the news, mostly free from the cognitive load of wondering whether the thing I was reading was possibly a blatant lie.

Another surprise was a sensation of time slowing down. One weird aspect of the past few years is how a “tornado of news-making has scrambled Americans’ grasp of time and memory,” as my colleague Matt Flegenheimer put it last year. By providing a daily digest of the news, the newspaper alleviates this sense. Sure, there’s still a lot of news--but when you read it once a day, the world feels contained and comprehensible rather than a blur of headlines lost on a phone’s lock screen.

You don’t need to read a print newspaper to get this; you can create your own news ritual by looking at a news app once a day, or reading morning newsletters, or listening to a daily news podcast. What’s important is choosing a medium that highlights deep stories over quickly breaking ones.

And, more important, you can turn off news notifications. They distract and feed into a constant sense of fragmentary paranoia about the world. They are also unnecessary. If something really big happens, you will find out.

Avoid social. This is the most important rule of all. After reading newspapers for a few weeks, I began to see it wasn’t newspapers that were so great, but social media that was so bad.

Just about every problem we battle in understanding the news today--and every one we will battle tomorrow--is exacerbated by plugging into the social-media herd. The built-in incentives on Twitter and Facebook reward speed over depth, hot takes over facts and seasoned propagandists over well-meaning analyzers of news.

You don’t have to read a print newspaper to get a better relationship with the news. But, for goodness’ sake, please stop getting your news mainly from Twitter and Facebook. In the long run, you and everyone else will be better off.

[deathbyzamboni-us-blog]

Norwegian Black Metal

This is a paper I wrote for school. As the title suggests it is an overview of Norwegian Black Metal. Enjoy! 

Heavy metal music is one of the most popular genres of music in the world. Its influence has reached every corner of the globe and boasts some of the most famous bands of all time. Bands like Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Metallica all are Metal bands and if not, have had metal signatures. Since bands like these are so pervasive around the world, metal has reached communities in the remotest corners of the earth. South America for instance has its own strand of heavy metal boasting a band like Seplatura and Japan is another breeding ground for the music. There are many reasons why the genre is popular but one of the most important aspects is its darkness. Due to its somber nature, heavy metal tends to deal with dark subjects. Many metal songs deal with death and the devil. Normally this is just done for fun. For many teenagers, listening to songs about Satan will piss off their religious parents. Songs about death can help people cope with feelings of depression. But what if some people took typical heavy metal themes to their literal conclusion? Some kids in Norway did this. The Norwegian Black Metal scene is one of the most infamous scenes in the history of music. It ended up in the burning of over 40 churches and the murders of two people.

 (Darkthrone - Blaze in the Northern Sky album cover)

           Since black metal is a subgenre of metal, here’s a primer for the uninitiated. Sorry, I can’t cover all the metal subgenre since there are too many subgenres. Also, I will be drawing from Sam Dunn’s Metal Evolution documentary and Last Podcast on the Left’s subcategories for there is no official list of what genre these bands belong to. Metal itself is a subset of rock and roll music, defined by being driven by guitar, bass, and drums. It harbors some the most popular performers of all time like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley and Jimi Hendrix. This influenced early UK metal, which includes the two bands who pretty much defined early Heavy Metal: Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. Metal music was slower, darker, louder, heavier and more complex than its father Rock and Roll. The general atmosphere of the music encouraged darker lyrical themes about depression, sadness, and sometimes, the devil.  A cousin of early UK Metal was shock rock. This genre included bands who would often dress up in make-up and give theatrical performances. One the most notable bands of shock rock, The Alice Cooper Band, often has a part of the concert where they simulate a decapitation of the lead singer. Out of the ashes of shock rock and early UK Metal came the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. This sub-genre was more refined and tighter than its forefathers and included bands like Iron Maiden and Motörhead. (Metal Evolution) Influenced by these genres, elements of Progressive Rock, and the speed of punk music, emerged what is possibly the most popular subgenre of metal, Thrash Metal. It includes bands like Metallica, Slayer and Megadeth. (Norwegian Black Metal part 1)

 (Metal Evolution Family Tree)

           The band Venom, is one of the first bands to overtly use Satanic imagery. It is key to note that they used it in jest. They also used extreme theatrics, which would contribute to the aesthetics of Norwegian Black Metal. King Diamond took this further by donning the black and white face paint in which most of the Norwegian bands would use. Then the Swedish band, Bathory would introduce the lo-fi sound that dominates Black Metal. In 1988, the band would move away from Satanic imagery into Norse mythology. They would also dip their toe into Nazi imagery. It is important to note that this was meant to shock and offend, but some of the members of the scene took some of this ideology literally. This would end up being the roots of the crimes that the scene would become infamous for. (Norwegian Black Metal Part 1)

           What does Black Metal actually mean? Ross Hagen in his journal article, “Musical Style, Ideology, and Mythology in Norwegian Black Metal” defined the term as follows: “The term “black metal: initially referred simply to any extreme metal that was explicitly “satanic” in nature, but by the late 1980’s a scene had begun to emerge that self-consciously used the term as both a description of the music and essential identity.” (Hagen) Before we discuss all the wonderful activities that some of these bands engaged in, it is important to discuss what the music sounds like.

(Bathory - Bathory Album Cover)

           Black metal actually deviates from many of the signature sounds that define heavy metal. For instance, some bands use keyboards to promote atmosphere. One of the trademarks of black metal is the high-pitched, banshee like vocals. Many bands choose to use this and clean vocals instead of the guttural growls that permeate many metal acts today. Full chords are used to produce a fuller, denser sound as opposed to the short blasts of power chords, which is commonly used in metal music. A technique called “buzz-picking” is often employed and allows to play more guitar strings at once, producing a fast and muddled sound. Black metal also eschews propulsive rhythmic drive, instead favoring a swirling and indistinct atmosphere. They do employ blast-beats though, which makes the drums make machine gun fire like beats, upping the tempo. Finally, black metal guitarists tend to disregard palm muting, because this technique muffles the guitar, making it more percussive, and was commonly used by Metallica in the 80’s (Hagen)

 (Mayhem - De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas Album Cover)

           The final piece of the black metal sound is its lo-fi sound. This genre does use the highly distorted guitars that most metal bands have used. The difference though is they use low quality production techniques. This was not only an aesthetic choice but also a by-product of all these bands being broke and unable to afford good recording equipment. (Hagen) Most bands leaned into this sound though. The leader of Burzum, Varg Vikernes (he plays a big part later), in the documentary, Until the Light Takes Us, talked about how he would purposely seek out the worst amplifiers he could find to achieve a raw sound. (Aites & Eweel) The result is a hissing sound from the guitars and the vocals. Many regard these production techniques to be cornerstones of the sub-genre. (Hagen)

           Not unlike many other musical genres, the image of black metal is just as instrumental as the sound.  Starting with the band logos…

 (From thetruemayhem.com)

This is a logo from one of the premier bands of the Norwegian Black Metal scene, Mayhem. Notice the truly intricate and almost illegible design. This is a visual example of the music’s exclusivity. Also included, is anti-Christian imagery, such as the inverted crosses. This logo is typical of the average black metal band logo. The bands tend to dress up in medieval armor with spikes and chains attached. They accessorize this look by posing with weapons such as swords and pikes. The most iconic part of the look is the black and white face paint that all the bands don. This is to simulate a corpse like aesthetic. The photos often mirror the music’s poor production quality, making it look raw and unfriendly. Finally, almost all black metal musicians use stage names. The names often derive from Germanic or Norse myth like Fenriz of Darkthrone. Others are inspired by the writings of Tolkien. For instance, Varg Vikernes’ stage first stage name, Count Grishnackh, and band name, Burzum. (Hagen)

 (Burzum - Filosofem Album Cover)

           Black metal is a genre. This means any part of the world can take part in it. What makes Norwegian black metal special, is the infamous church burnings, and murders. What is necessary to know are the major players; the band Mayhem, especially the guitarist, Øystein Aarseth, better known as Euronymous; Varg Vikernes of Burzum.

 (Dead (left) and Euronymous (Right))

           Mayhem was formed in 1984 in Oslo, Norway. The band was led by Euronymous. Around 1988, Per Yngve Ohlin, better known as Dead, joined the group. Dead was famously depressed and was one the first members of the scene to don the black and white face paint, to simulate a corpse like appearance. He would often cut himself during live performances to get blood flowing on stage. Dead once asked his band mates to bury him alive so as to achieve a more authentic, corpse like appearance. This all came to a head in 1991 when, Dead committed suicide by blowing his head off with a shotgun. Dead’s corpse lied in his and Euronymous’ apartment for hours. When Euronymous got home he didn’t do what most people did. He first took photos of the scene of the crime (which would be used for a cover on one of the band’s upcoming releases (warning link NSFW)). Then he is rumored to have used the fragments of his skull to make a necklace. (Norwegian Black Metal Part 2)

(Euronymous) 

         This is one of the most infamous stories from the scene. Why would any rational person do this? The thing about the Norwegian black metal scene is that these were a bunch of kids looking to rebel. Many members of these groups felt their lives were too good due to Norway’s excellent socialist economy. Since their lives were objectively good, the metal musicians found it hard to rebel like typical teenagers do. They did this by embracing Satanism and taking it literally. (That’s how you scare your parents!) This slowly became a sort of one up game of who could be more “real.” According to the “Norwegian Black Metal Part 1” by Last Podcast on the Left, this included members of these bands, who were so serious that they took pride in never smiling. (Norwegian Black Metal Part 1) This sick game of proving who could be more real was instigated by Dead’s suicide. He proved he was the most brutal by killing himself. Things grew worse when Varg Vikernes joined the scene, a man who already had problematic beliefs to begin with.

 (Young Varg Vikernes)

           Vikernes was born in Bergen, Norway in February of 1973. He grew up with parents who held White nationalist beliefs, which was passed down. His readings of the Lord of the Rings inspired him greatly. All though, he identified more with Sauron and the orc as opposed to the hobbits, saying that the hobbits had no personal strength. Vikernes joined the band Old Funeral in the 80’s before hooking up with Euronymous and Mayhem. From here he started the one-man group, Burzum, and it was successful. What is key to note is that Euronymous was at the heart of the Norwegian black metal scene. Alongside being in one of the central bands, Euronymous ran a record label that many of these bands used, and was quite poor at managing it. Also, he had a record shop that was the central hub of the scene. (Norwegian Black Metal Part 2)

 (Modern Varg)

           After the time of Dead’s death this part of scene called the inner circle started to develop, and it included Vikernes. The inner circle started going out at night and burning churches. This got extensive media coverage and Vikernes told a reporter that the scene was responsible. Euronymous stoked the flames of this to gain publicity for the scene. Most of the media got scared due to the fear that this was caused by Satanism. Vikernes maintains that it was motivated to take back the land that Christianity took. He claims that the religion had erased many cultures including Norway’s Norse mythology.  (Aites & Eweel)

 (Faust of Emperor)

           Another key story involves, Faust, of the band Emperor. After a late night of drinking, Faust had an encounter with a homosexual man. He was so offended by this that he stabbed the gay man to death. The other murder involved Euronymous and Vikernes. The former owed the latter money for records sold. One night in August of ‘93, Vikernes decided to confront Euronymous at his apartment in the middle of the night. Vikernes ended up stabbing Euronymous over 20 times. Vikernes claimed it was in self-defense, but that is highly questionable. Vikernes ended up getting arrested and was sent to prison for 21 years (Norway’s Maximum) for committing the crime. He got out in 2009 after serving 15 and was released on probation. (Norwegian Black Metal Part 3)

(Fenriz of Darkthrone)

           None of this nonsense is prevalent in the scene anymore. The look, sound, and themes of Satanism is still here, but not the church burnings or murders. Mayhem still exists, and is releasing records while touring. Vikernes still records under the title of Burzum, but now favors electronic music. Bands like Darkthrone are still releasing records but now the scene has calmed down and is strictly about the music. Black metal has artists from all around the world, but none of them are as infamous as the ones from Norway in the late 80’s and Early 90’s.

References

Aites, A., & Ewell, A. (Directors). (2008). Until the Light Takes Us [Motion picture on Amazon    Prime]. American: Variance Films. 

 Dunn, S., & McFayden, S. (Directors). (2011). Metal Evolution [Motion picture on TV]. United    States: Tricon Films. 

 Hagen, R. (2011). Musical Style, Ideology, and Mythology in Norwegian Black Metal. Metal         Rules the Globe, 180-199. 

 Kissel, B., Parks, M., & Zebrowski, H. (2017, September 10). Norwegian Black Metal Part 1        [Audio blog post]. 

 Kissel, B., Parks, M., & Zebrowski, H. (2017, September 15). Norwegian Black Metal Part 2        [Audio blog post]. 

 Kissel, B., Parks, M., & Zebrowski, H. (2017, September 21). Norwegian Black Metal Part 3        [Audio blog post].